Seeing Red in Our Future

The "MARS OR BUST" bumper sticker on the battered metal door to his office says it all: Geoffrey Landis wants very much for us to go to the Red Planet. His work at NASA Lewis Research Center in Brook Park may someday help land humans there. The 42 year old physicist and science fiction author spends much of his time on solar technology - a key source of energy for any future martian outpost on Mars. He designed an experiment carried last year on Mars Pathfinder, and even got to name one of the distinctively shaped boulders seen by the rovers camera on the Martian surface ("Yogi").

The 2001 robotic mission to Mars will carry a Landis-designed experiment on solar power. He also is working on another experiment for that mission to test the idea of creating oxygen out of the Martian atmosphere by performing some simple chemical reactions. The oxygen could be used for breathing, or for rocket fuel for a return trip home.

Q. Why should humans go to Mars?
A. I think it;s part of human nature to explore, and Mars is an interesting new place. It's not like the moon, which has no water or atmosphere at all. It's not like Venus that's extremely hot with a thick and poisonous atmosphere. Mars is a cold planet with a thin atmosphere, but it has water, and the atmosphere is carbon dioxide which we can break down to make oxygen. So in principle, we could live on Mars.

Q. What about colonizing Mars?
A. There's no doubt that colonizing Mars would be a major effort. It would take a major commitment from the nations of the Earth and many, many years. But then it took a hundred years to explore the Americas. It's probably not something were going to do in the next few years, but ultimately I think we can, and should, colonize Mars. Certainly one of the great events in the history of Western civilization was colonizing the Americas. I think we'd have equally great things from colonizing Mars. And the advantage of colonizing Mars is that nobody lives there now. We're quite sure there are no people on Mars, it's an open planet.

Q. What would you do if you were in charge of exploring Mars?
A. The first thing I'd do is send an expedition to explore the moons of Mars. The two moons, Deimos and Phobos, are very easy to get to from Earth because they are small and don't have much gravity, so you don't need a lot of rocket thrust to land on them. And there's some possibility that you could find water on the moons of Mars, chemically bound in the rock. You could split up water into hydrogen and oxygen and use it to breath, or for rocket fuel.

Q. What's the connection with science fiction?
A. Reading science fiction gives you ideas about the possibilities, that were not stuck to just one planet, and the future is limitless. We can expand out to the solar system and perhaps eventually to the stars.

Ulysses Torassa - May 31, 1998 - Cleveland Plain Dealer

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