In the age of human space exploration,
Purdue University carries a proud legacy.
Purdue's school of Aeronautics and
Astronautics has produced more than a
third of NASA's astronaut corps and
hundreds of alumni who continue to play
active roles in the research and design
of future space missions.  In the spring
of 2015, 51 students in Purdue's Senior
Spacecraft Design class teamed up with
former Apollo 11 astronaut Buzz Aldrin
to produce an in-depth feasibility study
of his 2013 book "Mission to Mars."  In this next segment, faculty and students from the
Senior Design class share their
experiences and accomplishments working
alongside an American icon.   People have their their work, and their families, and
they have their crises, and they're
worried about what's going to
happen tomorrow or next year.  But if you take a bigger perspective...if we get hit by a
comet or if we have a nuclear war, or
if we have a pandemic, all of
civilization could be rubbed out.  And the
people who worry about these things, the
visionaries, say we've got to move off of
the planet Earth and guarantee that
humans will continue on into the future.
Everyone says we want to go to this one place or this place, but Dr. Aldrin's trying
to lay out a vision for the future.  His goal is really to find the one unified vision,  his
unified space vision.   I first met Dr.
Aldrin when I was working at the Jet
Propulsion lab.  Dr.Aldrin came to JPL to
try out this new idea he had of putting
a spacecraft in orbit around the Sun - that would visit Earth and Mars without stopping at Earth or Mars.   It's a
space station-size place  that astronauts would
catch up to, and live in, and they'd be
more comfortable and they'd be safe.   It
is reusable as a living facility, a support
facility for radiation protection. 
I just bring Landers, they get on they get off.
It'll keep going to Mars and then coming back.  It's like a Taxi service.  If you want to go
from point A to point B, you don't design
and build a new taxi all the time.  You build only once.
And so, because I was working in mission design and I knew how to do these kind of
calculations, I worked out the basics of
how the "Aldrin Cycler" works.   And we've
continued to work together over the years
and now Dr. Aldrin is working very
closely with me, my research group, and of course, the Senior Design team.  So Dr. Aldrin
came up with this plan, in his book to go
to Mars, which was published I believe
in 2013.  But there were no
numbers in it.  We did not know the costs.
We did not know the risks involved in such a mission.
The course objective was to take Dr. Buzz Aldrin's plan
and turn it into numbers.   How
much does everything weigh?   How many
boosters are you going to need?  How much food will you need?   All of those things,
the technical details, the numerical results, that's what I asked my Design Team to
figure out.   This class will assess some
of the challenges presented by Dr Aldrin.
He is not only our distinguished guest
but he is also the customer for our
project.
You people
are gonna make history I think.
1961...President Kennedy wanted to go to Mars.  Mars!  His people said, "there's no way we
can do that."   For us, I think this
opportunity to work with Buzz Aldrin on his
vision to go to Mars is something that excites our students.  I've actually been leading and directing the
team of 51 students.  Professor Longuski
guided us and advised us a little
bit.  Had some interesting concepts he wanted us to look at, but in the end, this was actually a student-run-and-
directed project.  The classmates know who their leaders are and they always pick the best people I think.
And then the rest of the team basically
signed up for various disciplines that
they wanted to work on.  They were assigned to different parts of the mission.  So for
example, Communications Group, Mission Design,  Propulsion,
Aerodynamics.  Basically put Dr. Buzz
Aldrin's vision, that he wrote in his book,
put it into a feasibility study.   See if we could actually do
this mission.  So the first part,  one
the big things is doing some missions
around the moon.  Some of that is sending modules to low Earth orbit, to the
La Grange points, or even to the moon surface itself.  Making sure that they work in the space
environment.   Doing the first steps, but
then, at the same time, we begin to build
international moon bases.   Partner with
countries across the globe to
build an international presence on the
moon.
We don't compete at the moon, we help.   But help in the ways that help us to do the Mars
mission.   And then we are the
transportation nation of humans to Mars.
After that, we begin to establish the
cycler vehicles that will keep going back
and forth between Earth and Mars.  They will be able to take our humans out to Phobos
and Mars...so it's just a reusable space
habitat which is really valuable.   So once
we get to Phobos, the main point of
that one, is to be able to one test some
of the technologies before we're
actually going onto the Martian surface
because there's a little extra risk there.   And the main value of the Phobos base is that we're
being able to eliminate the 24-minute time delay that can happen between Earth and
Mars.  So we can actually be operating
Rovers on the surface in a timely
manner.  And that can really help the
science and exploration that we're doing
on the martian surface.  We build up
the facilities so that once they land, they are
assured of reliable living conditions.  After
that, we get onto the Martin surface and begin to do our real
exploration and colonization of the
surface.  We're not doing a flags-and-
footprints approach like we did with the moon before in the Apollo program.  No, this time we're
going to stay.   Pushing the boundaries of
science and exploration to make amazing
things happen.
But most importantly, we need this to inspire the next generation.   It's probably one of the
biggest, or the most challenging senior design project, just because of its scale.
There's a lot of places where we went pretty in depth on this mission and it'll show...
in our giant report.  It's a binder about that
thick.  I was very pleased with the results.
The results are in a 1,068 page report.  It's
a very aggressive program, sending 18
people out every 2.7 years.  Very ambitious.   And of course, when
you look at the numbers and look at the
costs, if you compare it to the Apollo
program when we went to the moon for the
first time, it's about three Apollo
programs in terms of expense.   But we've learned
a lot about sending people to Phobos,
sending cargo, landing on Mars, and I
think what we should to do next, is go
back and re-scale the problem.  Bring it down to
a level that is economically feasible.  It's a huge project.   We have to probably downgrade the
requirements of the mission - so
that's a lesson learned.  And you can see that
from the endorsement of Mr. Gertsenmaier who is really interested in what it
means to have Dr. Buzz Aldrin's plan.  And if that can help NASA's plan to go to Mars.   So we are in the
process of evaluating all the possible
plans to go to Mars.   We can do incredible things here
and I think, in the end, the
conclusions that were coming out of this,
you know, even if this doesn't end up
being the exact option we choose, it's
going to change the industry in terms of
the information we're
spreading out to other people we've been
working with.   Changing these numbers to
different numbers, different
specifications, is not going to be a
difficult step for us, because we've
learned so much already.   The next few
months are going to be very important
for these students here and very important for me
because I'll be able to
put distinct evolutionary plans for 30-40 
years to politicians.   This is just an amazing
experience because it's completely
different of any other kind of course because
it's exactly like if you were in a
company or agency...making something
really cool in a very high scale project.
And then there are many other lessons
learned for our students, you know, how to work as a team.  And it gives the students at
Purdue and particularly in the School of
Aeronautics and Astronautics that chance to work on
such kind of challenging problem which might change the course of history.   We know we're not the
only nation interested in going to Mars.  Is
America going to continue
to keep going up or our we leveling off?  I
don't want to see that happen.   I feel
very optimistic that in the future we'll
have better and better versions of how
we're gonna go to Mars.   What a remarkable thing it will be to commit to humans permanently occupying somewhere else.
And that's the name of the game...a colony.  This is the kind of opportunity we don't have in other places.
So it's really amazing.  Working with
Buzz Aldrin, I guess it's possible only at Purdue University.
Armed with this study, Dr.Aldrin will continue to lobby US leaders for an established human colony on Mars
by 2040.
That wraps up another Boiler Bytes.   Be
sure to check us out online at BoilerBytes.com
We'll see you next time.
