It can’t be done in secret. The spaceship have to communicate back to Earth and even if the communications are encrypted, it’s easy for a radio telescope to track the motion of the spaceship. During the space race, big radio telescopes like Jodrell Bank tracked every launch of the Russians to the Moon and knew exactly what they were doing. They could use laser instead but there is no way they could keep the laser so exactly focused that there is no leakage for other countries to track visually.
Anyway Russia aren’t interested in colonizing Mars. Of all the private space agencies only SpaceX are interested - Bigelow aerospace for instance have a lunar base as their main interest. The Moon may have near term commercial value for space tourism, and there are many potential revenue streams also for supply to LEO mining ice at the poles. It’s also got the vast lunar caves, and the peaks of eternal light at its poles are perhaps the most easy of all places to build a habitat in the near future.
Also humans on Mars have planetary protection issues. It makes far more sense scientifically to explore it from Earth or from orbit around the planet. Also it’s the riskiest place of all to land on, and it is so far away. You are committed to a two year voyage without a lifeboat if you go to Mars in the vacuum of space, like traveling on a submarine, but if there is any emergency, you can’t surface and breathe the air. If you go to the Moon, you can have lifeboats with supplies for all the crew to get back to Earth in two days, loaded up and ready to fly. You can’t do that with Mars. If you have some anomaly as the spaceship leaves Earth orbit, it is already too late, you can’t reverse and come back to Earth. The ship’s velocity will be too great. It relies on orbiting to Mars and back again to Earth to return. So an Apollo 13 situation the crew don’t have to just go around the Moon then return to Earth, they have to go around Mars and return to get back, and have to somehow last for two years without material help from Earth.
Humans on Mars have planetary protection issues also. Why destroy the science value of the planet for the search for extra terrestrial life, what may turn out to be the most significant discovery in biology of this century? We don’t know what the situation is like because our spacecraft can’t be sterilized sufficiently to approach the regions on the surface that are potentially habitable to life. But there are many such known, discovered in the last six years. Whether any are actually habitable, nobody knows. But many are promising. For life living at the edge, in just droplets and thin seeps of salty liquid here and there on the surface, or using the surface 100% humidity at night directly. Yet, these could be extraterrestrial microbes, perhaps early forms of life that have become extinct on Earth (RNA world life for instance) or life based on a different biology. The potential science value is very high. Why should one want to destroy this science value of Mars? It’s been waiting there for billions of years, what is the hurry to land humans on the surface? Why not explore from Earth or via telepresence from orbit until we understand the situation there better?
For all these reasons then the Moon is the obvious place to send humans first. And at present NASA plan to have humans only in orbit around the Moon while everyone else sets up bases on the surface.
Anyway none of the space agencies show any desire to “go it alone”. Even China wants to be part of an international collaboration in space like the ISS. The only reason China has a separate space station is because the US has a law which forbids them to collaborate with China. ESA want to collaborate with China in space and so do Russia and everyone else except the US. So if we have that future scenario with the US in orbit around the Moon and everyone else on the surface, China would surely join in too, in the ESA lunar village.
ESA Moon village idea. Everyone except the US has their eyes firmly focused on the Moon at present - the obvious first place to go from Earth. And barely explored - our longest mission there lasted for two days and we have only ever sent a single scientist to the Moon, which is so large it’s like a vast new unexplored continent. New discoveries include cave entrances which in the low gravity could lead to caves kilometers in diameter, and ice at the poles which may amount to hundreds of millions of tons of ice, with millions of tons of carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia.
Mars is not worth colonizing anyway. It’s got a near vacuum and is not that different from the Moon. Indeed in many comparisons the Moon comes out better than Mars, up to a colony of a million people or so at least. Both are harder to colonize than a mountain plateau several times the height of Mount Everest. For that reason, I think myself that we aren’t going to have colonization of space in the near future, though we may have space settlement, that’s rather likely. The difference is, I see settlement as like what we do in Antarctica, scientific bases, tourist facilities. Plus a bit like the sea bed. Again living on the sea bed would be far far easier than living in space, yet we don’t do it. So they have to have very good reasons to be there.
The Moon also has much by way of scientific interest too.
We don’t need Mars for a backup. There’s no natural disaster to make us extinct in less than hundreds of millions of years into the future. We can use the Moon for a backup of knowledge, seeds etc in addition to Earth itself.
I go into this in a lot more detail in my
See also my MOON FIRST - Why Humans on Mars Right Now are Bad for Scienceavailable to read online for free
About the Author
