This post is the second in a series. Read part one here.

“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: 

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.

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.

Before John Belushi, before Bill Murray or Chevy Chase or Dan Aykroyd—before any of them, there was Gilda.

Gilda Radner was the first performer Lorne Michaels hired for the cast of Saturday Night Live when it launched, in 1975. She was, at the time, one of the stars of The National Lampoon Radio Hour, the only woman in a cast of men destined to be famous. “I knew that she could do almost anything, and that she was enormously likeable,” Michaels once said of the decision. “So I started with her.”

Television audiences immediately fell in love with Radner. How could they not? She was magnetic. She sparkled with a kind of anything’s-possible energy, and stole every scene she was in. She made everything hilarious, and more daring. That was Radner—the tiny woman with the gigantic hair having more fun than everybody around her.

Radner’s charm was so off the charts that practically every character of hers wound up with a beloved catchphrase. There was the bespectacled nerd Lisa Loopner (“So funny I forgot to laugh!”); the poof-haired newscaster Roseanne Roseannadanna (“It just goes to show, it’s always something.”); and the little old lady Emily Litella (“Never mind.”). A typical Litella rant on “Weekend Update” went like this: “What’s all this fuss I keep hearing about violins on television! Why don’t parents want their children to see violins on television! … I say there should be more violins on television!” Chevy Chase eventually leans over and corrects her: Violence, not violins. Litella, sheepish: “Never mind.” Radner based Litella on her own childhood nanny. And the portrayal, like everything she did, was shot through with love.

Radner also appeared in the now-classic “Extremely Stupid” sketch, which became one of the earliest examples of actors breaking—that is, breaking character and cracking up on live television—in SNL history after the guest host, Candice Bergen, flubbed a line. Radner used the moment to great comedic effect, turning directly to the camera to exaggerate the impeccable delivery of her own lines, while Bergen dissolved into laughter beside her.

Almost every comic who came after Radner—and certainly the ones who wound up on Saturday Night Live—counts her as a formative influence. You can see Radner in the rag-doll chaos of Molly Shannon’s character Mary Katherine Gallagher; in the total commitment to the bit of Adam Sandler’s singsong gibberish; in the weird imagination of Kristen Wiig’s universe of absurd characters (the mischievous Gilly and the tiny-handed Dooneese both come to mind); and in the master-class physical comedy of Melissa McCarthy.

Radner herself was always drawn to classic physical comedy—among her idols were Charlie Chaplin, Lucille Ball, anyone who was, in her words, “willing to risk it.” So it made sense that Radner parodied Ball—and the legendary chocolate-factory episode of I Love Lucy—in a sketch, alongside Aykroyd, that had her juggling nuclear warheads coming down a conveyor belt. Then there was Radner’s wordless dance routine with Steve Martin—in which the pair toggles between all-out slapstick and total earnestness—that remains a higher form of comedy, even 50 years later. Radner’s particular charisma came from this blend of bigheartedness and fearlessness. She always went for it. “There was just an abandon she had that was unmatched,” Martin has said. She’d keep going until she got the laugh, however far that took her. And she could make fun without being mean-spirited. (See: her impressions of Barbara Walters as “Baba Wawa” and Patti Smith as “Candy Slice.”)

In 1979, Radner gave the commencement speech—fully in character as Roseanne Roseannadanna—to the graduating class at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, part of which wound up on her comedy album Gilda Radner: Live From New York, released that same year. And while the delivery is pure Roseannadanna, listening to it today is also a reminder of the trail Radner herself blazed, along with SNL cast members Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman, as women in comedy in the 1970s. “Imagine, if you will, an idealistic young Roseanne Roseannadanna, fresh out of the Columbia School of Broadcasting, looking for a job in journalism,” Radner-as-Roseannadanna says. “I filled out applications, I went out for interviews, and they allll told me the same thing: You’re overqualified, you’re underqualified, don’t call us, we’ll call you, it’s a jungle out there, a woman’s place is in the home, have a nice day, drop dead, goodbye. But I didn’t give up.” Radner didn’t give up either. But her sense of purpose wasn’t about proving a point or being a feminist, but something even more straightforward. If she wanted something, she went for it. Why wouldn’t she?

Radner was famously boy-crazy. (She used to joke that she couldn’t bring herself to watch Ghostbusters because it starred all of her ex-boyfriends.) She had on-again, off-again romances with Martin Short and Bill Murray (and that was after she’d dated Murray’s brother), among others. In her own telling of her eventual marriage to the great Gene Wilder, the two wound up together only because she pursued him so relentlessly. She knew from the minute she saw him that she wanted to be with him forever. He did not share this view, not initially. An interviewer once asked Wilder if it had been love at first sight. “No, not at all,” Wilder said. “If anything, the opposite. I said, How do I get rid of this girl?”

He would come around. “If I had to compare her to something I would say to a firefly, in the summer, at night,” Wilder recalled. “When you see a sudden flash of light, it’s flying by, and then it stops. And then light. And stops. She was like that.” What Wilder meant, in part, was that Radner could have the highest of highs but also the lowest of lows. In moments of lightness, the whole world was illuminated, and everything in sight seemed to bend in her direction. But other times she was anxious and sad. She grieved the death of her father, who died of cancer when she was a teenager, her whole life. She described herself as highly neurotic. She had had eating disorders more or less since she was 10 years old. And she suffered in other ways, too. She never got to be a mother, which she’d desperately wanted. And while she brought untold joy to millions of people, her short life ended tragically. At one point, toward the end, she looked back on the early SNL years and marveled. “We thought we were immortal, at least for five years,” she wrote in her memoir. “But that doesn’t exist anymore.”

Wilder and Radner were married for only five years before she died, at 42, of ovarian cancer. And today, she is remembered as much for the unfairness of her young death—like Belushi before her and Chris Farley after her—as she is for her originality and spectacular talent. In a gentler world, all three of them would still be with us. Radner and Belushi would be in their 70s, Farley in his 60s. In a gentler world, Radner could have had all the babies she wished for, made all the movies she never got to, and would still be making people laugh. When I think about Radner now, what I think about most is the way she lived, and how that ought to be a lesson to the rest of us. She had a sense of total urgency, and a willingness to do the things that terrified her. Somehow, she made it look easy. “I don’t know why I’m doing it,” she once said in an interview, about why she’d chosen to take her act to Broadway, “except that for some reason I’ve chosen to scare myself to death.”

That was Gilda Radner. Gilda, who as a child once overheard her mother saying, “Gilda could sell ice cubes in winter,” and so set up a little stand outside to do just that. Gilda, who loved work so much that she’d get impatient on the way to NBC Studios and ask her taxi drivers to speed up already. Gilda, who fell in love easily and often, and wasn’t afraid to be weird, or look ridiculous. Gilda, who could make anything funny. But her real legacy, it turns out, is something much more profound than her comedy. This is the lesson of Gilda Radner’s too-short life: For God’s sake, don’t bother with fear. Just go for the thing you want, with your whole heart. Each of us gets only so much time on this planet, and none of us knows for how long. Life can be terrible this way, and sad, and it isn’t fair at all. But it is funny, anyway. Really, really funny.

There is something puzzling about software development. It doesn’t work like many tasks, it doesn’t break down the same way. It feels strangely personal, like there’s a connection between the code and the coder, or else it goes brittle.

Today I learned a word for this!

Ursula Franklin was a physicist, among other things, and she has real thoughts about technology. First, she speaks about technology as practice, not as objects. Technology is how we do things; the material objects that we use are necessary details. Second, she makes some distinctions between kinds of technologies. One of them clears up my puzzle about software development.

Franklin divides technologies into holistic and prescriptive. Holistic technologies put decision-making near the work; prescriptive ones remove control to supervisory levels.

“Holistic technologies are normally associated with the notion of craft.” Potters, cooks, woodworkers — even when the output looks the same for several iterations, the process of getting there includes feeling into this particular material. There is an interaction between the medium and the crafter, a shaping. Each person leaves their mark. When people work together, “the way in which they work together leaves the individual worker in control of a particular process of creating or doing something.”

Prescriptive technologies break production down into well-specified steps that can be executed by separate groups. Assembly lines, Taylorism, standardized procedures. Each step is designed to fit into the others. This determination happens higher in the org chart. The work and the decisions are separated. This technology makes the work controllable, scalable, in theory legible, predictable.

Software itself is the most prescriptive technology ever! It does the same thing over and over in as many copies as we choose.

Software development is wonderfully holistic. It needs one mind understanding it, implementing it, integrating it, operating it. (For resilience, that mind is best embodied by a team of several developers working closely.) When you try to partition the work (gather requirements, design, implement, test, operate), projects fail. The understanding between the steps is too thick. I need all the context of learning what is needed and where, and then I can implement it, and then look at it, and show it to you, and then we get it right and then we run it in production and keep grooming it through change.

“Any tasks that require immediate feedback and adjustment are best done holistically.” Software does need that. We never know what “good” is until we try things.

“Such tasks cannot be planned, coordinated, and controlled the way prescriptive tasks must be.” This is why managing software teams is a different task than managing industrial production. Software managers are support staff, because developers are doing holistic work, so that the software can do incredibly prescriptive work.

This is my new favorite adjective for our work. Software development is holistic.

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In the center of a repurposed Brooklyn warehouse loomed a scale model of the U.S. Capitol, as imposing a symbol of empire as the real building a couple hundred miles to the south. Surrounding it stood a line of blue-uniformed miniatures — police, meant to protect the election certification going on inside. Just beyond them, an ocean of red and white, miniatures of men and women holding flags that proclaimed that the time for revolution had come; the time to make America great again was here at last. 

I knew what I had signed up for — a playtest of Fight for America! a wargame produced by Neal Wilkinson, Christopher McElroen, and Warhammer 40K designer Alessio Cavatore, depicting the insurrection attempt of January 6th, 2021 — but still, I was not prepared to relive the surreal horror that day has burned into the core of the American psyche.

A group of twenty or so stood on opposite sides of the miniature capitol hill. Divided into two factions by the designers, one in a red hat, the other in blue, the groups’ awkward, nervous energy felt more like the first minutes of a school dance than a game depicting a violent coup. Left stunned by the jarring contrast, I was ushered off to one side of the room, put in front of a camera, and asked the same preliminary question as every other player: What about America is worth fighting for? My response yielded more of an ideal than a reality — a commitment to equality, protection of the most vulnerable, and a rejection of the violent oppression the country was unequivocally built on. 

Seemingly content with my answer, the game’s organizers handed me a card. Like every player, I was embodying a real person: Adam Johnson. A QAnon supporter who you may know colloquially as “The Podium Guy”, Johnson was depicted on the card with his real-life photo carrying Nancy Pelosi’s podium. Having missed the opening rules video — an immersive, in-character speech where an actor, dressed in MAGA regalia, spoke to the players as freedom fighters who should achieve their mission by any means necessary — I was then handed a ruler with a brief breakdown of the game’s mechanics, before being sent off to a quadrant of Capitol Hill. Divided into multiple areas of combat, each section had at least two players: one representing the capitol police, the other acting as the MAGA coalition of Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, QAnon truthers, and other assorted right-wing groups. 

The collected players awkwardly introduced themselves to one another (a surprisingly diverse group of people across spectrums of gender, age, and race). The two women in my quadrant introduced themselves as casual board gamers. One, overwhelmed by the rules, played an Oath Keeper; the other, facing down both of us on her own, played Eugene Goodman, the Black police officer whose mere presence diverted the racism-driven mob away from Mike Pence’s location.

Introductions were cut short when a man stepped on stage, flanked by American flags and television screens. Now dressed as Uncle Sam, the same actor who had introduced us to the mechanics of the game shepherded us through its story. 

Our mutually exclusive win states were made clear. Team blue, the capitol defenders, must hold the line and defend the capitol. Team red must stop the steal — and hang Mike Pence. 

****

On January 6, 2021, I was alone. Hidden away in the forests near Albany, I walked through the snow-covered landscape, attempting to reconcile the horror of the previous four years and process the months of protesting I’d done that summer. A pandemic had brought the world to a halt, killing millions and disabling millions more. The collective lack of distraction forced us to bear witness to the horror of the brutal, yet all too routine, murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Elijah McClain. The promise of America had been broken, had always been broken, and now it could not be ignored. 

After hours of silent contemplation, I returned to my cabin, checked my phone, and for a moment, I fell out of time. There, streaming on every possible platform, was a sea of red storming the U.S. Capitol building. 

As I watched these people mob the beating heart of the nation they supposedly love, the only thing I felt in my chest was a pit of sorrow so deep that there was no bottom. To my horror, I recognized myself in these people. I had felt the violent fury of righteousness they believed they were fighting for. Though we stand at opposite ends of a vast chasm, I knew them. I’d sat in that seat of revolution. I’d felt the fire of injustice in my soul and wanted to use it to burn down the world around me. I’d enjoyed the rush of being a single piece of a larger whole, marching forward and staring down the barrel of empire.

I turned off my phone and wrote in the cabin’s guest book to document this moment that would mark the final schism of the grand democratic experiment. 

What about America is worth fighting for?

Just before the game started, those playing capitol police took an oath to defend the constitution from all enemies foreign and domestic. They stood together as a unified front, reciting this oath line by line — one the current President recently took while refusing to touch a Bible. The MAGA coalition each took their respective oaths.

Those playing the Oath Keepers, an anti-government paramilitary group founded in 2009 by Yale-graduate Stuart Rhodes, recited the 10 unconstitutional orders they claim they will refuse to obey. Those include orders to disarm the American people, conduct warrantless searches, detain American citizens, put American citizens into concentration camps, confiscate property, or infringe on protest or free speech — all of which were sped through during the game, seemingly as a way to show the half-hearted nature of this oath, which relies heavily on exactly who the Oath Keepers deem as American enough. 

The Proud Boys, a white nationalist hate group, were told to sing along to “Proud of Your Boy”, a bastardized song from the Disney musical Aladdin and the organization’s namesake — a fact confirmed by founder Gavin McInnes. The player acting as Jacob Chansley, better known as the QAnon shaman, recited the speech he gave at the capitol to his fellow QAnon truthers, believers in the once-fringe conspiracy network with far less organization. Documented as being drunk on that day, I and other QAnon players were given a real, actual beer. The national anthem played, and I performed a heightened degree of respect, assuring my fellow players that while I would take this game seriously, above the table, we were all on the same side. 

The absurd, almost comedic aspects of seeing the insurrection’s component parts created enough distance from our current reality that I felt able to tap into the mindset of my assigned role. As the final line of The Star Spangled Banner rang out — The land of the free and the home of the brave — I cracked my beer and chugged.

And then, the game began. 

The night before, I’d seen the Dimension 20 Madison Square Garden show. I’d almost not gone to the playtest, drained from a night of euphoric communal joy that I was afraid to let slip through my fingers by once again confronting reality. I’m not our wargames correspondent, and I could easily wait for Caelyn to attend the game when it toured in London this summer.

But this felt…personal, I suppose. Days before, Donald Trump had been re-inagurated. Within 48 hours, and in the two weeks since, his administration has attempted a fundamental overhaul of the United States government. Truth itself has become malleable, and personhood a subject for debate. Each day I look at the news, facing an onslaught of horrors, and I have to pragmatically decide whether my partner and me — both chronically ill and trans — will be able to survive. 

In the eyes of the current regime, we are expendable. Drains on the system at best; enemies of the state at worst. According to an executive order banning trans people from the military, we cannot live an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle”. In going to this event, I donned a baggy sweater and a hat, saying nothing as people around me referred to me as a man. Not out of fear of retaliation in the leftist enclave of Brooklyn, but out of the reality that to acknowledge myself as trans in this space would be to recognize that the person I am portraying likely wants me dead.

It was slow at first. Units amassed on the board, two insurrectionists for every officer. Turn by turn, the capital defenders held the line, unable mechanically and morally to strike first. A resulting red wave rapidly amassed on the steps of democracy. We waited, tensions rising, plotting when this standoff could escalate into violence. We moved tactically and with purpose.

Clips began to play on screen: news anchors from the ideological left and the right (all played by the same actor as Uncle Sam) recited broadcasts from the day. The left condemned the riot, and the right blamed insurgent groups like antifa rather than acknowledging their own base’s violence. Interspersed throughout was Donald Trump’s speech and tweets — which were used as evidence in the now-dismissed court case against the President for charges of election interference — encouraging his supporters to march on the capitol. 

As the speech ended, a timer went off allowing another hoard of units to enter the field, creating an even more horrifying imbalance between the two sides. This overwhelm allowed me to distract and cordon off the police units, opening a straight path to the halls of Congress. During the game, I found myself making sub-optimal moves. I could pretend that this was in character as the disorganized, drunken mob, or that it was based in my play philosophy of prioritizing fun over winning. But truly, it pulled my punches out of a profound need to avoid a total slaughter by fascist paramilitaries, a potential reality I simply couldn’t stomach even in a game. Units slowly disappeared from the board as insurrectionists overtook police, or the blue line repelled the domestic invaders.

As the facilitators continued their immersive elements, speaking directly to either side, announcements came to the group. Updates from the government, shouts from the insurrectionists to reaffirm their righteous cause. Bear mace burned in the air, tear gas canistered deployed. And then, shots fired. Live ammo was on the field. 

Uncle Sam began a chant. “Hang Mike Pence. Hang Mike Pence.” In the spirit of buying into the game, I chanted along. He handed me a card, my second amendment right to a concealed firearm.

When a fourth player joined our group, an experienced gamer and the child of a well-known game designer, the dynamics of the game shifted. I was no longer there to observe the game and guide my fellow players through this experience — I was there to win. Our moves picked up pace, and conflict broke out multiple times every round. 

I approached the Capitol and found myself staring down a half-dozen heavy tactical units. A clear problem for some, but I held the solution in my hand — my God-given right as an American to kill anyone in my way. I put down the card and fired. A police unit disappeared. What I had not realized was they had the chance to return fire. They did; one of my units, gone. My teammate and I had the choice: to return fire again and continue the bloodshed, or to stop it there. We fired again. There were more of us than there were of them. Another unit gone. Fire returned. This was no longer a protest, this was a battlefield. 

In the blink of an eye, half the people in our section had been wiped off the board. I turned to my fellow revolutionary, hesitating to continue this slaughter, and found her silently weeping. The spell broke, and I told the facilitators that we were done. As the miniature battle raged on around us, I checked in on her, assuring her that if we needed to stop entirely we could. No article was worth the lasting trauma this moment could undoubtedly bring. She told me everything was okay, that she wanted to keep playing. “I get it now,” she kept saying. “I understand what this game is.” 

For the last eight years, I have had escape routes mapped, contingency plans in place just in case the worst does indeed happen. It’s an exercise in futility, but preparation has always been my coping mechanism. Doomscrolling through the onslaught, looking at the sun hoping it does not blind me, is a survival tactic. Still, it will only buy me a little time, that much is clear now. 

This insurrection is ongoing. These factions are emboldened, celebrated for their acts of hate as immigrants are rounded up and deported, as trans people are stripped of their rights and documents, as an unelected oligarch commandeers the government’s most sensitive data and stripmines America for profit.

While the worst is yet to come, it’s clear that a revolution has already happened. It’s currently happening. But there’s nowhere to run. Even for the most privileged among us, regardless of where you are, it will find you. 

Fascism cannot be escaped, it can only be fought. 

After a pause, a moment to collect ourselves and remember exactly what this game is, my team and I continued into the endgame and stormed the U.S. Capitol. 

Once we breached the walls, the insurrectionists moved from the exterior of Capitol Hill into a scale floorplan of the building itself. One by one, we kicked open rooms that awarded us dice to add to a pool for a final roll. Our frantic, desperate search mirrored the one seen from CCTV footage: a swarm of red screaming out in search of Nancy Pelosi and Mike Pence. Driving their rage was an insatiable hunger for faulty justice against a system they believed is the fault of their suffering, revenge against the ones they’ve been told have perpetrated it, a vile desire to preserve a social hierarchy dependent on suffering.

As we reached the final moments of the game, the insurrectionists had an overwhelming advantage. Dice spread across the floor in a pool of blue and red blood, the answer clear. The insurrectionists had won. We had captured the vice president, who had held his oath to maintain the results of the election. It was now up to us to decide what we do with this traitor to our great leader.

Our group looked around at one another, knowing what we had to do—knowing what they would have done. Almost unanimously, some of us covering our eyes out of shame, we voted to hang Mike Pence, achieving our success scenario. Among the few who did not vote ‘yes’ was a man who’d been eager to play, but was accompanied by his young child. A girl of about 7 or 8 who was born into this broken, violent world, she watched this game removed from its reality, with an innocence only children can maintain. I can only imagine he wanted to prove to her that there is always hope for the good of people. A hope I hang on to as the days pass, and it becomes clear that they did win, even if not on January 6. 

As Uncle Sam delivered with stoic horror the decision we made, a montage of footage from the insurrection began to play. A flurry of CCTV footage, of congresspeople fleeing, of battered police dragged to safety by their comrades. We all sat in solemn silence, horrified at what we had just done, what had been done to us as a nation. Facilitators handed out a second set of character cards — this time showing the lives of these people since. 

My card, which had been drafted and printed prior to Trump’s re-election, said Adam Johnson had been convicted and sentenced to prison time and community service. On the card was a sticker, clearly not part of the original design. It was a single word, hastily laid over his image: Pardoned.

I don’t know where we go from here. No one does. But it is not over. Amidst all the noise, journalists are working to keep the public informed of what is going on, while organizers and activists show us what there is to do about it. Independent reporter Marisa Kabas’ broke the federal funding freeze story at her outlet The Handbasket and Wired has proven the strongest source of authentic reporting on an unelected billionaire’s attempts to eradicate the federal government’s ability to function, with a cadre of college-age sycophants. Protesters march in the streets as civil servants refuse to be pushed out of their jobs. 

On average, the lifespan of an empire is 220 years. America will celebrate its 249th birthday this July 4th. This is not a game, there is no win state. Only survival. Only the continuation of peoples our new rulers so desperately want to eradicate. Certain inalienable rights that have never been upheld for everyone in this country. An ideal of equality and dignity for everyone. A right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Even if the United States itself cannot survive what is to come, what about America is worth fighting for?