Taking man to Mars: Nasa reveals the technology behind its Orion capsule and the preparation for its first journey



Orion could take explorers further into space than anyone has ever gone



Will be blasted out of Earth's atmosphere using the Space Launch System



In September, Orion's heat shield will be tested in space for the first time

Orion will be launched for a second time in 2017 to the moon and back

This will be first time SLS, most powerful rocket ever created, are tested

Astronauts will get their chance turn to ride the Orion/SLS combination in 2021 on a lunar orbit. After that, destinations are still being debated

For the first time in a generation, Nasa is building a new astronaut-carrying spacecraft.



Called Orion, this capsule is designed to take explorers further into space than we’ve ever gone before. Eventually, journeys to Mars itself are being imagined.

The challenge of a journey to Mars must never be underestimated. It is unlike anything the world’s space agencies have tried before – it makes the Apollo Moon landings of the 1960s and ’70s look like child’s play.



'Mission to Mars' appears in issue five of Science Uncovered, on sale now

Called Orion, this capsule is designed to take explorers further into space than we've ever gone before. Eventually, journeys to Mars itself are being imagined

Mission to Mars appears in issue five of Science Uncovered, pictured, on sale now

Instead of a few weeks in space, a voyage to the red planet and back would take a few years, and this dramatically increases the difficulty.

There are no shortcuts home if something goes wrong. Malfunctions will have to be fixed on the fly – and that includes human malfunctions such as injury or illness.



Appendicitis en route could be a death sentence. Then there are the psychological stresses of living and working in a confined space, isolated from one’s home planet for years.

Nevertheless, Nasa and other space agencies around the world are positioning themselves to take this leap.

The most visible element of this effort is Nasa’s Orion capsule and the Space Launch System (SLS), a grand-sounding name for the most powerful rocket ever developed.



Orion is currently being bolted together and later this year, in September, it will be put through its paces in space for the first time.



'Orion, along with SLS, is the future of human space exploration,' says Brandi Dean, Nasa’s spokesperson for Orion. 'It’s the vehicle we are building to allow us to send humans farther than we’ve ever been able to go before.'

This artist rendering shows a wide-angle view of the liftoff of the crew vehicle configuration SLS from the launchpad. The first flight test of Nasa's new rocket is scheduled for 2017

THE MARS-BOUND CONTENDERS FOR A MISSION TO THE RED PLANET

Inspiration Mars Foundation

SPACECRAFT: Derived from Space X Dragon Capsule

LAUNCH TARGET: 2018

OBJECTIVES: To send a married couple on a Mars fly-by and then return them to Earth

DURATION: 501 days

PROGRESS: The foundation plans to issue a call for crew sometime this year. Its fast timescale has drawn some criticism and in November 2013, the company issued a report stating it would need Nasa’s Space Launch System. However, that will not be ready by 2018. The company has identified a ‘plan B’ launch in 2021.



Mars One

SPACECRAFT: Mars Transit Vehicle

LAUNCH TARGET: 2024

OBJECTIVE: Establishing

a permanent human colony on Mars

DURATION: Indefinite – the astronauts cannot return

PROGRESS: Mars One continues to stir controversy because it offers a one-way 'emigration to Mars', as the company calls it. There were 202,000 applications, of which the company has chosen 1,058 for further evaluation over the next 12 months. The first of over

half a dozen unmanned missions is set for 2018, although it is unclear whether the company has raised enough money yet. China

SPACECRAFT: Unknown

LAUNCH TARGET: 2040-60

OBJECTIVE: A crewed landing on Mars

DURATION: Unknown

PROGRESS: China is the only space-faring nation that is not part of the International Mars Exploration Working Group – the organisation set up to allow collaboration on a Mars mission. It is charting its own course and making extraordinary achievements in comparatively short spaces of time. Although it has no fixed plans for sending astronauts to Mars, it has suggested that missions could launch around the middle of this century.



Orion is the first step. It is modelled on the Apollo capsules, and the key component that sets it apart is its heat shield.



To break from Earth orbit requires more speed than simply getting into orbit. On its return, the craft will re-enter our atmosphere with that extra speed, meaning the shield will have a lot of work to do.

The heat tiles of the Space Shuttle will simply not cut it, so Nasa has been developing a new, heavy-duty shield for Orion. The first one was shipped to Kennedy Space Center in December 2013, where it’s currently being attached to Orion.

It is a five-metre-wide structure consisting of a titanium skeleton and carbon fibre skin that support a honeycomb of 320,000 cells. Each one of these was filled by hand with a special material called Avcoat. This proved to be the most effective of the samples that Nasa tested.

The main engines of the SLS are those used by the Space Shuttle. There will be four of them and they will be fed liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen to provide more than 3.8 million kg of thrust at lift-off

Avcoat will flake away during the fiery re-entry, carrying away heat energy and slowing down the spacecraft. Each cell has been X-rayed to check it for perfection.



The titanium skeleton will then provide the strength to withstand the final splashdown in the Pacific Ocean.

The shield will be tried out in this September’s test, when Orion will be lofted into space atop a Delta IV Heavy Lift rocket and sent on a couple of high elliptical orbits.



This will ensure that the capsule hits the atmosphere faster than the Space Shuttle, providing a real test for its shield.

HOW MARS COULD TEACH US ABOUT HOW LIFE STARTED ON EARTH

There are plenty of experiments to be done on Mars. For all the craft that have landed there, they have only just scratched the surface. Nothing will compare to sending humans. ' I think the scientific returns would be enormous frankly,' says Professor Ian Crawford from Birkbeck College, University of London.

'Astronauts are more flexible than robots. They can traverse larger distances and bring back more samples.' Although the exploration of Mars is important in its own right, it may also tell us about Earth. The origin of life on Earth is the ultimate mystery. No one knows the conditions in which our world went from being habitable to being inhabited. There is no laboratory experiment yet that has taken a flask of chemicals, combined them in some way, and produced life. Unhelpfully, most of the ancient rocks on Earth that were around when life was forming have been destroyed because of our planet’s restlessly shifting surface. The plate tectonics that drive earthquakes and volcanoes recycle the oldest rocks, erasing the fossil and chemical record of those primordial days.

Mars is different. Being smaller than Earth, it does not generate enough internal heat to drive a plate tectonics system. So the ancient rocks must still survive, and in them may be traces of life that once began to develop on Mars.

We haven’t yet got any rock samples back to begin analysis. There are some designs for a robotic sample-return mission that will gather a few hundred grammes, but according to Crawford, only human missions can bring back really useful amounts.

This is because the equipment to keep humans alive is so heavy that by the time you have developed a spacecraft capable of carrying it, a few hundred kilogrammes of rocks would be nothing.

The Orion spacecraft and the Space Launch System (SLS), NASA¿s next crew capsule and heavy-lift rocket, will provide an entirely new capability for human exploration. Pictured is water impact testing on the Orion spacecraft

Assuming all of that goes well, Orion will be launched for a second time in 2017. This flight will be to the moon and back, but there will not be a crew onboard and no landing will be attempted.

'We don’t generally put people on the first launch of a new rocket,' says Mr Dean.

This flight to the moon will also be significant for other reasons. Namely, it will be the first flight of the Space Launch System. 'SLS is a game-changer,' says Kimberly Henry of Nasa’s Marshall Space

Flight Center, where SLS is being developed. 'It will be the most powerful rocket [ever], with the most capacity that we have ever had to take humans and equipment further into our Solar System.'

Astronauts will get their chance turn to ride the Orion/SLS combination in 2021. This too will be to lunar orbit. After that, destinations are still being debated.

A barge arrives at the U.S. Army Outpost wharf at Port Canaveral in Florida, carrying two of the three United Launch Alliance Delta IV heavy boosters for Nasa's Exploration Flight Test-1 (EFT-1) with the Orion spacecraft

Orion itself is not capable of going to Mars alone. 'It’s designed for missions of up to 21 days,' says Mr Dean.



This means that a return to the surface of the Moon is possible with the development of a lunar lander. But to go further – to rendezvous with an asteroid or to visit Mars – would require a transfer vehicle that the astronauts can live in for months at a time.



Going to the red planet would essentially require a small space station in order to hold enough supplies for the journey.

There are some designs. The Boeing Corporation, best known as the maker of the jumbo jet, has been outlining possible hardware for Martian missions that uses technology being developed now.



One such concept is the expandable space module being designed by Bigelow Aerospace. This could be launched in a compact form and then inflated with air once in orbit to provide a roomy habitat for astronauts.

In December 2012, Nasa signed a $17.8 million (£10.7 million) contract with the company to produce a test module.



Known as the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (Beam), it is scheduled for a launch in 2015. It will be connected to the International Space Station and monitored for atmospheric leakage, radiation resistance and temperature fluctuations for two years.

Q&A WITH PLANETARY SCIENCE EXPERT PROFESSOR IAN CRAWFORD

How important is Orion?

It is clearly important because it is the only thing we have on the horizon for taking people out of low Earth orbit. Until we regain the means of doing that, we won’t be going anywhere in the Solar System. So for the first step, I think Orion is very important.



Can Orion be used to take humans to Mars?

The Orion vehicle itself is designed to provide for a crew for a small number of weeks. This is nothing like what you would need to take people to Mars, or even a near-Earth asteroid. It is sufficient to get people to the Moon and back again. So this is a first step, but it is necessary to recognise that to send people to Mars we certainly need more than Orion.



What else would be needed?

We would need a transfer vehicle that is yet to be developed, with more space and more radiation protection. You need to keep people alive in space for up to a year, rather than a few weeks, for a journey to Mars. So there are many other elements that need to be developed before we have a capability that can truly get to Mars.



What’s the biggest hurdle for sending humans to Mars?

Ultimately, it’s down to money and resources. But before the money it must come down to political will. That said, there are some non-trivial technical issues that have to be solved in order to get people to Mars. The biggest, I think, is the radiation hazard – especially if there were to be a solar flare. How we protect astronauts from that on a mission is an unresolved problem at the moment.



Radiation is a key threat to astronauts going to Mars. Just as mariners from the past faced unpredictable, life-threatening storms on Earth’s oceans, so too will the astronauts face dangerous ‘space weather’. The Sun gives out a constant ‘wind’ of radiation.

Other radiation comes into the Solar System from beyond. These ‘cosmic rays’ were monitored on the Curiosity rover during its cruise to Mars in 2012 to get an idea of what astronauts would experience. Unfortunately, the results did not make for happy reading.

Between December 2011 and July 2012, a Mars-bound astronaut would have clocked up the same radiation dose in a day that the average American receives in a year.



If you exclude medical dosages, it would be 10 times more than the average yearly dose for an American. If this is typical, and there is no reason to assume that it is not, the radiation from a 500-day round trip to Mars would exceed NASA’s current safety guidelines.



A mock-up of Nasa's Orion spacecraft recently took an east coast journey from the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida to Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia

Making matters worse is the fact that gigantic explosions occasionally take place on the sun, which create storms of radiation that are highly dangerous to humans in space.



Having to survive such storms is almost inevitable on a Mars mission, and despite many ideas, there is not yet any technology that has been tested to do this.

And then there is the problem of microgravity. Without the Earth’s pull to work against, our muscles begin to decrease in mass, and other parts of the body deteriorate as well.



Astronauts’ spines lengthen, causing pain and raising the possibility of slipped discs when they return to a gravity environment, as would be the case if they landed on Mars, where gravity is 38 per cent of that on Earth.

The two per cent scale models of the SLS boosters and core stage engines are ignited for a 100 millisecond, hot-fire test. The test was used to validate the design of the models

When European Space Agency (Esa) astronaut Andreas Mogensenconducts his mission to the International Space Station in 2015, he will wear a tight-fitting skinsuit that Esa hopes 0will prevent some of microgravity’s effects on the body.



If this is shown to be effective, it could help astronauts arrive on Mars in better condition so they can begin work straight away without having to go through any rehabilitation.

No one yet knows the name of the person who will be the first to set foot on Mars – but Mr Dean knows this much: 'The people who will go to Mars are certainly alive today. I would not be surprised if astronauts in the corps currently are included on the mission.'

