Perspectives for Crewed Missions to Mars: Exploration from Orbit and/or Short Stay

Kurzfassung

The debate “humans versus robots”, on Mars or anywhere else will not be engaged here. The decision has been made—by a single entity, a coalition, or a wide international agreement—to send astronauts to Mars. The focus is on what the astronauts could do, search for, or investigate while they are there. The Science goals described in this chapter are based on published documents, such as the Decadal Survey (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2023) and a NASA document describing a possible architecture for the first three missions to Mars (Drake et al., 2010) Mars is the furthest frontier that human exploration can realistically envision implementing in the mid-term future. Flying to Mars, landing on Mars, and launching from Mars to rendezvous in orbit to travel back to Earth have not been all mastered, even for a robotic (i.e. Mars sample return) mission. For a human mission the challenges are much greater. Nevertheless, several programmes (see Chap. 3) aim to send humans to Mars in the next decades and return them safely. Assuming that all technologies necessary will have been mastered, sending humans to Mars can have several motivations. The first is likely to be geopolitical as was the case with the Apollo Moon programme (Shelhamer, 2017). This endeavour could result from a competition between two or three groups of countries led either by the USA, People’s Republic of China, Russia, or India. It could be also the result of a cooperative agreement between competing groups of nations to set a joint, highly visible goal in the frame of a change in international policy. This was the case for deciding to build the International Space Station (ISS) in the 1990s. Interested groups and space agencies are developing scientific objectives that could be addressed by human exploration. These goals do not necessarily differ from those of robotic exploration, but in the case of human missions new tools, strategies, and priorities can be considered.