“Russian” to the Martian Frontier

In the twentieth century, the United States won the race to the Moon. In this century, though, don’t be surprised if Russia is the first to land a human on Mars. Roscosmos (Russia’s official space agency) is not only making bold promises about sending human explorers to Earth’s red neighbor; it’s making concrete progress in the here and now toward delivering on them.

NASA, continuing its descent from world-class space agency into undervalued arm of the Environmental Protection Agency, left Europe hanging last summer when it reneged on its promise to build a launch vehicle for the ExoMars mission. This mission, as THE FUTURIST discussed earlier this year, was supposed to be a joint venture by NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) to deploy a robot satellite to Mars in 2016, and a robotic land rover in 2018, for the purposes of searching the planet’s surface for signs of past life. With NASA suddenly bailing, ESA was left with a good satellite but no means of launching it.

Then Russia came to the rescue. In early October, Roscosmos head Vladimir Popovkin met with ESA chief Jean-Jacques Dordain and said that Russia would love to participate in ExoMars. The Russian official even offered the use of Proton, a Russian launch vehicle, for the mission.

ESA just may take Popovkin up on his offer. Alvaro Giminez, ESA’s director of the Science and Robotic Exploration, told BBC that ESA will consider all possible forms of Russian support of, and participation in, the ExoMars project.

"Everything is open for discussion," Gimenez said to BBC.

Russia can look forward to a well-deserved boost in international prestige if its participation leads to a successful mission. It can also expect a wealth of new data for its own national Mars research, as Oleg Korablyov, deputy chief of the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told RIA Novosti.

That research is quite extensive. Its near-term agenda includes the November 2011 launch of a space station that will analyze soil samples of Phobos, one of Mars’ moons; study the methane distribution in Mars’ atmosphere; and take measurements of the planet’s magnetic field. Following that will be Mars Net, a network of satellites that will deploy by 2017 and circle the entire planet in one connected grid to continuously monitor the planet’s weather patterns.

And Roscosmos isn’t stopping with robots. By 2012, Russia plans to have completed the manufacture of a new Megawatt-class nuclear spacecraft engine. This type of engine, which both NASA and Roscosmos have been researching for decades, will fly human crews to the Moon and other destinations far more efficiently than today’s chemical-powered rockets. Then, in 2013, Russia will begin tests of the Angara rocket boosters, which will have enough thrust to power a future human mission to Mars.

Incidentally, Roscomos chief Anatloy Perminov told RIA Novosti that he anticipates humans reaching Mars some time after 2035. Though that sounds far off, at least he is setting a target date. NASA, by comparison, remains fairly mealy-mouthed on the subject: “Eventually, humans will most likely journey to Mars.”

This blog post could go on and on with more examples, but by now you surely get the point: Russia is the nation that's showing leadership on space exploration. It is the Russian officials who are daring to look beyond Earth’s atmosphere. And it is they who are putting energy and funds into building the tools humanity would need to venture further out into those murky depths.

While it is a depressing moment for the United States, it is an uplifting one—literally—for both Russia and for the world at large. A human mission to Mars is a massive undertaking. Many nations will need to band together to develop the prerequisite technologies and to build the final spacecraft and launch vehicle. Given Roscosmos’ current momentum, it is looking like those nations will all have a capable and dependable partner in Russia.