Failure to launch: the technical, ethical, and legal case against Mars One

Mars One is pressing ahread with selecting crews for its initial missions, even though many technical and other uncertainties remain. (credit: Mars One)

The Mars One Project is the brainchild of Dutch entrepreneur Bas Lansdorp. The proposition is seemingly a simple one: select a team of four volunteers to establish a permanently colony on Mars with a launch date of 2024. Given that this will be, according to Lansdorp the media event of the century, the $6-billion venture will be funded in part by a reality TV show and subsequent media sponsorship.

Undoubtedly, Mars One has captured the zeitgeist with disproportionately optimistic media coverage heralding the selection of a group of hopeful colonists. Yet, significant criticisms and troubling questions encircle the project. This article will examine those questions and criticisms and provide a sobering evaluation of some of the technical, legal and ethical challenges facing Mars One. This article is not intended to be an exhaustive examination of all the technical, ethical, legal, and political issues facing this venture. Rather it is intended to be a prcis of some of the issues that need to be addressed by the Mars One Project if it to meet its deadline and its goals.

At the outset, there are two important and interlinked caveats that preface this discussion. First, it should be noted many of the problems facing the Mars One project are not sui generis to this endeavor. Any crewed mission to Mars will face them. The issue is not that such problems are insurmountable; merely that Mars One does not have the capacity or the budget for the research and development necessary to overcome them. Second, and perhaps crucially, this is not an attack on the people involved in the project. There is much to admire in the pioneering spirit and genuine enthusiasm held by those involved. This discussion is not seeking to discredit or diminish their bold vision. It is the project itself that is under scrutiny, a project that poses significant risk to these participants.

Although the ethical and legal challenges facing Mars One are considerable, this venture will ultimately rise or fall on the technical and engineering elements. The stated aim of Mars One, according to their website, is to use existing technologies available from proven suppliers.1 This statement provides the first crucial difficulty. At each crucial phase of the missiontravel to Mars, landing, and establishing a permanent colonythe claim that of utilizing existing technology is unsustainable.

For example, at present the only existing operational human spaceflight vehicle is the Russian Soyuz capsule. Mars One states that the existing technology that will be used to traverse millions of kilometers from the Earth to Mars will instead be a variant of SpaceXs Dragon capsule. To call the considerable research and development that this would require as existing technology is, at best, grossly oversimplifying the issue.

The Mars One project also provides no detail in respect of the development of reliable and effective life support systems and the problematic subject of dealing with human waste disposal. These are issues that will ultimately need to be solved for a successful mission to Mars, and there is significant research and development activity ongoing in this area.2 Such technology is, however, by no means existing without a significant amount of investment in research and development.

The picture is very much the same when considering the critical issue of landing the Mars One colonists on the Martian surface. Considered one of the most problematic aspects of human exploration, it is this aspect of the Mars One project where the notion of using existing technology is exposed as being dangerously misleading. The existing technology that has landed rovers on Mars is inadequate for landing humans.3 The Martian atmosphere poses considerable and serious challenges for landing a heavy payload onto the surface. The atmosphere varies considerably, making it extremely difficult to scale up existing technology used to land small rovers. Supersonic retropropulsion, which at present seems the most promising method of overcoming the obstacles posed by the variable Martian atmosphere, still requires expensive research and development.4 Again, this is not a problem unique to the Mars One project. It is, however, a fundamental obstacle to a 2023 mission with a projected budget of $6 billion.

Assuming, however, that the Mars One crew successfully makes it to the Martian surface, one aspect of space technology that remains untested, and makes the Mars One project fundamentally different from any previous space activity, is the technology required for the permanent settlement of Mars. Much has been made of in situ resource utilization (ISRU) technologies that will enable the colonists to live off the land. The much-publicized MIT feasibility study of Mars One casts significant doubt on the readiness of this technology, none of which has been deployed in practice.5 When challenged on this, the Mars One team responded by maintaining that the MIT study was based on ISS operations and therefore the study does not provide a valid comparison.6

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Failure to launch: the technical, ethical, and legal case against Mars One