Want to get away from Trump? Try Mars
Corrections & clarifications: A previous version of this story had the wrong name for the SpaceX rocket that would take people to Mars.
Some Donald Trump haters are vowing to move to Canada or Europe. But if that isn’t far enough away from the new president’s influence, there’s … Mars.
Never mind that the Red Planet is 34 million to 250 million miles from Earth, depending on their positions in orbit, or that the first manned visit is unlikely for at least 10 years. Interest in making the seven-month-long journey appears to have increased since Election Day, according to National Geographic Channel, which debuts a miniseries, MARS, on Monday night.
“I think we’ve seen a rise in sign-ups of people who want to go to Mars,” said Leonard David, who authored a companion book to the television series, Mars, Our Future on the Red Planet.
That pleases NASA, which counts on growing public support for its ambitious program of manned flights to Mars by the 2040s, if not sooner. NASA officials Jim Green and Jeff Sheehy say sending humans to Mars will eliminate the chance that our species will become extinct on Earth in the distant future because of some cataclysmic event.
MARS shows how the first manned mission to the planet could play out in 2033, based on plans by NASA and private companies such as SpaceX and Blue Origin.
People have been signing up for one-way trips to Mars “even before Tuesday’s election, and I bet it would be more now,” said Chris Albert, executive vice president for global communications at NatGeo.
Elon Musk's SpaceX is supplying the International Space Station using reusable Dragon capsules and has pioneered rocket boosters that return to Earth and land upright so they can be reused.
The company is developing plans for a reusable rocket, which it says will be able to send 100 to 200 people at a time to Mars. Musk aims to launch the first human flight within the decade at a cost of a mere $100,000 to $200,000 per person. He envisions sending 10,000 such missions over the next century.
The NatGeo miniseries illustrates the difficulties settlers would encounter. The atmosphere is so thin that nighttime temperatures reach minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit, there’s a constant threat from radiation, and help is months away.
Understandably, most people, like a group of Washington-area high school students who visited NatGeo headquarters recently, are hesitant about such a trip. The students met a NASA mission commander and watched the first episode of the miniseries.
Albert said only a few hands went up when he asked them if anyone would go to Mars. “But after they spoke to the mission commander and saw the series, I asked again, and almost all the hands went up,” Albert said.
Musk argues that going to Mars is a matter of biological survival. Confined to one planet, humans are at risk of going the way of the dinosaurs if our planet is hit by disaster in the form of an asteroid, world war or climate change.
Either “we’ll stay on Earth forever and become victim to some kind of extinction event, or we go on forever, become a multi-planet species, and that’s what we want,” he said.