Musk should only send one person to Mars to avoid contamination, says professor
Elon Musk should only send one person to Mars to avoid contaminating the red planet, a leading scientist has said.
The billionaire owner of SpaceX is hoping to colonise Mars with more than a million human beings and is working to make interplanetary travel easier, cheaper and more efficient.
Yesterday, SpaceX’s fifth test flight of the Starship rocket achieved a landmark success when it caught the “Super Heavy” booster of Starship back on the launchpad five minutes after take-off using a giant pair of mechanical fingers, dubbed “Mechazilla”.
The reusability of rocket components is a key aspect of the future of spaceflight. Smaller SpaceX rockets, such as the Falcon 9 and the Falcon Heavy, already use recycled components.
And while Prof Andrew Coates, a professor of physics at the UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory, called yesterday‘s achievement “an absolutely incredible sight”, he urged Musk to rein in his ambitions for Mars.
“One person may be okay eventually, but there are risks of contamination,” he told the Today programme this morning [Monday].
“Eventually, Elon Musk would like to be taking people to the moon and onto Mars… I think we have to be careful on the latter one.
“The last thing we need to be doing is taking life from Earth to Mars. Robotic exploration is the way to go.”
However, while there may never be a Martian equivalent of Buzz Aldrin, Prof Coates said it is fine for humans to go back to the moon in larger numbers.
“The moon is absolutely no problem, we can do that,” he said.
“It is a fantastic thing to have been able to do this with a very large rocket, it eventually helps us to get back towards humans exploring the moon — which I have no problem with —but I think we are going on to Mars with a lot of people and that is where we have to start worrying.
“Jumping to conclusions about colonising Mars, which is one of the stated aims, is something we would like to avoid in the future, personally.”
Prof Coates is involved with the Rosalind Franklin rover Nasa mission which will scour soil samples on Mars for signs of life.
He also is a co-investigator of the main camera on a spacecraft which is currently en route to Jupiter to study its moons.
Nasa is launching its own mission on Monday to investigate the Jovian system for signs of life with its Clipper spacecraft.
The craft is the biggest ever sent to another planet and weighs more than three tonnes while measuring more than 100 feet long.
It will study the moon Europa which experts believe likely contains an ocean of liquid water and could be the best place in the Solar System to contain life.
The $5.2 billion mission is scheduled to take off from Nasa’s Kennedy Space Center at 5.06pm BST.