Mars Society's Summary of the Mars Society Conference

Ninth International Mars Society a Convention a Great Success
August 7, 2006
For further information about the Mars Society, visit our website at
www.marssociety.org

The Ninth International Mars Society Convention, held in Washington DC August 3-6, 2006 was a great success. Over 400 people attended.  Speakers included NASA Administrator Mike Griffin, NASA Associate Administrator for Exploration Scott Horowitz, NASA Associate Administrator for Legislative Affairs Brian Chase, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, Space Telescope Science Institute Director Matt Mountain, former NASA Mars Exploration program Director Scott Hubbard, Mars Society President Robert Zubrin, Australian Astronaut Andy Thomas, leading exobiologists Chris McKay and Penelope Boston, NSS Executive Director George Whitesides, Space Adventures Vice President Chris Faranetta, and over a hundred others.

The conference was keynoted on the morning of Thursday August 3rd by Mike Griffin, who explained his plan to create a program that would enable human Mars exploration expeditions before the end of the 2020's. He was then followed by Elon Musk, who presented his plans for the privately funded creation of a line of launch vehicles that could make space travel cheap enough to allow the actual settlement of Mars. Brian Chase followed, explaining the parameters of the political battle faced by the Vision for Space Exploration, emphasizing the need to keep the grass roots coalition supporting the Moon-Mars initiative united and active.

Over a hundred Mars Society members then left the conference for Capitol Hill to spend the afternoon meeting with Congressmen and congressional and Senatorial staff.  Traveling from office to office in twenty groups of about 5 people each, the Mars Society members held over 100 half-hour meetings, underscoring the need for the Congress to support the Moon-Mars initiative, and, in fact, to accelerate it; to keep it a Moon-Mars program and not allow it to decay into a Moon-only program; and to insure funding and full support for a Shuttle mission to save the Hubble Space Telescope. The overwhelming response to the visits was positive. Particularly noteworthy was the response of a key aide to likely Democratic presidential candidate Senator Hilary Clinton, who assured the Mars Society activists that she was "fully onboard" with our program.

Returning to the conference exhilarated, the activists rejoined other conference attendees to attend a reception and then kick back for the evening watching a presentation about Mars in the movies, and then previewing the great documentary film "The Mars Underground," by Scott Gill. This movie, which has already aired in Europe and Australia to rave reviews, is the first to convey the passion and the vision behind the effort to get humans to Mars. It will be out in the USA this December in DVD, and may air on TV at about that time. Stay tuned.

The Friday morning plenary session was led off by Scott Horowitz, followed by Matt Mountain and Scott Hubbard. Horowitz laid out in greater technical detail NASA's plan for the Moon-Mars program, and thanked the Mars Society for the work it was doing in support of the vision. Mountain's presentation made clear the enormous value of Hubble for science, and the importance of the fight to save it. This was underscored in comments made by Mars Society president Robert Zubrin. "The Hubble is the most productive scientific instrument in human history, and by far the most important accomplishment of the NASA manned spaceflight program in the past 30 years. So what is involved in the decision to save Hubble is the integrity of the space agency. Is NASA really interested in advancing science, or are its claims to that effect just so much baloney that they say in order to get funds to distribute to aerospace contractors? Do we have a purpose driven space program, or don't we?" Mountain agreed, and thanked the Mars Society for its fierce defense of this treasure of human civilization.

After the morning session, the conference divided into five parallel tracks, to allow the maximum number of attendees the opportunity to present papers on every aspect of Mars exploration and settlement. (The full agenda and list of papers is posted at the Mars society website at www.marssociety.org.) The evening session was then devoted to a stirring panel discussion about the need to accept risk in human space exploration.

The Saturday morning session was led off by Zubrin, who laid out how far the Mars Society had come since its founding in 1998, when its ideas were ruled out completely by those in power, and the possibility of their ever being accepted was discounted by the gaggle of cynics and self-proclaimed experts who hang about the periphery of the space program. In eight years, our ideas have gone from Quixotic to mainstream, and now the task is to make sure they are implemented, and not stopped either by those who oppose the Vision altogether, or those charlatans who are currently peddling fraudulent promises of cheap electricity beamed from Lunar solar power stations in order to lure the public into accepting an initiative degraded to a Moon-only objective.

"They have a fundamentally base understanding of human nature," Zubrin said. "They use deceit, and appeal to greed. They try to tempt people to support space with a false promise of saving them some money at the pump. We say we need to go to Mars because it is the planet that has the resources to support the birth of a new branch of human civilization, because that is what this is really about – creating an open human future where people will have the freedom to be the makers of their worlds, not just the inhabitants of a world already made, and growing ever narrower and more regulated as it seeks to constrain human aspirations to accept ever tighter limits.  In the battle of ideas we will beat theirs, because ours are based on truth. We will win by building a movement based on Hope rather than Greed."

Zubrin was followed by Australian Astronaut Andy Thomas, a veteran of a five-month mission to the Russian Space Station Mir, a Columbia and an ISS mission, and most recently, STS 114, the summer 2005 mission commanded by Eileen Collins which returned the Shuttle to flight. Thanking the Mars Society for everything it is doing, Thomas presented Zubrin with a Mars Society flag that the STS 114 crew had brought to orbit with them on their historic mission. The morning session was then rounded out by exobiologist Chris McKay, who laid out the key issues involved in the search for life in the universe.

During the afternoon, dozens of additional presentations were made in the parallel track sessions, and the Mars Society Steering Committee also met. Most of the discussion at the Steering Committee meeting revolved around plans for the four-month Mars mission simulation crew expedition to the Flashline Mars Arctic Research Station (FMARS) on Devon Island. For four months, May-August 2007, this crew of seven people will engage in sustained program of active field exploration 900 miles from the North pole, while operating in the same mode and under the same constraints that an actual human expedition would need to face on Mars. Nothing like this has ever been done. By doing it we will learn a great deal about how to explore on Mars, while inspiring missions of people around the world with the tangible vision of human exploration of Mars.

It was decided that in order to insure the best chance for success of the mission, an engineering team would be sent to FMARS in advance, to inspect and upgrade the facility and make sure no damage had been done to it by natural or human causes in the interim since it was last used in the summer of 2005. A robust telescience team to back up the mission will also be created. The formal call for crew volunteers
will go out soon, with the goal of selecting the crew commander by the end of October, and the full crew by the end of November. In order to assure the widest possible field of candidates from which to select a crack crew, the Mars Society will pay crew transportation expenses to the Arctic. After selection, the crew will perform a two-week practice mission at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah in February.

Other decisions made at the Steering Committee included a go-ahead to initiate an intercollegiate Mars rover competition. The contest will differ from the several other rover/robot competitions that have been held by others in that it will not only be concerned with the rover mobility system. Instead, in this contest, the rovers, equipped with cameras and remotely commanded, will be made to run through a stretch of desert terrain with interesting and complex geology, and the operating teams will attempt to make and correctly interpret as many discoveries about the geology of the site as they can. The team that makes the most correctly-interpreted discoveries will win. The contest will thus be interdisciplinary, just as actual Mars missions are, requiring participation both by engineers and natural scientists. The complete rules for the contest will be published shortly.

Another initiative that will be taken will be a worldwide 5k race to raise money for the Mars Society's exploration projects. Details will follow soon.

Saturday night the Mars Society held its annual banquet, with entertainment provided by Mars musicians Bob McNally and Bebe Serrato. After the entertainment, Zubrin gave a brief talk laying out the plan for the 4-month FMARS 2007 expedition, calling upon those present to make it possible by funding it. Over $50,000 was raised.

On Sunday, the morning plenaries were led off by George Whitesides and Penelope Boston, who gave a fascinating talk about the need for joint human/robot exploration. The final plenary was given by Chris Faranetta, of Space Adventures, whose company is pulling together a Russian-made hardware set involving the Soyuz capsule and the Proton launcher to allow paying tourists to go on circum Lunar orbital voyages starting in 2009.