Making the “Impossible” Happen

I just finished reading The Martian by Andy Weir. I enjoyed it a lot, especially the exhaustive details—and the attitude. NASA isn’t the only place you can find it, but it has been damned hard to find elsewhere.

As shorthand I often say that when confronted by a problem, the first instinct in the Space Program is always to look for a solution, not to have even a fleeting thought that it’s insurmountable. But if you stick around for the long version, you’ll notice there is a line between that and reaching beyond what’s possible. Nobody in the Program likes to say the word impossible but it is important to advance in manageable steps.

Space travel is difficult and dangerous. We didn’t really know much yet in the 1960s. It took a heck of a lot of diligence and effort to get to the moon, but it also took tons of luck and cost lives. The Space Shuttle cost more lives even though it only went to low Earth orbit. But if humanity wants to survive, we can’t just stay where we are. We are sitting ducks in a shooting gallery. We’re trying to watch for any asteroids aiming to hit us and big enough to kill us, but we aren’t able to do much about it if we spot one.

Whenever I do a “Space Shuttle talk” someone asks about planned missions to Mars, especially the ones with very ambitious timelines. For example, a privately sponsored mission is due to launch in 2018 to send two people on a fly-by to Mars and back. There’s another, Mars One, recruiting people for a one-way trip to colonize Mars.

We are overdue to go beyond low orbit again. People don’t realize how much we learn about the Earth by going out there. But the main part of my answer is always that we don’t know enough yet to send people to Mars. Near the top of my list, right after protection from radiation (which does have solutions, just not great ones yet), we are still not able to create and successfully maintain a closed ecosystem. I haven’t come right out and said people will die if we go with only our current know-how, but I talk about the most important things we can’t do yet and the implications are obvious.

“Singing astronaut” Chris Hadfield is much more articulate, saying the same thing much better. If you’d like to hear him about that and more, take a look at his interview in The Guardian.

We didn’t go to the Moon in one big jump. We went into orbit first (Mercury), then learned how to do enough things in outer space to cope with several days away from Mother Earth (Gemini), then flew by the Moon and at last landed on it (Apollo). Going to another planet is as far beyond what we can do now as going to the Moon was when JFK set that goal. To establish a successful colony, I expect another series of patient and well planned steps, each building upon the lessons from the ones before it.

You can do big world-changing projects. Yes, you who are reading this now. But if you try to change the world all at once in one big step, you are very likely to fail. Take it one step at a time and you can make even the “impossible” happen.