I am going to Mars next year. Nothing can stop me now: I already have my boarding pass for a rocket ship to the Red Planet.
I have wanted to go into outer space for as long as I can remember. I came by my goal honestly, having grown up during the years of NASA’s Apollo missions to the Moon. I read everything I could find about every Saturn rocket that lifted every space capsule into orbit, clipping and saving every newspaper story I got my hands on, leaving almost every issue of my father’s Toronto Telegram a tattered mess.
I knew every astronaut, every mission parameter and every segment of every space vehicle, especially the command module and the lunar lander. When Neil Armstrong stepped off the landing strut ladder onto the Moon’s surface, becoming the first human ever to do so, I was among the millions on Earth who watched him on television and listened to his now immortal words: “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”
I was seven years old, enthralled by the feat and quite certain I had to follow Armstrong to the Moon and beyond. Feeding my desire and my imagination were several TV series produced at the time: primarily the original Star Trek and the less laudable Lost in Space. The former taught me that human space exploration was inevitable and good, while the latter showed me it could involve a young boy like Will Robinson – or me.
Years passed, but my fascination for space never dimmed. What did change as I grew older, however, was my understanding of political reality. At that time only Soviet cosmonauts and American astronauts were going into space. This was a problem for me since I was born a citizen of Canada. As my only route to a launch pad would most likely first lead me into the United States Air Force, in which most astronauts started their careers, not being an American would have made that nearly impossible. I could have joined the Air Force, but not become an officer.
With great reluctance I gave up my aspirations before I was even into my teen years, but it turned out I may have acted prematurely. Canada sent its first astronaut into space in 1984 (Marc Garneau, who hitched a ride on a NASA space shuttle) and more Canadians followed soon after, but by then it was too late for me. I had not prepared myself properly.
When the Canadian Space Agency issued an open call for recruits in 2008 I did not hesitate. I put my name forward, but it soon became clear I would not make the cut. My early choice to focus on writing and on studying subjects like history and political science – instead of the hard sciences like physics and mathematics – made me decidedly unqualified to be an astronaut. The Space Agency’s online selection process eliminated me after the very first step. I was not surprised. As I wrote at the time: “If an emergency happens on the way to the International Space Station they’ll want someone along who can help solve it, not just write about it afterwards.”
However, I have still not given up hope. Since that time my fall-back plan has been to become rich enough to afford the $20 million to $40 million the Russians were charging to take passengers into space in a Soyuz capsule. I’ve been getting closer to managing it, but only because the price has been dropping. Private companies like Virgin Galactic are proposing to take tourists on suborbital flights for as little as $250,000. Unfortunately, that is still a little out of my price range, so when NASA recently offered free boarding passes for a trip to Mars in 2020, I immediately signed up.
Departure is scheduled for July 17, at the earliest, on board an Atlas V-541 rocket launching from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. The transit to Mars is to take about seven months, covering more than 500 million kilometers to our final destination: the Jezero Crater.
The mission could be of immense importance, depending on if it finds what NASA hopes to find. The crater is astoundingly old and is believed to have been filled by a 250-meter-deep body of water about 3.7 billion years ago. Because of that, scientists think it may be one of the best places on the planet to look for evidence of ancient microbial life.
Unfortunately, I won’t really be there to witness any discovery. The spacecraft going to Mars is only big enough to carry a 1,000-kilogram robotic rover. It won’t have room to carry the million or so people like myself who have been issued boarding passes. Instead, our names are to be etched in microscopic letters onto a silicon chip to be attached to the rover and protected by a glass cover. My body won’t be on the Red Planet, but at least my name will.
The boarding passes are, of course, merely part of a publicity stunt to raise public awareness of the next Mars mission, but I don’t mind participating. It would be an extraordinary privilege to be involved in any way, no matter how insignificantly, in answering one of the biggest questions of all time: Is there life on other planets?
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