What technical skills will the crew need to survive and ultimately thrive on Mars?

IMPROVISATION AND EXPLORATION

MASON PECK

Explorers of Mars will need many technical skills, not to mention training on how to operate technologies chosen to take them to the surface of that world and keep them alive there. Human exploration of Mars will require people adept at handling electrical and electronic systems, including generators, computers, communications systems and sensors; people who can repair life support systems and keep the air breathable, the water drinkable, and temperature comfortable; people who can survey sites and construct the habitats in which the explorers will live out the bulk of their lives.

But there is one technical skill that is more important than any other and that we can predict will be needed in abundance even without knowing all of the technical requirements of the mission: the ability to improvise.

Human settlement of Mars will likely be conducted in a way that astronauts of the last fifty years would find unfamiliar. From the pioneers of the American Mercury and Soviet Vostok programs to the scientists and sojourners on the International Space Station, astronauts follow carefully scripted procedures that safely plan their extravehicular activities and scientific investigations. And that's perfectly appropriate — for now. In the decades to come, we should expect our natural creativity, resourcefulness, and adventurousness to determine how we make the farther reaches of the cosmos our own, as our ancestors did when they left Africa tens of thousands of years ago. We will once again improvise solutions to problems we can't even yet imagine.

Certainly improvisation has played a role in space exploration. Some of us remember the Apollo 13 mission. Probably more of us remember the movie. At one point the three astronauts, Fred Haise, Jack Swigert, and Jim Lovell, moved into the Lunar Module to conserve power, saving what little the Command Module had left for Earth atmosphere reentry. But with three astronauts in that small space, carbon dioxide built up too quickly. They needed more lithium hydroxide canisters to remove it. They could not simply use the canisters from the Command Module, which no longer needed them. Those were square, and the Lunar Module used round ones. Engineers had to improvise an adapter to allow the square lithium hydroxide canisters from the Command Module to interface with the round environmental system on the Lunar Module. The fix required tape, cardboard, and plastic bags. That's all it took to put a square peg in a round hole. It was one of many unconventional solutions that ultimately saved the lives of the Apollo 13 astronauts.

And Apollo 13 is not the only example of improvisation in space. I've been involved in a number of so-called anomaly resolution efforts over the years — getting a spacecraft's deployable components, such as solar panels or antennas, unstuck from their cramped launch configuration by commanding unusual maneuvers; uploading some new software to allow a spacecraft with a broken appendage to continue to point at the Earth; and others I can't even mention because they're trade secrets.

I've seen unmanned spacecraft saved by all sorts of improvised solutions. In 1998, some of my colleagues at Hughes Space and Communications rescued the AsiaSat-3 spacecraft (later renamed PAS-22) after the launch vehicle had failed to insert it into a high enough orbit. Jerry Salvatore, Cesar Ocampo, and many others sent it to a geostationary orbit the short way — around the moon. Changing the plane of the orbit required less propellant that far away from Earth. It was the first commercial communications satellite to make that trip. It arrived in geosynchronous orbit with enough fuel to provide telecommunications services. I remember my colleague John Haskell calculating (by hand) carefully timed thruster commands to a spacecraft (one I won't name) to keep it from tipping over while we scrambled to plan an unanticipated orbit-raising burn. He got it right every time.

Anomaly means "something that's not the same." It's an unexpected turn of events. I suppose it's a euphemism, a nice neutral word in place of "screw-up," a more direct term that encourages us to point a finger at a scapegoat. A friend of mine once typed the letter O instead of the number 0 when he was sending a command to a spacecraft. It wasn't his fault, but that simple difference caused a severe screw-up — I mean an anomaly — that nearly destroyed the spacecraft. The littlest things can cause problems.

One reason these anomalies cause consternation is that we typically can't go fix spacecraft when they fail. NASA's shuttle missions to repair the Hubble Space Telescope are unusual exceptions, costing more than half a billion dollars each time. In most other cases, that cost isn't justified. It might be cheaper to launch a new spacecraft, and in any case a new spacecraft will last longer and include better features. So, satellite servicing has not caught on yet. Companies like ITT Exelis and ATK are working on new ways to achieve satellite servicing, but a viable business case will demand an innovative approach to reducing the cost. Even if satellite servicing does become a financially viable enterprise in the years to come, we're not likely to see routine service missions to Mars for a very long time.

So, we aerospace engineers...