Tomorrow

Twenty years after Neil Armstrong pressed the first footprint into the moon's powdery gray surface, President George Bush set a course for the years to come in America's space program.• Echoing the challenge that sent Armstrong to our nearest neighbor John F. Kennedy's challenge to reach the moon in the 1960sBush urged a new national effort: Return to the lunar surface and put human footprints on Mars. • "The exploration of space is one of the fundamental goals of the U.S. civil space program," Bush said in a major policy statement to NASA. "The [Space Exploration Initiative] objectives, which build upon previous accomplishments, as well as upon existing programs, include a return to the moon, this time to stay, and human expeditions to Mars."

The Moon,
Mars and Beyond

NASA's amazing odyssey is just beginning

For 40 years, the reaches of space have beckoned, inspiring generations to meet new challenges and climb ever-higher mountains.

While President Bush's vision may not have inspired the imagination as in those heady days of Camelot, it laid out a plan that may well take humankind to the far reaches of space and beyond.

Long the speculation of science fiction, a space station orbiting Earth a stopover on the way to other planets, perhaps other stars has already become reality to some extent with the fledgling Skylab and Russia's rugged Mir. But the idea takes a major step forward this year.

In November, the first component of the International Space Station, the Zarya control module, will lift off aboard a Proton rocket from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Then, in December, a connecting module named Unity will go into orbit 220 miles up aboard the shuttle Endeavour. More than two dozen more shuttle flights, and nearly 50 rocket launches will be required to complete the 290-foot-long, 361-foot-wide station.

Additional components will be added by Japan, Canada and the European Space Agency, giving the world a stellar facility for conducting the research that will eventually launch the manned exploration of the solar system.

"What we're going to be doing on the space station, the long list of things related to science and those kinds of things, is preparing us to take that next step," says Wayne Littles, ME '62, who retired this year as director of the Marshall Space Flight Center after overseeing initial construction of the first U.S. components. "We're going to be getting more data on the long-term effects of space on the crew and determining what can be done to mitigate those effects."

Planned research aboard the space station spans the spectrum of scientific inquiry, from growing protein crystals to enhance the treatment of disease to creating semiconductors for new high-speed supercomputers. More importantly, perhaps, it will inspire a new generation of young pioneers.

"We're going to be preparing ourselves as we fly the space station and develop science and technology to take the next step whether that's going to Mars or whatever it is. There are endless opportunities."

Back to the Moon or Bust?

Bush's imperative to settle the moon set off a flurry of activity at NASA as scientists and engineers considered how to accomplish it. Likewise, it set off debate about whether the effort is worth it.

"There's got to be a need," says James R. Thompson Jr., AE '58, the former associate administrator of NASA who helped resurrect the shuttle program after Challenger's destruction. "The Apollo program was not done because there was going to be any direct benefit out of it. It was done in part because of a competitive relationship with the Soviet Union. It was done to make people reach higher than what they thought they could achieve.

"But it had no real practical value. I hate to say that in a flippant way, but if you ask, 'Why do you want to go to the moon?' People say they're going to work on the moon. Why? Work doing what?"

German scientist Kraftt Ehricke proffered a possible answer years ago when he advocated moving production facilities, especially polluting facilities, to the moon where even nuclear waste can't seep into the atmosphere and oceans. The low-gravity environment would ease many production problems and enable others. Such a production plan would also eliminate costly ferrying of many materials from Earth because they could be manufactured locally.

Meanwhile, lunar workers would be gaining the knowledge and skills needed for the next goal.

"The greatest achievement of the human race will occur in the next century when we go back to the moon and on to Mars and learn how to live and work on other places in the solar system," says astronaut John Young, AE '52, one of the 12 Americans who actually has worked on the moon. "We'll do that in the next century. We're going to get smarter, faster and learn better ways to do things."

Better ways of doing things includes many things people aren't doing on Earth today, such as "recycling everything, air, waste and water, so that you don't throw anything away. You recycle it, and you keep very close account of it," Young says. Long-term visitors to the moon will also require food, which will need to be grown locally. NASA currently is experimenting with closed-loop environments to grow crops and light-emitting diodes to simulate sunlight.

Mars on a Shoestring

Just as those early explorers who answered Kennedy's clarion call looked to the moon as the next great mountain to climb, men and women working on the lunar surface will look to the beckoning peaks of the Red Planet.

"The next really big program would be an exploration of Mars," says Richard Truly, AE '59, the only astronaut to serve as NASA's top man. "Mars is the only planet in our solar system that humans could really visit because all the others are too hot or too cold or too far away to be able to get to in the next century.

"But Mars is achievable. And like Mount Everest, sooner or later somebody is going to climb it."

There are many scenarios for a manned trip to Mars. Scientists have suggested building a ship in orbit near the space station or on the moon so the low gravity would help in getting the enormous stores of equipment, fuel, air, food and water en route. But even in free-fall, the huge mass would require Herculean thrust to reach Mars in a reasonable period of time. So some have suggested sending first a nuclear-powered robot that would create its own fuel and other stores, and serve as a return vessel for Martian astronauts.

But whatever path is finally chosen, the first steps have been under way for years with probes such as Mariner, Viking and more recently, Mars Pathfinder and Mars Global Surveyor. In keeping with NASA's new "better, faster, cheaper" credo, these robotic explorers are getting more affordable all the time.

Where the twin Viking missions cost $3 billion and took eight years to develop, Pathfinder and its roving robot Sojourner cost only $250 million and took half as long to develop. Surveyor cost just $152 million.

"Because the spacecraft cost less, we do them faster, and we have more in number," says NASA Administrator Dan Goldin. In addition to Global Surveyor, which will spend the next two years mapping and photographing Mars, NASA plans as many as eight new probes there by 2006.

Better, Faster, Cheaper, Smaller

At the Jet Propulsion Lab in California, the operative word in creating faster, cheaper spacecraft is "smaller." Scientists in JPL's Microdevices Lab have engineered semiconductor-based devices that can do the work of a gargantuan instrument package in the space of a dime.

"NASA has challenged us here at JPL to shrink the size of the science spacecraft we send into deep space so we can launch them on smaller launch vehicles, launch more of them more frequently and at less cost. One of the approaches here is through miniaturization," says Perry Bankston, AE '71, MS AE '73, Ph.D. '76, head of the Microdevices Lab.

Bankston and his colleagues are making strides in creating components needed for successful space flight. For example, they have created new technology techniques called micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) that let them create minuscule gyroscopes for navigating in space.

A newly designed Mars probe otical system compared to a
Susan B. Anothony silver dollar.

"We also have a number of activities associated with developing innovations in scientific instrumentation, the kinds of instruments sent to other planets, asteroids, comets or what have you, to make scientific measurements. These may be anything from new-technology infrared detectors to in situ sensors, or sensors that literally come into physical contact with an environment and allow you to take measurements on the surfaces or in the atmospheres of other bodies in the solar system."

The next two Mars probes will carry sensors of the type Bankston et al have engineered. In December and January, an orbiter and lander will begin the roughly 36 million mile journey, and they could send back some of the most important information ever gleaned from Mars' rocky red surfacethe presence of water.

Digging a Martian Well

Attached to the landing vehicle are two instrument packages, each smaller than a breadbox, that utilize the latest miniaturized sensors for detecting life's most-vital requirement.

"As the lander craft enters the atmosphere of Mars, these two microprobes will be spun off and will go hurtling toward the surface of Mars," Bankston says. "These two penetrators, which are a little bit smaller than a tin can, will hit the surface of Mars and penetrate it up to about a meter."

The penetrator will scoop a sample of soil and heat it up, freeing any frozen water present as water vapor. A semiconductor-based "tunable diode laser," a device that can be set to the frequency needed to detect water, will then look for evidence of the precious fluid.

"As the water passes in front of the laser, the detector will record a decrease in the intensity of the laser beam, with the result being you'll get a signal showing there's water vapor present," Bankston says. "The same device is also on the lander."

The lander, which will soft-land on Mars with retro-rockets, will use the detectors to search for water vapor in the Martian atmosphere.

To create the microprobes, the Microdevices Lab had to overcome significant design problems, such as creating batteries capable of withstanding the 80,000-G force of impacting Mars, as well as microprocessors and a small radio.

While the miniature technology already created at JPL is impressive cameras on a chip, for instance Bankston and his colleagues are looking much further, looking for the physical limits, the point at which it isn't possible to go smaller.

"We've been working on technologies that get spacecraft mass down into the tens of kilograms," he says. "What we want to be able to do eventually is build very capable science craft that are just a few kilograms, one or two or three, maybe even smaller, that can still make many of the measurements that in the past would have required systems weighing hundreds of kilograms."

Meanwhile, the Microdevices Lab is also laying the roadmap for the next level of miniaturization and nanotechnology, "seeking the smallest possible miniaturization that physics and chemistry allow in the future."

Andromeda Strain?

As the first Mars probe looks for the stuff of life, the possibility it could exist there, could even be dangerous, is the concern of NASA scientists.

With plans for the last Mars lander in the 10-year series currently under way calling for a return trip, these scientists are considering how they can safely retrieve a Martian soil sample without unleashing some space bug along the line of The Andromeda Strain.

The possibility attracted new attention after the recent and much-contested discovery of possible fossils in a meteorite from Mars, but a National Academy of Sciences committee said earlier this year the only likely sources of biological contamination are two of Jupiter's moons.

"We do know Mars one time had a lot of water, had a lot of rivers that flowed, and most of that is gone," says Charles Kohlhase, Phys '57, part of a NASA team studying the safest way to return a Martian soil sample. "The odds are there is nothing alive on Mars, but you want to be safe; you don't want to release an organism in the Earth's environment that might have a bad effect."

The group is considering a number of options: a direct route where the sealed sample drops into Earth's atmosphere like a meteor; a route into Earth orbit, with the sample retrieved by a space shuttle or the space station; even an "aerocapture" scheme involving parachutes.

"So far, we believe the best route is a direct entry, where it comes right in and the Earth's atmosphere slows it down," Kohlhase says. The sample would be protected by a crushable structure, like the crumple zones of safer automobiles, and it would land in either Utah or Australia, depending on the time of year. The sites are thought best for two reasons: they both are large enough to contain the 12-by-20-mile "footprint," the area in which the sample should land; and they are both dry and inhospitable.

"If it did break open, and there is anything in there, the last place you want to put it is in the water," Kohlhase says.

Beyond Tomorrow

Over the next few years, NASA plans a wide range of activities, from continuing to improve space flight near Earth in the shuttle to making a thorough robotic survey of near space.

"We'll be flying by, orbiting, roving and bringing back samples from every critical planetary body in the solar system," Administrator Goldin says. But what about the real adventures, those genuine leaps into the unknown that capture the world's imagination the way Apollo did in the 1960s, the kind President Bush wanted to launch when he called for human expeditions to Mars.

"The first Mars mission will be like Apollo," Truly says, one that "could be easily done in the next 25 to 50 years, which is nothing."

Predicting the future can be perilous business, of course. George Orwell missed the date with 1984, and with 2001 just 26 months away, there's no HAL 9000 or Space Odyssey to Jupiter on the horizon.

Still, the sky beckons. Like the curving horizon that was a siren to ancient seamen or the towering mountain peaks, it may be impossible not to go.

As Truly puts it, "People will go to Mars if for no other reason than because it is there."

And then? GT

The next frontier: Mars, photographed by the Viking probe