Once Upon a Time I Lived on Mars
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HI-SEAS was the kind of study that produced a lot of data and some of it—long-winded survey responses and videos, for instance—can be difficult to parse. It can take time to clean it, to process it, and draw conclusions. Soon, though, the data will be available on NASA’s website so anyone can download it for their own research. From these five missions, a bounty of various new questions might be asked and new stories told.
There may be more HI-SEAS Mars missions again, but in the meantime, the habitat is under the direction of its original benefactor, Rogers, who, in 2018 revamped the space with new floors, furniture, and computers. He now hosts short-term “moon missions” that last a couple of weeks or more. On these missions, crews act more like researchers and less like guinea pigs. They focus on field-testing technologies rather than enduring long stretches of isolation. There’s no twenty-minute communication delay. And cameras have been installed throughout allowing for a public live-stream, Rogers told The Atlantic. “We couldn’t do [that] during the NASA missions because having cameras around was considered an invasion of privacy, but we’re not running a honeymoon resort. We’re running a moon base,” he told the publication.
To be clear, Rogers doesn’t have complete autonomy over the dome on Mauna Loa. The private-public partnership requires something more of a dance, especially if and when it’s time for another NASA-backed Mars mission. “That’s a matter of negotiation between us,” Binsted commented in The Atlantic. “The University of Hawai‘i has the permit to use the land. Henk owns the physical structure. So neither of us can get on without the other one.”
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All things considered, and due to the funding structure of NASA, it looks like the private space industry is best poised to get people to actual Mars. For one thing, SpaceX has issued something of a mandate to leverage economies of scale: build a Mars-launch system, says Elon Musk, that makes the journey routine and therefore accessible to someone who can buy a six-figure ticket. SpaceX, of course, can’t do it alone. It’s primarily a rocket company, mainly focused on the propulsive aspects of getting to Mars. It needs partners on board with Musk’s vision for a complete Mars mission, let alone colonization, to be possible. Those partners include NASA.
But the relationship status of SpaceX and NASA is perhaps best categorized as “complicated.” In 2016, an uncrewed SpaceX rocket exploded on the launchpad, the cause being the company’s unconventional fueling methods. The approach injects super-cooled propellant into the rocket shortly before launch, while the crew is aboard. It’s a procedure that NASA has consistently deemed too dangerous. SpaceX consistently downplays the risks. And besides, one counter argument goes, SpaceX engineers have developed an ejection system that could chuck astronauts to safety if something were to go wrong.
Then in late 2018, Musk, whose net worth is $20.9 billion, appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, an audio and video podcast. On the show, he talked about a new airplane design, drank whiskey, and smoked weed.
Shortly thereafter, Jim Bridenstine, an administrator at NASA, ordered a workplace culture and safety review for both SpaceX and Boeing, which is also building astronaut spacecraft for the agency. The contracts for the two companies total $6.8 billion and include a clause for maintaining a program to achieve a drug- and alcohol-free workforce.
With respect to the drinking and smoking incident, Bridenstine said, “I will tell you that was not helpful, and that did not inspire confidence, and the leaders of these organizations need to take that as an example of what to do when you lead an organization that’s going to launch American astronauts … I will tell you, [Musk] is as committed to safety as anybody, and he understands that that was not appropriate behavior, and you won’t be seeing that again.”
While NASA was planning a culture and safety assessment for its contractors anyway, Musk’s public behavior pushed it to a priority. Marijuana is legal in California, where Joe Rogan’s show is produced, but Bridenstine said he’s actually more concerned with drugs like cocaine and opiates and with workplace cultures that foster long grueling hours in a high-stress environment, as, anecdotally, is the case at SpaceX.
“We want to get ahead of it,” Bridenstine said, “We want to see, right now, today, are they experiencing pressure from schedule, are they experiencing pressure from cost, and are those concerns challenging their thought process in a way that could be dangerous?”
Different cultures, different incentives, different leadership structures, different goals in space. But Mars: same expensive destination.
The history of space exploration is littered with concession and compromise between competing ideas and ethos within and beyond NASA. In a public-private push to Mars, whose ideas for innovation, safety, and inspiration will prevail? Whose money is spent where? Whose “brand” gets the glory? Who bears the consequence of failure?
Cost of a crewed Mars mission as estimated by NASA in 1989:
$400 billion
Cost of NASA’s human space exploration division yearly budget:
$4 billion
Cost to build the International Space Station in 2015 dollars:
$100 billion
Cost of a Mars mission using NASA’s new Orion capsule and Space Launch System as estimated by NASA in 2015:
$230 billion
Cost of each subsequent mission at three-year intervals:
$142 billion
Cost of the U.S. budget in 2018:
$4 trillion
Cost of NASA’s budget in 2018:
$20.7 billion
Cost of NASA since its inception in 1958:
$601.3 billion
Cost of an astronaut’s seat on the Russian Soyuz in 2018:
$81 million
Cost for a single ride on the subway to anywhere in New York City:
$2.75
Cost of a BART ticket from 24th Street Mission to 12th Street Oakland City Center:
$3.80
Cost of the most recent book I bought, Please Add This to the List: A Guide to Teaching Bernadette Mayer’s Sonnets and Experiments, edited by Katy Bohinc, published by Tender Buttons Press:
$10
Cost of a two-year MFA at Columbia University without fellowships:
$120,000
Cost, per hour, of a ghostwriter writing a book about the future of work and artificial intelligence:
$150
Cost of my brother Mark’s one-year stay at Kindred Hospital in Kansas City, including dialysis and other treatments:
$1 million
Cost of my brother’s medical care to my family because of Medicare, his private insurance, and, with gratitude, the payment structure at Kindred Hospital:
$0
Cost of The Washington Post, bought by Jeff Bezos in 2013:
$250 million
Cost of PayPal when Elon Musk and Peter Thiel sold it to eBay in 2002:
$1.5 billion
Cost of the U.S. occupation in Afghanistan per year:
$45 billion
Cost of my first salary in 2005 as a technology journalist in San Francisco:
$55,000
Cost of a jewelry-making class through the San Francisco recreation and parks program used by two lesbians to make their wedding rings in 2008:
$205
Cost of a commitment ceremony in Lawrence, Kansas, with 120 friends and family:
$7,000
Cost of a two-week honeymoon in Spain and Morocco:
$7,000
Cost per month of a studio in an independent-living facility in Overland Park, Kansas:
$1,715
Cost of filing paperwork for divorce in California:
$435
Cost of twenty small plastic magnifying glasses for an art book project:
$10
Cost of a U.S. passport:
$145
Cost of the Indian probe sent to Mars, the least expensive Mars mission yet:
$73 million
Cost of the Curiosity Mars rover:
$
2.5 billion
Cost of my first car, Judith, a used white two-door, four-speed manual Toyota Tercel, bought for me by my parents while I was in college:
$3,000
Cost of the United Arab Emirates starting a space program, founded 2014:
$5.2 billion
Cost of buying a six-unit rent-controlled apartment building in cash in San Francisco in 2016:
$2.4 million
Cost to pay out Mark’s life insurance policy:
$10,000
Cost of his funeral after negotiation:
$10,000
Cost of a double headstone, brother plus parents:
$875
Cost of the LEGO 6987 Blacktron Message Intercept Base set, bought for me by Mark the Christmas I was nine:
$50
Cost, on average, of one night in a hotel room in NYC in 2018:
$216
Cost per night of a bed in a “tent city” that holds children separated from immigrant parents in the United States of America:
$775
Cost of a ferry ride between Staten Island and Manhattan, with a good view of the Statue of Liberty:
$0
Cost of a roundtrip flight from New York City to San Francisco:
$315
Cost of a roundtrip flight from New York City to Kansas City:
$355
Cost of two pupusas and a Negra Modelo with tip at La Cabaña Salvadoreña in Washington Heights:
$12
Cost of a pack of six mini powdered donuts, Mark’s favorite:
$0.75
This is how SpaceX makes its money: it launches supplies to the ISS and satellites into orbit that do such things as take pictures of Earth and provide internet connections to remote areas. It sends up satellites and payloads at a much lower cost than other rocket companies in the “space launch services sector,” which includes Arianespace and United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin. In 2018, SpaceX made roughly $2 billion in revenue.
Because it uses previously launched then refurbished rockets, it can charge its customers less per launch than others in the business. The company says it costs $62 million to launch a Falcon 9, which translates to about $7.5 million per ton of space stuff. A launch on an Arianespace rocket, in contrast, costs $16.4 million per ton, more than twice as much.
SpaceX has also made a capsule called Dragon that sits atop its rockets. Dragon has been used to drop off astronaut supplies to the ISS, and has room for seven passengers, eventually, but that will have to wait for NASA’s safety tests. It’s reusable, though the agency will only use new capsules for crewed flights. Currently, the agency sends astronauts to the space station in Russian Soyuz capsules, which ride atop Russian Soyuz rockets. This has been the arrangement since the space shuttle was retired in 2011.
Long term, the goal for SpaceX is to build a rocket and spaceship system that can take dozens or hundreds of people to the moon and to Mars. The rocket—called BFR, which stands for Big Falcon Rocket or, internally, Big Fucking Rocket—that could do this, doesn’t yet exist. Engineers are working on it, though, and when it’s done, it should be more powerful than the monstrous Saturn V rockets that took astronauts to the moon, the most powerful rockets ever built. Musk has said that the cost of developing the BFR could be $5 billion, but some estimates project it could cost as much as $10 billion.
Meanwhile, NASA’s own rocket in development for the moon and Mars, called the SLS, or Space Launch System, is being made by a swarm of contractors. Like the BFR, it will also be more powerful than the Saturn V. Unlike the BFR, the SLS is not reusable. As of August 2018, NASA has spent $11.9 billion on the project, and it’s behind schedule, so the space agency may need to use other companies’ rockets to test its Orion capsule so as to keep some portion of its ambitious back-to-the-moon roadmap on track.
The other notable reusable rocket company is Blue Origin, owned by Jeff Bezos, a person whose net worth is around $115 billion. Blue Origin has successfully demonstrated its reusable rocket technology and in 2018 won a $500 million contract from the U.S. Air Force. It also makes money, as does SpaceX, by selling tickets to future flights on rockets that do not yet exist. Additionally, Bezos has told reporters that every year he dumps roughly $1 billion of his Amazon stocks into Blue Origin to keep the company in cash.
And lest you think rocket development is only happening in the United States by Americans, know that Russia is also working on a new heavy-lift rocket, to be ready by 2028. What’s more, India has also historically been a major player in the global space launch services sector because its single-use rockets are relatively inexpensive thanks to organizational efficiencies within the space agency itself. The Indian space agency is currently building a more powerful rocket as well, one that uses a cryogenic engine. It had planned to develop such a rocket decades ago, and in 1991 signed a contract with Russia to acquire the necessary technology, but at the time, the U.S. pressured Russia to back out, leaving India to develop the technology on its own.
China is also investing heavily in its rockets. In 2018, its thirty-seven launches broke its own record and were more than any other country that year. And recently, private Chinese space companies like LandSpace, OneSpace, and iSpace have become more significant players in the market. Where budgets are uncertain in the U.S. and Russia, China is pumping more money into space than ever, in particular for communication and reconnaissance satellites, a navigation system to rival the U.S.’s GPS, a space telescope, and a new space station to be completed by 2022.
* * *
We’re experiencing something of a rocket renaissance these days thanks to interest in satellite communications and imagery and big talk about the moon and Mars. The commercial space industry is estimated to be worth $350 billion worldwide. Which is a lot, but when compared to the giddy speculation at one time of ride-sharing start-up Uber of $120 billion, it is confusingly not that much. Or maybe it still is. It’s difficult to fathom the amount of money that’s at play in this world, almost as hard as grasping the age and expanse of the universe or that there are nearly eight billion people on the globe. It’s also, in some ways, hard to understand money at all and what it means for power and its consolidation. We make toy models of these abstractions so we can hold something like them in our minds and then do tricks. What is a dollar worth? Why? What’s an hour’s labor worth? How do you define labor? How much for a gallon of milk? Car insurance? An EpiPen? Shelves from Ikea? Why?
My first job in journalism was as an intern at The Economist the summer I turned twenty-five, an amazing stroke of luck and one of the major influences in my career and life to this day. Immediately prior, I had been a graduate student and research assistant in the physics department at the University of Kansas where, fiddling with lasers in a basement laboratory, I made $1,200 a month. At The Economist, I made £1,200 a month. That summer, I was able to stay in an apartment in London belonging to a foreign correspondent for the magazine who spent most of her time abroad. She subsidized the rent, so I paid £600 for an entire one-bedroom flat in a posh neighborhood near Buckingham Palace. It wasn’t without its stressors, though. The apartment was owned by a member of Parliament and my subletting it was technically prohibited in the correspondent’s lease. Also, the correspondent stipulated that I’d have to go elsewhere, effectively move out, whenever she came back to town, which happened a few times over the summer. I figured my situation could be much worse, and accepted the terms and the stress of my unauthorized rental as the price I paid for the price I didn’t pay.
At The Economist I learned about the cost of a barrel of oil. I learned that the Big Mac Index is a way of determining the “real” value of a dollar. I learned the freedom of writing without a byline about science and technology for a very large audience. I learned that Brits really do take four- to six-week-long vacations in the summer, leaving the interns to pull their weight. I learned how to write for money and to write like it was my job.
In
a recent conversation with one of my editors at The Economist, we discussed HI-SEAS, space exploration, and its most commonly referenced Earth analog, polar expeditions. He told me about a paper by an American professor concluding that of the polar expeditions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, those that were privately funded were significantly more successful than those that were publicly funded. Might there be a comparison we can make to today’s plans for space exploration?
I read the paper. It’s a deeply researched story, rife with details from the old days. A tale told with data by Jonathan M. Karpoff, a professor of finance at the University of Washington, the research looked at thirty-five government and fifty-seven privately funded expeditions between 1818 and 1909. These expeditions had as their goals to locate and navigate the Northwest Passage, to discover the North Pole, to set speed travel records, or to make other significant discoveries in Arctic regions.
Karpoff explains that the ambitions for private and publicly funded expeditions were identical: geographic discovery without loss of life or ship. The rewards were similar too: cash prizes, promotions, public adulation, book sales, lecture fees, and larger budgets for further exploration.
But in the end, though the publicly backed expeditions were larger and better funded than the private ones, Karpoff found that “they made fewer major discoveries, introduced fewer technological innovations, and were subject to higher rates of scurvy, lost more ships, and had more explorers die.” Ouch. Why?
Evidently much of it had to do with leadership, organizational structures of the expeditions, and cultural expectations. For instance, private expeditions were often led by passionate men who spent their lives preparing for such adventures. Whereas public expeditions were led by those who’d been appointed and sought promotion or who had social connections.