Leading-Edge Mars Mission Portends New Golden Age Of Exploring Planets

After a picture-perfect launch of twin Escapade spacecraft bound for Mars, Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket aced landing on a recovery vessel floating in the Atlantic, helping power a revolution in reusable rockets. (Photo by Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

NurPhoto via Getty Images

The picture-perfect launch of twin pathfinder spacecraft bound for Mars presages a fantastical new stage in exploring the solar system by independent rocket designers and their university allies, says the space physicist leading this Escapade mission.

Rob Lillis, who co-designed the mirror-image orbiters that will circle Mars as they map out potential sanctuaries for future astronauts, says an unfolding revolution in rocketry is opening the way for an explosion in “much more exploration for both robots and humans” across the eight planets and their moons.

Dr. Lillis, a planetary space physicist at the University of California Berkeley, told me in an interview that ever-morphing coalitions of leading-edge spacecraft inventors and space mission concept designers at American academic centers could spearhead an incredible new era of discoveries.

An acclaimed Mars scholar, Lillis has played a central role in Mars missions since earning a doctorate in physics at Berkeley, one of the foremost science universities worldwide, with more than five dozen Nobel Prize winners, including two awarded the Nobel in physics “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae.”

Predicting an idyllic new era in interplanetary flights powered by the invention of reusable rockets by SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab, Lillis says the pathbreaking Escapade mission to Mars that he heads is just the first breakthrough born of an expanding new alliance between space visionaries at these outfits and at elite science citadels like Berkeley.

Teaming up with engineers at Rocket Lab, Lillis co-conceived the futuristic spacecraft that will chart an archipelago of mysterious magnetic fields scattered across the dunes of the Red Planet – sectors that might provide shields for astronauts from the super-storms of charged particles sporadically ejected by the sun, or cosmic rays shot out by exploding stars.

High-energy radiation could endanger the lives of human scouts, while magnetic regions, depending on their strength, might provide havens for spacefarers slated to touch down on Mars in times ahead.

As data from the Escapade spacecraft is beamed back to Earth, Lillis and his team at Berkeley will refine their simulations of the Martian atmosphere, the cosmic bullets that have decimated it over the course of billions of years, and the isles of magnetism that dot the planet.

Their ultimate goal is to run the simulations backwards in time – to more than three billion years ago – when a molten dynamo at Mars’ core generated a magnetic sphere like the Earth’s that protected its thicker carbon dioxide atmosphere and the waterways that crisscrossed the planet.

The leaders of grand schemes to terraform Mars, or recreate it in the Earth’s image, by lofting massive orbital mirrors to melt its polar caps, heat the entire planet, and restore its atmosphere and ocean, might use similar simulations to model their geo-engineering campaigns as the first waves of human Martians begin landing.

Meanwhile, Lillis says creating high-resolution 3D atlases of the potential magnetic oases for astronauts joining these Earth-Mars odysseys will depend on deploying helicopters equipped with lightweight magnetometers to survey each site close up, to refine the maps constructed from orbit.

SpaceX founder Elon Musk has outlined sensational plans to send a flotilla of five Starships, crewed only by robots, on the super-capsules’ first flight to Mars, when the orbital transfer window opens next year, or, more likely, in late 2028.

Robert Zubrin, master architect of blueprints to transform Mars into a second foundation for civilization, told me in an interview that it is vital, to ultimately construct a human settlement, that this first flotilla include “platoons of rovers and helicopters” to lead a series of scientific investigations across the Martian surface.

SpaceX, Dr. Zubrin says, has humanity’s first chance to “do a super Mars exploration expedition.”

Squadrons of aerial robots, flying above brigades of rovers, could act as advance scouts, scientists and surveyors for the American and European aeronauts who will follow, says Zubrin, author of The Case for Mars, the top primer globally on recreating a habitable Mars for a million inter-world nomads.

“We need the Starship mission to Mars to be a grand science mission,” Zubrin says, “both for the sake of science and to create a bipartisan foundation for the human Mars exploration program.”

Helicopters outfitted to chart magnetic forces “will allow us to to characterize and measure Mars across the magnetic fields with much much better accuracy” than from orbit, Lillis says during our interview.

“They can really have a much better chance of characterizing it in 3-D.”

“I know there are there are groups of scientists who are hoping to convince NASA to send a helicopter mission,” he says. “But if there were a bunch of Starships with like dozens of helicopters, that would obviously be better.”

“That would be awesome. That would be totally awesome if that would happen.”

A central figure on the NASA science team for the Mars MAVEN orbiter, which has already begun charting the planet’s magnetic regions, Lillis has also co-authored a series of studies on deploying hyper-tech helicopters to conduct close-up observations of these forces.

“Satellite data provide a global picture,” he states in one overview, but flying aerial robots near the surface to characterize “smaller-scale magnetic fields on Mars can provide information that simply cannot be gleaned from orbit.”

“The recent successful deployment of the Mars helicopter Ingenuity,” he adds, “has opened new possibilities for future science-driven aerial exploration of Mars.”

Meanwhile, Lillis told me that Blue Origin, with just the second lift off of its powerful New Glenn rocket, “gave us an incredibly accurate launch.”

“The performance of their rocket was so good that it basically was right on the bull’s-eye in terms of what we were aiming for.”

“As a result,” he adds, “we actually have been able to postpone our first trajectory correction maneuver for several weeks because the launch was just so accurate.”

And the Jeff Bezos-founded spacecraft outfit, incredibly, managed a pinpoint landing of its booster on a drone ship floating in the Atlantic on just its second attempt to recover the rocket.

That means that Blue Origin has skyrocketed to become a primary player in the rocket revolution – based on reusable boosters – that is opening a new future for low-cost human spaceflight, and for voyages of discovery that crisscross the planets.

Blue Origin has “proven that reusable rockets are a generally adoptable technology,” Dr. Lillis says. “Of course it was very impressive.”

“And at Rocket Lab, their Neutron rocket is also going to be reusable when it starts launching early next year.”

“I think over the next five or 10 years you’re going to see more and more rocket companies reuse their rockets.”

As the development of recoverable boosters ricochets around the world, and the cost of launches drops dramatically, he predicts, a new golden age for space exploration will spread out across the Earth.

That in turn will fuel the take-off of science probes throughout the star system, with an ever-expanding constellation of robotic and human missions radiating outward.

“I think we’re seeing the beginning of that right now,” Lillis muses. “It’s a really exciting time.”

He adds that the Escapade mission to Mars “is a great example of a partnership between academia and new space companies like Rocket Lab,” a precursor to exploratory flights of the future.

Rocket Lab is “one of the top space companies absolutely,” Lillis says, and the engineering wizards at Blue Origin “have been fantastic partners.”

His Escapade team at Berkeley, and perfect clockwork coordination with Blue Origin and Rocket Lab on the trailblazing flight, might set up this NewSpace coalition to become essential partners on upcoming missions to the Red Planet conceived by NASA, but delegated to independent spacecraft designers and vanguard space scholars.

The entire Escapade expedition will cost NASA about one-tenth its outlay for past space treks, like the MAVEN orbiter, to the ruddy Martian orb.

Lillis says his ensemble at Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory “would very much be looking forward to working with NASA on more missions like this in the future.”

His skunkworks team, he adds, has already begun mapping out “mission ideas that we have for Earth orbiting missions, sun missions, Venus, Mars, asteroids, the Moon.”