GRAPEVINE -- The stock market has tanked. The country is divided. Space shuttles have been permanently scuttled. This summer has been too hot for words.
But a group in Grapevine this week is looking skyward for the next grand human endeavor.The goal: Mars or bust.For centuries, Mars has fascinated humanity and more recently been a reliable source of movies, most of them bad.The International Mars Society gathered Thursday to attack the goal of getting to the planet, what it would take to live there, how resources would be used and the spiritual significance of world-hopping.Even as members met, they got news that made their discussions not seem so far out. Water could be flowing on Mars, at least during the warmest months, NASA announced Thursday. A scorcher on Mars is about 23 degrees; when it's cold, it drops to 125 degrees below zero, according to NASA.The Mars Society, founded in 1998, isn't made up people dressed up like Star Trek officers or aliens.They're physics teachers, scientists and engineers. While they talk about the ethics and religious meanings of interplanetary travel, they're also practical. Society members examine means of propulsion and train crews to live and work in Mars-like environments in far-flung regions of the Arctic as well as Utah, with some cooperation from NASA.At the Embassy Suites Hotel on Thursday, they listened to NASA senior researchers. Later in the week, there will be discussion about the case for hydrogen gas guns and the chilling notion of punching a one-way ticket to Mars.The group seems focused chiefly on challenging this planet to do better by striving to go to another one.Lucinda Land, executive director, said she wants to communicate more about science to the general public to hook people on its possibilities. Sending people to another world would be a civilization-changing moment."The people who live and work day to day are probably more concerned about putting food on their table than they are about space exploration," she said. "And what I'd love to convince them [of] is that this is how we generate more revenue, this is how can generate more jobs, this is how can have a more prosperous future."It's a tall order given that news media orbit around starlets rather than stars and scandal rather than science.Just a few decades ago, astronomer Carl Sagan called the quest for travel to Mars "Blues for a Red Planet." With its 24-hour day and relative closeness, it seemed to beckon.Mars Society members say even making the effort would fill the sails of our civilization just as the moon race inspired a generation of scientists and engineers."All great nations have to decide to do great things or you're not great," said Homer Hickam, a convention speaker and author of Rocket Boys, the basis for the 1999 movie October Sky.Without risks such as interplanetary travel, new technologies and new ways of thinking are put in jeopardy, said Hickam, who during his NASA career worked in spacecraft design and crew training, including readying astronauts for many Spacelab and space shuttle missions.He sees investment in space as a way to improve not just the economy but the whole nation."I really believe that if we truly wanted to prime the pump, then you do it with agencies like NASA that do new things," he said. "We either do these great things, or we just start stagnating as a country."Everett Gibson, a senior scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, discussed the building blocks of life that he believes he's found by scanning minuscule fragments of Martian meteorites that bounced around the solar system and ended up on Earth.He simplified his presentation at one point to a basic consequence of life: "Martian poop."Richard Smith, a physics teacher, from Vancouver, British Columbia, has a more practical message during his lecture: getting there.His idea is to build a rocket sled on the side of a mountain, reducing the huge costs required to escape the Earth's gravity.A rocket sled would be far more cost-effective than giant booster engines, and within our means, he said. "A roller coaster is more complex."Others attended to bigger issues.Saara Reiman of Finland said she will speak about the ethics of seeking extraterrestrial life and conserving resources.And the Rt. Rev. James Heiser of Hillsboro, a founding member of the society, talked about the role of spiritual side of space. "This search to understand the destiny of man and also the role Mars plays within our destiny is fundamentally theological," he said.Humans, he said, are linked to the cosmos. They cannot stand aloof in such a universe.Thursday's announcement that salty water may flow on Mars may provide a new line of evidence for life.The new findings are based on images taken by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which is currently circling the planet. The otherwise unremarkable lines on the planet's slopes grow more prominent during the warm season, and scientists say they look like flow lines that would be left by running water.This report includes material from the Los Angeles Times.Darren Barbee, 817-390-7126Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
