Destination Mars
BBC2 9.00pm Thursday 18th January 2001

NARRATOR (JACK FORTUNE): These pictures hold clues to an enduring mystery. They’re from a place 100 million miles away: planet Mars. These tantalising glimpses of its surface reveal the possibility of life on another planet, but to know for sure humans will have to journey to this dry, frozen world. The plans are ready. By 2020 representatives of Earth could be standing in the Martian dust for the first time. It would be the most challenging voyage humanity has ever undertaken.

LAUNCH VOICE: 4, 3, 2, 1.

STORY MUSGRAVE (6 space shuttle flights): It’s like a voluntary death in a way in which you say goodbye to, to family and friends and humanity, you say goodbye to the entire thing.

NARRATOR: Flying to Mars was once the stuff of fantasy, but now it is close to reality. Today there are detailed plans for a mission that will travel 100 million miles through the Solar System and last for almost 3 years. The first pioneers will face enormous physical and mental challenges, unlike anything ever done before. It will be the ultimate test of human endurance.

JOHN CHARLES (Mission Scientist, NASA): Imagine heading off to Mars just you and 5 of your closest personal friends in a space the size of a vacation trailer for 2½ years. If you’re going to make it successfully you better get along well together.

JERRY LINENGER (143 days in space): There’s a lot of dangers out there. It’s not a, you know, easy little trip that well let’s just go jump in a rocket and fly to Mars. You’re way out on the frontier. It’s a dangerous voyage.

NEIL ARMSTRONG: Just one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

NARRATOR: In 1969 the Apollo landings united the world in awe as the first human beings set foot on the Moon. It was a milestone in human endeavour. No-one knew what they would find there, or whether anyone would survive.

ASTRONAUT: Hey Al. (Yeah) Could work out here all day.

ASTRONAUT: Take your time.

ASTRONAUT: Roger, copy contact.

NARRATOR: The Americans astounded the world with their courage and vision, but the Russians were aiming for something more incredible, something that would make the Apollo missions seem like a walk in the park – past the Moon and into the Solar System.

LEONID GORSHKOV (Energiia Astro Ltd): Well we started thinking about it I would say in the 1960s because in the 1960s we already submitted suggestions, which seem to be quite naïve now, suggestions as to how to send a man to Mars. The first serious project started in 1969.

NARRATOR: For many years the Russians secretly worked on their dream of interplanetary exploration. Their plan for Mars was specific and detailed.

LEONID GORSHKOV: First the spacecraft is assembled in Earth orbit. The complete Mars craft would look like this. It’s like a giant butterfly. It spins out on a slow spiral from Earth until it reaches the point where we set sail for Mars, after 30 days circling the Earth.

NARRATOR: The Russian ship was to have used electric rocket motors powered by giant solar panels. They’re efficient, but slow. It would take a year to get to Mars, but once there the crew would only spend a week on the surface. Long enough for a quick look around the landing site before setting off on the long flight home. In all it would have meant 2 years in space for a week on the planet.

LEONID GORSHKOV: Of course we’re disappointed, but staying any longer would seriously complicate the project. Spending more time on Mars creates too many problems for the first flight and if it’s too complex it’s much less likely to succeed. It’s one of the limitations of our scheme. We know that, but we’ve looked at all the pros and cons and decided on a short stay.

NARRATOR: Such a huge undertaking would need research on how humans would cope with long-term life in space. It was to lead to this: the Mir Space Station programme. In the 80s and 90s dozens of cosmonauts acted as human guinea-pigs completing stays in space ranging from a few months to more than a year. Their experiences were invaluable, but their journey to Mars is now off the agenda. The Russians financial problems have put an end to their cosmic ambitions, so now it is the Americans who will be venturing out into the universe and they are thinking big, so big they may well change the course of human history. Under their audacious plan they won’t just be make the dangerous voyage to Mars, they’re going to create a colony there, the first humans to live away from Mother Earth.

MICHAEL FOALE (178 days in space): The current Mars scenario that NASA has on the plan – I think it’s a great one, it’s ambitious, at long last it’s, it’s, it’s really gutsy – sends you in a period of 6 months to the surface of Mars and then you stay there until Mars has gone around the Sun again and then you are back in place to do a launch back to Earth, so you end up being on the Martian surface like 500 days and this is an extraordinary stay. It means you have to go to Mars prepared to live there and survive.

NARRATOR: The American plan is carefully timed to make best use of celestial mechanics. Mars takes almost twice as long to orbit the Sun as does the Earth, so there are only certain times when the planets are near each other, about once every 2 years or so. If a mission chooses the right moment to set off the journey could be shortened to just 6 months, but it means stay on the surface of Mars of 18 months waiting for the planets to line up again for the return trip. They wouldn’t just be tourists on Mars, they’d be making it their home.

MIKE DUKE (Lunar Planetary Institute): We took the point of view that we would do everything we could to make the surface of Mars the next safest place to be in the, in the Solar System other than Earth and we did that in part by uti, utilising a strategy in which we sent hardware to Mars in advance of the people.

NARRATOR: Before the first astronauts take off a complete habitat fir the humans will have been built amid the red dust on Mars. Sophisticated robot factories will have been sent on ahead to manufacture air and water from the thin Martian atmosphere.

MIKE DUKE: One very important thing was that we would produce propellants on Mars to send people back and so we could actually create reservoirs of, of consumables, buffers as we call them, that would be there ready to be used before we actually sent people out.

NARRATOR: So in a radical move the crew will set off with only enough fuel to take them to Mars. To get home again they will have to make contact with the robot factories. It will demand an accurate landing. Any error and their chance of survival will be slim. And the journey has begun. These astronauts are the first to live on the International Space Station, permanently in orbit above the Earth. In the next decade astronauts from all over the world will be laying the groundwork for the first Mars pioneers, solving the problems of long-term life in space. The vast interplanetary rocket will be assembled here, module by module. The Space Station will be its launch pad. From here there is only one destination: Mars. It is 2018. The launch has been successful. The crew are now on board. They won’t be back on Earth for nearly 3 years. After 3½ billion years of evolution, life from Earth is finally setting out to live somewhere else in the Solar System. The empty fuel tanks are jettisoned. They are on their way to Mars. Ahead is 100 million miles of deep space. The crew are now truly weightless as they settle into their cramped surroundings for their first night’s sleep. Everything we take for granted on Earth becomes a logistical nightmare in space. the challenge for those planning the mission is to keep the astronauts alive, healthy and in relative comfort for almost 3 years. At the heart of it is Shuttle astronaut Cady Coleman who’s in charge of NASA’s crew comfort research.

CATHERINE ‘CADY’ COLEMAN (16 days in space): This for me is one of the most important places on the space vehicle and it’s the place that you live. It’s your cabin, it’s, it’s the place that is really hours to go and be by yourself whenever you need to and this space that you see here is probably larger than what we will have on the Mars mission, but what’s important is that it, there’s enough for you to physically be in and be with your things and to be able to close yourself off from other people. For some folks in zero gravity when you are actually in your sleeping bag your head doesn’t really rest on a pillow and so it’s kind of strange thing and so we actually have this strap that can go across your forehead here and it’ll make your head feel like it’s on a pillow and some people like that. You probably have a big store of clothes somewhere, but also use these, put you know your sort of stock for the week or something here so you could get at them easily and what you don’t see here that I am sure you would see in every cabin would be pictures of your family and your pets and, you know, just thing that remind you of what it’s like back on Earth and, and who you left behind.

NARRATOR: After a few days in space the crew will be facing their first threat. Living in zero gravity will be a biological battle for survival. Human bodies are not designed for life away from Earth. Over time, away from gravity, they will gradually disintegrate. The Russians are finding out what happens to the victims of this elemental encounter. This volunteer has been in bed for a year. Staying horizontal is the best way to simulate weightlessness here on Earth. Just as would happen in space, with no stress on his body, the volunteer’s muscles are wasting away and his bones disintegrating. His heart capacity has shrunk. Even short bouts of exercise are exhausting. Until Dr. Valery Poliokov completed a world record 14 months space flight in 1995, no-one was sure humans could survive the complete return journey to Mars. The aim of this bed rest research is to develop exercises to prevent bodies designed for life on Earth from slowly decaying in space.

VALERI POLYAKOV (678 days in space): We had some good results, but we’re continuing with our research to find out exactly what’s going on. These experiments have helped a great deal in space.

NARRATOR: But fighting the effects of space takes willpower.

VALERI POLYAKOV: When you’re floating in space you feel like you are a bird, or a fish, you feel so relaxed. It’s such an effort to strap yourself into the exercise equipment to do the training, but once you realise that you would turn into a miserable wreck all the faster if you didn’t exercise the realisation that you need to train to stay healthy makes you do it.

NARRATOR: From the Russians’ experience on Mir life in space will be dominated by exercise – 2 hours a day every day doing a cosmic workout.

JERRY LINENGER: And we’ll take you to the treadmill. I just got off and I had my final run today.

NARRATOR: American Jerry Linenger spent 5 months on Mir.

JERRY LINENGER: Right down here and you either sprint or you walk. That’s your, that’s your options in life, so when you hit this panel you’d better be ready to run. I strapped myself to a treadmill, 70 kilogram load plates, exercise 2 one hour periods a day, put bungee cords around my neck, do squats, do anything I could as a sports medicine physicians to keep my bones strong, tried to keep my muscles from atrophying. In spite of my best efforts came back 13% bone loss – hips, lower spine, decalcification of the bone.

JOHN CHARLES: That turns out to be about 1 or 1½% every month, 1, 1% or so per month in flight. The question then arises if we send somebody on a 30 month trip to Mars will that person lose 30% of their bone mass?

NARRATOR: That could mean osteoporosis or even bone fracture, but there’s a lurking danger that could strike at any time.

JOHN CHARLES: Kidney stones. Little gems like this can accumulate in the shorter time as one week in space flight. This is just calcium from bones. If the calcium leaves the bones it has to go some place in the body and the body takes care of it by flushing it through the blood vessels and it ends up in the kidneys.

NARRATOR: Drinking lots of water can prevent this happening, but that brings it own problems.

JOHN CHARLES: In space flight going to the bathroom is a major undertaking. Astronauts don’t like having to, to wrestle with the hardware and clean up afterwards, so astronauts generally tend not to drink a lot of fluids in space flight so we perhaps need to figure out some way to protect bone health and kidney health by making going to the bathroom easier in space flight.

NARRATOR: Two weeks in the crew are exposed to the hidden dangers of space, having left the protection of the Earth’s magnetic field far behind. Cosmic rays, huge doses of radiation from collapsed stars continually rip across the void. The astronauts are sitting ducks. During a 3 year mission a crew would be exposed to hundreds of times more radiation than a similar time on Earth. Highly charged particles will tear through their bodies leaving damaged DNA in their wake.

JOHN CHARLES: They can cause cancers, they can cause cataracts, they can cause lesions, holes in the, the tissues such as the brain, they can cause long-term risk of cancer, they can cause sterility and, and infertility problems if the crew member is intending on having a family later after the mission.

JERRY LINENGER: I would see flashes. I’d be sleeping at night – flash, flash, flash, flash like someone’s taking my picture. Open my eyes up, look around, dark as can be, flash, flash, flash.

NARRATOR: Jerry had sensed energised particles of radiation hitting his retinas.

JERRY LINENGER: I turned my head 90 degrees, (EFFECT), see a contrail going by, less intense but nonetheless, you know, radiation’s coming from that direction and it’s hitting me. In my case I’m thinking hey, I still want more family when I get home so I try to find a lead battery, you know get behind something to shield myself, but you still get the flashes.

NARRATOR: Even worse are sudden bursts of lethal energy from the Sun – solar flares. The full dose of this radiation could kill within hours. The crews’ only protection is a thick walled metal anti-radiation chamber where they may have to spend a week sitting out the cosmic storm, but shielding the entire spacecraft is a technical nightmare.

JERRY LINENGER: You know I don’t think there’s any way to solve the radiation problem. You’d have to shield the vessel beyond practicality. You wouldn’t be able to lift enough shielding into the air to, to shoot off to Mars.

JOHN CHARLES: We have to decide how best to protect the crew members from it. Do you, do you build heavy shielding that you can’t possibly launch, or do you build light shielding and accept an increased risk of cancer later in life as a result of having gone on this 2½ year mission to Mars.

MICHAEL FOALE: To be honest on a medical level the radiation is so bad that it is better to do this at the end of your life than at the beginning because the chance of the radiation giving you cancers is just less if you do it at a later age.

STORY MUSGRAVE: The Earth will shrink rather fast on, on a planetary mission. You will see it hour by hour.

NARRATOR: Alone in a tiny craft, travelling hundreds of thousands of miles every day, the enormity of their quest will become apparent. Isolated in the vastness of space life back home will become a distant memory.

ASTRONAUT: Hello Houston..

MISSION CONTROL VOICE: Houston.

NARRATOR: The psychological pressure could be huge.

JERRY LINENGER: I can tell you the isolation, for example, that I felt on Space Station Mir 5 months was way beyond anything I expected. You know I thought I was pretty prepared. My, my past life experiences helped me out. I’m a naval officer, I’d been out on ships and I’d been isolated and in submarines and the only doctor on an island middle of the Indian Ocean, but I’ll tell you it’s a different ball-game up there in space.

NARRATOR: It’s a form of sensory deprivation: removing the everyday experiences of Earth.

STORY MUSGRAVE: You are going to crave things like the touch, like the touch of seeds and the touch of grass, the change in temperature, the wind and all of these kind of things.

ASTRONAUT: We’re beginning to go into darkness at this time.

JERRY LINENGER: And those people are going to be sitting there on the way to Mars just sort of counting the days off and that’s going to take a lot of mental strength to do that and I can see psychological problems, like depression, you know, rising up.

JOANNA WOOD (Psychologist, Krug Life Sciences): You don’t have many options if you get upset. There aren’t new vistas to look at, there aren’t new faces, new people to interact with. You only have so many movies that you can watch. After a while those movies start to get old. You have so many interactions and you want things to be different and when they’re not there’s no way to, to relieve that, that aggravation, the irritation and so it continues to build. You can’t get away from it for a while and by being, there being then enclosed, by having so few options everything takes on a much larger importance.

NARRATOR: The Russians were aware of these potential problems during the Mir programme. All the cosmonauts were constantly monitored for signs of trouble. Psychologists eavesdropped on their conversations. They counted how many words each cosmonaut spoke and analysed the sound of their voices for signs of stress.

VYACHESLAV SALNITSKII (Psychologist, Institute of Biomedical Problems): If there’s some tension within the team we try to get them to drain their negative feelings onto us on Earth. By doing that we find they bond better. That’s one of the main methods we use and it’s very effective.

JOANNA WOOD: Put some outrageous demand on them, get them really ticked off and then they can pull together against this unreasonable person who’s down there doing bizarre things. Now it’s not, it, that particular tactic might not be very productive in the, the grander scheme of things because then they’re not going to talk to the people on the ground. So hopefully you find a way to work around that.

NARRATOR: To cheer them up Ground Control might even order the crew outside for a space walk, a tactic they used on a recent mission when things were getting difficult.

DR ANATOLI GREGORIEV (Director, Institute of Biomedical Problems): The space walk was complicated. They worked outside for a whole 5 hours, but we realised that it was some4ething they needed to do. They needed a change. When they’d done their space walk they were in great mood. All their personal problems had been smoothed away and forgotten.

NARRATOR: One source of comfort in space has traditionally been talking to families, but on the way to Mars communication with Earth will be difficult. Radio signals will take longer and longer to reach base, as much as 20 minutes. It means written messages will have to take the place of conversation. Jerry Linenger had some experience of this with Mir’s haphazard text communication system.

JERRY LINENGER: I would write a letter to my son for example, or I’d write a, a note to the American contingency down there in, in Moscow and it might take 2 weeks to get down to ‘em. I’d get a letter from my wife and it was 2 weeks old it was still, you know, a great letter and a great message from my wife. What you did miss though was the real time back and forth exchange. I couldn’t, could not ask a question and then expect an answer the next time. I’d get the answer 2 weeks later, so it’s sort of a disjointed sort of communication.

NARRATOR: But by the time we go to Mars technology could exist to make the separation less painful.

STORY MUSGRAVE: I think it will be important to have on board virtual reality kinds of systems which will give us Earth and which we can experience Earth even after we have gone, which we can experience Earth, which we can experience the culture that has formed us along the way, that we can experience our house, our families, our grocery stores and all of that. I think those kind of systems will help and as technologies develop to go to Mars I don’t see quite as much emphasis being put on the development of those psychological systems as I see in the technical systems.

NARRATOR: Everything on the spacecraft will be strictly rationed. basics like water for washing will be in short supply. Every drop they use must come from Earth. The Russians found that after months on Mir just taking a simple shower was a real luxury, one to be truly savoured.

CADY COLEMAN: Washing your hair in space is actually a little challenging if you have hair like mine. You get a bunch of water in there and shampoo and mush it around and then you take a towel and you soft that out. It’s actually very much like when you wash your dog. I mean your dog will stay cleaner wet until he decides to shake and then you’re going to have a real mess. You just have to be very careful. We can’t really afford to waste any water up there. Water’s very precious and as we try and plan for space and how much power and how much room, everything, all those things are trade-offs and one of the things I think that might fall off on the lower end of the scale would be taking a shower because you can stay very clean taking a, a sponge bath and not take up so much room in the spacecraft.

FRED SMITH (NASA Systems Engineer): We recycle all of our waste water and that waste water includes our hand wash waste, our shower waste and also humidity condensate that is generated from being inside of a closed atmosphere. We also collect our urine waste water also. We collect our urine in this device here with a funnel and the unit’s transferred from here to our urine treatment system which is called a vapour compression distillation unit. That unit basically boils off the water from the urine and condenses it back out in a purer form. This unit right here it basically treats the water and brings it to almost drinkable standards. This sub-system oxidises the impurities out of the water so the water’s then ready for consumption for drinking again and for juice in our shower.

NARRATOR: For almost 3 years the crew will eat only what they brought with them.

JERRY LINENGER: You know food’s a highlight of the day up there. You get up there and you know as the mission goes on you know the first month you sort of grab whatever’s there, you eat it. By the end of the 5th month you are sitting there looking like what haven’t I eaten in a while and you are digging through and it might take you, you know, 10 minutes to find the jellied pike perch or you know whatever you want to squeeze out of the tube. You just want something different.

ASTRONAUT: (INAUDIBLE REMARK)

MISSION CONTROL VOICE: Our physician will stand by for implications from the spacecraft.

NARRATOR: On Mir there were regular supply ships bringing fresh food. It’s a luxury a pioneering Mars crew will have to do without.

JERRY LINENGER: When a resupply ship comes up you open that hatch up and fresh fruit comes flying out and you know a lemon for example it’s just, you know, the smell of the earth, food, you know, didn’t care to eat the lemon, we just you know pass it around, everyone sit there smelling lemons you know. It’s like wow, this is fantastic.

NARRATOR: But to get fresh fruit and vegetables for the long trip to Mars the crew will have to grow their own. Ground experiments are going on to squeeze every ounce of matter from the tiny greenhouse they’d have on the rocket. Plants will grow without gravity but keeping them alive is complicated. It’s very difficult to stop the roots getting waterlogged an rotting away. Some plants flown up from Earth do very well, but starting from seeds is much harder. Astronaut Mike Foale try to grow rape seedlings when he was on Mir.

MICHAEL FOALE: They’re confused. They don’t know which way to grow ‘cos there’s no gravity here and so we’ve been using strong light above them to try and pull them, you know, they're attracted to the light and they’re not growing quite as tall as they would do on Earth I think.

NARRATOR: Mike’s seeds were successful – the first complete crop cycle in space. Since then other space farmers have successfully grown wheat in zero gravity, perhaps making bread an option for a Mars colony and recently salad was on the menu. Four different kinds of fresh greens were grown for cosmonaut digestion.

COSMONAUT: It’s a small leaf. It’s green, beautiful and very attractive and it smells wonderful.

COSMONAUT: It’s terrific. There’s no taste like this on Earth. Try being away from Earth without Earth food and then eating this.

NARRATOR: There are other possible additions to the menu. The Russians tried rearing quail chicks on Mir, but the baby birds wouldn’t grab hold of anything so they couldn’t feed. The solution was to fit the birds with harnesses to anchor them down. It seems they then developed normally. They’ve even been persuaded to breed and lay eggs. The Russians believe quail will make an excellent self-sustaining food source in zero gravity. Deep in the outer reaches of space approaching Mars there is another ever present danger: a medical emergency. With no possibility of evacuation, a dangerously ill or injured astronaut would have to be treated on board. It is an unnerving prospect.

JOHN CHARLES: Every time you send 6 people on a 2½ year trip which is the duration we’re talking about, there’s about a, a 90% chance that somebody will need an emergency room equivalent level of treatment.

ASTRONAUT: What’s wrong generally?

ASTRONAUT: She’s not breathing. Can you help?

ASTRONAUT: I’ll get the mask.

NARRATOR: In space even basic life-saving procedures are complicated. Just holding down an unconscious patient takes practice. More complex medical procedures may simply be too difficult for zero gravity.

JOHN CHARLES: There are certain kinds of, of injuries, say fractures, that you would, you would splint on Earth that you may decide not to splint, you may decide amputation is the better response in space flight instead of trying to spend a lot of time and a lot of resources watching a limb heal in a, in a questionable environment. You really don’t have the kind of knowledge about how limbs heal in space because we’ve not had injuries in space and it’s kind of, of questionable ethics to send an astronaut up and break his arm and see how it heals on a long direction space flight, so there, there may be those kinds of, of medical, tough, tough medical decisions that are comparable to battlefield medicine.

ASTRONAUT: Inside the cage as well as monitors the animals activity…

NARRATOR: But to find answers to such difficult questions research has been carried out – on animals.

MISSION CONTROL VOICE: …getting all those messages and we’ll get that up to you as soon as we’ve got it here.

MICHAEL FOALE: There have been one or two very controversial experiments done on Shuttle doing dissection and again because of the concerns just on vivisection, let alone in orbit, that’s a hard area to get any progress in. It does require some vivisection I think in space and so you’ve got to address all those issues.

NARRATOR: If there is a medical emergency on the way to Mars the knowledge gained from these experiments may prove critical because surgery in zero gravity throws up unique problems.

DAVE WILLIAMS (15 days in space): Dealing with bleeding in space is really quite interesting. A lot of people assume that blood is just going to float freely throughout the spacecraft and in fact what happens if you end up with a small little cut the blood will pool on the surface of the skin and not leave the surface of the skin. If it was an artery that was cut arteries by virtue of the pressure inside the blood vessels tend to spurt. In zero G it’s quite possible that if you don’t get pressure on that quickly enough that some blood may actually escape from the area of the cut and go flying off into the spacecraft itself.

MICHAEL FOALE: The whole problem of, of mopping up the blood that would ball and form gobs and all that stuff is a huge problem. Managing a, an infection-free site is a tough thing to do.

NARRATOR: But there is always the unthinkable. An astronaut might die in space. Uncomfortable choices will have to be made.

JOHN CHARLES: Then you have the issue of, of what do you do with, with the person. That’s, that’s kind of a, it leaves me kind of squeamish. I’m not exactly sure what the right approach would be. Whether it’d be the noble thing to have a burial in space like a burial at sea where you would essentially eject the, the person to travel for ever in space, whether you’d bring the, the, the person back to Earth for burial at, at home. There, there would probably be some sort of, of over-writing operational consideration.

ASTRONAUT: OK Houston, we’ve had a problem here.

MISSION CONTROL VOICE: This is Houston, say again please.

ASTRONAUT: Houston, we’ve had a problem. Had a main beam underbolt.

MISSION CONTROL VOICE: Roger, main beam underbolt. OK, stand by 13, we’re looking at it.

NARRATOR: When two liquid oxygen tanks exploded on the Apollo 13 mission the world realised that things can go wrong in space.

MISSION CONTROL VOICE: …looks abnormal on your system.

ASTRONAUT: Negative Ike.

MISSION CONTROL VOICE: OK now let’s everybody keep cool. We’ve got limbs still attached. Let’s make sure we don’t blow the whole mission.

NARRATOR: It was a close call, but falling back to Earth is not an option on a Mars trip. The technical systems on board the Mars spacecraft will have to work perfectly. Regulation of temperature, pressure and oxygen are critical to the crew’s survival. In the event of an accident the astronauts will be terrifying vulnerable. On Mir one of the crews experienced the nightmare that haunts all astronauts: smoke poured into the cabin when an oxygen canister burst into flame.

SASHA LAZUTKIN (184 days in space): When I saw the ship was full of smoke my natural reaction was to want to open the window and then I was truly afraid. For the first time we were in an enclosed space. You can’t escape the smoke, you can’t just open the window to ventilate the room.

JERRY LINENGER: You know you’re out there, you’re alone, you’re with just your other crew mates up there, you’ve got to put the fire out, there’s nowhere to run, there’s no 911 number you can call. You can’t call for help. During those moments there was terror and I’m not afraid to say that. I mean that’s what hits you. It hits you with a, you know, right down inside a human emotion that’s can only be described as fear.

NARRATOR: From Mir emergency evacuation back to Earth would have taken a couple of hours. On the long journey to Mars it’s not so simple. Once in their tiny evacuation vehicle the crew would face a stark choice: either limp back to Earth, a journey that would take months if not years, or head for Mars, wherever they may land.

MICHAEL FOALE: It’s better to get on the surface somewhere and wait and work the problem out and if there's food and materials for you to, plus we’d do your intended goal, mission or staying there as well that’s all the better.

NARRATOR: But the surface of Mars is not a welcoming place for humans. Without essential life-support survival would be impossible.

KENT JOOSTEN (NASA Office of Exploration): Where we land the crew they’d basically have to land in the general vicinity of these things that we have pre-deployed to get them home. If they land too far away and can’t get to them we’re in real trouble.

NARRATOR: But if all goes to plan there will be no emergencies. Boredom will be the only enemy. After 5 months with the same few faces, the same movies, the same magazines finding new stimulation will be a challenge. Yuri Romanenko made the Russians first ever long duration space flight. The only thing that kept him sane was music. He learnt the guitar from his co-pilot.

YURI ROMANENKO (430 days in space): He showed me some simple chords and after that I practised on the guitar on my own and got on fairly well. I wrote 25 songs and they are like a diary that follows my whole flight from launch to landing. Sometimes I’d wake up at night. I had a pen and a paper beside me and just wrote down the words in my head. (PLAYS GUITAR & SINGS)

NARRATOR: Finally, after 6 months of speeding silently through space it’s time for the last critical manoeuvre. They spin for a precisely timed breaking burn to take them into Martian orbit. For the crew it cannot come a day too soon. the astronauts are in sight of their goal.

STORY MUSGRAVE: I think that is about as powerful as an experience as one could have.

JOHN CHARLES: The over-riding sense of, of pride and beyond that even probably relief that, that that person is actually on Mars. We finally did it, we made it this far.

JERRY LINENGER: Oh it’d be just pure elation, just yahoo, I’m on another planet, this is incredible. You know putting that first foot down just got to be absolute incredible thrill.

NARRATOR: For 500 days the crew will now live on the planet waiting for the right time to return. This time it will be more than flags and footprints. Their mission will be to search the nooks and crannies of this vast planet for signs of life, to look for alien fossils etched into the Martian rock, but it will also be an expansion of humanity beyond the Earth.

STORY MUSGRAVE: It’s a physical quest, it’s a spiritual quest, it’s a reach out there for what our place is in the universe.

MICHAEL FOALE: Why are we doing this at all? It’s all to do with human expansion and looking for more territory and more, more resources. If we do this in a thoughtful way we are justified in expanding our borders. I live for it and I would love to do it and I will defend us doing it to the end.

JOHN CHARLES: It’s inevitable that we go to Mars. It’s part of what makes people people as far as the, the sense of exploration, not just an urge to explore, but an actual understanding that it is part of the physical make-up and the intellectual make-up of people.

NARRATOR: The explorers will become household names on Earth, probably the most famous faces in the world and yet on their 500 day vigil they’ll be facing the loneliness of the universe on Mars, alone in space.

JERRY LINENGER: Dear John. You know although I’m up here floating above the Earth I am still an Earthling. I feel the pain of separation, the pride of a father, the loneliness of a husband away from his wife, like an Earthling. Goodnight my son. I’ll be watching over you. Dad.

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