Italy Charters SpaceX Precursor Flight To Future Human Landing On Mars

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With its expanding alliance with SpaceX, the Italian Space Agency is set to help chart and safeguard future astronaut flights to Mars while testing techniques to transplant life across the ruddy desert dunes of the Red Planet.

The agency, representing one of the globe’s rising space powers, is taking initial exploratory steps aimed at propelling giant leaps in founding a human citadel on Mars, one day surrounded by paradisiacal gardens mirroring Eden 1.

Teodoro Valente, president of Agenzia Spaziale Italiana, tells me in an interview that ASI has commissioned one of the first SpaceX treks to Mars by its Starship super-capsule for a series of leading-edge experiments.

The ASI-designed mission to Mars is ultimately aimed at protecting aeronauts and other life from Earth across their earliest interplanetary flights and during path-breaking sojourns on the Martian sandhills, says Valente, a onetime professor on aerospace engineering and nanotechnologies at La Sapienza University, Rome, one of the leading academic centers in the European Union.

When based at the elite, 700-year-old university, Professor Valente headed its collaboration with the Italian Space Agency and sketched out alternative designs to shield spacecraft blasted by the fiery temperatures generated while speeding through the Earth’s atmosphere, or descending through the Martian aether, in a series of trailblazing studies.

Twin Italian experiments slated for a SpaceX demo flight to Mars, he says, will test how plants react to coursing through space at tens of thousands of kilometers per hour as the Starship, and its biotic passenger, are potentially pelted by high-energy cosmic particles emitted by exploding supernovas, or by protons ejected by the Sun.

Because Mars lacks a magnetic shield like the Earth’s, which protects all life and DNA from these micro-bullets, the interior of the Starship will be monitored for radiation levels after it lands on Mars’ orange-red deserts, and during the half-year journey between the planets, President Valente tells me.

The Italian Space Agency’s measuring the ship’s bombardment by star-shot particles, he says, will also help in the development of anti-radiation shielding for the spacecraft, when humans begin piloting their first Martian odysseys, and when they live inside the capsule on the otherworldly surface.

“Living organisms have adapted to life on planet Earth, where we are protected against damaging radiation,” Valente says.

“The interplanetary conditions, as well as the surface of planet Mars, are quite different.”

Before the first waves of astronauts are lofted on the Mars-bound Starships, he adds, “We need to find a set of countermeasures to protect humans from radiation, absence of atmosphere and reduced gravity.”

Habitats for Mars explorers assembled across the dunes will likewise require hyper-tech shields against cosmic particles, unless SpaceX opts to shelter these structures inside lava tubes that surround dormant volcanos.

NASA has already begun commissioning advanced tech studies on shielding deep-space spacecraft from these subatomic bullets by recreating the Earth’s magnetic field, on a micro-scale, via superconducting magnets that would protect the capsule, or the Martian habitat, but no working prototype has been perfected so far.

When the colossal, Italian-commissioned SpaceX capsule, the most technologically advanced spacecraft ever designed on Earth, and its photosynthetic voyager touch down on Mars, that will mark the first time ever that any life form has been rocketed from planet to planet in this solar system.

“Indeed, it will be the first time that an Earth living object will land on the surface of Mars or even go beyond low Earth orbit,” President Valente muses.

Yet he adds that in this first-stage experiment, no attempt will be made to transport the Earth flora onto the pristine sediments of Mars, to give it a second life on a second planet.

These test plants, he says, “will remain on board Starship, and will not be released on the surface.”

With the Starship demonstration voyage, and its zero-gravity conditions, Valente says, “We want to understand how biological systems are affected by the interplanetary medium during long duration travel.”

Space “exploration is very taxing on biological systems,” he adds, “and in order to find adequate countermeasures, we need to perform in-orbit experimentation.”

The Italian Space Agency, via its space entente with SpaceX and cutting-edge spaceflight tests ahead, is seizing a vanguard position in exploring Mars, and in gauging the potential to create a Martian biosphere that over time becomes a looking glass of the Earth.

Right after SpaceX unveiled the new flight agreement with the agency, founder Elon Musk sketched out details on his sensational new masterplan to adapt flotillas of Starships into gigantic space arks that will ferry life on Earth to its bioengineered twin on Mars.

During a SpaceX livestream in August, while counting down toward the picture-perfect 10th flight test of the Starship rocket and capsule, Musk told his 200 million followers on X: “We will be landing ships on Mars in the future and … building greenhouses and life on Mars.”

Broadcasting live from the glittering, futuristic Starbase launch center on the Gulf of Mexico, and the massive new Starfactory, designed to turn out 1000 Starships each year, Musk pledged he is committed to “ensuring the long term survival of life as we know it.”

The pledge represents a remarkable philanthropic expansion of his ever-expanding blueprints to terraform Mars, using planet-scale engineering projects to restore the ancient Martian atmosphere and ocean, by building an armada of Noah’s arks to shuttle a wonderland of wildlife to the solar system’s newest habitable planet.

“It’s important to note here that obviously, we are effectively stewards of life here on Earth,” he said during the webcast, “that the other creatures cannot build spacecraft and get to other planets.”

“So if there were to be a cataclysmic event, like a giant meteor that destroyed the dinosaurs, or ultimately the Sun will expand to envelope Earth and destroy all life … then if we don’t take life to another planet,” Musk predicted, “life will be destroyed.”

“So it’s incumbent upon us to ensure that we do bring life to other planets and ensure long term survival of life as we know it on planet Earth.”

Pete Worden, an eminent American astrophysicist and onetime director of the NASA Ames Research Center, lauds the Italian Space Agency’s taking the first steps toward recreating Mars in the Earth’s image.

“Recent moves to develop Mars terraforming and settlement technologies are encouraging,” he tells me in an interview. “The Italian Space Agency’s efforts to send plants to Mars are significant.”

“This and other international efforts make it all the more likely that we will see permanent human activity on Mars in the 2030s.”

Human settlements on Mars will be propelled by the revolution in reusable rockets being led by SpaceX and Blue Origin, he says.

As scientists begin designing an Earth-like ecosphere for Mars, Worden predicts, architects and their robotic builders will assemble colossal geodesic domes as havens for astronauts and for an archipelago of experimental Eden-like microcosmic biospheres.

President Valente at Italian Space says the results of the ASI experiments being rocketed to Mars will help guide planning for future missions.

“ASI is promoting extensive research on methods and technologies to safeguard human health in [space] exploration.”

“The Italian Space Agency considers human exploration as one of its top priorities.”

Italy’s pivotal role in human spaceflight advances stretches back to the building of the International Space Station a quarter-century ago, and is likely to extend to the rush of Moon and Mars missions that now await.

Thales Alenia Space, one of the globe’s leading space-tech design outfits and based in Turin, in northwestern Italy, created the Cupola module attached to the ISS, the dome-shaped haven for astronaut-photographers who have taken some of the most remarkable images ever sent back from the Station.

The Cupola’s seven super-size portals, which provide a fantastical Windows on the World as the globe and its clouds rotate from day into darkness, as cities light up into golden sparklers of photons, allow the astronauts to capture these scenes, and spread them across cyberspace.

Inventors and engineers at Thales Alenia Space likewise designed the ISS Columbus science lab, along with the I-HAB and HALO habitation modules that will form the core of the Gateway observatory, set to orbit the Moon.

Alenia’s prototyping the West’s first lunar surface habitat, set to be lofted to the South Pole of the Moon by NASA and the European Space Agency at the close of the 2020s, “offers Italy and ‘Made in Italy’ the opportunity to be protagonists of the human settlement on the Moon,” President Valente told space chroniclers at Italy’s Ministry of University and Research.

Yet the ultimate celestial destination in Italy’s sights is Mars.

ESA has commissioned Thales Alenia as the prime contractor for the ExoMars mission slated for launch in 2028, in charge of developing the Mars Entry, Descent and Landing Module that will carry a sophisticated robotic explorer and photographer to the still-mysterious orb.

SpaceX’s Elon Musk said this summer that he aims to loft the first astronauts to Mars when the Earth-Mars orbital transfer window opens in the beginning of 2031.

After the Italian Space Agency booked an independent flight for an Italian Air Force astronaut to the ISS, aboard a SpaceX Dragon capsule, I asked President Valente if ASI could similarly charter passage for one of its aeronauts on the first human-piloted Starship headed to Mars.

This summer, SpaceX began accepting reservations for astronaut flights to Mars via its website, but without providing fare rates for round-trips between the planets, or projections on the timing of the first liftoff.

“Book your flight to travel to Mars,” the inter-world portal reads. “Click Join a Mission below to inquire on mission availability.”

President Valente deflected the question, but he tells me: “Italy has been at the forefront since the beginning of space flight,” and aims to spearhead a new era of Mars discoveries.

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