Artemis versus Apollo: An Invidious Comparison?

 

In Greek mythology, the sun god Apollo and the moon god Artemis were twins born to Leto after she had an extramarital affair with Zeus.  As the main point of  NASA's Apollo program of the 1960s was to land men on the moon, not the sun, Artemis would have been a better name for it. 

 

There's an old saying in engineering that if there's not enough time to do it right, there's somehow always enough time to do it over.  I'm not sure that applies to NASA's Artemis program, which is currently aimed at what looks to me like an Apollo do-over, but it all depends on your point of view.

 

One point of view that's very popular in some circles these days is what might be called the Original Sin of the White Male.  In the dark ages preceding the civil-rights movement of the 1960s and second-wave feminism of the 1970s, if you were not a white male you were out of luck.  Most doors to professions were slammed in your face, and these injustices tainted any cultural or national achievements with racism and sexism, including the successful landing on the moon in July of 1969 by—you guessed it—white males.

 

In many historical religions, people tried to make up for their past sins by sacrifices designed to please the gods.  If you look at the main webpage for NASA's Artemis program, the first sentence you will see is this:  "With Artemis missions, NASA will land the first woman and first person of color on the Moon, using innovative technologies to explore more of the lunar surface than ever before." 

 

When I read somewhere that one of the main goals of the Artemis program was to remedy the white-males-only record of lunar flights, I didn't want to believe it.  But there it is, in—pardon the expression—black and white, right on their webpage.  When you look into the history of the program, it's a little more complicated than just wanting to make up for Apollo by sending women and people of color to the Moon.  But obviously, NASA has chosen to make that feature a big selling point to the public.

 

The problem that democracies have with any large-scale program that lasts longer than four years is to keep them going despite the winds of political change that blow through Washington at least that often.  In the early 2000s, NASA conceived something called Constellation, which was its effort to put people back in space after the end of the Space Shuttle, which wound down in 2011.  The Obama administration cancelled Constellation except for the Orion spacecraft, which was then folded into something called the Space Launch System (SLS).  One way or another, with various name changes (the name was changed to Artemis during the Trump administration), the program has limped along with funding that is, relatively speaking, a pittance in fraction-of-GNP terms compared to Apollo. 

 

Well, not that much of a pittance, actually.  One estimate places the total cost of Artemis, assuming it actually gets off the ground by 2025, at $93 billion.  If expressed in 2020 dollars, the 1960s Apollo program cost $257 billion, not quite three times as much.  So Artemis isn't that much of a bargain.  And we still haven't got a single person—of any color or sex—off the ground under its auspices, while Apollo spent most of the 1960s in rehearsals of various kinds.

 

Until Hurricane Ian came along, NASA was planning to launch Artemis 1, the first shot in the Artemis series, on Sept. 23.  Problems with fuel tanks on Sept. 12 led launch officials to postpone the scheduled launch, and then concerns about Hurricane Ian pushed the next tentative launch date to November of this year. 

 

Artemis 1 will not be a manned (womaned?) flight.  Only some satellites and flight-test dummies will be aboard.  The SLS rocket is attributed to (I kid you not) the Aerojet Rocketdyne Northrop Grumman Boeing United Launch Alliance.  If that isn't a creature of politics, I don't know what is.  The newer private-rocket company SpaceX is prime contractor for the Human Landing System (HLS), which is planned to get people from lunar orbit down to the moon.  But that won't be an active part of the Artemis 1 launch, which is mainly to see if the launch rocket works.

 

After a certain point, large organizations develop a kind of default mode that they will operate in unless strong external forces are brought to bear on them.  NASA's default mode, for the last decade at least, has been to seek funding for projects that have a political appeal wide enough to motivate enough federal support to provide contracts for as many contractors as possible, while keeping one eye on a goal that can be achieved if NASA only had about twice as much funding as it ever gets. 

 

For a time, around 2010, several of my undergraduate engineering students spoke admiringly of space programs and expressed a desire to get involved in them.  One of them, the smartest undergraduate woman I've had in my electromagnetics class in twenty years, even ended up working for Blue Origin.  But lately, the bloom has come off the space-exploration rose, and the highest ambitions many students have these days is just to land a job that will let them pay off their student loans before they retire. 

 

When Neil Armstrong uttered his first words on the moon—"one giant leap for mankind"—I wasn't aware of any women or girls who felt excluded because he said "mankind" and not "humanity."  He couldn't get away with that today, because the original sin of the white male plays such a prominent role in the public's consciousness these days.  It's an open question as to whether redressing this wrong at a cost of $92 billion is worth it.  Of course, a lot of other good and useful things may be done by returning to the moon with an eye toward using it as a base for wider-ranging exploration of space.  But can't we concentrate on the job at hand, and take integration of people of color and women and other minorities in stride, rather than making it the main focus, which is what NASA seems to want it to be?  The problem with that is that we'd have to decide what the main job is, and the answer to that question is far from clear.

 

Sources:  NASA's Artemis webpage is at https://www.nasa.gov/specials/artemis/. 

The Artemis project cost estimate is from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/years-late-and-billions-over-budget-nasas-most-powerful-rocket-finally-set-for-takeoff, the Apollo cost estimate is from https://www.planetary.org/space-policy/cost-of-apollo, and I also referred to the Wikipedia pages on the Artemis program and the Artemis HLS development program. 

Asteroid Dust, Anyone?

 

Last Thursday, Oct. 30, the NASA spacecraft Osiris-Rex sampled about four pounds (2 kilograms) of material from an asteroid named Bennu.  If the rest of the mission goes as well as it has so far, in October of 2023 the sample container will land in the Utah desert, bringing the largest amount in history of asteroid material to earth.  Japanese space probes have previously succeeded in sampling pieces of asteroids, but never as much material as we will get from Bennu.

 

In the nature of such projects, planning probably began more than a decade ago.  This is the type of project that scientists devote entire careers to, and I'm sure that dozens or hundreds of people have been working on it for most of the twenty-first century so far.  The spacecraft was launched from Cape Canaveral in September of 2016, and spent about two years catching up to Bennu, whose orbit lies partly inside that of the Earth.  In fact, one reason Bennu was chosen as a target is that there is about a 1 in 2700 chance that it will collide with Earth some time in the next ten years.  Bennu is a small asteroid by asteroid standards, only about 490 meters (1600 feet) across.  But it's big enough to do plenty of damage if it entered our atmosphere.  An old rule from combat is "know your enemy," so if we find ourselves scrambling to avoid Bennu's wrath and want to do something about it, knowing what it's made of will help.

 

Once the spacecraft reached the asteroid, it went into orbit about a mile away.  Even an object as small as Bennu has enough gravity to enable a satellite to orbit in that fashion.  Then, in a horribly tricky 36-hour process, Osiris-Rex crept up to the surface and snatched a four-pound sample and put it in a can to return it to Earth.  And NASA has pictures to prove it.

 

The entire project, including the launch rocket, cost under $1 billion.  That is chump change compared to the least expensive manned mission the U. S. undertook, Project Mercury back in the early 1960s, which cost about $2 billion in 2020 dollars.  My point is that if you just leave the people at home, you can do extremely impressive things in space for a whole lot less money.

 

What do we get for that $1 billion?  Well, if you like to put it this way, the world's most expensive dirt, at $250 million a pound.  Space exploration and astronomy seem to be the main beneficiaries these days of what is left of pure-science curiosity.  That is why the U. S. government found the wherewithal and the consistency to fund the Osiris-Rex project from its inception in the early 2000s to its completion sometime in 2023. 

 

And that is appropriate, because from my worm's-eye view teaching young people who are technically inclined (electrical engineers), many of the best of them seem to seek out space-related jobs.  One of the best electromagnetics students I ever had went to work initially for Boeing, and she is now at Blue Origin, the spaceflight company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.  And just last week, I was talking with a former grad student of mine who wants to go into aerospace engineering or science to develop space probes. 

 

In terms of frontiers of exploration, it makes sense to look upward, as there's a lot of room out there and a lot of things to find out.  Every age has what philosopher Richard Weaver calls its "metaphysical dream."  This is not necessarily a religious thing.  But just as most of us need some basic reason to get out of bed in the morning, a society needs something to look forward to and hope for.  Astronomy and especially space exploration, both manned and unmanned, seem to satisfy that need in a way that few other current enterprises do.

 

While interest and pride in unmanned projects like Osiris-Rex is justified, another point to be made is that if exploration is all you want to do, leaving the people at home is by far the most efficient way to do it.  This argument does not go down well with the space-as-manifest-destiny crowd, who believe that Earth is to space as Europe was to America:  a place we'll simply look back on and say yes, we came from there, but we're glad we're here now. 

 

The danger in making space the ultimate destiny of mankind is the same danger that any other utopian project brings.  For whatever reason, it seems that if people convince themselves that there is a perfect future out there for them, infinitely better than anything we have now, they begin to justify all manner of wickedness and injustice in the present for the sake of the ideal perfect future that somehow never arrives.  This sort of thing is most easily observed in the history of Marxism, which led to the death of millions on the altar of the perfect workers' paradise that never got here. 

 

Maybe you think that hoping to colonize other planets or space in general can't cause serious problems here on Earth.  Well, think of it this way.  Marriage is supposed to be a lifelong total commitment of two souls to each other.  But if one of the parties starts thinking, "Well, things are fine now, but if (he, she) gets old and floppy, I can always find somebody else," just the harboring of that thought can cause invisible corrosion of the relationship that can eventually lead to a total rupture.

 

Once we start looking at Earth not with the eyes of a homeowner, but with the eyes of a renter who has no long-term commitment to the upkeep of the property, you can see what problems might arise.  Everybody involved in Osiris-Rex deserves praise for their persistence, skill, and commitment to a long-term project that could benefit all of humanity, and not just a few space scientists.  By the same token, let's not look on Earth as just a starter apartment, but as the place where humanity has committed to stay and live peaceably and responsibly as long as we can.

 

Sources:  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer carried the AP article "Asteroid samples tucked into capsule for return to Earth" on Oct. 31, 2020 at https://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Asteroid-samples-tucked-into-capsule-for-return-15685773.php.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Osiris-Rex, Bennu, and Blue Origin.

SpaceX Launches NASA Astronauts At Last

On Saturday, May 30, American astronauts flew into orbit on an American-made space vehicle for the first time since 2011.  SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket carried Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, both veterans of the old Space Shuttle program, inside the Dragon capsule, and once the capsule separated safely, the first stage returned automatically to earth and landed intact on a barge to be reused.  Meanwhile, the Dragon capsule has been catching up to the International Space Station (ISS) where, assuming the docking goes smoothly this morning (I'm writing this Sunday), the astronauts will stay for the next several months.  The return flight in the Dragon capsule is planned to end in the ocean, a mode of re-entry that hasn't been done for over forty years. 

Many news reports remarked on the contrast between the good news of a successful launch and the general tone of recent U. S. news events:  the COVID-19 virus and all its consequences, riots over police brutality, and so on.  But this is nothing new. 

The space race between the U. S. and the USSR over who would get to the moon first was conducted during what was probably the most tumultuous decade in the last half of the twentieth century.  The 1960s were not exactly peaceful:  the Vietnam War, antiwar protests, race riots, and the sexual revolution are just a few items of turmoil that come to mind.  But amid all the strife, America found the will and the capability to land men on the moon on July 20, 1969.

Engineers are not much into symbolism.  But space exploration carries a heavy load of symbolism, and it's worthwhile considering what that means in light of the huge effort and expense that sending people into space entails.

In retrospect, the Apollo program was mainly a way to carry on the Cold War by peaceful means.  Its extraordinary expense was justified not for scientific reasons, although there was some useful science done.  But being the first nation to put men on the moon would show our technological superiority to the world, and in an age dominated by technology, that achievement had implications that everyone understood.  It took a couple more decades for the USSR to crumble away, but it did.  Nevertheless, in their rough-and-ready way, the Russians maintained their ability to travel into space despite all kinds of political reverses, and once the Space Shuttle program outlived its usefulness, America turned inward with regard to space and paid taxi fare to the Russians to put people on the International Space Station.

When one asks about the ultimate motivations of the younger generation of space cadets—Elon Musk being their spiritual leader—the answer isn't as clear-cut as it was for my generation.  Nationalism pure and simple doesn't seem to be a big factor, although Musk is enough of an American to take pride in the fact that the rocket was made here and launched from here.

To be sure, profit is a motive as well.  That's why the fact that SpaceX and not NASA was the builder of the rocket is so significant.  It may be the case that SpaceX is a long way from turning a profit with direct commercial space activities, as opposed to government-subsidized projects such as the ISS launches.  But with ideas such as asteroid mining around, it may be that some of the next great fortunes may be made in space. 

If I had to guess, though, I'd say that the new space explorers see themselves taking part in a long-term project that will end up putting significant numbers of people out in space, in places that will be just as habitable as Earth, if not more so.  Every so often I come across a student who wants to get involved in the space program somehow, and there's often a kind of glitter in their eye when they talk about it.  The phrase "manifest destiny" has fallen under a cloud in recent years, as its original meaning that the United States was destined to conquer the whole midsection of the North American continent has been taken to be insensitive to the people (and animals) who were already here.  But presumably, displacing natives is not a big problem in the solar system, at least.  And believing that humanity is fated to found colonies on other planets, and perhaps beyond the solar system, seems to be close to an article of faith for many space enthusiasts.

It's interesting that the word "fate" came up in a quote from Musk himself as he commented on the successful launch yesterday.  Remarking on the contrast between Saturday's successful launch and the earlier attempts that were scrubbed by weather conditions, he said, "Today, I don't know, it felt like just the fates were aligned." 

Without putting undue weight on what may have been just an offhand remark, I think it's interesting that the leader of the company that launched Americans into space for the first time in nearly a decade attributes success to the fates being aligned. 

Musk mixed his metaphors, for one thing.  The usual phrase is to say that the stars are aligned, which harks back to the time when astrology—forecasting auspicious times and events by observing stars and planets—was every bit as respectable as forecasting the progress of pandemics is today.  And the Fates were mythological goddesses who presumably determined one's lifespan and, well, fate in life.  Either way, he was saying that despite all the highly technical and cross-checked planning involved, there is an element in the venture that wasn't under human control.  But we don't believe in Fates or astrology any more, do we? 

It depends on what you think life and the world are about.  If the most one has to look forward to is playing a brief role on a stage where your only hope of immortality is to make a big splash that will be remembered by future generations, then living a Musk-like life makes some sense, especially if humanity is fated to live among the stars.  Then you will be viewed by future generations as a Columbus (if that name isn't too offensive any more), or someone equally famous for venturing out to discover and eventually populate new worlds. 

But if everything we do and are is owing to a supernatural Ground of existence, namely a God who is intensely interested in what we puny humans do, then one has a different perspective on things.  It still may be worth while to explore space, and even for some people to live there.  But other priorities and other goals may intervene.

Sources:  I viewed the pre-launch clip and read the accompanying news copy about the SpaceX launch at https://apnews.com/da66485df4d82c055ce9d6b84a20e450.

Thank God for Gravity: Scott Kelly's Endurance and the Future of Space Travel

Scott Kelly is a NASA astronaut, veteran of a year's stay on the International Space Station (ISS), and now a published author of a popular memoir called Endurance.  He is also the twin brother of fellow astronaut Mark Kelly, who is married to former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an assassination attempt in 2011.  At the time Giffords was shot, her brother-in-law was in orbit during an earlier ISS stay.

Needless to say, Kelly has led an eventful life, and his memoir is rather unusual in that he doesn't shy away from matters that reflect badly on either him or aspects of the space program.  He is honest about many of his shortcomings, including his first marriage that ended in divorce.  And when in the course of narrating in detail his experiences in space, he is inconvenienced by a NASA policy or action, he lets you know about it.  The part of the book that describes day-to-day life on the ISS has got to be one of the most detailed and vivid descriptions of space flight in print.  And that's the problem.  If he wrote this book to encourage people to think about mass migration to space, it may have backfired.

To a landlubber like me, Kelly's trials and risks he undergoes to be in space are appalling.  Take what sounds like a simple thing:  a space walk.  First off, it takes about five hours to get ready, involving hundreds of separate checklisted steps, many of which if neglected or done in the wrong order could result in your untimely and painful demise. 

Then there is the zero-G environment.  I never really appreciated gravity until I read Kelly's book.  On earth, you put down a pen, or a wrench, or a screw, and it stays there.  Not in space.  Every single last thing you might possibly need has to be either tied down, kept in a bag, stuck to a piece of Velcro (TM), or otherwise secured, or else on the space walk you will inadvertently contribute to the already vast quantity of space junk orbiting Earth, and lose whatever you needed in the bargain.  The most chilling aspect of his space walks is to learn that over the nearly two decades that at least some of the ISS has been up there, meteors or orbiting pieces of derelict satellites have punched holes and taken entire chunks out of handrails on the outside of the structure.  And it's just a matter of chance whether another one of those 17,000-MPH pieces of debris drills a hole through you while you're outside. 

Kelly, along with anyone else who endures the rigors of years of training and competition to go into space, deserves accolades for his monumental achievements.  But at the same time, I can't help but wonder whether the up-close view of what life in space is really like lends more weight to the argument that, like many people say of New York, it's a nice place to visit but I wouldn't want to live there. 

The question really boils down to this:  is space, and whatever lies beyond in terms of potentially habitable planets, really more like America in 1620, or Antarctica in 1920?  Here's what I mean.

Right now, corporations are being organized to go into space exploration commercially, and large groups of visionaries are planning to spread humanity in some form to other planets.  From what I can tell, these folks believe that space and regions beyond it will eventually harbor lots of people, like the New World (North and South America) does now.  Some even seem to think that we have damaged our planet here beyond repair with global warming and pollution, and we better start making our plans for an exit strategy when Earth becomes uninhabitable.  Either way, these folks (who Kelly, incidentally, does not explicitly identify himself with) have an attitude toward space that says it is our manifest destiny to go there and occupy it with all the trappings of civilization:  cities, nations, the whole bit.  They would say that space now is like America was to Europe in 1620:  a new world beckoning us to explore and settle it.

If Kelly's spare-time reading had been about Columbus or Vasco da Gama, I might agree that he is of that party.  But what book did he take with him on the ISS?  Endurance:  Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, the story of Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton's ill-fated 1914 expedition to cross the Antarctic.  Their ship got stuck in ice and Shackleton and his men ended up floating away on chunks of sea ice and lifeboats.  In his choice of reading matter, I think Kelly has inadvertently answered the question of what space exploration is most similar to in the history of humanity so far.  And it doesn't bode well for any large-scale plans that involve moving lots of ordinary people into space.

There have been manned outposts in the extreme Arctic and Antarctic regions for about a century now, and the population of Antarctica still hovers in the hundreds at most.  The fact is that the environment there is so hostile to human life that living there is extremely expensive, inconvenient, and worth while only if a strong scientific or cultural motive justifies it. 

I think space is the same way.  It's hard to imagine how we could make space travel so safe, convenient, and comfortable that you could get lots of people (I'm talking thousands at least) to attempt it.  And by definition, you have to travel through space to get to anywhere besides Earth. 

So I salute Kelly and his compatriots for the incredible achievements they have made in simply keeping the ISS running and keeping alive up there, no small part of which is due to Kelly's accumulated expertise in repeatedly fixing what has to be the world's most expensive toilet.  But by the same token, I think space travel will remain a hugely expensive and highly specialized endeavor for a narrowly chosen few, for the foreseeable future—and maybe beyond that, too.

Sources:  I thank my wife for giving me Scott Kelly's Endurance:  A Year In Space, A Lifetime of Discovery (Knopf, 2017) for Christmas.

The Prospect of Space Prospecting

Isaac Asimov's sci-fi story "Catch That Rabbit," published in 1944, is set in an asteroid mine and portrays what might happen if formerly obedient robots decided to rebel.  These days, Asimov's dream of space mining is a lot closer to reality, with several firms making definite plans to launch exploratory vehicles around 2020 and have full-scale mining up and running later in the decade.  But as an article in October's Scientific American points out, the legal status of space mining is by no means clear. 

It still costs a lot to put anything into space, or to bring it back, for that matter.  So instead of being enticed by visions of extraterrestrial gold and diamonds, space-mining companies have their eyes on more prosaic materials that could be extracted from asteroids:  water for either human consumption or conversion into convenient rocket fuels such as hydrogen and oxygen, iron and refractory materials for construction, and other useful but bulky and heavy stuff that becomes very expensive to lug into space from Earth.  The idea is to extract enough materials from an asteroid to allow space-based operations that are supplied by space resources, rather than having to bring everything along with you.  Such space-based resupply stations will be necessary for any space exploration much beyond what we've attempted so far. 

That is well and good, but there's a little thing called the 1967 Outer Space Treaty standing in the way.  Almost 100 states (including the U. S., Russia, and China) have signed this agreement, which forbids colonization or use of space for military operations.  The key phrase in the treaty bans "national appropriation" of celestial bodies such as asteroids.  That means, for instance, you couldn't just hitch an asteroid to your spacecraft and drag it back home behind you.  Russia, for examples, interprets this phrase as prohibiting space mining.

On the other hand, U. S. companies argue that the international laws of the sea prohibit appropriation of international waters, but allow certain kinds of exploitation such as fishing and offshore drilling, although there's only an analogy between space law and sea law.  The real problem is that the 1967 agreement didn't address space mining in any detail.  Clearly, a new agreement would be nice to negotiate, but something called the Moon Agreement ran into opposition a few years ago and remains mostly unratified.  So countries aren't in the mood to sign away any rights to asteroids right now. 

It's rather disquieting to compare the current situation to, say, the way things were in Europe in the 1400s when expeditions to the New World were just beginning.  Right now, it's hard to imagine that anything going on at an asteroid or two would have significant consequences for the history of the Earth.  But few people were expecting that the voyages of an eccentric guy named Columbus would amount to much either. 

If one imagines a scenario in which space travel becomes highly valued for some reason, then space mining would suddenly take on a new and vital aspect.  There is already among some space-minded people an attitude that says our days on Earth are numbered, not only individually but collectively.  That is to say, just as America served as a place to make a new start for many who found Europe not to their liking for various reasons, the idea of space colonization (the Outer Space Treaty notwithstanding) serves as a kind of secular Paradise for people who have given up on the hope that we can agree to live here on Earth peacably and without trashing it beyond repair. 

So suppose a kind of abandon-ship mentality spreads among the elite and wealthy of many nations, and a keen competition arises to see who can manage to leave the sinking vessel the fastest.  Unless somebody invents a Star-Trek-type warp drive soon, space mining will be a necessary part of any large-scale space travel.  And one can easily imagine the powerful of different nations coming to blows over who gets to mine which asteroid.  After all, it's not that easy to sneak around in space, so covert operations are out.  Everybody would know what everybody else is doing, and things could get really ugly.

Not that they're real attractive right now.  I admit that in the present shape of world politics and affairs, a little thing like space mining is way down the priority list.  But there is still time now to examine the question dispassionately before vested interests get into the act and try to hijack the discussion in their favor.  Presently there are no significant vested interests out in space—no mines, no rockets heading out to do space mining, and only plans to do so yet.  I am generally no fan of the United Nations, but it seems like that would be a good forum in which to breach the subject of space mining and how plans could be coordinated so that if humankind does eventually decide to move into space in a major way, we could at least agree on the means and resources to make it possible and how to share them. 

But achieving a united vision of such prospects requires a type of diplomacy and leadership that is currently in short supply.  It may be that there will be a better time in the future to hash out an international agreement about space mining than now.  But as private space companies make more technical progress, the legal situation will either have to keep up with them or deal with the technology as it happens.  That won't be the first time—I don't think Columbus got a nicely notarized clear title to land he claimed for Spain, at least not from the folks whose land he was claiming.  And if you're thinking of investing in a space-mining company soon, be aware that there might be a few legal problems ahead.

Sources:  "Space Prospecting" by Jesse Dunietz appeared on pp. 14-16 of the October 2017 issue of Scientific American.  I also referred to an article in LiveScience at https://www.livescience.com/19862-asteroid-mining-fiction-present.html that refers to Asimov's story, and to the New World Encyclopedia's article on the Spanish Empire at http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Spanish_Empire.

"Survivor" On Mars: Poor Ratings Could Be Deadly

Reality shows on TV claim to present life as it happens.  Never mind that the kind of life that happens on these shows is something that most of us would pay money to avoid:  getting tossed into a wilderness with next to nothing to live on, or being expelled from the show altogether by a vote of your peers.  But reality shows continue in various forms to be one of the more popular TV genres.

A Dutch nonprofit startup called Mars One is planning a reality show that is literally out of this world.  The organization's plan is to send four astronauts—two men and two women—to Mars by 2025, that is, eleven years from now.  And they plan for their main source of revenue to be fees charged by the outfit for continuous media coverage of the entire venture. 

Did I say anything about bringing the astronauts back?  No, and neither does Mars One.  From the get-go, the organization's plan has been to get their stars to Mars, and after that, well, they knew what they were getting into, didn't they?  And there's always phone calls—with a seven-minute one-way delay.  Despite this, er, disadvantage, about 200,000 people have reportedly expressed interest in being selected for the first trip.  As of last May, Mars One had culled the list of prospects down to about 700 lucky (or unlucky, as the case may be) people.  Eventually it will have to be cut down to a few dozen or so at most who will undergo the planned seven or eight years of training, which has to commence no later than 2016 for the project to keep on schedule for the launch in 2024 (it will take over a year to get there). 

The Mars One website has that characteristically Dutch tone of modesty combined with a tolerance for things that other cultures consider beyond the pale.  It may be no coincidence that the same country harboring Mars One is also where euthanasia has made its biggest advances.  And as far as living on earth is concerned, the Mars One trip would be just a long-drawn-out, televised, technologically implemented end to your earthly existence. 

In a way, there's nothing new about Mars One's invitation to become famous and historical at the price of never being on earth again.  In wars and disasters, individuals have at various times chosen to throw away their lives with a vanishingly small chance of survival, in order to achieve a greater good.  Japanese fighter pilots flew suicide missions in the closing days of World War II.  Arland D. Williams, Jr., one of only six survivors of a plane that crashed into the Potomac River on January 13, 1982, repeatedly handed lifelines to the other survivors, only to drown when the plane's wing he was standing on sank.  But rightly or wrongly, these people were sacrificing their lives for a cause greater than themselves.

What is the comparable cause that Mars One is proposing to achieve, at the price of its passengers' lives?  Whatever it is, 200,000 people around the world at least considered it worthwhile enough to apply. 

National glory doesn't seem to be much of a motive.  Mars One is probably the most extreme existing example of the turn toward private space ventures that began about a decade ago.  When space exploration was something so difficult that only governments could afford it, those who volunteered and went through the arduous training and took great risks—and those who lost their lives, too—had the satisfaction of knowing that their actions were on the behalf of the United States, or the USSR, or (more lately) the People's Republic of China.  During the space race of the 1960s, being an astronaut was a way of fighting the Cold War by other means.  But the Mars One venture has a deliberately international tone to it, and I suspect that most of their applicants consider themselves mainly citizens of the world, rather than of the particular country where they happened to be born.

What if Mars One barely manages to get their first folks on Mars and then runs out of money?  Even the most debauched reality-TV shows up to now have not proposed to show us live scenes of slow starvation, but that's what we'd be dealing with.  What would the dying colonists be thinking? 

There are precedents for this sort of thing, after all.  We can look at the record left behind of a man who knowingly ventured on a risky expedition that turned out badly:  Robert Falcon Scott.  In 1912, his team was the second in history to reach the South Pole, after Roald Amundsen.  A few weeks later, after his team consumed the last of their provisions, Scott was the last of his five-person party to die of cold and starvation.  Knowing what was coming, he left a "Message to the Public" which reads in part: "We took risks, we knew we took them; things have come out against us, and therefore we have no cause for complaint, but bow to the will of Providence. . . . Had we lived, I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance, and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman."  He lived and died an Englishman to the last, and expressed his dying thoughts in prose that has stood the test of time.

If Mars One ever gets off the ground, the adventure may end in tragedy—suddenly, with no time for last words or regrets, or slowly, allowing its victims to reflect on their fate as Scott did in his last letters.  Maybe in the applicant pool of 700 there are one or two Robert F. Scotts whose grasp of reality, and what the human spirit is capable of, would be equal to a supreme crisis like the one Scott faced.  But the track record of reality TV is not promising in this regard.  

Sources:  The Mars One website is www.mars-one.com.  I referred to reports on their activities at http://www.clickondetroit.com/news/oneway-ticket-to-mars-anyone/25397422 (posted April 13, 2014) and a CNN report at http://www.cnn.com/2013/04/22/world/mars-one-way-ticket.  I also consulted Wikipedia articles on reality television and Ronald Falcon Scott.