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In order of being read. Giorgio Agamben – What I saw, heard, learned… One night, along Venice’s Zattere, watching the putrid water lap at the city’s foundations, I saw that we exist solely in the intermittence of our being, and that what we call I is just a shadow continuously bidding farewell and saying hello, barely mindful of its own dissipation. All the machinery of our body serves solely to provide that break, that inversion of breath in which dwells the I—the intercessor of its own absence, unforgettable, neither living nor speaking, but the only reason we’re given life and language. [Translated by Alta L. Price] This book has 72 pages. On each of the first 61 there is a single paragraph. Reading them in sequence is like springing from stone to stone to cross a river. Sometimes one gives way. The final 11 pages have a negative version of the title and whose content is comparable to Blanchot's A Primal Scene? in The Writing of the Disaster. Holly Langstaff – Art and Technology in Maurice Blanchot The unprepossessing title disguises a brilliant and beautifully written analysis of the subject, and perhaps timely given the step-change in Artificial Intelligence currently wiping out sources of income (including my own). What I learned is that Blanchot's vision of literature is much more radical than I had previously allowed, no doubt enchanted by the romanticism of Blanchot's keywords without facing up to their implications, all due to an unyielding humanism. He may have welcomed the AI-generated novel because it undoes instrumentality and exposes us to "the abyssal non-foundation of art" in which we might find "something profoundly affirmative ... where nothing is predetermined, neither by an all-powerful God nor by the teleological progress of history". In February, I wrote about AI-generated poetry as criticised by Alice Oswald. Wade Davis – Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest There are hundreds of pages in this book telling the story of a generation of amateur mountaineers in the years before, during and after Great War that have a resonance similar to Max Aue's fictionalised account of the Babi Yar massacre in Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones. The reader also enters into the silence. Thomas Bernhard – Gargoyles At the midpoint of the year I became seriously jaded with reading. Everything was routine and a chore. I bought books assuming the author and subject matter would guarantee the old spark of new life, only to set them aside after a handful of pages. They piled up like a gambling debt. Then, in desultory scanning of bookshelves, I picked out Bernhard's second novel. It had never been a favourite but I hadn't read it for many years and fancied bathing in Prince Saurau's speech that usurps the novel halfway through (the novel should be reissued with a better translation of the German title Verstörung as 'Disturbance', in part to refer to the Prince's state of mind). Before that speech arrived, however, it became one of my favourite novels of all time (why do people use that stupid phrase?), and not just of Bernhard's, which are among the best novels of all time. Someone on Twitter puts it well: "Though his style got more refined, the melancholy and poetry of his earlier works were never matched again, not even by him." Soon after, I would read a book that helped me to appreciate why melancholy and poetry sparked new life. But first, something completely different. Nicholas Rooney – Talking to the Wolf: the Alexander Dugin Interviews Alexander Dugin's reputation goes before him and I began to read these interviews as a means of bypassing received opinion. Once started, I didn't stop. There are over 500 pages covering philosophy, theology and politics. His focus in theology is often on the need for a relation to eternity: The distance between us and eternity is growing and it demands more and more effort in our life in order to return to eternity. So we go out of eternity and fall. Time is a kind of radical sin and not a kind of progress; it’s something completely opposite. We should make time something other than it is, and that is precisely why when Christ was baptised the river Jordan went in the opposite direction. So that is precisely what we need to do. We need a kind of revolution of time. We need to direct time in the opposite direction. Eternity is also a topic for Tancredo Pavone in Gabriel Josipovici's interview-novel Infinity in which the composer speaks a fusion of profundity and bullshit. Whether 'also' should appear in that sentence is up to the reader of these conversations to decide. The question must be why I enjoyed them almost as much as Gargoyles (so not completely different after all). When Dugin turns to politics, his deeply conservative opinions do not preclude proposals for a multipolar world order. This was unexpected and hopeful, which must be why he is demonised by the unipolar West. William Franke – Dante’s Vita nuova and the New Testament: Hermeneutics and the Poetics of Revelation Some years ago Lee Rourke, a fellow scourge of Establishment Literary Fiction, identified the default mode of the contemporary novel as 'lyrical humanism'. As he has written for the New Humanist, I assumed this was because lyricism appeals to a residual irrational and thereby religious inclination in secular society and, contra Mallarmé, he seeks to purge literary language of anything beyond functional utility. I may have assumed too much, but reading Bernhard's Gargoyles and especially Prince Saurau's gloriously disconsolate aria, I realised that I am travelling in the opposite direction. This is not a religious turn but faithfulness to an experience that cannot be conveyed by a chronicle of facts. For Dante the experience was the incarnation of eternity in time in the form of Beatrice, conveyable only in lyric. William Franke's book helped to appreciate the prose 'explanations' in the Vita Nuova alternating with the lyrics were necessary to avoid the latter becoming absorbed by a literary and rhetorical tradition rather than the voice of an individual recording a unique vision. In this way the Vita Nuova becomes a contemporary gospel, risking blasphemy in doing so. Prince Saurau's speech may be its recurrence in a secular time, hence its paradoxical glory. I have written before about the Vita Nuova in Dante on the Beach. Gabriel Josipovici – A Winter in Zürau and Partita I wrote about this two-book edition in October, so all there is to do here is to reiterate the gift of the first part is its case for formal adventure in writing and of the second its enactment. It is one Josipovici has made throughout his career, but never with such focus. He makes clear that what distinguishes Kafka is that his experimentation in the Bohemian countryside was not a means to impress critics, not a noodling with sentences, not playing with genre, but a means of relating to "ultimate things" borne on a deeply felt existential anxiety. Mark Bowles – All My Precious Madness The blurb I contributed to this wonderful novel is deceptive in that Mark Bowles is like Thomas Bernhard only in the narrator Henry Nash's exultant anger with the social and political conditions in which we live – more or less unheard of in the British novel – and the triangular relationships, as set out by Thomas Cousineau in his book on Bernhard, in the form of Nash himself, his father and Cahun, the ghastly representative of the professional managerial class. It may be described as the Bildungsroman of a Critical Theorist, only with the rebarbative prose of that movement replaced by luxurious sentences, something else he has in common with the great Austrian.
A review of A Winter in Zürau and Partita by Gabriel Josipovici Gabriel Josipovici has said that as a critic he is conservative but as a novelist he is radical. The second claim may not be controversial but the first will come as a surprise to those who remember what he said about the big-name contemporary novelists in What Ever Happened to Modernism?. This novel and non-fiction combination offers an opportunity to experience the two in close proximity – two sides of an LP, as Nick Lezard put it. Side one is is a study of the eight months Franz Kafka spent in the Bohemian countryside after a diagnosis of TB and in particular the collection of notes he wrote there known as the Zürau Aphorisms. On the other side, Partita is a novel written mostly in dialogue following Michael Penderecki on the run after a death threat in which he spends most of this time chasing a lover who herself keeps running away. The threat of death and the promise of escape are two links between the sides that otherwise seem to have little in common. Josipovici's two claims, however, provides another. Before he left for Zürau, Kafka told Max Brod he intended to use the time to "become clear about ultimate things". Josipovici follows him through each day as recorded in the collection known as The Blue Octavo Notebooks. At first the entries include short stories, regular first-person diary entries and legalistic and theological speculations, the latter of which Josipovici is impatient as they lead Kafka into uncharacteristically "clunking" prose. But then the first aphorism appears: The true way is along a rope that is not spanned high in the air, but only just above the ground. It seems intended more to cause stumbling than to be walked along. Every edition dedicated to the aphorisms begins here but, Josipovici claims, this is deceptive. On that day in October 1917, Kafka writes a long and indeed clunking paragraph before interrupting himself with the line translated as "I digress". He then writes the aphorism. Every edition deletes this line. Reiner Stach's recent The Aphorisms of Franz Kafka is the exception but relegates it to an aside in his commentary, with the rest discussing the rope motif. Josipovici points out the original German is "Ich irre ab", which he translates as "I'm on the wrong track", backed up by Google Translate which has "I'm going astray". This he says marks a decisive change and relates directly to the form of the rope entry, which he describes as "the melding of fiction and discursive prose in extremely compact pieces". "Ich irre ab" is thereby closer to Dante's "I had lost the path that does not stray" before he begins his journey and gives the first aphorism a similarly salvific imperative. The difference is that Kafka has no Virgil or Beatrice to guide him; belief in God has gone and the means of salvation uncertain, and the word possibly meaningless. By removing the line, the editors place the existential peril at a safe distance from which a critical apparatus can flourish. The generic distinction of 'aphorisms' is therefore inappropriate as Kafka's notes are not the witty or pithy sayings of a wise man but "the anxious jottings of a man under sentence of death". Kafka's digression was not then playing with genre for the sake of it or to show off his talent as a writer but, as he said, to "become clear about ultimate things". The rope motif stands for Kafka's ambivalence about writing and Josipovici is rare in Kafka studies by bringing it into the foreground. Kafka recognised the grace it affords when in his diary he describes writing as "a merciful surplus of strength at a moment when suffering has raked me to the bottom of my being", but then he wonders "what kind of surplus is it?". In a letter to Brod, the doubts are expressed even more succinctly: "Writing sustains me, but is it not more accurate to say that it sustains this kind of life?" – a life in which he felt distant, a spectator unable to enjoy join in, as he described in a passage in his diary. Josipovici also shows how doubts about writing are dramatised in his stories. The officer in In the Penal Colony tells the traveller to read the sentence the machine has written on the body of the condemned man but he sees only "a labyrinth of lines crossing and recrossing each other". The machine takes twelve hours to kill so the engraving of the sentence has to be embellished to fill the time: In so doing it brings out the paradox of the machine: meant to make the accused feel in his own body the justice of the punishment, it only helps to bring out that language can never be 'true' or 'just', that it will always contain flourishes. In Zürau among simple farmers and labourers, Kafka saw no flourishes. He observed the centuries-old traditions embedded in daily life of the villagers governed by the seasons and centred on the church and recognised he was living the consequences of a society wrenched from such roots. Tradition had to be there already and could not be back-engineered. The best he could do as a writer was to distance himself from literary flourishes, to get as close to what Josipovici describes as "the unthinking life-activity that produces the works of Homer", in effect to disappear as a writer and for writing to disappear as a means of constructing ideas about the world. This was a common theme in the writers of the time. Josipovici cites Eliot's Prufrock and Wallace Stevens's snowman: What they are all searching for in their art – and in their lives, actually – is a kind of perfect anonymity, something that is the opposite of the image of the entrepreneur, the figure of Progress, linked to capitalism in society and, in art, to fictions with beginnings, middles and a nice resolution at the end. Blanchot calls this a "combat of passivity, combat which reduces itself to naught". Of course, that naught is still not disappearance as it is a combat for literature, an irony one aphorism melding fiction and discursive prose recognises: Like a path in autumn: scarcely has it been swept clear than it is once more covered with dry leaves. Josipovici notes how odd it is not to be told what is the path is like and admits that he's not sure why but the line "would be much weaker if it started with: 'I feel like' or 'My life is like a path in autumn'". The question of why it would be weaker is fascinating and maddening. Josipovici says "this is what Kafka’s best fictions and images do to you: in a few plain and simple words they set your imagination going and refuse to provide it with a safe landing". This is the gift of Kafka's quest to become clear about ultimate things, "a gift we do not receive" as Blanchot says in the same passage. The gift of A Winter in Zürau is that it makes us aware of the distance between us and Kafka, a distance between us and awareness of distance, a distance from the loss of tradition, a distance between us and ultimate things, and so a distance from the deep roots of fiction, as one of Kafka's melded commentaries on myth describes: There are four legends about Prometheus. According to the first, because he betrayed the gods to men he was chained to a rock in the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that devoured his liver, which always grew again. According to the second, Prometheus in his agony, as the beaks hacked into him, pressed deeper and deeper into the rock until he became one with it. According to the third, in the course of thousands of years his treachery was forgotten, the gods forgot, the eagles forgot, he himself forgot. According to the fourth, everyone grew weary of what had become meaningless. The gods grew weary, the eagles grew weary, the wound closed wearily. What remained was the inexplicable range of mountains. The great books by the great writers is an inexplicable mountain range we admire only from a distance. We hurry to name contemporary equivalents but we know something is missing. For Kafka, the horror and the undivine comedy of modern life was close enough in time to contrast with village life to sense what was lost so there remained a tension: "From the true antagonist boundless courage flows into you" he wrote in Zürau, a single sentence that many of us would pass over without pause but for the close attention Josipovici provides: "the agon or trial of strength was the fulcrum on which Kafka’s imagination turned" and cites the father in The Judgment, but then adds a crucial note: "The question is whether for modern man such an antagonist exists." Side two of this edition offers an answer. While Partita's features an Englishman with a Polish name on the run across Europe to escape a threat of death and then pursuing an unpredictable lover in variously dark, comic and surreal episodes, the title points away from the content just as music points away from itself. It has a non-musical meaning too: in Italian verb 'partire' means to leave, to go away, and the noun in the feminine describing someone who has left is 'la partita'. There are seven chapters each named after parts of the musical form; variations on a theme. In the Praeambulum, music is in the foreground when Michael Penderecki's host insists on playing Yves Montand singing Les feuilles mortes (Autumn Leaves) on his fancy record player: A quiet voice of great beauty begins to tell a story. It tells of memory and of those happy days when the sun always shone, days when we were friends; it tells of the dead leaves of autumn swept up into piles, like our memories and regrets. The dead leaves echo the fate of Kafka's true way, in this case one cleared by feet running into the future soon covered again as it becomes the past. The song recurs throughout the novel; a literary earworm reminding us that what ever joy we have, what ever hope we maintain, goes away. Everything passes. Perhaps this modern man's only potential antagonist, the one we confront in every waking moment while music and dreams are the ineffable reminders of escape, the promise and impossibility of escape that we seek anyway in flight from death and in pursuit of love; poles of the same earth. We exalt both with all kinds of rationales from the purely subjective to the purely technical, except music is heard and love felt differently to how we spell it out. In the novel it has a comic equivalence in Michael Penderecki's surname: his name may be spelled Penderecki but he irritates people by telling them it is pronounced Penderetzky. And with two otherwise incompatible books, we have two versions of the name. A Winter in Zürau spells out Josipovici's advocacy of formal adventure in writing as he follows Kafka sounding out the losses and paradoxes that haunt its necessity, while in Partita the antagonist can only be experienced in its pronunciation; it is experienced as it leaves us, forever there and forever out of reach. In this sense, Josipovici is radical as a critic and conservative as a novelist.
On this day in 2004, I posted the first entry on this blog. In recent years many posts have reflected on the past and present of literary blogging (there is no future) so I will not go over that waste land again except to wish more had followed the example of This Space. One of the very few has been Dan Fraser's Oubliette, which he appears to have forgotten, but he has continued writing elsewhere, such as at A Personal Anthology and Radical Philosophy, the latter reviewing a book that has influenced the direction taken by this blog over the years; one might say the opposite direction. I'm always impressed by writers like Dan who can summarise a book with apparent ease. It's the one thing that slows me down, often to a halt. Although I see this as a personal failing, it may be a sign of what distracts from my true interests. With this in mind, last week Donald Clark, the learning theory guru who is himself very adept at summarising, posted a blog about Google's AI tool NotebookLM, which summarises books for you. I pasted my notes taken from various non-fiction books and was stunned by the breadth and clarity of what it delivered. If writing about literature can survive such technology it has to be in pursuing what rational exposition conceals, which in a literary blog may be found in its haphazard and discontinuous non-procedure. One feature of NotebookLM which Donald Clark says will blow your mind is its automated podcast featuring two chirpy American voices discussing what you have uploaded. Here's what they've got to say about my recent ebook: The Opposite Direction. I apologise in advance.
"Stupid" and "a marketing exercise" were the first two descriptions I saw of the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century polled from hundreds of "literary luminaries" offering ten choices each, and while it is both of those things, "parochial" is the first word that comes to this non-American mind, and not only in the predominance of books written by Americans. The word also applies to "best", quietly amended in the standfirst to "the most important, influential books of the era", which is something else entirely. A discussion of how "the best" may be defined would have led to a far more interesting feature, but of course it is the business of newspapers like the New York Times to contain critical thought, hence a billion social media responses such as "I agree with many choices, disagree with many others", a statement whose crippling banality highlights the crisis of authority hidden beneath such lists, with "the best" finding its foundation in the infinite shallows of personal taste. "It's all subjective, isn't it" an anxious friend of mine often said to shut down discussions of the merits of various books. Well, if reading is an encounter with something other than oneself – even if the other is within and there is an uncanny homecoming – reading then becomes a dislocation of the subject, so perhaps a book can be judged according to the quality of dislocation, something lacking in the home comforts of the New York Times list. The person who made the banal comment goes on to suggest as much: nobody picked a reviled book—a disturbing book—a book that is only loved by a few—a book that might resurface in 20 years as an unheralded and forgotten classic. Such a large poll makes this impossible. Even when an individual's choices are revealed, the selections are conservative (or hilarious in Sarah MacLean's case, demoralising in Karl Ove Knausgaard's). Many years ago James Wood was right to decline to take part in a poll to find "the best novel" in the final 25 years of the 20th century as he said people tended to choose the book they assumed worthy of such an accolade – a serious book about a serious subject – rather than apply some independent thinking to the question (Beloved came top). Especially shocking here is that the "literary luminaries" have chosen not only worthy books but those they merely enjoyed or admired – someone has chosen a novel published so recently they may not have even finished it. Imagine instead if someone from another time had written the email: Hi, the New York Times here. Hope you're well. We'd like you to list ten books from this century that affected you like a disaster, that grieved you deeply, like the death of someone you loved more than yourself, like you were banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. By Thursday if possible. Kafka's proclamation is easily dismissed as teenage angst or, with more attention given to the historical conditions, an expression of the confusion and despair of a society metamorphosing from one world into another, but it raises the spectre of a book alien to a literary professional making a list. The same media that produces Best Book lists celebrates Kafka's novels as definitive of a certain time and assumes that by asking around like this it can recognise the books that define our own, except Kafka was only a peripheral figure in 1924, with his friends Franz Werfel and Max Brod much more likely to have made a Best Books of the 20th Century list in that year but whose work is more or less forgotten now. What this suggests is that the writing of such significance is untimely. Apart from the enjoyable and admiring kind of reading – industry-friendly reading – how might we recognise the untimely? In the book of fragments known as The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot described three possibilities: ◆ There is an active, productive way of reading which produces text and reader and thus transports us. Then there is a passive kind of reading which betrays the text while appearing to submit to it, by giving the illusion that the text exists objectively, fully, sovereignly: as one whole. Finally, there is the reading that is no longer passive, but is passivity’s reading. It is without pleasure, without joy; it escapes both comprehension and desire. It is like the nocturnal vigil, that "inspiring" insomnia when, all having been said, "Saying" is heard, and the testimony of the last witness pronounced. We can see the first two kinds of reader – the connoisseur and the consumer – competing in the New York Times list, often difficult to distinguish one from the other, but what of the third? The experience of the list may be its revelation: overwhelmed by possibility, exhausted before even having begun to read, stalled in sleeplessness, the consumer can consume no more, not even a wafer-thin novella. We experience it elsewhere as the stack of 800-page novels grows a book higher every week, each an apparent summit and summa of art and civilisation, heralded by one and all as the incontrovertible refutation of The Death of the Novel and yet, in its maximal, long, approaching shadow, its terminal desire. The third is the testimony of a silence from and to which these books lead, and us its mute, impatient witness. The open, silent spaces of Blanchot's fragmentary writing may be their correlate, each novel straining to share the testimony of eternity – the untimely – in a merciful surplus of strength Blanchot calls the disaster. In the next entry, Blanchot says: To write in ignorance of the philosophical horizon—or refusing to acknowledge the punctuation, the groupings and separations determined by the words that mark this horizon—is necessarily to write with facile complacency (the literature of elegance and good taste). Hölderlin, Mallarmé, so many others, do not permit this. We see a great deal of elegance and good taste on the New York Times' 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list, but a glimmer of those that do not permit it? Without commitment, without wishing to speak of "the best", and only out of propriety, I would point to the example of books written this century in which the philosophical horizon presents itself in form and content: well-known works like Jon Fosse's Septology, perhaps more accurately an anti-work, Coetzee's Jesus trilogy, and Knausgaard's My Struggle, all untimely in their way and one of which appears on the list, and lesser known works of fiction such as Tao Lin's Eeeee Eee Eeee, Dag Solstad's Novel 11, Book 18, Josipovici's Infinity, Vila-Matas' Bartleby & Co, Sam Pink's The Ice Cream Man and other stories, and non-fiction books presenting the horizon in more formal terms: Jeff Fort's The Imperative to Write, Josipovici's What Ever Happened to Modernism?, Quentin Meillassoux's The Number and the Siren, and Willem Styfhals' No Spiritual Investment in the World. Not one here, I suppose, that may be reviled or disturbing, so perhaps comment with your own suggestions of those otherwise unheralded, loved by a few.
More in literature
A rare and winning combination: a serious person who seldom takes himself seriously. He keeps his ego a little off to the side, muffled, away from the business at hand. It never disappears. It grows dormant, like some cases of tuberculosis. Jules Renard is such a man and writer, an aphorist and wit with the soul of a peasant. Often, he thinks like a farmer – practical, focused, unsentimental – while writing like a satirist. Here is Renard in his Journal, bargaining with fate on October 17, 1899: “Of all that we write, posterity will retain a page, at best. I would prefer to choose the page myself.” Renard writing as a commonsensical critic, September 6, 1902: “A great poet need only employ the traditional forms. We can leave it to lesser poets to worry themselves with making reckless gestures.” More writerly common sense, November 27, 1895: “Keep their interest! Keep their interest! Art is no excuse for boring people.” A lesson for “cancel culture, August 1896: “We always confound the man and the artist, merely because chance has brought them together in the same body. La Fontaine wrote immoral letters to his womenfolk, which does not prevent us from admiring him. It is quite simple: Verlaine had the genius of a god, and the soul of a pig. Those who were close to him must have suffered. It was their own fault! – they made the mistake of being there.” Renard sounding like the premise of a story by Maupassant, September 29, 1897: “Some men give the impression of having married solely to prevent their wives from marrying other men.” On why some of us become writers, May 9, 1898: “Inspiration is perhaps merely the joy of writing: it does not precede writing.” Renard was born on this date, February 22, in 1864 and died of arteriosclerosis in 1910 at age forty-six. With Montaigne and Proust, he is the French writer I most rely on. [All quoted passages are from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]
In the “Prologue” to his 1962 prose collection The Dyer’s Hand, W.H. Auden borrows a conceit from Lewis Carroll and divides all writers – “except the supreme masters who transcend all systems of classification” – into Alices and Mabels. In Alice in Wonderland, the title character, pondering her identity, says “. . . I’m sure I can’t be Mabel for I know all sorts of things, and she, oh! she knows such a very little. Beside she’s she and I’m I.” The categorization recalls Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Foxes and Hedgehogs. Of course, all of humanity can also be divided into those who divide all of humanity into two categories and those who don’t. Leading the list of Auden’s Alices is Montaigne, followed by the names of eight other writers, including Andrew Marvell, Jane Austen and Paul Valéry. Like Alice, Montaigne knew “all sorts of things” – he is among the most learned of writers -- even while asking “Que sais-je?”: “What do I know?” Montaigne begins his longest essay, “Apology for Raymond Sebond,” (1576) with these words: “In truth, knowledge is a great and very useful quality; those who despise it give evidence enough of their stupidity. But yet I do not set its value at that extreme measure that some attribute to it, like Herillus the philosopher, who placed in it the sovereign good, and held that it was in its power to make us wise and content. That I do not believe, nor what others have said, that knowledge is the mother of all virtue, and that all vice is produced by ignorance. If that is true, it is subject to a long interpretation.” Montaigne distills skepticism, which isn’t the same as nihilism or know-it-all-ism. It’s closer to the absence of naiveté, credulity and mental laziness, coupled with an open mind and curiosity. Montaigne was a benign skeptic and a Roman Catholic who lived through the French Wars of Religion. Auden wrote “Montaigne” in 1940, the year France fell to the Germans. “Outside his library window he could see A gentle landscape terrified of grammar, Cities where lisping was compulsory, And provinces where it was death to stammer. “The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took This donnish undersexed conservative To start a revolution and to give The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book. “When devils drive the reasonable wild, They strip their adult century so bare, Love must be re-grown from the sensual child, ‘To doubt becomes a way of definition, Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer, And laziness a movement of contrition.” “Death to stammer” is no exaggeration. In the sixteenth century, speech defects were often equated with possession by the devil. The final stanza is a writer’s credo. Auden was born on this day in 1907. He shares a birthday with my youngest son, David, who turns twenty-two today. [The Montaigne passage is from The Complete Essays of Montaigne (trans. Donald Frame, Stanford University Press, 1957).]
Five new prompts The post “Muse Circe Reclaims Her Lucre” appeared first on The American Scholar.
This post is the second in a series. Read part one here. p {line-height:1.6em; } p.caption { margin-top:0px;padding-top:0px;margin-bottom:20px;text-align:center;} a.fnote {text-decoration:none;color:red} img {margin-bottom:0px;} “From a mathematics and trajectory standpoint and with a certain kind of technology, there’s not too many different ways to go to Mars. It’s been pretty well figured out. You can adjust the decimal places here and there, but basically if you're talking about chemical rockets, there's a certain way you're going to go to Mars.” - John Aaron[1] Unlike the Moon, which hangs in the sky like a lonely grandparent waiting for someone to visit, Mars leads a rich orbital life of its own and is not always around to entertain the itinerant astronaut. There is just one brief window every 26 months when travel between our two planets is feasible, and this constraint of orbital mechanics is so fundamental that we’ve known since Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic what a mission to Mars must look like.[2] Using chemical rockets, there are just two classes of mission to choose from: (The durations I give here can vary, but are representative). Long Stay: Spend six months flying to Mars, stay for 17 months, spend six months flying back (~1000 days total). This is sometimes called a conjunction class mission. This profile trades a simple out-and-back trajectory for a long stay time at Mars. Short Stay: Spend six months flying to Mars, stay for 30-90 days, spend 400 days flying back (~650 days total). This is also called an opposition class mission. This profile trades a short Martian stay time for a long and frankly terrifying trip home through the inner solar system. Before comparing the merits of each, it’s worth stressing what they have in common—both are long, more than double the absolute record for space flight (438 days), five times longer than anyone has remained in space without resupply (128 days), and about ten times humanity’s accumulated time beyond low Earth orbit (82 days).[3] It is this inconvenient length, more than any technical obstacle, that has kept us from going to Mars since rockets capable of making the trip first became available in the 1960's. [4] And because this length is set by the relative motions of the planets, it’s resistant to attack by technology. You can build rockets that go faster, but unless you make Mars go faster, you’ll mostly end up trading transit time for longer stay times. Getting a round trip below the 500 day mark requires fundamental breakthroughs in either propulsion or refueling. [5] Delta-v requirements for short stay missions of varying length (left) and a long-stay mission (orange line right) for comparison. Note the sharp jump at around 500 days. source. That’s the bad news. The good news is that these constraints are so strong that we can say a lot about going to Mars without committing to any particular spacecraft or mission design. Just like animals that live in the sea are likely to have good hearing and a streamlined body shape, there are things that have to hold true for any Mars-bound spacecraft, just from the nature of the problem. I. No escape, no rescue A trip to Mars will be commital in a way that has no precedent in human space flight. The moon landings were designed so that any moment the crew could hit the red button and return expeditiously to Earth; engineers spent the brief windows of time when an abort was infeasible chain smoking and chewing on their slide rules. [6] But within a few days of launch, a Mars-bound crew will have committed to spending years in space with no hope of resupply or rescue. If something goes wrong, the only alternative to completing the mission will be to divert into a long, looping orbit that gets the spacecraft home about two years after departure.[7] And if they get stuck on Mars, astronauts will find themselves in a similar position to the early Antarctic explorers, able to communicate home by radio, but forced by unalterable cycles of nature to wait months or years for a rescue ship. Delta-v in km/sec required to return to Earth in 50, 70, and 90 days from various points in a long-stay Mars mission. Values above 10 km/sec are not realistic at our current technology level. source The effect of this no-abort condition is to make Mars mission design acutely risk-averse. You can think of flying to Mars like one of those art films where the director has to shoot the movie in a single take. Even if no scene is especially challenging, the requirement that everything go right sequentially, with no way to pause or reshoot, means that even small risks become unacceptable in the aggregate. To get a feel for this effect, consider a toy model where we fly to Mars on a 30 month mission. Every month there is a 3% chance that a critical system on our spacecraft will fail, and once that happens, the spacecraft enters a degraded state, with a 5% chance every month that a subsequent failure kills the crew. In this model, the probability that the crew gets home safely works out to 68%. But if we add an abort option that can get them home in six months, that probability jumps to 85%. And with a three month abort trajectory, the odds of safe return go up to 92%. These odds are notional, but they demonstrate how big an effect the absence of abort options can have on safety.[8] This necessary risk aversion introduces a tension into any Mars program. What’s the point of spending a trillion dollars to send a crew if they’re going to cower inside their spacecraft? And yet since going outside is one of the most dangerous things you can do on Mars, early missions have to minimize it. The first visitors to Mars will have to land in the safest possible location and do almost nothing. Risk is closely tied with the next issue, reliability. II. Reliability The closest thing humanity has built to a Mars-bound spacecraft is the International Space Station. But ‘reliable’ is not the first word that leaps to the lips of ISS engineers when they talk about their creation—not even the first printable word. Despite twenty years of effort, equipment on the station breaks constantly, and depends on a stream of replacement parts flown up from Earth.[9] A defective heat exchanger packaged for return to Earth from ISS in 2023 Going to Mars will require order of magnitude reliability improvements over the status quo. Systems on the spacecraft will need to work without breaking, or at least break in ways the crew can fix. If there’s an emergency, like a chemical leak or a fire, the crew must be able to live for years in whatever’s left of the ship. And the kind of glitches that made for funny stories in low Earth orbit (like a urine icicle blocking the Space Shuttle toilet) will be enough to kill a Mars-bound crew. Complicating matters is that traditional reliability engineering practices don’t work in life support, where everything is interconnected, often through the bodies of the crew. Life support engineering is much more like keeping a marine aquarium than it is like building a rocket. It’s not easy to untangle cause from effect, the entire system evolves over time, and there’s a lot of “spooky action at a distance” between subsystems that were supposed to be unrelated.[10] Indeed, failures in life support have a tendency to wander the spacecraft until they find the most irreplaceable thing to break. Nor is it possible to brute-force things by filling the spacecraft with spare parts. The same systemic interactions that damage one component can eat through any number of replacements. The bedrock axiom of reliability engineering—that complex designs can be partitioned into isolated subsystems with independent failure rates—does not hold for regenerative life support. The need for long and expensive test flights to validate life support introduces another kind of risk aversion, this time in the design phase. With prototypes needing to be flown for years in space, there will be pressure to freeze the life support design at whatever point it becomes barely adequate, and no amount of later innovation will make it onto the spacecraft. This is a similar dynamic to one that afflicted the Space Shuttle, a groundbreaking initial design so expensive to modify that it froze the underlying technology at the prototype phase for thirty years. In that period we learned nothing about making better space planes, but burned through decades and billions of dollars patching up the first working prototype. Such timorousness goes against the grain of a development strategy that proven spectacularly successful in recent years for SpaceX, an approach you could call “fly often and try everything”. With hardware to spare, SpaceX is not afraid to make wholesale changes between tests of its Starship rocket, relying on rapid iterations to advance the state of the art at an exhilarating pace. But this Yosemite Sam approach to testing won’t work for Mars. It only takes a few hours for engineers to collect the data they need after a Starship launch, while test runs of Mars-bound systems will last for years. The inevitable outcome is a development program that looks an awful lot like NASA, with long periods of fussing and analysis punctuated by infrequent, hideously expensive test flights. III. Autonomy Autonomy is a concept alien to NASA, which has been micromanaging astronauts from the ground since the first Mercury astronaut had to beg controllers for permission to pee (the request went all the way up the reporting chain to Wernher Von Braun). To this day, missions follow a test pilot paradigm where the crew works from detailed checklists prepared for them months or years in advance. On the space station, this takes the form of a graphical schedule creeping past a red vertical line on a laptop screen, with astronauts expected to keep pace with the moving colored boxes. Most routine work on the space station (like pumping water or managing waste heat) is relegated to specialized teams on the ground and is not even visible to the crew. Alan Shepard aboard Freedom 7, explaining that he really has to go pretty bad. But as a Mars-bound spacecraft gets further from Earth, the round-trip communications delay with ground control will build to a maximum of 43 minutes, culminating in a week or more of communications blackout when the Sun is directly between the two planets. This physical constraint means that the crew has to have full control over every system on the spacecraft, without help from the ground. Autonomy sounds like a good thing! Who wants government bean-counters deciding how astronauts spend their space time? But the ground-driven paradigm has its advantages, most notably in limiting workload. The ISS is run by a staff of hundreds who together send some 50,000 commands per day to the station. The seven astronauts on board are only called in as a last resort, and even so the demands on their time are so great that the station has struggled to perform its scientific mission.[11] One benefit of NASA’s backseat driving has always been that in an emergency, the crew has access to unlimited real-time expert help on Earth. The starkest illustration of this came on Apollo 13, when an oxygen tank in the service module ruptured 56 hours into the flight. It took the crew and mission controllers nearly an hour to get their bearings, at which point there was only a short window of time left to power down the spacecraft in a way that would preserve their ability to return to Earth. A transcript of that first hour shows how difficult it was for crew and ground to figure out what was happening, and prioritize their response. It casts no aspersions on the crew of Apollo 13 to say they could not have survived a Mars-like communications delay. And while this mission is the most famous example of ground controllers backstopping an Apollo crew, there were at least five more occasions in the Apollo program when timely help from the ground averted serious trouble: Apollo 12 was hit twice by lightning after launch, scrambling the electrical system and lighting up the command module with warning lights. Flight controller John Aaron recognized the baffling error pattern and passed into NASA legend by telling the crew to flip an obscure switch that restored sanity to their displays. On Apollo 14, the descent radar on the lunar module failed to lock on properly, returning spurious range data. Without a timely call from ground control (who told the pilot to reset a breaker), the problem would likely have led to an aborted landing. On Apollo 15, the crew struggled to contain a water leak that threatened to become serious. After fifteen minutes, engineers on the ground were able to trace the problem to a pre-launch incident with a chlorination valve and relay up a procedure that solved the problem. Also on Apollo 15, a sliver of loose metal floating in a switch caused an intermittent abort signal to be sent to the lunar module engine. Suppressing the signal so the lunar module could descend safely required reprogramming the onboard computer in a procedure guaranteed to raise the hairs on the head of every modern software developer. On Apollo 16, a pair of servo motors on the service module failed in lunar orbit. Mission rules called for an abort, but after some interactive debugging with the command module pilot, ground controllers found a workaround they judged safe enough to continue with the landing. While these incidents stand out, Apollo transcripts reveal numberless other examples of crew and ground working closely to get on top of problems. The loss of this real-time help is a real risk magnifier for astronauts going to Mars. IV. Analysis Another way in which the ISS depends on Earth is for laboratory analysis of air and water samples, which are collected on a regular schedule and sent down with each returning capsule. The tests that can be performed on the station itself are rudimentary, alerting crew to the presence of microbes or contaminants, but without the detailed information necessary to trace a root cause. For Mars, this analytic capability will have to move into the spacecraft. In essence, this means building a kind of Space Theranos, an automated black box that can perform biochemical assays in space without requiring repair or calibration. Such an instrument doesn’t exist anywhere, but a Mars mission requires two flavors of it—one that works in zero G, and another for Martian gravity.[12] This black box belongs to a category of hardware that pops up a lot in Mars plans: technologies that would be multibillion dollar industries if they existed on Earth, but are assumed to be easy enough to invent when the time comes to put them on a Mars-bound spacecraft. [13] Some Mars boosters even cite these technologies as examples of the benefits going to Mars will bring to humanity. But this gets things exactly backwards—problems that are hard on Earth don’t get easier by firing them into space, and the fact that nonexistent technologies are on the critical path to Mars is not an argument for going there. V. Automation The requirement that the crew be able to handle the ship when some members are incapacitated and there is no communication with Earth means that an ISS-size workload has to be automated to the point where it can be run by two or three astronauts. Astronaut Alexander Gerst (right) interacting with CIMON, NASA's $6 million AI chatbot Automation means software, and lots of it. To automate the systems on a Mars-bound spacecraft will be a monumental task, like trying to extend the autopilot on an airliner to make it run the airport concession stands, baggage claim, and airline pension plan. The likely outcome is an ISS-like hotchpotch of software tested to different levels of rigor, running across hundreds of processors. But this hardware will be exposed to a far harsher radiation environment than systems on the ISS, making software design and integration a particular challenge. A special case of the automation problem comes up on long-stay missions, when the orbiting spacecraft has to keep itself free of mold, fungus, and space raccoons for the year and a half that the crew are on the Martian surface. Anyone who owns a vacation home knows that this problem—called “quiescence” in the Mars literature—is already hard to solve on Earth. Unless carefully managed, the interplay between automation, complexity and reliability can enter a pathological spiral. Adding software to a system makes it more complex. To stay reliable, complex systems have to degrade gracefully, so that the whole continues to function even if an individual component fails. But these degraded modes, as well as unexpected interactions between them, introduce their own complexity, which then has to be managed with software, and so on. The upshot is that automation introduces its own, separate reason for running full-length mock missions before actually going to Mars. There will be too many bugs in a system this complex to leave them all for the first Mars-bound crew to discover. Implications The extreme requirements for autonomy, reliability, and automation I’ve outlined are old news to designers of deep-space probes. The solar system is full of hardware beeping serenely away decades after launch, most spectacularly the forty-six-year-old Voyager spacecraft. But no one has ever tried attaching a box of large primates to a deep space probe with the goal of keeping them alive, happy, and not tweeting about how NASA sent them into the vast empty spaces to die. A Mars-bound spacecraft will be the most complicated human artifact ever built, about a hundred times bigger than any previous space probe, and inside it will be a tightly-coupled system of software, hardware, bacteria, fungi, astronauts, and (for half the mission) whatever stuff the crew tracks with them back onto the spacecraft. Designing such a machine means taking something at the ragged edge of human ability (building interplanetary probes) and combining it with something that we can’t even do yet on Earth (keep a group of six or eight humans alive for years with regenerative life support).[14] My argument is not that it is impossible to do this, but that it is impossible to do it quickly. Preparing for Mars will be an iterative, open-ended undertaking in which every round of testing eats up years of time and most of our space budget, like Artemis and the ISS before it. The first decade of a Mars program will be indistinguishable from the last forty years of space flight—a series of repetitive, long-duration missions to orbit. The only thing NASA will need to change is the program name. Nor is this a problem that can be delegated to billionaire hobbyists. Life support is going to be a grind no matter whose logo is on the rocket. The sky could be thick with Starships and we’d still be stuck doing all-up trials of hardware and software on these multi-year missions to nowhere. The only way to explore Mars in our lifetime is to ditch the requirement that people accompany the machinery. Choosing a profile But since we’re determined to go to Mars, and have two profiles to choose from, which one is better? Everyone agrees that only the long-stay profile makes sense for exploration. There’s no point in spending 95% of the trip in transit just to get a rushed couple of weeks at the destination. But on early missions, where the goal is just to get the crew home alive, the choice is tricky. Long Stay The virtue of the long stay profile is simplicity. You fly your rocket to Mars, wait 17 months for the planets to align, and then fly the same trajectory home. Each leg of this transfer journey lasts about as long as an ISS deployment, and it’s possible to tweak the transfer time by burning more fuel (although the crew then has to stay longer on Mars to compensate). At every point in the mission, the ship remains between 1 AU and 1.5 AU from the Sun. This simplifies thermal and solar panel design and greatly reduces the risk to the crew from solar storms. But the problem of what to do with all that time on Mars is vexing. 500 days is a long time for a first stay anywhere, even someplace with nightlife and an atmosphere. And as we’ll see, an orbital mission is probably out of the question. The requirement that the crew go live on Mars on their first visit adds enormously to the level of risk. Short Stay The appeal of the short stay profile is right in the name. Instead of staying on Mars so long they have to file taxes, the first arrivals can plant the flag, grab whatever rock is nearest the ladder, and get the hell out of there. Or they can choose to skip the landing and make the first trip strictly orbital, following a tradition in aerospace engineering of attempting the impossible sequentially instead of all at once. But the problem with the short stay profile is that trip home. The return trajectory cuts well inside the orbit of Venus, complicating the design of the spacecraft and adding spectacular ways for the crew to die during the weeks near perihelion. For most of that journey, the ship is on the wrong side of the Sun, hampering communications with Earth while leaving the crew with no warning of solar storms. And that crew has to spend two consecutive years in deep space, maximizing their exposure to radiation and microgravity, the biggest known risks to astronaut health. The short stay profile also requires more propellant, in some years a prohibitive amount. If your strategy for mitigating risk on Mars is to launch crews during every synodic period, so that there are always potential rescuers en route to Mars, then this is a problem.  A diagram comparing the delta-v requirements for short stay and long stay missions across future launch dates. Since propellant requirements go up exponentially with delta v, a mission in 2041 requires five times as much propellant as one in 2033. source“ Orbit or Land? Once you’ve picked a profile, the other decision to make is whether to land the spacecraft. Obviously you have to land a crew at some point; if you don’t, the other space programs will make fun of you, and there will be hurtful zingers at your Congressional hearing. But since surviving a trip to Mars requires tackling a sequence of unrelated problems (arrival, entry, landing, surface operations, ascent, rendezvous), there is a case for cutting the problem in half by making the first mission orbital. This was the approach taken by the Apollo program, which looped the first crew around the Moon before a working lunar lander existed. Not having to carry a lander on the first mission means more room for spare parts and consumables, which improves the margin of safety for the crew. It also buys time for engineers to work on the hard problems of entry, landing, quiescence, and ascent without holding back the entire program. But there are powerful arguments against an orbital mission. Since so much of the risk in going to Mars is a simple function of time, why roll the dice more than necessary? And given the expense and physical toll on crew, how do you justify not attempting a landing? Imagine driving to Disneyland, turning the car around in the parking lot, and announcing to your family that you’re now ready for the real trip next year. There will be angry kicking from the backseat, and mutiny. NASA has waffled for years over which option to choose. In the 2009 design reference architecture, they favored sending a crew of four on the long stay trajectory. Their more recent plans envision a shoestring mission on a short-stay profile with four crew members, two of whom attempt a landing. Elon Musk, for his part, has proposed solving the problem in stages, sending volunteers to settle Mars first, then figuring out how to get them home later.[15] What makes the choice genuinely hard is that we lack answers to two key questions: 1. How does the human body respond to partial gravity? Decades in space have given us a good idea of what prolonged periods in free-fall do to astronauts, and how they recover after returning to Earth. But we have no idea what happens in partial gravity, either on the Moon (0.16 g) or on Mars (0.38 g). In particular, we don’t know whether Martian gravity is strong enough to arrest or slow the degenerative processes that we observe in free fall.[16] The answer to this question will drive a key decision: whether or not to spin the spacecraft. As we’ll see, spinning a spacecraft to create artificial gravity is an enormous hassle, but whether it’s avoidable depends on the unstudied effects of long stays in partial gravity.[17] 2. What is the risk to the crew from the heavy-ion component of galactic cosmic radiation? Radiation in space comes in many varieties, most of which are well-understood from experience with their analogues on Earth. Low-dose heavy-ion radiation, however, is different. It doesn’t exist outside of particle accelerators on Earth and is hard to study in low orbit, where both the magnetosphere and the bulk of our planet shield astronauts from most of the flux they’d experience in free space. Heavy ion radiation has biological effects that are not captured by the standard model of radiation damage to tissue. In particular, there is a class of phenomena called non-targeted effects (NTEs) that are known to damage cells far from the radiation track. This is a weird effect, like if found yourself hospitalized because your neighbor got hit by a car. It’s believed that NTEs disrupt epigenetic signaling mechanisms in cells, but the phenomenon is poorly understood. Uncertainty about the effects of low-dose heavy ion radiation widens our best guess at radiation risk by at least a factor of two.[18] At the low end of the range, these effects are just a curiosity, and Mars missions can be planned using traditional models of radiation exposure. At the high end of the range, long-duration orbital missions may not be survivable, and astronauts on the Martian surface will either have to live in a cave or cover their shelter with meters of soil. Prediction of tumor prevalence after 1 year of galactic cosmic radiation exposure. The solid line at bottom shows the standard radiation model (TE). The dotted lines show the influence of non-targeted effects (NTE) under different assumptions. Note the nearly threefold uncertainty in predicted tumor prevalence in the unshielded case. source This uncertainty about biological effects makes radiation the greatest uncharacterized known risk facing a Mars-bound crew, and it affects every aspect of mission design. It’s helpful to combine the three main risk factors in going to Mars into one big chart:  table.risk { font-size:1.1em; margin:0px; margin-top:20px; width:550px; border-spacing:0px; } caption { font-size:1.2em; margin-bottom:10px; color:#777; } th { text-align:center; padding-bottom:10px; } td { text-align:left; padding:14px; margin:0px; } td.risk {border:1px solid #777;} td.unknown { background:#888; color:white; } td.low { background:#afa; } td.mid { background:#ff9; } td.high { background:#fc9; } td.vhigh { background:#f99; } Technical Risk OrbitLand Short Stay Spacecraft trajectory complicates spacecraft design, communications are a challenge. Requires working lander and ascent stage, less margin than orbital mission. Long Stay Lowest complexity, large mass budget for spares and consumables. Highest complexity, all-up mission must work on the first try. Radiation Risk OrbitLand Short Stay 600 days in deep space, return trip requires close solar approach (0.7 AU). Risk from solar particle events may require flying near solar minimum, incurring higher GCR dose. Long Stay Risk of death or incapacitation from heavy ion component of GCR may exceed 50% Lowest radiation exposure, but adequately shielding the habitat on Mars increases complexity and contamination risk Deconditioning Risk OrbitLand Short Stay 1.5 times beyond human endurance record; crew at risk for bone fractures and eye damage. Long Stay 2.5 times beyond human endurance record. Physiological effects of partial gravity unknown. The gray areas in these grids represent knowledge gaps that have to be filled before we decide how to go to Mars. How long this preliminary medical research would take is anyone’s guess, but it has to be some multiple of the total mission time. Studying partial gravity in particular is tricky—you can do it on the Moon (42% of martian gravity) and hope the results extend to Mars, or you can build rotating structures in space and do more precise tests there. Studying radiation effects means flying animals outside the magnetosphere for a few years and then watching them for tumors, which (unless the radiation news is really bad) is also going to take some time. In software engineering we have a useful concept called “yak shaving”. To get started on a project you must first prepare your tools, which often involves reconfiguring your programming environment, which may mean updating software, which requires finding a long-disused password, and pretty soon you find yourself under the office chair with a hex wrench. (The TV show Malcolm in the Middle has a beautiful illustration of yak shaving in the context of home repair.) The same phenomenon afflicts us in trying to go to Mars. It would be one thing if, given enough rockets and money, explorers could climb on a spaceship and go. But there is always this chain of necessary prerequisites. We paint Destination: Mars! on the side of our spaceship and then find ourselves in low Earth orbit a decade later, centrifuging mice. It’s dispiriting. It’s tempting to say “you can just build things” and dismiss all this research and testing as timid and unnecessary. But this would mean ignoring the biggest risk factor for Mars, which I’ll include here for the sake of completeness. Unknown Risks OrbitLand Short Stay Unknown Unknown Long Stay Unknown Unknown A trip to Mars is so difficult that we don’t have the luxury of ignoring known risks—we need all the room we can spare in our risk budget for the things we don’t know to worry about yet. My goal in all this is not to kill a cherished dream, but to try to push people to a more realistic view of what it means to commit to a Mars landing, and in particular to think about going to Mars in terms of opportunity costs. In recent years, there’s been a remarkable division in space exploration. On one side of the divide are missions like Curiosity, James Webb, Gaia, or Euclid that are making new discoveries by the day. These projects have clearly defined goals and a formidable record of discovery. On the other side, there is the International Space Station and the now twenty-year old effort to return Americans to the moon. These projects have no purpose other than perpetuating a human presence in space, and they eat through half the country’s space budget with nothing to show for it. Forget even Mars—we are further from landing on the Moon today than we were in 1965. In going to Mars, we have a choice about which side of this ledger to be on. We can go aggressively explore the planet with robots, benefiting from an ongoing revolution in automation and software to launch ever more capable missions to the places most likely to harbor life. Or we can stay on the treadmill we’ve been on for forty years, slowly building up the capacity to land human beings on the safest possible piece of Martian real estate, where they will leave behind a plaque and a flag. But we can’t do both. Next time: Eyes and Bones Footnotes [1] Quote taken from a 2000 oral history with Aaron. [2] For an early example, see the 1928 Scientific American article, “Can we go to Mars?”, While understandably hand-wavy about the means of propulsion, it describes a conjunction-class orbital mission not substantially different from NASA’s 2009 Design Reference Architecture. [3] Valerii Polyakov set the 437 day record on a space flight that landed in 1995. The International Space Station went without resupply from Nov 25, 2002 to April 2, 2003. Nine Apollo missions went beyond low Earth orbit, the longest of these (Apollo 17) was gone 12.4 days. [4] The Saturn V was capable of launching about 20 tons on a Mars flyby trajectory. NASA undertook preliminary planning for such a mission (requiring four Saturn V launches) in 1967. [5] In 1987 a team chaired by Sally Ride proposed a ‘split/sprint’ mission architecture that is probably the best way to get to Mars. In this architecture, slow-moving tankers pre-position cryogenic propellant depots in Mars orbit, and then in the next synodic period a human mission (the “sprint” part of the mission) lands briefly on Mars, refuels from the orbiting depots, and get home within 400 days. Such a mission requires about 15 heavy launches and two nonexistent technologies: long-term storage of liquid hydrogen in space, and the ability to pump liquid hydrogen between spacecraft in space. (Interestingly, both of these technologies are part of Blue Origin's plan to build a moon lander). The other way to get to Mars fast is with nuclear thermal rockets. A nuclear thermal rocket is just a nuclear reactor that shoots hot hydrogen out one end. Nuclear thermal rocket designs are about twice as efficient as chemical rockets, making it feasible to fly missions with higher delta V requirements. [6] For a comprehensive discussion of Apollo abort modes, see 1972 Apollo Experience Report - Abort Planning. [7] You can read about possible Mars abort modes in Earth to mars Abort Analysis for Human Mars Missions. What kind of a failure scenario would even benefit from a two-year abort option is an interesting philosophical question. [8] I wrote a little python script if you want to play with these scenarios yourself. [9] Life support equipment on ISS is packaged into components called ‘Orbital Replacement Units’. In some cases, this means that an assembly weighing hundreds of kilograms has to be flown up because a tiny sensor within it failed. Here's a partial list of ORUs replaced in calendar year 2023 (source): Heat exchanger in Node 3 Common cabin air assembly water separator Node 3 water separator Common cabin air assembly water separator liquid check valve 21 charcoal filters stationwide HEPA filters in Node 3 Blower in carbon dioxide removal assembly (twice, first replacement failed) Sample Distribution Assembly in Node 3 Mass Spectrometer assembly Multifiltration bed Pump in oxygen generation assembly [10] An early urine reprocessor on the space station failed after it got clogged up by calcium crystals from the astronauts' dissolving bones, an effect of weightlessness that wasn't properly accounted for in the design. [11] The 50,000 command figure is from The ISS: Operating an Outpost in the New Frontier, a detailed primer on space station operations. ISS utilization has gone up in recent years, but still remains below 80 hours/week—two full-time equivalents. The seven-member crew spends most of their waking time on mandatory exercise, housekeeping, and station repair. [12] Existing instruments in space are usually set up to identify chemicals on a target list of 10-20 substances, a much easier task than identifying arbitrary compounds. For the state of the art on the latter, see Progress on the Organic and Inorganic Modules of the Spacecraft Water Impurity Monitor, a Next Generation Complete Water Analysis System for Crewed Vehicles (ICES-2023-110). [13] Other examples of magic Mars technology include leakless seals for spacesuits, waterless washing machines, biofilm-proof coatings, nutritionally complete meals that can be stored for years at room temperature, and autonomous solar-powered factories for turning CO2 into hundreds of tons of methane. [14] The endurance record for closed-system life support belongs to Biosphere 2, which kept a crew alive for 17 months before oxygen fell to dangerous levels because of unanticipated interactions with building materials. [15] Plans involving Starship and Mars depend on being able to produce hundreds of tons of propellant on the Martian surface so the rockets can launch again. In the absence of any details from Musk or SpaceX, the closest thing we have to a detailed plan is this analysis in Nature. [16] For all we know, the set of problems collectively called "deconditioning" could get worse in partial gravity. This goes against our intuitions, but there have been bigger surprises in space. [17] Another decision that hinges on the effects of partial gravity is whether or not to include heavy exercise equipment on the Mars surface habitat, where space and mass are at a premium.
