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How exactly do you imagine the first manned mission to Mars? You're probably thinking of something like the Apollo program, only on a much larger scale. An epic launch, a historic landing, a few selfies against the backdrop of red dunes, maybe a bit of metademonic survival, like in the movie The Martian, and then a triumphant return to earth with tears, fireworks, and a confetti parade down Fifth Avenue to the applause of the whole world. Sounds quite logical, doesn't it? After all, we've already pulled this same trick with the moon. But no, Mars is not a moon. The truth behind Elon Musk's headlines and grand promises is actually quite frightening. And it is that whoever
takes that first step onto the rusty Martian soil may never again feel the wind on their face on earth. He may never go outside again without a spacesuit, and it's entirely possible he'll never return home. In short, it could be a one-way ticket. And the problem isn't that the rocket might break or someone might forget to pack a spare roll of tape. No, the bitter [throat clearing] truth is different. The reality is that three ruthless forces will work against this homecoming : economics, orbital mechanics with engineering, and our own icy bodies. And the latter can put us in the worst position.
Let's start with the obvious. Mars is far away. No, seriously, he's really far away. Astrophysicist Neil Des Tyson once gave a brilliant analogy for this. Imagine that the Earth is just a standard-sized school globe sitting on your desk. Do you know where a moon on that scale would be? Not too far. Only about 9 m away somewhere in the next room, maybe in the backyard. And Mars, on the same scale, would be about a mile and a half away at its closest point. And almost 10 km away in the most distant one. It could be somewhere in a park, say, a few blocks from here, or even on the other side of town, on the other side of the train tracks. You know, in a bad
neighborhood. In fact, we are talking about a colossal cosmic chasm from 55 to 400 million km. Ova! This difference is enormous and it directly translates into cost. Huge, simply obscene amounts of money. While the Apollo program cost about $200 billion in today's money, estimates for a mission to Mars and back range anywhere from $ 500 billion to a trillion. But no one can honestly name an exact price yet, because the mission's purpose hasn't even been finalized. Have you ever seen humanity drop a trillion bucks just to do something cool and plant a flag? Spoiler: never. Science was far from the main reason for our flight to the moon. It was primarily an arena where one superpower sought to rub its nose in
another and demonstrate its technological prowess at the height of the Cold War. Once the landing took place, the political urgency disappeared and the lunar program was curtailed. [snort] And if we're going back to the moon now with the Artemis program, competition with China is certainly an important component, as China has announced plans to send its taikonauts there. Good old international competition is in action, but Artamida also aims to advance science, establish a permanent presence on the moon, and prepare for manned missions to Mars. But Mars doesn't have an Apollo-style geopolitical deadline. at least for now. And there is no obvious
short-term business plan either. Yes, of course, there is water, ice, carbon dioxide, iron, and many other potentially useful materials. But Mars' gravity well, combined with the enormous cost of interplanetary transportation, makes exporting massive resources back to Earth an economic absurdity. These materials would be much more valuable on Mars itself, as water, oxygen, fuel, and building materials. No investor in their right mind is going to just throw billions of dollars at a round-trip ticket just because Mars might contain precious stones. But let's fantasize for a second. Let's imagine we found money. Elon Musk opened
his wallet. Governments fell, everyone hugged. Meet physics. In particular, what is called the Tsiolkovsky formula. What the hell is this, you might fairly ask. Let me explain. If you want astronauts to return, you need not only a descent module, but also a take-off module. I mean, they have to leave the planet somehow, right? During the lunar landing, this module was relatively light. The moon's gravity is only 1/6 of Earth's, and there is no atmosphere on the moon at all. The gravity of Mars is already 38% of that of Earth. Plus, there is an atmosphere there that creates resistance. This means you need a serious, heavy, powerful rocket capable of accelerating to about 4 km/s just to reach Martian orbit. And such a heavy
rocket needs fuel. A lot of fuel, about 30 tons in one of NASA's main concepts and potentially more depending on the ship. And here begins the real cosmic tragicomedy. To bring those 10 tons of fuel with you from the ground, you need even more fuel. Just to get that fuel up. And this mass grows exponentially. Hauling full tanks all the way there is not physically impossible, but it is inefficient. Depending on the mission architecture, you may need multiple launches. super-heavy rockets just to launch, assemble, and refuel a Martian ship piece by piece in low-Earth orbit. But wait, you might say after hearing all this, we'll just make the
fuel right there on Mars. That concept is called ROW. Using on-site resources, you extract water from Martian ice and split it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then you combine hydrogen with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere using a sebite reaction. This produces methane and water, which can be recycled and re-cracked to produce more oxygen. Together, these processes give you both components of rocket fuel: methane and liquid oxygen. This, by the way, is one of the reasons why Starshape is being developed with methane engines. In principle, both fuel components could be produced right there, on Mars. On paper, it sounds like a dream. Bingo.
The problem is solved. But in reality, producing fuel on another planet is an absolute logistical nightmare. To produce tens of tons of cryogenic fuel, you would have to send an entire chemical plant to Mars in advance, along with a large and extremely reliable power system. Depending on what the plant will produce, NASA's concepts range from about 30 kW to well over 200 kW. And this means either giant fields of solar panels that will lose power during dust storms and gradually accumulate Martian dust, or several compact nuclear power units. You have to deliver all this infrastructure using a fleet of unmanned cargo landers. And this plant must successfully land, deploy with the help of robots, and
operate autonomously for hundreds of days before the crew even takes off from the ground. Multiply the cost and complexity of the mission many times over by betting human lives on the fact that an autonomous chemical plant will survive wild temperature swings and massive dust storms. And that's when economics, together with physics, offer one brutal but pragmatic way out of this conundrum. A one-way ticket. A one- way ticket, according to some engineering calculations, costs from 1/5 to perhaps even the cost. Regardless of the calculations, this would undoubtedly eliminate huge amounts of launch weight, equipment, fuel, and mission complexity. You don't need to lug around a fuel production plant for the launch module. You don't
need the launch module itself and you don't need food and life support systems for the months-long journey home. You don't need to build a ship to return, you just need to build a house. OK. Yes, it's more than just a home. You have to somehow build permanent, extremely reliable housing, and then sustain the lives of its inhabitants. and provide them with everything they need for the rest of their lives. Common sense dictates that a one- way mission is not just a backup plan. This is probably humanity's best realistic chance of ever reaching Mars this century. But let's be optimistic for a moment.
Let's say we found this trillion dollars, nailed down the logistics, solved the engine and fuel problems, built this giant ship with a return ticket, and headed to Mars. But then we hit the third and, by the way, one of the most ruthless barriers. Your own body. One of the biggest obstacles to returning from Mars isn't a broken rocket or a lack of fuel. This is biology. The human body is an evolutionary masterpiece, but it was finely tuned for only one planet and only one gravity, Earth's. Take away most or all of our gravitational weight, and the body, being a ruthlessly efficient machine, begins to adapt, taking itself apart for parts. Seriously, your body will do its thing and say to itself, "Why waste energy
maintaining something you no longer use?" A mission to Mars is not a six-month trip to the ISS. It will probably last up to three years. A typical low-energy round-trip flight could involve anywhere from one to nine months of weightlessness on the way there. about 300 dash500 days on Mars. Potentially most of that time on the surface at 38% gravity, and then another six to nine months of weightlessness on the way back. And the biological timer starts the second you start in weightlessness. Fluids in your body redistribute and shift to your head. You get a big swollen face on your head, and the increasing pressure literally deforms your eyeballs and compresses a healthy nerve. Some astronauts return to earth with
vision problems that persist for years. Then it's your own bones and muscles' turn. In weightlessness, you lose about 1% density in your supporting bones every month. This is not good. More calcium enters your blood and urine. This means kidney stones, and your muscles weaken and atrophy. Do you consider this a kind of reverse effect of strength training? And you can pedal a space bike and spend hours on strength training every day. And that will help a little, but ultimately you can't fool biology. In just six months of flying, you can develop a level of osteoporosis that would take years to develop on the ground.
And then there's your heart. Don't forget, it's also a muscle. Essentially, it's a biomechanical pump that rips through the ground, pushing blood upward against gravity. But in space, the workload changes. Blood volume drops and your entire cardiovascular system begins to lose shape and your heart becomes smaller, while the body loses its ability to maintain blood pressure when gravity returns. And we haven't even mentioned the dangerous radiation yet. Outside the Earth's protective magnetic field, you are bombarded 24x7 by galactic cosmic rays and periodically threatened by intense solar particle emissions. And it's not just your regular, everyday old solar UV radiation.
Galactic cosmic rays include high-energy protons and heavy ions moving at relativistic speeds. They will pierce the ship's hull, tear the strands of your DNA, and, most terrifying of all, destroy some of the dendritic spines in your brain. These are, by the way, literal connections between your neurons. Your memory deteriorates, anxiety goes through the roof, and you have difficulty making snap decisions. Does this sound like the right combination to you for someone expected to operate the most complex piece of machinery ever created on a completely different planet? In my opinion, no. Absolutely not.
Okay, one way or another, we're finally arriving. Hooray! Mars! Woohoo! Gravity here is only 38% of Earth's. You might think you could finally breathe a sigh of relief. You finally have some weight. Solid ground under your feet. Yes, but not quite. You are going to spend about a year to a year and a half on Mars. Wait, a year and a half. Why do you need to stay so long? Well, it all comes down to the iron laws of orbital mechanics. Earth and Mars revolve around the Sun at different speeds. And the most fuel-efficient launch window, when the planets
align so that you can get home without burning an insane amount of fuel, only happens once every 26 months. You can't just jump back into your rocket, hit the gas, and head home whenever you feel like it. You have to sit and wait for the planets to line up again. And this year and a half of waiting is not a rest. This is the time when your body finally lets go of its earthly past. Your skeleton and heart will realize that you now weigh only close to what you do on Earth. And that means they can just keep shedding all that extra bone mass and muscle tissue. The body doesn't need it. Once and no. And in just a year and a half, purely biologically, you will turn into a real Martian. And this means you will be very thin, with thin
tiny bones and not a lot of muscle. Normal for Mars. Maybe not so much for Earth. Now imagine the journey back. Still from ten to ten months of weightlessness. The capsule lands in the ocean, the hatch opens. And now you feel the full force of Earth's gravity, flattening and smudging you. This is tough. Seriously. This is just terrible. This could be a serious medical crisis for your new Martian body. Your reduced heart, completely unaccustomed to such a load, most likely will not be able to push blood back to the brain as before. and you will instantly faint. And your icy porous bones, having lost up to 50% of their density, can simply break from simply trying to stand up under their own weight.
Now, it would seem, the powerful gravity of this already alien planet Earth for you. During your three-year mission, you will biologically cease to be an Earthling. Do you know this old saying? You can't go back home twice. For you, this may become literally true. The earth itself could kill you if you try to return. Because economics, orbital mechanics, and biology make return extremely difficult, if not impossible, a crew headed to Mars can launch knowing full well from day one that it's a one-way ticket. But it's one thing to sit in a cozy office on the ground, sipping Lata and nodding philosophically while signing a contract. And it's quite another to hear the floodgates
closing behind you forever. Welcome to absolute isolation. Take, for example, the International Space Station. In essence, the ISS is just a high-tech suburb of Earth. If any unforeseen situation arises, whether it's a surf in the hull, a broken filter, or just a buddy farting too much, astronauts can contact Houston almost instantly. Down on the ground, hundreds of smart guys with pocket pads, slide rules, and big, thick horn-rimmed glasses are monitoring the telemetry in real time. They analyze the problem and help station residents decide which buttons to press. The signal delay, by the way, is only a fraction of a second. This is nothing. And if the station becomes uninhabitable, docked crew ships provide a possible emergency route
home. Unfortunately, Mars is not a suburb. A radio signal traveling at the speed of light takes between three and 22 minutes to travel this entire distance. So imagine this. A fire breaks out at your base or someone urgently needs an appendix removed. And you send a sauce, wait 22 minutes for it to reach the ground. The Earth is panicking, engineers are scratching their heads, they write down some procedure, encrypt it and send it to you. You wait another 22 minutes, a total of 44 minutes, just to start the first exchange of lines in a critical conversation. During these 44 minutes, you will either localize the emergency situation and begin to fix it yourself using your ingenuity, duct tape, and a lot of likes. Or
the situation could become fatal in terms of how the Earth can significantly help you. So, the crew has to be very autonomous. The margin for error is minimal. Now add a pinch of daily misery to this cauldron of hardship. You are locked in a tin can with five other lucky people. Every breath you take is recycled air. Every sip of water you drink is moisture from your breath. Plus, your colleagues' semen and urine have been lovingly passed through filters for the thousandth time. Yes, it's a scumbag.
Outside, there is radiation, toxic dust, freezing cold, and atmospheric pressure that is less than 1% of Earth's. To simply go outside, you have to spend about an hour checking your spacesuit, knowing full well that any microcrack, puncture, or faulty valve could kill you in seconds if you don't get to safety in time. This is the constant daily background stress of your new Martian life for years, maybe forever. On earth, if your neighbor, spouse, or coworker is annoying you, you can go to a bar, go outside, get some fresh air, or just slam the door. On Mars, you can slam the door and jump out, but only once. Bam!
Psychologists who study isolated groups know this very well. In such a tight space, every little thing, like how a person chews, how they breathe in the air, how they joke, can cause your eye to start twitching after a couple of months . And you won't just have to tolerate these people. You have to trust them with your life every second for years, maybe decades, maybe forever. Someone might say, "Well, Antarctic explorers or submarine crews live like that too." That's right. But they have a psychological lifeline. They know that their mission has an end date and that they will eventually return home. The Martian with a one-way ticket will have no date to count down and simply will not exist.
But what really gets into your head is not the fear of suffocation, it's the realization that this is forever. Sooner or later, each of them will look up into the steely sky, find that tiny, dim blue planet the size of a pixel, and understand. That's all. Everyone they had ever known, everything they had ever loved, they had left behind on that little blue speck of light. Every last forgiveness before the start was real and forever. They chose this exile themselves, and they will have to wake up with this thought every morning for the rest of their lives. Which raises the obvious question. If it's all so expensive, so logistically difficult, physically dangerous, and psychologically
exhausting, why even fly there? Why send people through the endless dark expanses of space down into yet another gravity well, where a cold and rusty desert awaits them with no return ticket? The answer is simple: dinosaurs did not have a space program, and we all know what that turned out to be for them. As long as humanity lives only on Earth, we put all our eggs in one basket: a random asteroid, a supervolcano eruption, a global pandemic, or nuclear war. Any catastrophe of a planetary scale could devastate human civilization, and in the worst case, threaten the survival of our species. A permanent, self-sustaining settlement on Mars would not be extreme tourism, nor would it simply be an attempt to flatter
someone's ego. Over time, it could become a backup for humanity. The only real safety net we have for our species is to leave the planet and settle somewhere else. And the first people to board this ship will understand this perfectly. They will be heroes, perhaps even saviors of civilizations, who will begin the long process of transforming humanity into a multi-planetary species. They won't return home. But here's the thing. This will not happen because the mission failed, ran out of fuel, or the rocket broke. They will not return because that is the mission. This is a cruel compromise, without which colonization of another planet in our century is simply impossible. The first permanent Martians will make the greatest
sacrifice in human history. They will voluntarily, forever, give up their home planet: the oceans, the forests, the flowers, the blue sky, the very air we breathe, and even Earth's gravity, so that our species has a chance at survival if something goes wrong at home. Not so. And their traces in the red dust will live forever.
