BEHIND-THE-SCENES : [#128 ONE SMALL STEP]
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ANDRE BORMANIS ON MARS AND REAL SCIENCE

Well, [#128 One Small Step] was a fun story for us to do. I've always liked the idea that our real near-term future is part of the Star Trek history and that we can explore that in episodes, so of course when is the first human mission to Mars going to take place? what are the challenges of that mission going to be? what's the spacecraft going to look like? how many people will be in the crew? when will it happen? I think in that episode we predicted that some number which is a bit of a ways down the road. I would certainly like to see the first human mission to Mars long before that. It's hard to say when that's going to happen.

André Bormanis, [Star Trek Voyager] science consultant (and writing contributor e.g. the story for [#81 Waking Moments])

[#128 One Small Step]

excerpt from [#128 One Small Step]: Kelly, via comms: "Ares IV to Kumagawa. How was the sunrise from down there?" Kumagawa, via comms: "Beautiful. There was a little green mixed in today. It was really quite spectacular." Kelly, via comms: "Sorry I missed it." Kumagawa, via comms: "Next time, Lieutenant."

Well, one of the things that I think has always been fun about Star Trek is the fact that it is inspiring the next generation of scientists, engineers, space explorers. That's something that the show has done since the beginning. In fact, probably half the scientists I know who're my age or younger grew up watching [TOS] and cite that as a big part of why they got interested in science, and that continues today.

click to enlarge, full-size 117Kb the historic Apollo 11 moon mission

upper left to right: extra-vehicular activity, Hubble Telescope, International Space Station and Space Shuttle,
lower left to right: Viking Lander, Space Shuttle launch, extra-vehicular activity

The opening titles for the Star Trek series [Enterprise], which aired after [Star Trek Voyager], charts Mankind's exploration of the sky and into space and, ultimately, into Star Trek history e.g. Zefram Cochrane's warp test flight. screenshot excerpts

Mars, as taken by the Hubble Telescope art depiction of the Mars Express Orbiter at Mars; the Mars Express was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) from Baikonur in Kazakhstan in a Soyuz rocket on 2nd June 2003 to take advantage of the fact that in 2003 Mars was sited very close to the Earth

We get that all the time at this Lego Rover project the Planetary Society has developed (to coincide with the NASA-led study of Mars via remote-controlled landers called Rovers), and Bob Picardo has been heavily involved in that. He's on the Board of Advisors of the Planetary Society (see Page 3 of this article). The latest Mars Rover, named Reconnaissance, was launched from Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida, U.S.A. at 0743 Eastern Daylight Time (EDT), 1143 GMT, on 12th August 2005, and is due to reach Mars in March 2006. This was the first NASA launch to use the new Atlas V rocket built by Lockheed-Martin. NASA plans to launch the Phoenix Mars Scout in 2007 to land on the far northern Martian surface, and is also developing an advanced rover, the Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) for launch in 2009.

Valles Marineris on Mars: overhead, montage and perspective views by the ESA's Mars Express Orbiter

click to enlarge, 101Kb Mars Exploration Rover in cruise mode - cutaway diagrams

I was in Pasadena when the Rover Spirit entered Gusev Crater, and it was extraordinarily exciting. There was an event sponsored by the Planetary Society. We were talking about the extraordinary interest that has been generated by these unmanned missions to Mars, the Sojourner Rover back in 1997 - the Pathfinder mission - was extraordinarily exciting, and I think that the Spirit and Opportunity Rovers, which are bigger and much more capable of travelling greater distances, are even more exciting than that mission. And we had several thousand people at the Pasadena Space Center to watch the live feed from JPL as Spirit descended through the Martian atmosphere, bounced in its airbags and finally to see these spectacular pictures before the end of the evening. We thought at most we might get back a signal that says "OK, I got here and I'm fine." but by the end of the night this stunning panorama was displayed on the screen and people went wild.

watching the live feed from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)

below: Spirit at Gusev Crater

left: the first image taken by Spirit from "ground level", being approximately one yard from the lander, taken by the rover's front hazard identification camera;

middle: above but rear view, taken by the rover's rear hazard identification camera; the criss-cross material on the lander is the exit ramp the rover used; the airbags can be seen on either side of the ramp

right: Spirit stretches out her arm to reach out to the Martian surface

There is a push at NASA which is trying to develop a successor to the Space Shuttle, and build a spacecraft that will actually be able to return astronauts to the Moon and eventually be able to take them on to Mars. So the exploration aspect of the space programme has been rekindled. We'll see what happens in the next few years. Certainly the Space Shuttle is going to have to be replaced (NASA plans to decommission the space shuttle fleet by 2010). Whether they're going to be able to develop a next generation launch vehicle to take advantage of advances in material science - probably advances in propulsion, I think that's an area we haven't seen any real progress in the last 20 or 30 years, frankly, but I know that there's some research being conducted to try and develop nuclear propulsion. That's something that's been talked about for decades. There was a programme at NASA in the 1960s that was developing a nuclear rocket engine. That might be revived in the next ten or fifteen years.

the International Space Station Mars exploration tribute from my screensaver program Ares IV in orbit above Mars, in 2032, in [Star Trek Voyager: One Small Step]

We could, starting right now, figure out a whole scenario for how to get people to Mars and back. The question is are people, especially these days when we're running these huge deficits and money's kind of tight and there are other priorities, are politicians going to be willing to appropriate the money? I think once we've finished the International Space Station* that will free up money in NASA's budget to start seriously looking at Mars vehicles, so we have to complete the Station and the successor to the Space Shuttle before we can really start seriously spending any effort on vehicles that can take humans to Mars. But it'll happen eventually. It's just a question of when. * A joint effort of at least 15 nations, the International Space Station is the largest man-made object in outer space. When completed, it will be more than 100 metres in length. More than 45 space flights will be required to get all of the station's components into orbit. It is scheduled to be completely assembled by 2004. The ISS orbits only 400 km above Earth’s surface, so it moves very rapidly, circling Earth 18 times every day. It can often be seen in the sky near sunset or sunrise, but is rarely above the horizon for more than 10 minutes. The BBC sometimes announces when naked-eye views can be seen, though you need a telescope to see any detail. The ISS can be as bright as magnitude -1, equal to the brightest stars in the sky.

There are other interesting architectures that people are looking at for getting humans and cargoes into space or from Earth orbit out to the other planets. There's a plasma rocket that's being developed by a scientist, who's also a NASA astronaut. Another interesting event that took place was the first private space launch with a human being. A guy named Mike Melville flew a small rocket plane called Spaceship One just to the edge of space. He achieved an altitude of little more than a hundred kilometres - about a hundred kilometres is somewhat arbitrarily defined as the edge of space - but he was weightless for several minutes; he was well above 99 per cent of the atmosphere; he could see stars, the black of space, the curvature of the Earth. He received astronaut wings from the FAA upon his return. He flew into space and this was all done with private money. So that's hopefully the beginning of a renaissance in private space exploration. And, who knows, maybe in ten years, people will be talking about a privately funded expedition to Mars and not a government-sponsored expedition as we had all been expecting for some many years now.

The Spirit Rover took 225 panoramic camera images for this 360-degree panorama of the Mars landscape surrounding the rover. The view begins to the north at the left edge. To the east is the East Hill Complex whose seven hills are named in honour of the seven crew who died in the space shuttle Columbia accident on 1st February 2003. Near the centre of the image, to the south of the rover, is Sleepy Hollow.

Next page: Robert Picardo and the Planetary Society

ST DVD accompanies André Bormanis' words with NASA original footage covering Man's exploration of space. Instead of that very grainy footage, I present enhanced NASA pictures/artwork from my collection. Other pictures on this page are also from my collection, gathered from a variety of sources. Pictures of André Bormanis and people watching the JPL live feed are from ST DVD.