MARS (2016) s01e03 Episode Script
Pressure Drop
1 NARRATOR: Previously on Mars.
Hana Seung: I will miss my sister, she's my heart and soul.
GRANN: For something like this to work, it has to be personal.
Hana Seung: We had traveled further than anyone ever had to get to Mars.
But before we even entered Mars's atmosphere it was like she was trying to push us away.
Robert Foucault: Retro rockets about to fire.
[BEN CRASHES.]
Hana Seung: And once we landed, she pushed even harder.
Joon Seung: What is Ben's status? [BEN COUGHING.]
Marta Kamen: How far did we overshoot? WOMAN: 75.
3 kilometers.
GRANN: Come on, let's fix this.
It's our guys up there.
Joon Seung: The workshop module.
What if they can make it there? Live in it? CREW: They'd have a chance.
Robert Foucault: Wheels 5 and 6 just locked.
Mae: Suspension system compromised.
Hana Seung: We have to walk.
Marta Kamen: It's -35 degree.
It will be -70 by nightfall.
We'll freeze to death out there.
GRANN: Jesus.
[CRASHING NOISE.]
Amelie Durand: Ben? Hana Seung: Far off course, we struggle to make our way to a temporary habitat.
Amelie Durand: We need to cut the suit.
Hana Seung: Fighting just to stay alive.
Amelie Durand: Dammit, Ben.
Hana Seung: Ben, stay with me.
Come on, come on.
Still our mission remained, to find a safe haven for the first human settlement on Mars.
But getting there had killed the best among us.
I was in command now and I knew if we couldn't find a permanent home in this place the Mars Mission would die.
[THEME MUSIC PLAYS.]
INTERVIEWER: When did you first know you wanted to go to Mars? Hana Seung: When we were 6, my sister and I were at the planetarium, and it felt like we were looking at the planets.
We had these alien dolls in our hands that my mom had just bought us, and I told my sister I was going up there, that I was going to Mars, and she said she was coming with me.
But when the call came for this mission, only one of us was going to be on that ship.
They say twins have one mind.
But it's sharing a heart that's the problem.
The only way to separate it is to break it.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE.]
We all knew someone could die here.
But no one ever thought it would be Ben.
We picked a place to bury him outside camp out in the regolith.
The Sun makes this pattern on the ground, when it sets behind the cliffs.
They're looking to me for answers Joon, and I can see the doubt in their eyes.
I stay away from the portholes because I'm afraid if I see my reflection it will be in mine too.
I need to be strong for them.
As strong as he was.
The repairs on the Rover are done.
We're able to take what we could from the original landing site, but the workshop module's designed for 2 people working 8 hours a day.
Not a crew of 5 full time.
Marta is preparing the drones to start scanning surrounding lava tubes for ice and the geology we need to deploy the dome.
Javier is optimizing WAVARs for water.
And Robert is doing everything he can to upgrade the environmental systems to keep the air breathable.
But the mods to the workshop are already taxing the electrical system.
We'd be lucky if it supports us for 8 months, assuming Amelie can keep this crew from falling apart.
[JAVIER MUMBLES IN SPANISH.]
Javier Delgado: Where is the cover? But, this why, why? It's all covered in dust.
Let's see if it's something from here.
Marta Kamen: Javier, todo bien? Javier? Javier Delgado: esta bien, esta bien, esta muy bien.
[MUMBLES.]
Robert if you open a cover, close it.
If you open a box, close it.
Patience, patience.
You don't just cannibalize my equipment when you need to jury-rig a goddamn junction box.
Robert Foucault: I needed the fan to cool the upgrades, it was the only option.
You have redundancies.
Javier Delgado: That's not the point.
Robert Foucault: If I don't fix this now, we are going to have problems with the upgrades later on.
Hana Seung: Robert.
Come help me with the recycling system.
Now! Robert Foucault: This system is built for 2 people.
If you want to keep breathing I need the hardware.
Amelie Durand: Why don't we take a little break.
Javier Delgado: Amelie, I can't.
Amelie Durand: Close your eyes.
Close your eyes! Tell me when you have it.
Please.
Javier Delgado: Nothing comes.
Amelie Durand: Okay, breathe with me.
[DEEP BREATHING.]
Javier Delgado: It's raining.
The drops are hitting a tin roof.
It's just a wash of sound above me.
Amelie Durand: And what does it smell like? Javier Delgado: Lavender.
Amelie Durand: Lavender.
Now open your eyes.
Javier Delgado: Thank you.
Amelie Durand: You're welcome, now go back to work.
Javier Delgado: Lavender.
Hana Seung: Even in those rare moments of quiet, we could feel the storm was always looming.
We knew if we didn't find a home with the resources to sustain us, Mars would kill us in any of a thousand ways.
Casey Dreier: Mars itself is your enemy.
You have a shared common enemy on Mars trying to kill you every day.
MAN: Mars.
Photographs reveal a cratered landscape, much like the moon and apparently hostile to life.
Casey Dreier: It's actually the lack of resources that we have to worry about on Mars.
We still have to figure out how to create them there.
Peter Diamandis: When we get to Mars we need to solve our basic needs and the basic needs are going to be food, water, shelter and a particular protection from radiation.
Stephen Petranek: The longer you spend on the surface, the more dangerous it is so you have to get underground and get away from radiation.
There are a number of strategies that can be employed.
One of them could be the lava tube.
REPORTER: Rising from the flame, giant volcanoes.
Jim Green: Volcanoes have existed on Mars for hundreds of millions of years, and as they died away, the tubes that carry the lava solidify and become huge long rooms.
We can inflate a habitat within a lava tube, but you have to be near them so knowing where we are on Mars and what the features are that we can use are extremely important.
You'll have to be looking for water also.
Now Mars has some trapped water resources.
Jennifer Heldmann: Everything we've learned about life as we know it requires liquid water.
Full stop.
So that's why the mantra for Mars exploration has been thus far follow the water.
There's the possibility that there could be ice within lava tubes and we're looking to see, you know, what the feasibility of that is.
We're still in the process of figuring out where those lava tubes are and mapping them is not a trivial thing.
They're not so easy to find because they're underground.
Thomas Kalil: So there's no shortage of hard, technical challenges that need to be addressed before we can have a sustained human presence on Mars.
It's really important that we figure out how to get some of the basics.
Marta Kamen: We'll use a set of drones to find a lava tube with the conditions we need to deploy a small domed habitat.
Hana Seung: And that little foothold will become humankind's first real home beyond the gravity well.
Olympus town.
Mae: Charged and ready.
Unmanned aerial vehicles.
Hana Seung: We watched as our drones took off into the alien sky, knowing they were the only hope of finding the shelter and the resources we'd need to deploy the dome and complete our mission.
But if we couldn't find enough ice to supply settlement, we'd be stranded and the Mars mission would end.
Jedidah Isler: There's much to learn about Mars.
I mean, we're still as of this week finding things out.
We've sent orbiters, we've sent rovers, we've sent things there to explore it to get to know more about it.
We have the interest and are on the edge of the robotic technology that would allow us to get there and do that work.
Jennifer Heldman: So we're in the process of right now what we call precursor missions, robotic missions that go before the humans go so we can characterize what the resource is, where we would send humans.
Nicolas Thomas: Something that people might find a bit surprising is that with modern orbiters, we've covered only about 3% of the surface.
We just don't have the data volume coming back from Mars to get anywhere close to mapping the whole surface.
If we want to have humans landing on the surface of Mars, we want to make sure that the place where they're going is safe, and you can't do that with 100 meter-per pixel resolution images.
That tells you diddly squat.
We have to prove that the resources are there and so we like to think that ExoMars is the next step to building up the knowledge for that future manned mission.
ExoMars comprises 2 major elements.
The first element is the trace gas orbiter, which will launch in 2016.
I've been mostly involved with the main imaging system.
We like to talk about it being the best color cameras that's ever been sent to Mars.
We have stereo capability.
That means that we can construct a 3D-view of what the martian surface looks like.
I used to think of it almost as a sort of a dead world.
As you start to get more and more immersed, I mean, you see fantastic phenomenon on the surface of Mars.
It just grabs you, polar caps, looking at these new impact craters, the dune fields and you're seeing them moving across the surface, dust devils running around the place, and that to me, it's brought the place to life.
I get a real kick out of looking at data from an object or from a surface or from something that no one's ever seen before.
Casey Dreier: ExoMars is important because there are goals of the scientific community that we want to advance before humans get there.
Hana Seung: Seung, Hana.
Mission Entry Phase 1.
The crew is losing faith.
Morale is slipping.
We're doing everything we can to find a way to make this workshop habitable until we can find the place in those lava tubes.
We were supposed to have two years to find a lava tube with enough ice to supply the water necessary to survive on Mars.
But without the infrastructure of Daedalus to sustain us while we searched, we'd be lucky if we had a few months.
Anything? Marta Kamen: Hmm, either the candidate skylights don't have the horizontal entrances we would need to bring in equipment, or the tubes the skylights connect to don't have the subsurface topography and ice access a settlement would need.
Hana Seung: Keep looking.
Robert Foucault: Ugh, if I push these modifications any further we risk overloading the entire electrical system.
Every piece of hardware we've got is running into this junction box.
It's too much.
Hana Seung: We don't have a choice Robert.
MAN'S VOICE: We have one shot to deploy that dome.
It doesn't go back in the box.
WOMAN'S VOICE: There's a pilot in charge of a multi-billion-dollar mission.
If the conditions for settlement are not there, we need to use our second ship, Vega, as a life raft and forget about Phase 2.
MAN'S VOICE: If they deploy on the surface, every nation from the International Mars Science Foundation will vote to pull the plug on Mars.
WOMAN'S VOICE: [inaudible.]
was already short, we cannot tolerate any more failure.
MAN'S VOICE: IMSF is sending a deputy to Mission Control to assess whether they're going to proceed or cancel this whole thing.
You need to come to sit before the board.
WOMAN: We've got an international hero dead and five more stuck in a utility shack meant for two trying to find a needle in a haystack before their systems fail.
BOARD MEMBER: We don't like the optics on this, Ed.
Ophelia was doing just fine in the satellite business before we bought into your MMC initiative.
BOARD MEMBER 2: If the most qualified astronauts on the planet can't make it work, how do you expect to make money selling tickets to people following in their footsteps? BOARD MEMBER 3: IMSF is already watching every move we make, waiting for an excuse to end this whole thing.
BOARD MEMBER: We need to cut bait before they leave us holding the bag.
GRANN: Are you done? I made billions of dollars in private enterprise and then I did it again and again.
Every small town car dealer knows about profits, bottom lines, and cutting losses.
And they all know about fear.
You know what they don't know about? Foresight.
And faith.
These are my tax reports for the last five years.
It shows my income, investments and all my accounts, business and personal, onshore, offshore, all around the world.
You look at it and you'll find that I've invested 90% of my own net worth in this mission.
I've got faith.
And I'm asking for a little bit more of yours.
Slow down IMSF, and let this crew carry out the mission we sent them there to do.
MAN: If they fail, I don't care how much you invested, we're out.
GRANN: If they fail, everyone's out.
Hana Seung: We were at a critical stage and all I could do was pretend I wasn't just as worried as the rest of them.
Javier Delgado: We haven't been able to make the system run more efficiently.
Amelie Durand: Mae, report CO2 scrubber status.
Mae: CO2 scrubbing has declined an additional 3% since your last inquiry.
Javier Delgado: There are just too many of us.
Amelie Durand: If we can't make the workshop safe for long-term habitation, we're going to need to start considering deploying the dome on the surface.
Hana Seung: Then the next ship that comes will be a rescue mission.
We've got eight months.
We're going to use them.
[EXPLOSION.]
Fire, Robert! Mae: Warning fire detected in the laboratory section.
Amelie Durand: Mae, extinguish the lab.
Mae: System malfunction.
Hana Seung: Get to the airlock! Robert Foucault: Fire! Hana Seung: Go, everybody! Into the airlock, go! Depressurize to put out the flames, go! Mae: Fire containment system malfunction.
Airlock motors off.
Robert Foucault: The circuit's blown! CREWMAN: The fire is growing! Hana Seung: Everyone back, get inside the east wall! CREWMAN: What is she doing? Amelie Durand: Hana! Robert Foucault: Open up, Hana! Amelie Durand: What is she doing? Hana, Hana! [CREW SCREAMING.]
Robert Foucault: Open the door! No, don't do it! Amelie Durand: Hana! Robert Foucault: No, Hana! Javier Delgado: She's going to burn herself alive in there.
[CREW SCREAMING.]
[GLASS BREAKS.]
MAN: As Mariner 4 passed over Mars, it recorded on tape tiny bits of information to transmit back to Earth.
Roger Launius: The track record is probably about 50% of the probes sent to Mars have been successful in accomplishing any part of their mission.
That's not a great track record.
Nicolas Thomas: Mars seems to have been a graveyard for several spacecraft, I've been involved in two missions where we've had failures, Mars Polar Lander was one.
Tom BROKAW: There is more news from NASA tonight and like almost all the news from the space agency this year, it's not good.
MISSION CONTROL: SLM, go ahead.
SLM: This is the [inaudible.]
shutdown load and go.
Nicolas Thomas: But there comes a point where you think to yourself ah, this ain't gonna happen.
MISSION CONTROL: I'm sorry to report that all we have is a nominal no contact M.
R.
path.
MISSION CONTROL 2: Copy that, Mod, thanks for that uh, thanks for hanging in there with us.
MAN: Mars is still the death planet, it's a graveyard of many, many spacecraft.
Roger Launius: Mars is hard to do.
INTERVIEWER: what do you think your biggest challenge will be on this mission? Hana Seung: Well, the biggest challenge would be finding those lava tubes, but the unknown to me is a bigger challenge than that.
It's a vicious planet.
IMSF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: The fire left them with less than a week of oxygen.
IMSF sent me to make a decision.
Is Vega now a rescue mission? Because if the crew no longer has the means to find a location in the lava tubes, they're going to have to deploy the dome on the surface.
Joon Seung: They're working on sealing off the lab now, but we're still waiting to hear about structural damage.
GRANN: What about the drones? Oliver: Damage to the remote system was catastrophic.
No way they fly again without additional supplies from Earth.
GRANN: Okay, guys, go back to your stations and check it all again.
[GRANN SPEAKING FRENCH.]
Joon Seung: I'd like to speak to you about the horizontal entrance.
GRANN: Joon, please.
The nations are meeting the day after tomorrow to vote on how to proceed.
If they deploy the dome on the surface, we fail.
IMSF will dissolve, MMC will go bankrupt, and Earth will forget about Mars just like they forgot about the moon.
If we can't find a site, the Mars mission is dead.
Joon Seung: I understand, sir.
Javier Delgado: I've thawn all I can.
Amelie Durand: We're still leaking O2 like a sieve.
Robert Foucault: There's no way to complete the repairs without the equipment that burned in the lab.
Marta Kamen: At this rate, we've got a little more than 100 hours of breathable air.
Amelie Durand: We're running out of options.
Marta Kamen: Hana? Hana Seung: We will find it.
Robert Foucault: Aye-aye, Captain.
IMSF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: Your faith is admirable, but unfounded, Mr.
Grann.
IMSF sent me here to determine whether or not you can stop this thing from becoming a global embarrassment, but what I can tell so far, that seems to be an inevitability.
Ground penetrating radar isn't going to find us a site that isn't there, without the drones there's no way.
GRANN: My people have done the impossible.
They can do it again.
Sam: There's nothing, sir, we've been over the terrain a hundred times.
Oliver: We're seeing no options for sub-surface habitation with gamma rays or neutron specs.
They were supposed to have two years to find a location with the right conditions.
Ava: And that was with six drones in the air twelve hours a day.
Sam: There's not a single tube that shows any sign of a horizontal entrance.
IMSF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: They have to deploy.
Joon Seung: Wait! I think I have something.
We ignored this horizontal entrance because it was clogged with breakdown debris and too far from the nearest candidate skylight to be part of the same tube system.
But if we look at the GPR scans here you can see that entrance leads to a tectonic cave that passes right beside the lava tube under this skylight.
With the right equipment on the next ship, we can clear the horizontal entrance and combine the two cave systems.
Sam: They'd have to lower the dome in vertically, through the skylight.
Ava: That tube is at least two-hundred meters, rim to floor; the winch on the crane only has fifty of cable.
Oliver: What about the guidelines for the Daedalus? They've got three 35 meter spools of cable with a nearly identical gauge.
They splice those together, that's 215 meters.
Joon Seung: If the topography is right, and the ice is there, we can justify deployment.
GRANN: Do it.
Joon Seung: Daedalus crew, great news.
We may have found a place for deployment.
Stand by for transmission of coordinates.
Marta Kamen: Kamen, Marta.
Mission Entry Phase 1.
The idea that one of the lava tubes we deemed unsuitable could be connected to a tectonic cave is brilliant.
Thanks, Joon, Mission Control.
Spasibo.
Robert Foucault: Hey Marta, I hope you're not scared of the dark.
[laughs.]
Javier, how are the cables? Javier Delgado: Good.
Robert Foucault: Alright, Marta, hang in there.
Marta Kamen: Okay.
[DEEP BREATHING.]
Robert Foucault: Doing great, doing great.
Javier, how are the cables holding? Javier Delgado: Strong.
I hope we have enough to get her down.
Javier Delgado: Talk to us Marta, what do you see? Marta Kamen: Can't see, I can't see anything.
Javier Delgado: Mae, remaining cable? Mae: 150 meters remaining, 120 meters, 100 meters, 80 meters.
Robert Foucault: Come on, come on, come on, come on.
Mae: 60 meters, 50 meters remaining.
Hana Seung: Marta, what do you see? Mae: 35 meters, 30 meters.
Marta Kamen: Nothing, nothing at all.
Jeremy WILKS: Hello, and welcome to Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Counting down to the launch of ExoMars, the world's biggest ever mission to the red planet.
Nicolas Thomas: Baikonur is the largest launch facility in the world.
It's where the Russians have been launching missions from for the past 60 years, all of the big missions have gone from there, the Sputniks, the Vostoks, the Soyuz.
It's the place where Gagarin went up and did his launch.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN.]
It's sort of a holy place I think for space scientists.
The ExoMars program is a collaboration between the European Space Agency and RosCosmos, and so there are principal investigators, both from Europe and from the Russian side.
Oleg Korablev: Maybe it's a false impression that Mars is studied in every detail, but it is actually not mapped in every detail completely.
Far from that.
Nicolas Thomas: I've been thinking about ExoMars for more than 16 years.
So, so that's it over there, right? Now it's serious guys.
What we're doing is really rather difficult.
A lot of things have to go right.
Oleg Korablev: One minute.
Nicolas Thomas: One minute.
Building the instruments is hard and maybe if you haven't done enough test time and you're thinking to yourself, oh my goodness, you know, this is going to go in another one of these damn rockets.
Launches are inherently dangerous.
There's always some sort of a risk of something blowing up.
As long as the thing doesn't blow up when I'm too close to it.
MISSION CONTROL: And we have liftoff.
Roger Launius: The Americans have had failures, the Europeans have had failures, the Russians have had failures.
We check things, we recheck them.
We have checkers checking the checkers, and how much is enough to ensure that you don't fail? [EXPLOSION.]
[RUSSIAN RADIO CHATTER.]
Nicolas Thomas: There she goes.
Geez, look at that! Oleg Korablev: Beautiful.
[LAUGHTER AND CONGRATULATIONS.]
Nicolas Thomas: That's an experience, isn't it? Holy smokes! Oleg Korablev: (bleep)! Nicolas Thomas: We have to wait a little bit while things deploy and then we're on our way to Mars.
It gets you sort of right there.
[APPLAUSE.]
Casey Dreier: You have this incredible number of people all working to send something to a strange kind of pinkish dot in the sky.
I really like not seeing Mars as a challenge to overcome, but Mars as an opportunity to unite people together in a peaceful way and give our species a goal.
You're giving people something optimistic to pursue.
Javier Delgado: We've detected glaciers of ice on Mars from orbit that are 40 meters thick extending down to a latitude of 38 degrees.
There is a huge amount of sub-surface ice there so this is a unique opportunity for us.
Mae: 35 meters, 30 meters.
25 meters, 20 meters remaining.
Robert Foucault: We're running out of line.
Mae: 18 meters, 17 meters, 16 meters 15 meters remaining, 14 meters.
Robert Foucault: Hang in there.
Mae: 13 meters, 12 meters.
Marta Kamen: Easy, easy, easy.
Stop, I'm on the ground.
Hana Seung: She hit the ground.
Robert Foucault: There you go.
Hana Seung: Marta, report please, what's down there? Marta Kamen: Even topography, room to build.
I'm unclipping to dig for ice.
No indication of exposed ice.
There's nothing.
There's no ice here, there's nothing here.
[MARTA SCREAMS.]
Amelie Durand: What's happening, Marta? Hana Seung: Status update, Marta.
Marta Kamen: Still here, still here.
Hana Seung: Marta can you hear us? Amelie Durand: Marta, do you hear us, Marta? Hana Seung: Is she okay? Amelie Durand: Heartrate elevated, but no injuries.
Marta Kamen: There's a crevice down here.
Bear with me.
Hana Seung: What do you see, Marta? Status update, please.
Amelie Durand: Marta? Robert Foucault: C'mon.
Marta Kamen: There's ice, we're home.
[JOYFUL CRIES AND LAUGHTER.]
Javier Delgado: Yes! Marta Kamen: We're home.
[JAVIER MUMBLES.]
Hana Seung: The words house and home have different meanings.
A house is an inanimate object.
Home is a feeling.
["SHELTER FROM THE STORM" BY BOB DYLAN PLAYS.]
Bob Dylan: 'twas another lifetime, One of toil and blood Where blackness was a virtue the road Was full of mud.
I came in from the wilderness, A creature void of form.
Come in, she said, I'll give ya, Shelter from the storm.
Hana Seung: Seung, Hana.
Mission Entry Phase 1.
The flag is planted.
It's official.
Humankind has a home on Mars.
Reporting to you from inside the dome which we successfully deployed early this morning on the cabin floor.
All of the components are in place, pressurization is complete, and all we got to do now is decorate.
What a day, guys.
What a day.
Over and out.
Bob Dylan: Not a word was spoke between us, There was little risk involved.
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place that's always safe and warm.
Come in, she said, I'll give ya Shelter from the storm.
Hana Seung: Vega wasn't going to be a rescue mission.
There would be more ships after them.
And even though there was hard work to do to get the habitat ready for the next phase, the Mars mission was alive.
Bob Dylan: I'm living in a foreign country, But I'm bound to cross the line.
Beauty walks a razors edge.
Someday I'll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
Come in, she said, I'll give ya Shelter from the storm.
Hana Seung: I will miss my sister, she's my heart and soul.
GRANN: For something like this to work, it has to be personal.
Hana Seung: We had traveled further than anyone ever had to get to Mars.
But before we even entered Mars's atmosphere it was like she was trying to push us away.
Robert Foucault: Retro rockets about to fire.
[BEN CRASHES.]
Hana Seung: And once we landed, she pushed even harder.
Joon Seung: What is Ben's status? [BEN COUGHING.]
Marta Kamen: How far did we overshoot? WOMAN: 75.
3 kilometers.
GRANN: Come on, let's fix this.
It's our guys up there.
Joon Seung: The workshop module.
What if they can make it there? Live in it? CREW: They'd have a chance.
Robert Foucault: Wheels 5 and 6 just locked.
Mae: Suspension system compromised.
Hana Seung: We have to walk.
Marta Kamen: It's -35 degree.
It will be -70 by nightfall.
We'll freeze to death out there.
GRANN: Jesus.
[CRASHING NOISE.]
Amelie Durand: Ben? Hana Seung: Far off course, we struggle to make our way to a temporary habitat.
Amelie Durand: We need to cut the suit.
Hana Seung: Fighting just to stay alive.
Amelie Durand: Dammit, Ben.
Hana Seung: Ben, stay with me.
Come on, come on.
Still our mission remained, to find a safe haven for the first human settlement on Mars.
But getting there had killed the best among us.
I was in command now and I knew if we couldn't find a permanent home in this place the Mars Mission would die.
[THEME MUSIC PLAYS.]
INTERVIEWER: When did you first know you wanted to go to Mars? Hana Seung: When we were 6, my sister and I were at the planetarium, and it felt like we were looking at the planets.
We had these alien dolls in our hands that my mom had just bought us, and I told my sister I was going up there, that I was going to Mars, and she said she was coming with me.
But when the call came for this mission, only one of us was going to be on that ship.
They say twins have one mind.
But it's sharing a heart that's the problem.
The only way to separate it is to break it.
[SPEAKING FOREIGN LANGUAGE.]
We all knew someone could die here.
But no one ever thought it would be Ben.
We picked a place to bury him outside camp out in the regolith.
The Sun makes this pattern on the ground, when it sets behind the cliffs.
They're looking to me for answers Joon, and I can see the doubt in their eyes.
I stay away from the portholes because I'm afraid if I see my reflection it will be in mine too.
I need to be strong for them.
As strong as he was.
The repairs on the Rover are done.
We're able to take what we could from the original landing site, but the workshop module's designed for 2 people working 8 hours a day.
Not a crew of 5 full time.
Marta is preparing the drones to start scanning surrounding lava tubes for ice and the geology we need to deploy the dome.
Javier is optimizing WAVARs for water.
And Robert is doing everything he can to upgrade the environmental systems to keep the air breathable.
But the mods to the workshop are already taxing the electrical system.
We'd be lucky if it supports us for 8 months, assuming Amelie can keep this crew from falling apart.
[JAVIER MUMBLES IN SPANISH.]
Javier Delgado: Where is the cover? But, this why, why? It's all covered in dust.
Let's see if it's something from here.
Marta Kamen: Javier, todo bien? Javier? Javier Delgado: esta bien, esta bien, esta muy bien.
[MUMBLES.]
Robert if you open a cover, close it.
If you open a box, close it.
Patience, patience.
You don't just cannibalize my equipment when you need to jury-rig a goddamn junction box.
Robert Foucault: I needed the fan to cool the upgrades, it was the only option.
You have redundancies.
Javier Delgado: That's not the point.
Robert Foucault: If I don't fix this now, we are going to have problems with the upgrades later on.
Hana Seung: Robert.
Come help me with the recycling system.
Now! Robert Foucault: This system is built for 2 people.
If you want to keep breathing I need the hardware.
Amelie Durand: Why don't we take a little break.
Javier Delgado: Amelie, I can't.
Amelie Durand: Close your eyes.
Close your eyes! Tell me when you have it.
Please.
Javier Delgado: Nothing comes.
Amelie Durand: Okay, breathe with me.
[DEEP BREATHING.]
Javier Delgado: It's raining.
The drops are hitting a tin roof.
It's just a wash of sound above me.
Amelie Durand: And what does it smell like? Javier Delgado: Lavender.
Amelie Durand: Lavender.
Now open your eyes.
Javier Delgado: Thank you.
Amelie Durand: You're welcome, now go back to work.
Javier Delgado: Lavender.
Hana Seung: Even in those rare moments of quiet, we could feel the storm was always looming.
We knew if we didn't find a home with the resources to sustain us, Mars would kill us in any of a thousand ways.
Casey Dreier: Mars itself is your enemy.
You have a shared common enemy on Mars trying to kill you every day.
MAN: Mars.
Photographs reveal a cratered landscape, much like the moon and apparently hostile to life.
Casey Dreier: It's actually the lack of resources that we have to worry about on Mars.
We still have to figure out how to create them there.
Peter Diamandis: When we get to Mars we need to solve our basic needs and the basic needs are going to be food, water, shelter and a particular protection from radiation.
Stephen Petranek: The longer you spend on the surface, the more dangerous it is so you have to get underground and get away from radiation.
There are a number of strategies that can be employed.
One of them could be the lava tube.
REPORTER: Rising from the flame, giant volcanoes.
Jim Green: Volcanoes have existed on Mars for hundreds of millions of years, and as they died away, the tubes that carry the lava solidify and become huge long rooms.
We can inflate a habitat within a lava tube, but you have to be near them so knowing where we are on Mars and what the features are that we can use are extremely important.
You'll have to be looking for water also.
Now Mars has some trapped water resources.
Jennifer Heldmann: Everything we've learned about life as we know it requires liquid water.
Full stop.
So that's why the mantra for Mars exploration has been thus far follow the water.
There's the possibility that there could be ice within lava tubes and we're looking to see, you know, what the feasibility of that is.
We're still in the process of figuring out where those lava tubes are and mapping them is not a trivial thing.
They're not so easy to find because they're underground.
Thomas Kalil: So there's no shortage of hard, technical challenges that need to be addressed before we can have a sustained human presence on Mars.
It's really important that we figure out how to get some of the basics.
Marta Kamen: We'll use a set of drones to find a lava tube with the conditions we need to deploy a small domed habitat.
Hana Seung: And that little foothold will become humankind's first real home beyond the gravity well.
Olympus town.
Mae: Charged and ready.
Unmanned aerial vehicles.
Hana Seung: We watched as our drones took off into the alien sky, knowing they were the only hope of finding the shelter and the resources we'd need to deploy the dome and complete our mission.
But if we couldn't find enough ice to supply settlement, we'd be stranded and the Mars mission would end.
Jedidah Isler: There's much to learn about Mars.
I mean, we're still as of this week finding things out.
We've sent orbiters, we've sent rovers, we've sent things there to explore it to get to know more about it.
We have the interest and are on the edge of the robotic technology that would allow us to get there and do that work.
Jennifer Heldman: So we're in the process of right now what we call precursor missions, robotic missions that go before the humans go so we can characterize what the resource is, where we would send humans.
Nicolas Thomas: Something that people might find a bit surprising is that with modern orbiters, we've covered only about 3% of the surface.
We just don't have the data volume coming back from Mars to get anywhere close to mapping the whole surface.
If we want to have humans landing on the surface of Mars, we want to make sure that the place where they're going is safe, and you can't do that with 100 meter-per pixel resolution images.
That tells you diddly squat.
We have to prove that the resources are there and so we like to think that ExoMars is the next step to building up the knowledge for that future manned mission.
ExoMars comprises 2 major elements.
The first element is the trace gas orbiter, which will launch in 2016.
I've been mostly involved with the main imaging system.
We like to talk about it being the best color cameras that's ever been sent to Mars.
We have stereo capability.
That means that we can construct a 3D-view of what the martian surface looks like.
I used to think of it almost as a sort of a dead world.
As you start to get more and more immersed, I mean, you see fantastic phenomenon on the surface of Mars.
It just grabs you, polar caps, looking at these new impact craters, the dune fields and you're seeing them moving across the surface, dust devils running around the place, and that to me, it's brought the place to life.
I get a real kick out of looking at data from an object or from a surface or from something that no one's ever seen before.
Casey Dreier: ExoMars is important because there are goals of the scientific community that we want to advance before humans get there.
Hana Seung: Seung, Hana.
Mission Entry Phase 1.
The crew is losing faith.
Morale is slipping.
We're doing everything we can to find a way to make this workshop habitable until we can find the place in those lava tubes.
We were supposed to have two years to find a lava tube with enough ice to supply the water necessary to survive on Mars.
But without the infrastructure of Daedalus to sustain us while we searched, we'd be lucky if we had a few months.
Anything? Marta Kamen: Hmm, either the candidate skylights don't have the horizontal entrances we would need to bring in equipment, or the tubes the skylights connect to don't have the subsurface topography and ice access a settlement would need.
Hana Seung: Keep looking.
Robert Foucault: Ugh, if I push these modifications any further we risk overloading the entire electrical system.
Every piece of hardware we've got is running into this junction box.
It's too much.
Hana Seung: We don't have a choice Robert.
MAN'S VOICE: We have one shot to deploy that dome.
It doesn't go back in the box.
WOMAN'S VOICE: There's a pilot in charge of a multi-billion-dollar mission.
If the conditions for settlement are not there, we need to use our second ship, Vega, as a life raft and forget about Phase 2.
MAN'S VOICE: If they deploy on the surface, every nation from the International Mars Science Foundation will vote to pull the plug on Mars.
WOMAN'S VOICE: [inaudible.]
was already short, we cannot tolerate any more failure.
MAN'S VOICE: IMSF is sending a deputy to Mission Control to assess whether they're going to proceed or cancel this whole thing.
You need to come to sit before the board.
WOMAN: We've got an international hero dead and five more stuck in a utility shack meant for two trying to find a needle in a haystack before their systems fail.
BOARD MEMBER: We don't like the optics on this, Ed.
Ophelia was doing just fine in the satellite business before we bought into your MMC initiative.
BOARD MEMBER 2: If the most qualified astronauts on the planet can't make it work, how do you expect to make money selling tickets to people following in their footsteps? BOARD MEMBER 3: IMSF is already watching every move we make, waiting for an excuse to end this whole thing.
BOARD MEMBER: We need to cut bait before they leave us holding the bag.
GRANN: Are you done? I made billions of dollars in private enterprise and then I did it again and again.
Every small town car dealer knows about profits, bottom lines, and cutting losses.
And they all know about fear.
You know what they don't know about? Foresight.
And faith.
These are my tax reports for the last five years.
It shows my income, investments and all my accounts, business and personal, onshore, offshore, all around the world.
You look at it and you'll find that I've invested 90% of my own net worth in this mission.
I've got faith.
And I'm asking for a little bit more of yours.
Slow down IMSF, and let this crew carry out the mission we sent them there to do.
MAN: If they fail, I don't care how much you invested, we're out.
GRANN: If they fail, everyone's out.
Hana Seung: We were at a critical stage and all I could do was pretend I wasn't just as worried as the rest of them.
Javier Delgado: We haven't been able to make the system run more efficiently.
Amelie Durand: Mae, report CO2 scrubber status.
Mae: CO2 scrubbing has declined an additional 3% since your last inquiry.
Javier Delgado: There are just too many of us.
Amelie Durand: If we can't make the workshop safe for long-term habitation, we're going to need to start considering deploying the dome on the surface.
Hana Seung: Then the next ship that comes will be a rescue mission.
We've got eight months.
We're going to use them.
[EXPLOSION.]
Fire, Robert! Mae: Warning fire detected in the laboratory section.
Amelie Durand: Mae, extinguish the lab.
Mae: System malfunction.
Hana Seung: Get to the airlock! Robert Foucault: Fire! Hana Seung: Go, everybody! Into the airlock, go! Depressurize to put out the flames, go! Mae: Fire containment system malfunction.
Airlock motors off.
Robert Foucault: The circuit's blown! CREWMAN: The fire is growing! Hana Seung: Everyone back, get inside the east wall! CREWMAN: What is she doing? Amelie Durand: Hana! Robert Foucault: Open up, Hana! Amelie Durand: What is she doing? Hana, Hana! [CREW SCREAMING.]
Robert Foucault: Open the door! No, don't do it! Amelie Durand: Hana! Robert Foucault: No, Hana! Javier Delgado: She's going to burn herself alive in there.
[CREW SCREAMING.]
[GLASS BREAKS.]
MAN: As Mariner 4 passed over Mars, it recorded on tape tiny bits of information to transmit back to Earth.
Roger Launius: The track record is probably about 50% of the probes sent to Mars have been successful in accomplishing any part of their mission.
That's not a great track record.
Nicolas Thomas: Mars seems to have been a graveyard for several spacecraft, I've been involved in two missions where we've had failures, Mars Polar Lander was one.
Tom BROKAW: There is more news from NASA tonight and like almost all the news from the space agency this year, it's not good.
MISSION CONTROL: SLM, go ahead.
SLM: This is the [inaudible.]
shutdown load and go.
Nicolas Thomas: But there comes a point where you think to yourself ah, this ain't gonna happen.
MISSION CONTROL: I'm sorry to report that all we have is a nominal no contact M.
R.
path.
MISSION CONTROL 2: Copy that, Mod, thanks for that uh, thanks for hanging in there with us.
MAN: Mars is still the death planet, it's a graveyard of many, many spacecraft.
Roger Launius: Mars is hard to do.
INTERVIEWER: what do you think your biggest challenge will be on this mission? Hana Seung: Well, the biggest challenge would be finding those lava tubes, but the unknown to me is a bigger challenge than that.
It's a vicious planet.
IMSF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: The fire left them with less than a week of oxygen.
IMSF sent me to make a decision.
Is Vega now a rescue mission? Because if the crew no longer has the means to find a location in the lava tubes, they're going to have to deploy the dome on the surface.
Joon Seung: They're working on sealing off the lab now, but we're still waiting to hear about structural damage.
GRANN: What about the drones? Oliver: Damage to the remote system was catastrophic.
No way they fly again without additional supplies from Earth.
GRANN: Okay, guys, go back to your stations and check it all again.
[GRANN SPEAKING FRENCH.]
Joon Seung: I'd like to speak to you about the horizontal entrance.
GRANN: Joon, please.
The nations are meeting the day after tomorrow to vote on how to proceed.
If they deploy the dome on the surface, we fail.
IMSF will dissolve, MMC will go bankrupt, and Earth will forget about Mars just like they forgot about the moon.
If we can't find a site, the Mars mission is dead.
Joon Seung: I understand, sir.
Javier Delgado: I've thawn all I can.
Amelie Durand: We're still leaking O2 like a sieve.
Robert Foucault: There's no way to complete the repairs without the equipment that burned in the lab.
Marta Kamen: At this rate, we've got a little more than 100 hours of breathable air.
Amelie Durand: We're running out of options.
Marta Kamen: Hana? Hana Seung: We will find it.
Robert Foucault: Aye-aye, Captain.
IMSF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: Your faith is admirable, but unfounded, Mr.
Grann.
IMSF sent me here to determine whether or not you can stop this thing from becoming a global embarrassment, but what I can tell so far, that seems to be an inevitability.
Ground penetrating radar isn't going to find us a site that isn't there, without the drones there's no way.
GRANN: My people have done the impossible.
They can do it again.
Sam: There's nothing, sir, we've been over the terrain a hundred times.
Oliver: We're seeing no options for sub-surface habitation with gamma rays or neutron specs.
They were supposed to have two years to find a location with the right conditions.
Ava: And that was with six drones in the air twelve hours a day.
Sam: There's not a single tube that shows any sign of a horizontal entrance.
IMSF DEPUTY COMMISSIONER: They have to deploy.
Joon Seung: Wait! I think I have something.
We ignored this horizontal entrance because it was clogged with breakdown debris and too far from the nearest candidate skylight to be part of the same tube system.
But if we look at the GPR scans here you can see that entrance leads to a tectonic cave that passes right beside the lava tube under this skylight.
With the right equipment on the next ship, we can clear the horizontal entrance and combine the two cave systems.
Sam: They'd have to lower the dome in vertically, through the skylight.
Ava: That tube is at least two-hundred meters, rim to floor; the winch on the crane only has fifty of cable.
Oliver: What about the guidelines for the Daedalus? They've got three 35 meter spools of cable with a nearly identical gauge.
They splice those together, that's 215 meters.
Joon Seung: If the topography is right, and the ice is there, we can justify deployment.
GRANN: Do it.
Joon Seung: Daedalus crew, great news.
We may have found a place for deployment.
Stand by for transmission of coordinates.
Marta Kamen: Kamen, Marta.
Mission Entry Phase 1.
The idea that one of the lava tubes we deemed unsuitable could be connected to a tectonic cave is brilliant.
Thanks, Joon, Mission Control.
Spasibo.
Robert Foucault: Hey Marta, I hope you're not scared of the dark.
[laughs.]
Javier, how are the cables? Javier Delgado: Good.
Robert Foucault: Alright, Marta, hang in there.
Marta Kamen: Okay.
[DEEP BREATHING.]
Robert Foucault: Doing great, doing great.
Javier, how are the cables holding? Javier Delgado: Strong.
I hope we have enough to get her down.
Javier Delgado: Talk to us Marta, what do you see? Marta Kamen: Can't see, I can't see anything.
Javier Delgado: Mae, remaining cable? Mae: 150 meters remaining, 120 meters, 100 meters, 80 meters.
Robert Foucault: Come on, come on, come on, come on.
Mae: 60 meters, 50 meters remaining.
Hana Seung: Marta, what do you see? Mae: 35 meters, 30 meters.
Marta Kamen: Nothing, nothing at all.
Jeremy WILKS: Hello, and welcome to Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan.
Counting down to the launch of ExoMars, the world's biggest ever mission to the red planet.
Nicolas Thomas: Baikonur is the largest launch facility in the world.
It's where the Russians have been launching missions from for the past 60 years, all of the big missions have gone from there, the Sputniks, the Vostoks, the Soyuz.
It's the place where Gagarin went up and did his launch.
[SPEAKING RUSSIAN.]
It's sort of a holy place I think for space scientists.
The ExoMars program is a collaboration between the European Space Agency and RosCosmos, and so there are principal investigators, both from Europe and from the Russian side.
Oleg Korablev: Maybe it's a false impression that Mars is studied in every detail, but it is actually not mapped in every detail completely.
Far from that.
Nicolas Thomas: I've been thinking about ExoMars for more than 16 years.
So, so that's it over there, right? Now it's serious guys.
What we're doing is really rather difficult.
A lot of things have to go right.
Oleg Korablev: One minute.
Nicolas Thomas: One minute.
Building the instruments is hard and maybe if you haven't done enough test time and you're thinking to yourself, oh my goodness, you know, this is going to go in another one of these damn rockets.
Launches are inherently dangerous.
There's always some sort of a risk of something blowing up.
As long as the thing doesn't blow up when I'm too close to it.
MISSION CONTROL: And we have liftoff.
Roger Launius: The Americans have had failures, the Europeans have had failures, the Russians have had failures.
We check things, we recheck them.
We have checkers checking the checkers, and how much is enough to ensure that you don't fail? [EXPLOSION.]
[RUSSIAN RADIO CHATTER.]
Nicolas Thomas: There she goes.
Geez, look at that! Oleg Korablev: Beautiful.
[LAUGHTER AND CONGRATULATIONS.]
Nicolas Thomas: That's an experience, isn't it? Holy smokes! Oleg Korablev: (bleep)! Nicolas Thomas: We have to wait a little bit while things deploy and then we're on our way to Mars.
It gets you sort of right there.
[APPLAUSE.]
Casey Dreier: You have this incredible number of people all working to send something to a strange kind of pinkish dot in the sky.
I really like not seeing Mars as a challenge to overcome, but Mars as an opportunity to unite people together in a peaceful way and give our species a goal.
You're giving people something optimistic to pursue.
Javier Delgado: We've detected glaciers of ice on Mars from orbit that are 40 meters thick extending down to a latitude of 38 degrees.
There is a huge amount of sub-surface ice there so this is a unique opportunity for us.
Mae: 35 meters, 30 meters.
25 meters, 20 meters remaining.
Robert Foucault: We're running out of line.
Mae: 18 meters, 17 meters, 16 meters 15 meters remaining, 14 meters.
Robert Foucault: Hang in there.
Mae: 13 meters, 12 meters.
Marta Kamen: Easy, easy, easy.
Stop, I'm on the ground.
Hana Seung: She hit the ground.
Robert Foucault: There you go.
Hana Seung: Marta, report please, what's down there? Marta Kamen: Even topography, room to build.
I'm unclipping to dig for ice.
No indication of exposed ice.
There's nothing.
There's no ice here, there's nothing here.
[MARTA SCREAMS.]
Amelie Durand: What's happening, Marta? Hana Seung: Status update, Marta.
Marta Kamen: Still here, still here.
Hana Seung: Marta can you hear us? Amelie Durand: Marta, do you hear us, Marta? Hana Seung: Is she okay? Amelie Durand: Heartrate elevated, but no injuries.
Marta Kamen: There's a crevice down here.
Bear with me.
Hana Seung: What do you see, Marta? Status update, please.
Amelie Durand: Marta? Robert Foucault: C'mon.
Marta Kamen: There's ice, we're home.
[JOYFUL CRIES AND LAUGHTER.]
Javier Delgado: Yes! Marta Kamen: We're home.
[JAVIER MUMBLES.]
Hana Seung: The words house and home have different meanings.
A house is an inanimate object.
Home is a feeling.
["SHELTER FROM THE STORM" BY BOB DYLAN PLAYS.]
Bob Dylan: 'twas another lifetime, One of toil and blood Where blackness was a virtue the road Was full of mud.
I came in from the wilderness, A creature void of form.
Come in, she said, I'll give ya, Shelter from the storm.
Hana Seung: Seung, Hana.
Mission Entry Phase 1.
The flag is planted.
It's official.
Humankind has a home on Mars.
Reporting to you from inside the dome which we successfully deployed early this morning on the cabin floor.
All of the components are in place, pressurization is complete, and all we got to do now is decorate.
What a day, guys.
What a day.
Over and out.
Bob Dylan: Not a word was spoke between us, There was little risk involved.
Everything up to that point had been left unresolved.
Try imagining a place that's always safe and warm.
Come in, she said, I'll give ya Shelter from the storm.
Hana Seung: Vega wasn't going to be a rescue mission.
There would be more ships after them.
And even though there was hard work to do to get the habitat ready for the next phase, the Mars mission was alive.
Bob Dylan: I'm living in a foreign country, But I'm bound to cross the line.
Beauty walks a razors edge.
Someday I'll make it mine.
If I could only turn back the clock to when God and her were born.
Come in, she said, I'll give ya Shelter from the storm.