August 1, 2014 • 58 mins
NASA says the first humans to land on Mars are already walking around on Earth today. How does NASA propose we get there?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future and says the sunlight is
going into the mountain. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick,
(00:21):
and our other host, Lauren Vogelbaum is not with us
in the studio today, but she will be back next time.
So um, Joe. Yeah, when you are thinking about potential
places that you would like to vacation, does the Red
Planet ever make the list? Is that a euphemism for
Las Vegas? Know that that would that would be like
(00:44):
what happens on the Red Planet stays on the Red planet. Well,
you might be more right than you know. It might
be really hard for stuff to happen on the Red
planet that gets off the Red Planet. I'm sorry, We're
going to reference the movie Total Recall a lot of times. Yeah,
(01:04):
at least Joe will I will I will attempt to
keep a lid on it. Well, yeah, actually, I'm gonna
spend this whole podcast trying not to talk exclusively about
Total Recall, the one that takes place on Mars. I
don't know what happens in the new one, I mean
the old one, the good one. Yeah. Yeah, So we
wanted to talk about Mars simply because there's this big
(01:25):
anniversary that happened this year. Some guys went to uh,
pretty distant neighborhood called the Moon. Oh I've heard of that. Yeah.
The Polo landing happened forty five years ago, and as
part of the celebration for it, NASA published this this
little report saying what comes next, and one of the
things that really focused on was an attempt to actually
(01:48):
send human beings to Mars for the first time. In fact,
what they said is the first human being to set
foot on Mars is alive today. Yeah. Yeah, And so
the first ones who will set foot on Mars are
are currently walking around, which suggests that not only are
they alive there at least three. Yeah. What age do
you start walking? Oh? I started walking right right, Yeah.
(02:10):
I was right around thirteen when I started walking. Before that,
I was just carried everywhere like a pasha. But uh, yeah,
at this point, um, we're talking about you know, according
to NASA, assuming and and keep in mind that NASA
publishes this kind of stuff in part to get support
behind its its goals, right because it's it's government funded,
(02:30):
so it has to get support so that it gets
the funding necessary to do the science that we need
to do. Of course, a lot of people don't like science, yeah,
or they don't think it's like the idea of it,
but they don't like paying for it, right. That's when
it ultimately comes down to I'm not going to shy
away from it. That's you know, some people are like, yes,
I want us to go to Mars. No, I don't
(02:51):
want that to be you know, any of my responsibility. Uh,
And that's an issue, which that's part of what NASA
is trying to to to address, saying, look, this is
what this is a lofty goal and it's a goal
worth having. And we'll talk more about wine a little bit. Well,
let's uh take a minute before we get into NASA's
new announcement and just look back on the idea of
(03:15):
going to Mars, because this has been around for a while,
but obviously we've never been it. Only you know, it
wouldn't even take a full year to get there if
you time the trip, right, would be some several months,
probably eighteen months total from start to finish, like to
get their land, wait for the right time to be
(03:35):
able to come back. I'm not talking about a round trip,
I'm talking about to get there, to get there okay,
six months, Okay, Okay, that's not that bad. Why haven't
we been to Mars yet? And maybe this discussion will
help color our ideas about how we will get there
in the future. I would guess one of the big
(03:56):
things has got to be something we mentioned just a
second ago. Money. Yeah, cost, money is a huge one.
How how much would it actually cost to get to
Marston I'm sure some people of gas. Okay, so here,
here's the thing. We don't know, obviously, because we haven't
sent anyone to Mars. We can't say if we had
sent someone to Mars and then said, hey, can you
tell you up all your receipts and let's know how
much it was. Yeah, we stopped for coffee somewhere right
(04:18):
between the Moon and Mars, and that added you know,
if we ended up all the costs, then we could say, okay,
this is how much it actually cost us to send someone.
But not knowing means we have to make a lot
of estimations, and those estimations are all over the place,
right I mean seriously, all over the place. You're about
to hear an amazing space. So Mars one, this is
(04:40):
a this is a private venture. We talked about it
briefly in our episode about going to the Moon versus
going to Mars. We talked about the Mars one initiative.
We can offer some opinions about Mars one and a bit,
but I would say they have offered a somewhat low ball.
They have aggressively priced their trip to Mars. Okay, so
(05:01):
they say that to set the first of four, the
first four astronauts of a group of I think it's
like sixteen ultimately something like that. It's it's quite a
few that will eventually get there. But the the first
four to get to Mars and set them up, including
all the equipment and everything necessary to keep them alive,
(05:21):
would cost six billion dollars, and every subsequent mission of
four more astronauts joining the ones who are already there
would be four billion. Hm. That's pretty low when you
compare it to say, the nineteen eighty nine plan that
was proposed by NASA, which did not have a price
(05:41):
tag associated with the actual plan. They laid out what
the plan was and then other people based on what
the plan was, estimated what the cost would be. So
based upon NASA's plan, and I'll talk about what that
was in a little bit too. Uh they cost They
said that would cost about four hundred fifty billion dollars.
It is pretty pretty big range between six billion to
(06:03):
four hundred fifty billion. Yea, yeah, so, uh, there are
a lot of different reasons why those range of costs
are so different. First of all, nine nine technology very
different from current technology. Wait a minute, was that estimated
in nineteen eighty nine dollars? Also? Uh? Yeah, I imagine so,
so we'd have to figure in inflation, which I did
(06:23):
not do. But it may also be due to either optimism,
like blind optimism if you want to be you know,
really really kind of hardcore about this. Yeah, all right.
May just again, when I say aggressive, it may be unrealistic.
You might say that that the Mars one view may
be unrealistic, which is all dependent upon your knowledge of
(06:45):
everything that's going on and how how the world works. Um.
I don't feel fully qualified to say that at all.
I don't feel qualified to say it necessarily, but my
gut is that it is unrealistic. Um. Whereas you might
say that it was blind pessimism that cause people to
say the NASA plan would have cost four fifty billion dollars.
Will never know because that plan was never put into action,
(07:05):
so we can't really say one way or the other,
but it does sound like to be pretty expensive. So
there are other plans that fall between these two extremes,
like the Mars Direct Initiative, which has said that it's
planned to send people to Mars and come back, which
is important but only cost thirty billion. The reason why
I say it's important is that Mars One Initiative, Uh,
(07:26):
that's a one way ticket. You go to Mars, you're
part of a Martian colony, and you may or may
not ever have the opportunity to come back to Earth.
You go knowing that there's the overwhelming possibility that that's
where you spend the rest of your life. Uh. Because
that that's what the whole focus of the Mars One
Initiative is is to get people on Mars and to
(07:48):
create a sustainable colony. Uh, not to have a place
where people can go explore and then come back to Earth. Um.
That's one way to keep the cost down because you
don't have to worry about building a launch system. Cap
double of escaping Mars is gravity and taking people back
all the way to Earth. Okay, but another thing is
if you're talking about a mission that has a colony,
(08:09):
so it has a crew, it's an ongoing mission and
not just like you're sending a probe to do one job,
You're gonna be talking about potentially unforeseeable ends and unknown costs.
Right sure, yeah, because I mean unless you just say, okay,
we're calculating the cost to dump them on the surface
and then never spend any more money. Well, which I mean,
(08:33):
can you can do the math for all? Right, here's
the bare minimum of stuff we will need to accomplish this, right,
this is. This is the amount of fuel will need.
This is the amount of food and water and oxygen
will need. Uh you know, this is this is the
number of replacement parts we want in case there's something
that goes wrong. You can go ahead and factor in
all those things and try and come up with a budget.
(08:55):
But stuff happens, right, Things things happen that you did
not anticipate. Because that's the way the world works, or
in this case, that's the way the universe works. Uh,
so it means that you know, even if you come
up with a budget that seems realistic, you can never
really be sure until you've actually done the thing, right.
I mean, just like one practical scenario is imagine you
(09:18):
put the colony down, they're set up, and then a
very crucial piece of equipment of their's breaks and they
don't have a way to make another one. So you now,
and what if their lives depend on this, you need
to send another one to Mars. Keeping in mind that's
going to take months and months, because you remember that
six to eight months is all depended upon where Earth
and Mars are in their respective orbits, right, it could
(09:39):
be a lot longer if they're not in the optimal position. Yea.
So also you got to remember that what if, what
if it comes time for them to launch off of Mars,
But that also coincides with the time when Mars has
an enormous dust storm, which does happen on that planet,
which could extend their need to stay on the planet
for perhaps even up to you know, almost a year
(10:02):
in order for the orbits to come into the right
optimal position. Because that that orbit stuff that's really important,
You've got to have the right amount of fuel to
get to your destination. And if it turns out that, well,
we couldn't launch the launch window. Now there's no way
for us to make it back to Earth. If we
were to launch today. We have to wait until we're
(10:23):
back around to a point where the orbits are ideal
for us to do it. Again. That's another you know,
several months at the very least. So it's you know,
it's there are a lot of things you have to
take into consideration. Uh So, Yeah, it's one of those
things where again it's impossible to say, of course until
after we actually do it. Of course, the even bigger
(10:43):
thing than costs probably is the human risk. I mean,
there are very serious dangers in going to Mars. Yeah,
there's serious dangers just going into space, right, Like we're
talking about serious dangers that go that are involved if
you're just going into lower Earth orbit. And it's hard
for me to say just because that's further than I've
ever gone, but low Earth orbit is still relatively safe
(11:08):
compared to anything that that travels outside of the Earth's
gravitational field, which is very much a protective layer for us.
So you first have all the dangerous associated with your
average space launch. Those are all still at play, right,
and you could have a critical failure all those things,
but that, like you said, that could happen anytime you're
(11:28):
leaving the atmosphere. That's just your baseline. So that's you
already have that. And we've already determined that the risks
associated with space launches are are not so great as
to prevent us from actually doing them. We've just and
and again when we talk about risks, this is also
something that comes down to a a individual choice to
There are people out there who are willing to take
(11:51):
enormous risks if it means the chance to go to Mars,
and to them, they may they may look at something
that to another person and seems far too dangerous to undertake,
and they'll say, no, I want to do this. So
this is this also comes down to individual preference in
some respects. But there are some things that are just unavoidable.
Avoidable like cosmic rays, cosmic rays, solar radiation another one.
(12:15):
We here on Earth are are very lucky. And in fact,
you might say it's not that it's not luck, it's
the reason why we're here. Yeah, we evolved done Earth,
Earth protects us. Yes, uh, not sentiently necessarily, although there
are people who say otherwise, Uh, yeah, there, but it
has the Earth's atmosphere and it's magnetosphere both protect us
(12:38):
from radiation. The the atmosphere largely protects us from solar
radiation um, although also can help protect us from cosmic
rays as well. The magnetosphere mainly protects us against cosmic radiation.
Cosmic rays are really charged particles, right, They're not. They're
not raised in the sense of like a science fiction
ray gun. They are these charge particles that can really
(13:01):
do some pretty very fast. Yeah, and they have a
lot of energy in them, and they can seriously cause
some problems if say a person were to encounter them. Now,
of course, if you were to take a crew of
people and put them out of Earth's magnetosphere, say on
the way to Mars, suddenly they would be exposed. Right.
They no longer have the the beneficial protection of the
(13:23):
Earth's magnetosphere nor the atmosphere obviously, and so you have
to figure out, well, how do we shield them from
these these cosmic rays and the solar radiation that they
will encounter as they move through the Solar system. How
do we make sure that they are protected so that
they don't suffer terrible health effects, either in the short
(13:43):
term or in the long term. So how do how
do we prevent that as much as possible? And it
mostly means improvements in shielding, although there have been some
other suggestions as well. Okay, so I've got another one. Okay,
do you know how much exercise astronauts on the Internet
Sational Space Station have to get. It's it's a lot.
It's like, it's like more than an hour a day,
(14:04):
is No. They have to do tons of exercise, and
even then they don't get stronger like you do when
you exercise a lot. On that This is this is
preventive therapy. They're trying to slow the onset of the
deconditioning that naturally occurs when you live in a microgravity environment.
What is that deconditioning, Well, it's muscle loss and its
(14:28):
bone density loss, and those things are not nice, not
good for your body. Muscle loss is easier to deal
with than bone density loss, but neither are great. I
mean it means that if you if you read up
on astronauts and their experience, especially when they get those
that spend a lot of time on the I s S,
for example, the International Space Station. You'll hear about them
(14:49):
going through lots of physical therapy when they get back
in order to help offset any muscle loss or bone
density loss that they've had while they're they were on board. Now,
with bone dens that, you're kind of stuck, right, I mean,
you you can't really offset that that much. So that's
one thing you would have to do is plan for
how do you deal with uh putting the stuff off
(15:13):
or or or counteracting it as much as possible during
the duration of the trip. Also, keep in mind that
Martian gravity is thirty eight percent what Earth's gravity is,
so even once you get there, the problem isn't totally solved.
Yeah it's not, as it's not a severe thirty eight
percent is still pretty good. You probably wouldn't suffer well,
you certainly wouldn't suffer the same extent of bone loss
(15:34):
as you would if you spent the equivalent amount of
time in micro gravity. But it's still something to keep
in mind. And you know, it's a little harder to
um figure out how to exercise. I mean, what do
you do you pack exercise equipment that's uh three times
heavier than what it would be on Earth, so that
it would feel the equivalent amount of weight when you
lift it. You know, it's you can't really weighing down
(15:56):
the spacecraft in order to do that. It is probably
not the best idea because that increases the cost. Again,
another thing is, so if you have extended space travel
and you do wanna give give the astronauts something to
help keep them healthy on this strip, what are your options?
I mean, there aren't many. Basically, the only thing I
can imagine is creating an artificial gravity spacecraft. We've we've
(16:20):
discussed how you could do that, but we've also discussed
why that's difficult because it would just involve lots and
lots more building in space and shipping more and more
materials up there. So yeah, the Mars direct approach is uh,
you know, it's different from saying, let's let's make sure
the astronauts have X amount of time per day to
exercise so that they can counteract this these effects. And
(16:42):
when they were actually when they would be traveling from
Earth to Mars, they would, according to that approach, be
in a rotating spacecraft. It would it would simulate gravity,
and then that's how they would avoid muscle loss and
bone density loss. Well, that does seem ideal for astronaut health.
But my question is that seems yet again like that's
(17:03):
going to be massively increasing your costs. And they were
talking about you offset that specifically using the the the
launch vehicle as a counterweight, and it's so okay. So
instead of like a tourist or wheel, it would be
like a tethered right, so you'd have a floor inside
your spacecraft and then that would be spinning opposite a
(17:26):
counterweight through a tether, yes, yes, and then you would
you would end up severing that connection once you got
to Mars, because really it's it's just acting as a
counterweight in the first place. That makes sense. So it's
an interesting approach. But you know, again, that's that's just
one initiative. That's the one that was the thirty billion
dollar approach. Um. That one was proposed by a person
(17:46):
who used to work with NASA and is you know
now kind of the head uh evangelist for this Mars
direct initiative. Um. But we'll talk a little more about
that in a bit. Also, the other thing that's dangerous
about trip to Mars, and we're just Right now, we're
just talking about the trip to Mars. We're not talking
about how dangerous it will be once you get there. Um,
(18:09):
the last bit is, uh, the actual arrival at Mars
pretty dangerous because it's hard to land something on Mars um,
largely because Martian atmosphere is very, very thin. Yeah, there's
not a lot to it. So uh, using a parachute
will only slow you down so much you would think, oh,
that's only the gravity, How hard could it be? Well,
(18:31):
it's pretty you know, you're traveling at an incredible speed.
You have to slow yourself down. Uh, and the parachute
is not going to slow you down enough to have
necessarily a safe landing with astronauts on board. Now, if
I recall, I think when they landed the Curiosity rover,
it had to have multiple different stages of deceleration in
the atmosphere. Right, it had I'm just going off memory.
(18:52):
I think it had parachutes and it had retrorockets. That's right. Yeah,
First it would it positioned itself so that the large
surface area was facing the ground, which helps slow it down. Yeah,
it had a parachute that helps slow it down a
little more. And then it used thrusters to counteract the
falling and so it could lower itself down easily. And
(19:15):
keep in mind, all of that was accomplished with pre programming,
because it was fourteen minutes before we knew whether or
not it worked, So it had been on the ground
for fourteen minutes before we even knew that it managed
to to land on Mars safely. Now, of course, with
a human manned trip to Mars, that's not an issue.
(19:36):
You would actually have people there who could uh interact
with whatever uh spacecraft they had, so if they needed
to make adjustments on the fly, they could, they wouldn't
have to wait for commands back from Earth to do so.
So there's that. But I mean, we've already managed to
do it with an you know, a semi autonomous vehicle. Uh,
(19:57):
So that is support for a Mars mission. Saying well,
we we've accomplished what most people would say was, I
think freaking crazy is an appropriate phrase. We managed to
do it already, So that's that's kind of a check
in the positive column. Right, Okay, But so once we
(20:17):
get the astronauts to the planet, then everything is pretty easy, right, No,
not at all? Nohere then atmosphere not to mention, it's
not oxygen richly. You can't breathe it anyway. It's carbon
dioxide rich not good for us, not at all. You
get big, like you were talking about earlier big dust
storms on Mars, so you can have gigantic dust storms
(20:39):
that cover the whole planet. Not to mention, some of
that dust on Mars is now believed to be highly
toxic to humans. Like you wouldn't want to be You
wouldn't want to get it stuck anywhere in your suit
and bring it into the habitat. Yeah, that dust can
have a lot of perchlorates and that which can can
be very toxic. Um. You know, they were talking about
stuff that has chlorine in it. Chlorine is a is
(21:01):
a is toxic to humans. So yeah, anything where you'd
be tracking that dustin or anything that could end up
being uh uh, you know, not completely secure against it
could end up creating severe health hazards. Mars is super
cold to be kind of like living in Antarctica, yeah,
kind of. So the temperatures on Mars very depending upon
(21:23):
where you are, kind of like on Earth. Yeah, the
average temperature is about minus eighty fahrenheit, which is about
minus sixty celsius, which is anyone who has been out
on even a mildly cold day would say, wow, that's
gotta be you know, that's gonna be almost instant death.
That's so cold. Uh that. But again it varies. So
(21:44):
if you're at the equator at noon, Mars might reach
a high of about seventy degrees fahrenheit twenty celsius, which is,
that's nice. That's a nice day. I would love that.
But at the polls the low is about minus two
hundred twenty five fahrenheit or minus one fifty three elsius.
Not a good day. So don't go to the poles.
Don't go to the poles. Yeah. So anyway, you've got
(22:05):
these extreme temperatures that you'd have to deal with, uh
in some way. You'd have to figure out how do
we make sure that the people who are going to
Mars are going to be able to endure this. Another
thing is Mars doesn't protect you from space the way
Earth does. Mars wants you to die. Things like cosmic
radiation and solar radiation both can be more severe on
(22:27):
the surface of Mars. You don't have the atmosphere really
to protect you, not not a strong one, and you
don't have a strong magnetic field protect you, so you
need to provide additional layers of protection. You'd either need
to dig down under the ground and build underground habitats
to shield yourself or have some kind of In any case,
this is going to be greatly adding to the mission
costs and the different kind of things you're gonna have
(22:48):
to do. It's going to make it a lot harder.
You're either you're either doing some very primitive terraforming in
the sense of digging a hole, or you have to
factor that into your habitats, you know, features like the
actual material has to be good at shielding against cosmic
radiation and solar radiation. Um. Yeah, we already talked about
(23:09):
the gravity, so that could also potentially be an issue,
and we talked about the soil. So yeah, as it
as it turns out, getting to Mars and staying on
Mars really some big challenges. They're not necessarily, you know, insurmountable,
but certainly things that you have to keep in mind. Yeah.
One of the other things I want to say is, Okay,
so why do we want to go to Mars. I
(23:32):
would say that the main reasons are, well, I guess
maybe two main reasons. One is just purely emotional. It's
just the emotional experience of exploration. It's exciting, it's inspiring
to humans. But it's really something that's fundamental to humans.
I mean, we've you see it in the history of Earth, right,
just just exploring the different places on Earth, and then
(23:54):
of course you just extend that outward. Human curiosity is
not bound just to our planet. Yeah. The other ing
is of course science, to do scientific research, planetary science
research on Mars, which could potentially tell us a whole
lot about all kinds of things about you know, could
give us insights into, uh, into how planets are formed,
(24:14):
how Mars is different from Earth, what happened to the
Martian atmosphere, could give us ideas about astrobiology, you know,
all kinds of different things that we could learn from Mars.
But unmanned rovers are doing a pretty good job so
far doing planetary science on Mars. So I wonder what
are the added benefits that having humans on site will provide. Yeah, um, well,
(24:40):
I want to add a third thing to your list,
on top of science and on top of inspiration, which
is technology, which is that you know, sometimes these these
challenges to meet these challenges means that we develop new technology,
new approaches to various problems. I guess I would have
lumped that in with inspiration in a weird and that
(25:00):
just that it gives us an impetus to to go
further right, and it does mean that we can stand
to benefit in in indirect ways to the efforts to
get to Mars. I mean the if you look at
a list of inventions that were either created during or
or popularized by the Space Race, there's a lot that
(25:25):
end up being really fundamental to the way we rely
on technology today. In fact, the development of the transistor
in large part has UH the Space Race to thank
for it, because there was a there was a strong
incentive to continue to develop to miniaturize electronics that you
could create these space capsules that could keep people alive.
So so another thing that you know, another potential benefit
(25:47):
down the road to getting to Mars is uh technology.
We'll talk more about the various benefits at the end too,
But anyway, so why would you want to go human
versus rover? One thing is that humans can a vice.
That's totally true, and I remember I wrote about that
in a video episode. We did a while back about
the future of space exploration should it be entirely unmanned,
(26:10):
And I think there is a big role for unmanned
exploration because there are a lot of places humans just
can't shouldn't go, it's just too dangerous. Where you can
pair robot and humans together so that the humans can
do things that humans are really well suited for, and
the robots can do the stuff that humans are not
really well suited exactly. But the one I'd say, the
(26:33):
main thing that I I think humans can do that
robots can't do is figure out what to do in
a situation where you've been presented with unforeseen circumstances. I mean,
a robot can very easily get stuck. It just doesn't
know how, it doesn't know how to get out of
the problem that faces it, and and it may be
(26:56):
a long time before someone back on Earth is able
to one ascertain what the problem actually is and to
come up with a potential solution, and then three enact
that solution, and then four evaluate said solution to see
if it actually solved the problem. So you're talking about
potentially something that could take days depending upon what the
(27:18):
nature of the problem is, or sometimes it could just completely, um,
you know, close the door on an entire project if
the problem is is severe enough for the robot. But
humans are really good at recognizing situations and either overcoming
them or working their way around them so that it's
not a problem in the first place. Right. So one
(27:39):
big example in this would go back to something we
talked about a minute ago, like, so, what if you're
on Mars and a very crucial piece of equipment breaks,
what do you do? Robots so far are just not
very good at fixing things. Fixing what what is it
about the concept of xing that it's just an inherently
(28:02):
human task to mend or repair, to you know, see
how a thing should be and put it back in
that state, right, or even just jerry rigging something to
do the same function or building a replacement that's also
very human. Hard for robot to do something like that
maybe impossible. And when you're on Mars, like we were
talking about, you may not even have the option of
(28:24):
getting sent a new one. It might be that it
would be a year before it gets there, and if
you don't have one by next week, you're going to
be dead. Right now. There are times when when robots
have been able to quote unquote improvise, but that's all
due to the direction of the people back on Earth
right where something did not work the way it was anticipated,
and so uh we had to you know, essentially switched
(28:47):
to Plan B. But that kind of improvisation takes lots
of time and in the meantimes, you know, the situation
can change, whereas humans can do that on the fly.
So that's a big one. Mobility obviously a big difference.
You know, depending upon how you've designed the robot, it
may be very good at going across certain terrain and
terrible ago at encountering anything else. So humans are really versatile.
(29:11):
We can we can deal with all types of terrain. Uh,
the regions that we would probably visit on Mars are
somewhat limited in the types of terrain that we would encounter.
We wouldn't necessarily be going to the polls um. So
we're pretty good at again, adapting to that situation and
and conquering it. So that's another reason why humans would
be a good choice because they could. That means that
(29:33):
we could do a lot more science in the same
amount of time as a robot could. You know, we're
able to adapt if we see something interesting on our
way from point A to point B, we can go
out of our way really quickly and check it out
or even collect samples that kind of thing, and then
continue on our way. That's a lot easier for us
(29:53):
than it is for a robot um. Also, any human
human visit to Mars would likely take some time, and
this is largely in part because of that that situation
we're talking about with the various orbital paths of Earth
and Mars. When they are approaching one another, that's when
you ideally want to launch from one to get to
(30:15):
thegether because it will take the least amount of time
um if there. If they are moving away from each other,
then as you know as you're traveling that your destination
is actually moving away from you, so you have to
counteract that, which means you have to spend more energy
to get there and it's going to take you more time.
So any visit to Mars is likely going to take
a long time, just because in the in the duration
(30:37):
of going from Earth to Mars, the position of the
planet's change, and by the time you land on Mars
is no longer ideal for you to turn around and
go back to Earth, you have to wait, So any
visit to Mars is going to take a long time.
If you're trying to be really conservative with fuel and
all that kind of stuff, that means that you're gonna
be spending more time on the service of Mars than
your average rover project is to outlast. They often exceed projections,
(31:08):
and I think part of that is just being conservative
with projections so that way, should the worst happen, it's
not as it's not as a big a blow. Like
if you have very specific parameters and you get that
approved for your project and then you go beyond it,
everyone's happy. If you set very specific parameters and you
don't make those, everyone gets upset. So you want to
be conservative with what you can achieve and hope that
(31:31):
the situation is such that you can continue to operate
long after the planned into the project has coming on um.
But with humans, you know, we would be stuck there essentially,
is what what it really boils down to, and it
would mean that we'll be able to do a lot
more science in that time. Yeah, okay, so let's say
that there is a good benefit to taking humans to Mars.
(31:52):
As we've just established that there may very well be
who's talking about going these days. We've mentioned Mars one,
maybe we should focus on them for a bit. Okay, sure,
so Mars one this is like a you know, I
don't I want to be fair, I want to be objective,
I don't want to be snarky. That being said, Mars
one thing makes me think of a circus act. It's
(32:15):
like if P. T. Barnum were we're arranging a trip
to Mars. That's that's the implication I get. Maybe I'm
just too cynical, It's it's quite possible. But the premise
behind Mars one is is got some showmanship behind it. Yeah,
I will say that they're having read a lot of
their materials, they sound extremely optimistic in a way that
(32:38):
slightly confuses me. So so then again, I mean, we're
always trying to encourage scientific ventures and optimism on this show.
I mean, we don't want to throw a wet blanket
on anybody and say don't try. But the best thing,
the best thing we can say here is that even
if Mars one does not ultimately succeed in their endeavor,
they will at least in some way a contribute to
(33:02):
our understanding of the difficulty of getting the Mars right.
So no matter what, we're gonna learn something. Now, what
we learned might not be, you know, how to get
to Mars. It might be hell not to get to Mars.
But let's hope that maybe they've got this planned out
way better than we can anticipate. Here's the pitch, though, Yeah,
let's bracket all the wet blankets stuff right now. Try
not to be a bummer. Just what are they talking about.
(33:24):
The pitch is they want to create a permanent colony
on the service of Mars, meaning that there's no necessary
plan to get people back, So anyone who wants to
be part of this has to be prepared that this is,
you know, potentially a one way ticket. Uh. They have
crowd funded and crowd sourced a lot, so they they're
essentially kind of holding auditions to be astronauts that would
(33:47):
participate in this, narrowing it down to a certain pool.
And then here's where the showman thing comes in. They
want to have essentially a reality television show that has
them settle on the final list of astronauts who will
be attempting this um, including alternates in case one of
the top picks is not able to make it this. Yeah,
(34:10):
they also want to have essentially like a reality television
experience while the astronauts are in training and preparing for
what they would eventually be doing UM, and that they
would raise money through various means like trying to get
people to invest, crowdfunding, selling merchandise, and this television series
(34:32):
would also be part of the way that they would
plan to finance the trip. Keeping in mind, like I
said at the top of the show there, their estimation
of the cost is six billion dollars for those first four.
They do plan on doing this in stages, so it's
not like they would immediately launch four people into space
and say good luck. UM. The first stage would involve
(34:53):
actually doing some demonstration missions to make sure that they
could get to Mars safely, that they would be able
to set up a communication satellite to help facilitate communication
between the colony and back here on Earth. But in general,
the plan is to send human beings to Mars by
they would actually land in so the year would change
(35:15):
over here on Earth between when they launched him when
they landed on Mars, and then the six you would
have a second group before joining the first before that
you would actually send up several missions where rovers would
land on the surface of Mars. You would also send
up cargo, including the habitats that people would be living
in the rovers. Their responsibility would be to prepare the
(35:37):
landing site, really preparing the habitat site, so that astronauts
would have a place to kind of check in, you know,
after their long road trip. They have their own little
Mars motel, the check in UH. Like Joe was saying,
this is the approach where you would the rovers would
theoretically dig UH and bury these habitats so that the
(35:57):
soil would provide the protection against solar radiation and cosmic radiation,
so that the UH, the astronauts would have a safe
place to stay in between doing science out on the
surface or working within the context of the habitats. They
would have to grow their own food UM, so there
would be they would be bringing plants along with them
to UH to grow in one of those habitats. The
(36:18):
food the plants they grow would also help provide some
of the oxygen they would need, although they would have
to generate more oxygen by extracting UH possibly water from
the soil of Mars and then using electrolysis to separate
that out into hydrogen and oxygen. Ah. Yeah, there are
a lot of things you have to take into consideration.
I mean, there are a lot of of steps to this.
(36:40):
I mean a lot of things that have to happen
for this to work. Um. So they also have to
produce you know, not just the water, but the oxygen,
the food. Uh, they would end up being there forever probably,
I mean, unless Mars one came up with a plan
for creating a return ticket. See that's super tricky because
not only do you have to have something that can
(37:00):
get all the way to Mars Land safely, it then
has to be able to launch back off of Mars
and come back to Earth. Um. Now, some of the
other plans involve ways of generating fuel while on Mars,
which helped get around that because otherwise you just have
to carry twice as much fuel. Well not twice as much,
but you get what I mean. You have to carry
enough fuel to get two Mars and then you have
(37:22):
to have enough left over to get back. So it's really,
like you said, really ambitious, really aggressive, really optimistic, and
uh uh, you know, I don't know what what people want.
NASA have to say about this. I don't know what
their opinions are of this particular initiative, but based upon
the plans I've seen, which are much more kind of
(37:44):
methodical and um, you know, they're they're looking further ahead
than as the first date to send people to Mars.
You know, I don't want to put words in their mouths,
but I would imagine that most of them feel like
it is a very aggressive and very optimistic approach. Some
might say, uh, some might go so far as to
say unrealistic. That's that's the way I feel about it.
(38:06):
It just seems like, based upon what we know of
the challenges of getting there and landing and making sure
people are safe. I mean, we're assuming here that the
approach will actually work and that everyone would be alive
and and maintain living conditions on Mars. It's I mean,
that's a that's an enormous endeavor. So, but they're They're
(38:27):
not the only ones, right. There have been other private proposals.
There's actually one from Dennis Tito, right, yeah, Inspiration Mars Foundation,
which Dennis Tito has been to space. Right he was
was he the first space tourist. I don't know if
he was the first one. But he was a key
was let me look it up right here, right Well,
I'll talk about what he was doing while you look
that up. So yeah, he talked about According to glance
(38:51):
at Google results, he was the first space tourist. There
we go. He has proposed a manned fly by of Mars,
originally set for two thousand eighteen because as again you're
talking about when Earth and Mars are are aligned well
enough to to do this with the least amount of fuel. UM.
Now it's been adjusted to one, which would be the
next time that this would work. It would be a
five and one day mission for two crew members, a
(39:15):
man and a woman aboard a modified Ryan spacecraft. Uh.
It would just orbit Mars and then come back. It
wouldn't land on the surface of Mars, so fighting here
in one days to go all the way out and
all the way back. UM. And originally he had hoped
to raise this money through philanthropic efforts to have people
donate money to it. UM I think I think one
(39:36):
of the costs they estimated was around two billion. But
again they're not talking about landing on the planet. They're
just talking about flying by and coming back. So those
costs are largely in the stuff you have to have
in the capsule keep everybody alive, and the fuel costs obviously. Um.
But he went to look to Congress to get additional funding.
(39:57):
But that's when the government said, UM, yeah, no, we
will let you have access to all the experts that
we know endlessly. You can talk your head off to him,
but we're not going to sign a check. We're not
gonna give you any money. And he said that he
was not willing to um to go ahead with this,
(40:20):
to ask for money from more investors until there was
an official mission on the books, like there was like
this is going to happen, this is the date of
the launch, etcetera. But on the flip side, no one
wants to put a mission on the books if it
hasn't been funded already. So you're in a catch twenty two, right,
you can't he's not gonna ask for He says, I
don't want to ask people for money for something that
(40:42):
may not ever happen, because no one ever gives me
to go ahead. Meanwhile, they're saying, well, we can't give
you the go ahead until you can prove you can
pay for it. So it's it's kind of this, this
sort of stalemate that we're in right now. Then there's
the boldly Go Institute. Obviously, so they put the split
infinitive right in the name, paying tribute to Star Wars.
(41:05):
I guess, except no, it wouldn't be split. It's like
a severed infinitive with no too, and it obviously wouldn't
be Star Wars at a Star Trek. That was a test.
Oh I didn't even pick up. No, that's fine, I'm
sure I did that specifically just to tweak listeners. I
do know the difference. My parents wrote books for Star Trek,
so um. Anyway, this nonprofit has a plan to send
(41:25):
a spacecraft in an orbit around Mars, and this case
it would do be another kind of fly by mission,
but it would also scoop up some of the dust
from Mars atmosphere and return to Earth. Because so far,
the stuff we have studied from Mars, it's all been
rovers that have analyze the stuff on the surface and
then send the data back to us. Right, it's not
(41:47):
like we've got Martian rocks that have been collected and
brought back. We haven't brought anything back. This would be
a change to that. So that's kind of cool. Uh.
The type of mission would be a sample collection for
investigation of Mars, also known as skim because they're skimming
the atmosphere. That's cute, But it's skim with the CEA.
(42:09):
It's kind of like scum or or sim Okay, okay, okay,
private ventures. We've talked about them. What's the deal with NASA?
What are they saying these days? Everybody wants to know. Well, first,
let's let's look back at the plan, the one that
supposedly would have cost four hundred fifty billion dollars, not
(42:30):
according to NASA itself. Right, Well, NASA didn't put a
budget to it. They were saying this is what they
this is what the proposed plan is. They didn't go
so far as to say here's how much it would
cost the Space Exploration initiative. It laid out an incredible plan,
like it kind of makes Mars one seem quaint in comparison. Um. So,
their plan was to build a thousand ton Mega ship
(42:54):
in orbit at the International Space Station. Thousand tons and
it is capable of carrying a thousand tons of cargo,
so enormous, right, talking like like we've talked about per
pound launch costs before which in the past, Well, in
this case they're talking about building it, still have to
launch it. Yeah, you'd have to. You'd have to launch
all the materials. But it has to be it has
to be capable of carrying a thousand tons. It doesn't
(43:15):
itself have to weigh a thousand tons. You have to
be misunderstood, you, Yeah, it's the the old way of
describing ships, like it's a sixty ton frigate. Well, that
would mean it could carry cargo up to sixty tons,
not that itself weighed sixty tons. Anyway, it would um
it would be this enormous vessel that would take astronauts
(43:36):
to Mars. It would land on the surface. Part of
that vessel would be able to take off back from
the surface of Mars to head back towards Earth. The
final part of the plan was using Venus to slingshot
around Venus, because it would actually be closer to get
to Venus at that point than back to Mars. Slingshot
around Venus to get to that final leg back to
(43:59):
Earth and this land. Yeah, that's total Star trek right
uh at Star Trek four voyage home. Anyway, that was
kind of once once you've got people estimating, like, well,
based upon the the enormity of this plan, it would
cost you four billion dollars whatever, even if that were
just a number pulled out of the air. Yeah, well Congress.
(44:21):
Congress's reaction was essentially saying that's way too expensive and
we're not gonna fund any of it. So there's some
people who have said that this initiative actually caused more
harm than good, because what essentially did was tell politicians, hey,
this is going to be so expensive that you're never
going to get the approval for it, and they said, well,
we just won't support it at all of them. So
it makes it harder to sell it in the future
(44:42):
because you've already presented like this enormous, this enormous package,
and they've said, no, we can't. You know, we've already
established we're not gonna pay for that. Couldn't they just
sell this under the guys of starting a war on Mars?
Well again, you know, it's hard to it's hard to
to mention it, it's hard to promise things that haven't
(45:02):
been developed yet. But it is true that any time
we were to if we were to take that plan,
there's so much that we would have had to advance
in order to make it possible that there would have
been enormous benefits in multiple industries. But it's hard to
to say these things that don't yet exist and we
cannot anticipate are totally going to be due to this project,
(45:23):
and therefore it's going to pay for itself. That's that's
like it's too nebulous, right, you can't really sell that. Yeah, okay,
So what's the new plan? Much more methodical? Uh. In fact,
if you were to read the release that's on NASA's
website that's all about traveling to Mars, it really focuses
most on asteroids. Going to asteroids. First step, it is
(45:44):
the first step part of this would be capturing and
moving an asteroids. So actually relocating an asteroid and uh,
either an asteroid or part of an asteroid. Some asteroid
mining companies have already talked about this. Actually, instead of
just going to an asteroid where we find it orbit
and then coming back with the materials, they've talked about
finding a real small one just bringing it straight to
(46:05):
Earth to maybe orbit the Moon or orbit the Earth.
And in fact, this is what NASA proposes, is to
bring the asteroid into a lunar orbit so it orbits
the Moon. And this would provide a testing ground for
a lot of approaches and technologies that would be necessary
for us to send people to Mars and have them
be safe so they in order for us to be
(46:26):
able to one capture the asteroid to move it, we
would need to help develop more approaches for things like propulsion.
A big development would be in solar electron propulsion. That's
essentially an ion drive. It uses solar energy to convert
into electricity to generate ions. It emits these ions and
(46:47):
that's what creates the thrust. So it's a low power thrust.
It doesn't it's not like it gives you the sudden zoom.
You're not going to be thrust back into your seat,
you know, light speed style or or ludicrous speed style,
depending upon your sci Fi of choice. But it's the
kind that can continuously allow you to accelerate in the
the wonderful uh medium of space. And it also is
(47:12):
a low energy propulsion system. It means you wouldn't have
to carry as much fuel. Um, you know, you'd have
to have enough to do certain maneuvers, and you'd have
to have enough to you know, launch a vehicle into space,
but then once you're in space, you wouldn't need tons
of fuel to get around. You can use this too
in theory any way to get around. So it would
require developments in that. It would require developments improvements in
(47:34):
space suit technology um as well as the capsule technology,
because the environment of lunar orbit is different than just
if you're in low Earth orbit. You're getting to the
extremes of the magnetosphere. You are more susceptible to things
like solar radiation and cosmic radiation, so you have to
build that stuff into making this project work. So essentially
(47:56):
what they're saying is we want to go to Mars.
The first step to going to Mars is manipulating these asteroids,
which could be a huge benefit to us for multiple reasons,
and what we learn as we do that will help
us get on get the next step, which is to
go to Mars. So if we sell this idea of
the asteroid first, that step one, yeah, because it is
(48:20):
very methodical, right, It's instead of just saying we want
to go to Mars and here's what's going to take
to get there, it's saying we want to be able
to manipulate asteroids. This has enormous potential benefits for us
in the future, including being able to get a resources
that we just can't get here on Earth easily, So
that's an easier sell. And then once you have established
all that and say, hey, look at all the stuff
(48:41):
we learned, look at all the technology we developed as
a as a result of having this goal. This is
stuff we can apply to going to Mars, then you
can sell that idea. So it is interesting that you know,
there's this whole thing about let's go to Mars, and
then as you read it, it's all about asteroids. A
little on there about Mars itself, because I think NASA
(49:04):
has has I think they're a little wary of trying
to make too big a goal too quickly and and
make it seem like it's it's unreachable, where they say, no,
it's totally reachable, but we have to concentrate on the
specific steps so that way we can get to our destination. Well,
I think space exploration is kind of like what the
(49:29):
mayor of Amity says in the movie Jaws. He says, no, no, no,
he says, you know, you say Barracuda. Everybody says what
you say, shark, then you've got a panic on your hands.
And it's right. I think the same thing is sort
of true in space. This asteroid plan to me sounds
(49:49):
very smart, very useful. But if you say asteroid, everybody
says huh what, But you say Mars, then they know
what you're talking about. The public becomes much more susceptible
to your pitch. It's interesting. So in one sense, you're saying, like,
if we say this, if we frame this as this
is our our roadmap to Mars, you get and it
(50:11):
actually is part of the I'm not saying it's like
a diversion. Well, I just mean it's interesting because if
you present it to the public as this is our
roadmap to Mars, the public is, oh, that's really cool.
If you present it to the to the government saying,
look at this practical use of technology that could benefit
us in the future, Oh and we could also get
to Mars, and it's like it's it's like you're using
the same strategy, but you're framing it in two different
(50:33):
ways depending upon your audience, right, which is kind of interesting.
It's it's very savvy actually, um, anyway, it's gonna mean
that we're going to see lots of different improvements, not
just in technology, but in approaches, things like how do
we develop stuff that is uh, maintainable and reparable out
in space by astronauts because a lot of the stuff
(50:56):
that exists right now, you know, International Space Station. Obviously
you have to stuff that's reparable by astronauts because you
can't bring that back to Earth to fix it. But
things like space suits haven't really changed that much over
the decades. So in order to repair a space suit,
you generally have to bring it back. Then you have
experts who maintain it or do repairs or whatever, and
then it can be sent back up into space. Obviously,
(51:19):
for something that's a long term mission, you know we're
talking about maybe uh, if you're talking about landing and
spending time there and coming back, it might be nine days.
That's you know, that's a long time to spend out there.
You obviously need to have equipment that can be maintained
and repaired by people when it needs to be. You know,
(51:40):
you can't just say, well, I guess I'll just live
with that for two and a half years. Who needs oxygen?
You know, obviously you need to have ways of addressing that.
And it's also true that whatever tech they develop for
this kind of stuff will ultimately need to be useful
on Mars, because the stuff that's useful in space is
not necessarily ideally suited for what's gonna what they're gonna
(52:02):
encounter on Mars. Right, So what your encounter in micro
gravity is different than what you encounter in a thirty
eight percent Earth's gravity environment. So these are a lot
of things that they have to address and challenges they
have to meet in order for a NASA trip to
Mars to be feasible. So to me, it's really interesting,
(52:24):
like they may even incorporate some elements of plans like
Mars Direct. It's not like a a project to send
people to Mars independent of NASA. It's more of a
proposal saying, here is a way that we could do
this that would be UH, that would not be economically unfeasible,
and would address a lot of the issues that UH
(52:46):
that are that come up as concerns in a trip
to Mars. So it may be that the future real
plan to go to Mars from NASA incorporates a lot
of those elements. Totally, We'll have to see, so The
cool thing is there are tons of resources online if
you want to read all about NASA's plans about Mars,
(53:09):
the incredibly thorough research that's been done to the feasibility
of a MANDA Mars mission. There there are huge documents online.
We looked at several of them. There are more than
a hundred pages long for several of these that are
very interesting, uh, extremely thorough. There also, the Mars Direct
Initiative has a great website where you can learn all
about the proposed plan. Mars One has a website that
(53:33):
uh will either fill you with optimism or leave you
scratching your head, like like it does with with us. Uh.
So uh, There's there's lots of stuff online where you
can read more about this. But ultimately, I think, um,
I think when it comes down to it is the
question of is it is it in fact a good
idea to pursue the goal of sending people to Mars. Joe,
(53:54):
what is your take? I wouldn't want to rush to it,
especially not if you can't find a good way to
make it safe for multiple reason. I mean, number one, obviously,
you just don't want people dying on Mars or on
the way to Mars. I mean, that's horrible, But even
apart from that tragedy in itself, I can see that
(54:15):
being a blow to exploration in the future. Um, if
you have a tragedy on the first major mission to Mars,
I can see public support for continued exploration being much lower. Sure.
I mean, we we saw that with previous tragedies in
the space industry, where things projects get get shelved indefinitely,
(54:37):
sometimes to the point where they're never brought back because
in the duration between the tragedy and when everything was
given the all clear, it lost the support it needed
to continue. Yeah. So I am very in favor of
sending people to Mars, but I think it's something that
we need to be very sure we can do before
(54:57):
we try to do it. Um, I'm not as I guess,
maybe I'm not as bullish on this as I am
about a lot of things on space exploration, just because
of that problem, like the fact that we need to
be very careful and and the asteroid thing could actually
teach us a lot there. Yes, I see, I think, Um,
(55:18):
I feel that it would be great to really pursue
the goal of landing humans on Mars. Uh because the
the benefits we stand to gain in advances in science
and technology, as well as inspiring future generations to go
into those fields, you know, various fields like engineering, science, whatever.
(55:40):
I think that would be incredibly beneficial to us as
a whole, even if we ultimately came to the decision
that we're putting off an actual man mission to Mars
because we just don't we don't have the infrastructure in
place to make it a safe uh project, or at
least within the excel upable levels of risk. I think
(56:03):
that just having it as a goal for something to
strive for will provide a lot of incentive to people
to innovate in various ways. And so for me, I
think it's incredibly important that we at least attempt to
send people to Mars. Maybe you know, maybe that actual
(56:23):
the actual pressing the button and launching the rocket into space,
that to me is actually less important than than having
that goal there, so that people have something that is
all right, I know what I want to achieve, How
is the best way to achieve it? Because that's what's
going to specifically focus a lot of innovation, And like
I said, we all stand to benefit from that in
(56:44):
ways that we cannot anticipate, and maybe the next commonplace
technology that revolutionizes some aspect of consumer life comes from
discoveries made in this project. That to me is that
means that there's a real value to this that goes
beyond Even if you don't care about science. If you
(57:05):
have you just want a better Panini press, it might
come from Mars. It could. I will say that anyone
listening to this, if they don't care about science, I
don't know how they found the show because uh boring, Yeah,
you were like, you know, I like to have a
way of punishing my kids when they act up in
the back of the car. So I'll turn you guys on.
(57:26):
But I mean, I think most of you guys are
probably really in twenty minutes of photonics, I think most
of you are really into into science, and therefore you
are you probably have a similar mind. You might you
might have even stronger opinions. You may be thinking, you know,
we need to have the money on the table to
send people up asap because X, Y and Z. If
(57:47):
you have those kind of opinions, if you have strong
thoughts one way or the other, maybe you think manned
space missions are ultimately not the way to go, and
you disagree with what Joe and I said, I really
want to hear what your thoughts are, so you can
share them with us on Facebook, Twitter, or on Google Plus.
Our handle at all three of those locations is f
W Thinking and We'll talk to you again really soon.
(58:15):
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
I visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by
Toyota Let's Go Places
Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Forward Thinking. Hey there, and welcome Forward Thinking, the podcast
that looks at the future and says the sunlight is
going into the mountain. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Joe McCormick,
(00:21):
and our other host, Lauren Vogelbaum is not with us
in the studio today, but she will be back next time.
So um, Joe. Yeah, when you are thinking about potential
places that you would like to vacation, does the Red
Planet ever make the list? Is that a euphemism for
Las Vegas? Know that that would that would be like
(00:44):
what happens on the Red Planet stays on the Red planet. Well,
you might be more right than you know. It might
be really hard for stuff to happen on the Red
planet that gets off the Red Planet. I'm sorry, We're
going to reference the movie Total Recall a lot of times. Yeah,
(01:04):
at least Joe will I will I will attempt to
keep a lid on it. Well, yeah, actually, I'm gonna
spend this whole podcast trying not to talk exclusively about
Total Recall, the one that takes place on Mars. I
don't know what happens in the new one, I mean
the old one, the good one. Yeah. Yeah, So we
wanted to talk about Mars simply because there's this big
(01:25):
anniversary that happened this year. Some guys went to uh,
pretty distant neighborhood called the Moon. Oh I've heard of that. Yeah.
The Polo landing happened forty five years ago, and as
part of the celebration for it, NASA published this this
little report saying what comes next, and one of the
things that really focused on was an attempt to actually
(01:48):
send human beings to Mars for the first time. In fact,
what they said is the first human being to set
foot on Mars is alive today. Yeah. Yeah, And so
the first ones who will set foot on Mars are
are currently walking around, which suggests that not only are
they alive there at least three. Yeah. What age do
you start walking? Oh? I started walking right right, Yeah.
(02:10):
I was right around thirteen when I started walking. Before that,
I was just carried everywhere like a pasha. But uh, yeah,
at this point, um, we're talking about you know, according
to NASA, assuming and and keep in mind that NASA
publishes this kind of stuff in part to get support
behind its its goals, right because it's it's government funded,
(02:30):
so it has to get support so that it gets
the funding necessary to do the science that we need
to do. Of course, a lot of people don't like science, yeah,
or they don't think it's like the idea of it,
but they don't like paying for it, right. That's when
it ultimately comes down to I'm not going to shy
away from it. That's you know, some people are like, yes,
I want us to go to Mars. No, I don't
(02:51):
want that to be you know, any of my responsibility. Uh,
And that's an issue, which that's part of what NASA
is trying to to to address, saying, look, this is
what this is a lofty goal and it's a goal
worth having. And we'll talk more about wine a little bit. Well,
let's uh take a minute before we get into NASA's
new announcement and just look back on the idea of
(03:15):
going to Mars, because this has been around for a while,
but obviously we've never been it. Only you know, it
wouldn't even take a full year to get there if
you time the trip, right, would be some several months,
probably eighteen months total from start to finish, like to
get their land, wait for the right time to be
(03:35):
able to come back. I'm not talking about a round trip,
I'm talking about to get there, to get there okay,
six months, Okay, Okay, that's not that bad. Why haven't
we been to Mars yet? And maybe this discussion will
help color our ideas about how we will get there
in the future. I would guess one of the big
(03:56):
things has got to be something we mentioned just a
second ago. Money. Yeah, cost, money is a huge one.
How how much would it actually cost to get to
Marston I'm sure some people of gas. Okay, so here,
here's the thing. We don't know, obviously, because we haven't
sent anyone to Mars. We can't say if we had
sent someone to Mars and then said, hey, can you
tell you up all your receipts and let's know how
much it was. Yeah, we stopped for coffee somewhere right
(04:18):
between the Moon and Mars, and that added you know,
if we ended up all the costs, then we could say, okay,
this is how much it actually cost us to send someone.
But not knowing means we have to make a lot
of estimations, and those estimations are all over the place,
right I mean seriously, all over the place. You're about
to hear an amazing space. So Mars one, this is
(04:40):
a this is a private venture. We talked about it
briefly in our episode about going to the Moon versus
going to Mars. We talked about the Mars one initiative.
We can offer some opinions about Mars one and a bit,
but I would say they have offered a somewhat low ball.
They have aggressively priced their trip to Mars. Okay, so
(05:01):
they say that to set the first of four, the
first four astronauts of a group of I think it's
like sixteen ultimately something like that. It's it's quite a
few that will eventually get there. But the the first
four to get to Mars and set them up, including
all the equipment and everything necessary to keep them alive,
(05:21):
would cost six billion dollars, and every subsequent mission of
four more astronauts joining the ones who are already there
would be four billion. Hm. That's pretty low when you
compare it to say, the nineteen eighty nine plan that
was proposed by NASA, which did not have a price
(05:41):
tag associated with the actual plan. They laid out what
the plan was and then other people based on what
the plan was, estimated what the cost would be. So
based upon NASA's plan, and I'll talk about what that
was in a little bit too. Uh they cost They
said that would cost about four hundred fifty billion dollars.
It is pretty pretty big range between six billion to
(06:03):
four hundred fifty billion. Yea, yeah, so, uh, there are
a lot of different reasons why those range of costs
are so different. First of all, nine nine technology very
different from current technology. Wait a minute, was that estimated
in nineteen eighty nine dollars? Also? Uh? Yeah, I imagine so,
so we'd have to figure in inflation, which I did
(06:23):
not do. But it may also be due to either optimism,
like blind optimism if you want to be you know,
really really kind of hardcore about this. Yeah, all right.
May just again, when I say aggressive, it may be unrealistic.
You might say that that the Mars one view may
be unrealistic, which is all dependent upon your knowledge of
(06:45):
everything that's going on and how how the world works. Um.
I don't feel fully qualified to say that at all.
I don't feel qualified to say it necessarily, but my
gut is that it is unrealistic. Um. Whereas you might
say that it was blind pessimism that cause people to
say the NASA plan would have cost four fifty billion dollars.
Will never know because that plan was never put into action,
(07:05):
so we can't really say one way or the other,
but it does sound like to be pretty expensive. So
there are other plans that fall between these two extremes,
like the Mars Direct Initiative, which has said that it's
planned to send people to Mars and come back, which
is important but only cost thirty billion. The reason why
I say it's important is that Mars One Initiative, Uh,
(07:26):
that's a one way ticket. You go to Mars, you're
part of a Martian colony, and you may or may
not ever have the opportunity to come back to Earth.
You go knowing that there's the overwhelming possibility that that's
where you spend the rest of your life. Uh. Because
that that's what the whole focus of the Mars One
Initiative is is to get people on Mars and to
(07:48):
create a sustainable colony. Uh, not to have a place
where people can go explore and then come back to Earth. Um.
That's one way to keep the cost down because you
don't have to worry about building a launch system. Cap
double of escaping Mars is gravity and taking people back
all the way to Earth. Okay, but another thing is
if you're talking about a mission that has a colony,
(08:09):
so it has a crew, it's an ongoing mission and
not just like you're sending a probe to do one job,
You're gonna be talking about potentially unforeseeable ends and unknown costs.
Right sure, yeah, because I mean unless you just say, okay,
we're calculating the cost to dump them on the surface
and then never spend any more money. Well, which I mean,
(08:33):
can you can do the math for all? Right, here's
the bare minimum of stuff we will need to accomplish this, right,
this is. This is the amount of fuel will need.
This is the amount of food and water and oxygen
will need. Uh you know, this is this is the
number of replacement parts we want in case there's something
that goes wrong. You can go ahead and factor in
all those things and try and come up with a budget.
(08:55):
But stuff happens, right, Things things happen that you did
not anticipate. Because that's the way the world works, or
in this case, that's the way the universe works. Uh,
so it means that you know, even if you come
up with a budget that seems realistic, you can never
really be sure until you've actually done the thing, right.
I mean, just like one practical scenario is imagine you
(09:18):
put the colony down, they're set up, and then a
very crucial piece of equipment of their's breaks and they
don't have a way to make another one. So you now,
and what if their lives depend on this, you need
to send another one to Mars. Keeping in mind that's
going to take months and months, because you remember that
six to eight months is all depended upon where Earth
and Mars are in their respective orbits, right, it could
(09:39):
be a lot longer if they're not in the optimal position. Yea.
So also you got to remember that what if, what
if it comes time for them to launch off of Mars,
But that also coincides with the time when Mars has
an enormous dust storm, which does happen on that planet,
which could extend their need to stay on the planet
for perhaps even up to you know, almost a year
(10:02):
in order for the orbits to come into the right
optimal position. Because that that orbit stuff that's really important,
You've got to have the right amount of fuel to
get to your destination. And if it turns out that, well,
we couldn't launch the launch window. Now there's no way
for us to make it back to Earth. If we
were to launch today. We have to wait until we're
(10:23):
back around to a point where the orbits are ideal
for us to do it. Again. That's another you know,
several months at the very least. So it's you know,
it's there are a lot of things you have to
take into consideration. Uh So, Yeah, it's one of those
things where again it's impossible to say, of course until
after we actually do it. Of course, the even bigger
(10:43):
thing than costs probably is the human risk. I mean,
there are very serious dangers in going to Mars. Yeah,
there's serious dangers just going into space, right, Like we're
talking about serious dangers that go that are involved if
you're just going into lower Earth orbit. And it's hard
for me to say just because that's further than I've
ever gone, but low Earth orbit is still relatively safe
(11:08):
compared to anything that that travels outside of the Earth's
gravitational field, which is very much a protective layer for us.
So you first have all the dangerous associated with your
average space launch. Those are all still at play, right,
and you could have a critical failure all those things,
but that, like you said, that could happen anytime you're
(11:28):
leaving the atmosphere. That's just your baseline. So that's you
already have that. And we've already determined that the risks
associated with space launches are are not so great as
to prevent us from actually doing them. We've just and
and again when we talk about risks, this is also
something that comes down to a a individual choice to
There are people out there who are willing to take
(11:51):
enormous risks if it means the chance to go to Mars,
and to them, they may they may look at something
that to another person and seems far too dangerous to undertake,
and they'll say, no, I want to do this. So
this is this also comes down to individual preference in
some respects. But there are some things that are just unavoidable.
Avoidable like cosmic rays, cosmic rays, solar radiation another one.
(12:15):
We here on Earth are are very lucky. And in fact,
you might say it's not that it's not luck, it's
the reason why we're here. Yeah, we evolved done Earth,
Earth protects us. Yes, uh, not sentiently necessarily, although there
are people who say otherwise, Uh, yeah, there, but it
has the Earth's atmosphere and it's magnetosphere both protect us
(12:38):
from radiation. The the atmosphere largely protects us from solar
radiation um, although also can help protect us from cosmic
rays as well. The magnetosphere mainly protects us against cosmic radiation.
Cosmic rays are really charged particles, right, They're not. They're
not raised in the sense of like a science fiction
ray gun. They are these charge particles that can really
(13:01):
do some pretty very fast. Yeah, and they have a
lot of energy in them, and they can seriously cause
some problems if say a person were to encounter them. Now,
of course, if you were to take a crew of
people and put them out of Earth's magnetosphere, say on
the way to Mars, suddenly they would be exposed. Right.
They no longer have the the beneficial protection of the
(13:23):
Earth's magnetosphere nor the atmosphere obviously, and so you have
to figure out, well, how do we shield them from
these these cosmic rays and the solar radiation that they
will encounter as they move through the Solar system. How
do we make sure that they are protected so that
they don't suffer terrible health effects, either in the short
(13:43):
term or in the long term. So how do how
do we prevent that as much as possible? And it
mostly means improvements in shielding, although there have been some
other suggestions as well. Okay, so I've got another one. Okay,
do you know how much exercise astronauts on the Internet
Sational Space Station have to get. It's it's a lot.
It's like, it's like more than an hour a day,
(14:04):
is No. They have to do tons of exercise, and
even then they don't get stronger like you do when
you exercise a lot. On that This is this is
preventive therapy. They're trying to slow the onset of the
deconditioning that naturally occurs when you live in a microgravity environment.
What is that deconditioning, Well, it's muscle loss and its
(14:28):
bone density loss, and those things are not nice, not
good for your body. Muscle loss is easier to deal
with than bone density loss, but neither are great. I
mean it means that if you if you read up
on astronauts and their experience, especially when they get those
that spend a lot of time on the I s S,
for example, the International Space Station. You'll hear about them
(14:49):
going through lots of physical therapy when they get back
in order to help offset any muscle loss or bone
density loss that they've had while they're they were on board. Now,
with bone dens that, you're kind of stuck, right, I mean,
you you can't really offset that that much. So that's
one thing you would have to do is plan for
how do you deal with uh putting the stuff off
(15:13):
or or or counteracting it as much as possible during
the duration of the trip. Also, keep in mind that
Martian gravity is thirty eight percent what Earth's gravity is,
so even once you get there, the problem isn't totally solved.
Yeah it's not, as it's not a severe thirty eight
percent is still pretty good. You probably wouldn't suffer well,
you certainly wouldn't suffer the same extent of bone loss
(15:34):
as you would if you spent the equivalent amount of
time in micro gravity. But it's still something to keep
in mind. And you know, it's a little harder to
um figure out how to exercise. I mean, what do
you do you pack exercise equipment that's uh three times
heavier than what it would be on Earth, so that
it would feel the equivalent amount of weight when you
lift it. You know, it's you can't really weighing down
(15:56):
the spacecraft in order to do that. It is probably
not the best idea because that increases the cost. Again,
another thing is, so if you have extended space travel
and you do wanna give give the astronauts something to
help keep them healthy on this strip, what are your options?
I mean, there aren't many. Basically, the only thing I
can imagine is creating an artificial gravity spacecraft. We've we've
(16:20):
discussed how you could do that, but we've also discussed
why that's difficult because it would just involve lots and
lots more building in space and shipping more and more
materials up there. So yeah, the Mars direct approach is uh,
you know, it's different from saying, let's let's make sure
the astronauts have X amount of time per day to
exercise so that they can counteract this these effects. And
(16:42):
when they were actually when they would be traveling from
Earth to Mars, they would, according to that approach, be
in a rotating spacecraft. It would it would simulate gravity,
and then that's how they would avoid muscle loss and
bone density loss. Well, that does seem ideal for astronaut health.
But my question is that seems yet again like that's
(17:03):
going to be massively increasing your costs. And they were
talking about you offset that specifically using the the the
launch vehicle as a counterweight, and it's so okay. So
instead of like a tourist or wheel, it would be
like a tethered right, so you'd have a floor inside
your spacecraft and then that would be spinning opposite a
(17:26):
counterweight through a tether, yes, yes, and then you would
you would end up severing that connection once you got
to Mars, because really it's it's just acting as a
counterweight in the first place. That makes sense. So it's
an interesting approach. But you know, again, that's that's just
one initiative. That's the one that was the thirty billion
dollar approach. Um. That one was proposed by a person
(17:46):
who used to work with NASA and is you know
now kind of the head uh evangelist for this Mars
direct initiative. Um. But we'll talk a little more about
that in a bit. Also, the other thing that's dangerous
about trip to Mars, and we're just Right now, we're
just talking about the trip to Mars. We're not talking
about how dangerous it will be once you get there. Um,
(18:09):
the last bit is, uh, the actual arrival at Mars
pretty dangerous because it's hard to land something on Mars um,
largely because Martian atmosphere is very, very thin. Yeah, there's
not a lot to it. So uh, using a parachute
will only slow you down so much you would think, oh,
that's only the gravity, How hard could it be? Well,
(18:31):
it's pretty you know, you're traveling at an incredible speed.
You have to slow yourself down. Uh, and the parachute
is not going to slow you down enough to have
necessarily a safe landing with astronauts on board. Now, if
I recall, I think when they landed the Curiosity rover,
it had to have multiple different stages of deceleration in
the atmosphere. Right, it had I'm just going off memory.
(18:52):
I think it had parachutes and it had retrorockets. That's right. Yeah,
First it would it positioned itself so that the large
surface area was facing the ground, which helps slow it down. Yeah,
it had a parachute that helps slow it down a
little more. And then it used thrusters to counteract the
falling and so it could lower itself down easily. And
(19:15):
keep in mind, all of that was accomplished with pre programming,
because it was fourteen minutes before we knew whether or
not it worked, So it had been on the ground
for fourteen minutes before we even knew that it managed
to to land on Mars safely. Now, of course, with
a human manned trip to Mars, that's not an issue.
(19:36):
You would actually have people there who could uh interact
with whatever uh spacecraft they had, so if they needed
to make adjustments on the fly, they could, they wouldn't
have to wait for commands back from Earth to do so.
So there's that. But I mean, we've already managed to
do it with an you know, a semi autonomous vehicle. Uh,
(19:57):
So that is support for a Mars mission. Saying well,
we we've accomplished what most people would say was, I
think freaking crazy is an appropriate phrase. We managed to
do it already, So that's that's kind of a check
in the positive column. Right, Okay, But so once we
(20:17):
get the astronauts to the planet, then everything is pretty easy, right, No,
not at all? Nohere then atmosphere not to mention, it's
not oxygen richly. You can't breathe it anyway. It's carbon
dioxide rich not good for us, not at all. You
get big, like you were talking about earlier big dust
storms on Mars, so you can have gigantic dust storms
(20:39):
that cover the whole planet. Not to mention, some of
that dust on Mars is now believed to be highly
toxic to humans. Like you wouldn't want to be You
wouldn't want to get it stuck anywhere in your suit
and bring it into the habitat. Yeah, that dust can
have a lot of perchlorates and that which can can
be very toxic. Um. You know, they were talking about
stuff that has chlorine in it. Chlorine is a is
(21:01):
a is toxic to humans. So yeah, anything where you'd
be tracking that dustin or anything that could end up
being uh uh, you know, not completely secure against it
could end up creating severe health hazards. Mars is super
cold to be kind of like living in Antarctica, yeah,
kind of. So the temperatures on Mars very depending upon
(21:23):
where you are, kind of like on Earth. Yeah, the
average temperature is about minus eighty fahrenheit, which is about
minus sixty celsius, which is anyone who has been out
on even a mildly cold day would say, wow, that's
gotta be you know, that's gonna be almost instant death.
That's so cold. Uh that. But again it varies. So
(21:44):
if you're at the equator at noon, Mars might reach
a high of about seventy degrees fahrenheit twenty celsius, which is,
that's nice. That's a nice day. I would love that.
But at the polls the low is about minus two
hundred twenty five fahrenheit or minus one fifty three elsius.
Not a good day. So don't go to the poles.
Don't go to the poles. Yeah. So anyway, you've got
(22:05):
these extreme temperatures that you'd have to deal with, uh
in some way. You'd have to figure out how do
we make sure that the people who are going to
Mars are going to be able to endure this. Another
thing is Mars doesn't protect you from space the way
Earth does. Mars wants you to die. Things like cosmic
radiation and solar radiation both can be more severe on
(22:27):
the surface of Mars. You don't have the atmosphere really
to protect you, not not a strong one, and you
don't have a strong magnetic field protect you, so you
need to provide additional layers of protection. You'd either need
to dig down under the ground and build underground habitats
to shield yourself or have some kind of In any case,
this is going to be greatly adding to the mission
costs and the different kind of things you're gonna have
(22:48):
to do. It's going to make it a lot harder.
You're either you're either doing some very primitive terraforming in
the sense of digging a hole, or you have to
factor that into your habitats, you know, features like the
actual material has to be good at shielding against cosmic
radiation and solar radiation. Um. Yeah, we already talked about
(23:09):
the gravity, so that could also potentially be an issue,
and we talked about the soil. So yeah, as it
as it turns out, getting to Mars and staying on
Mars really some big challenges. They're not necessarily, you know, insurmountable,
but certainly things that you have to keep in mind. Yeah.
One of the other things I want to say is, Okay,
so why do we want to go to Mars. I
(23:32):
would say that the main reasons are, well, I guess
maybe two main reasons. One is just purely emotional. It's
just the emotional experience of exploration. It's exciting, it's inspiring
to humans. But it's really something that's fundamental to humans.
I mean, we've you see it in the history of Earth, right,
just just exploring the different places on Earth, and then
(23:54):
of course you just extend that outward. Human curiosity is
not bound just to our planet. Yeah. The other ing
is of course science, to do scientific research, planetary science
research on Mars, which could potentially tell us a whole
lot about all kinds of things about you know, could
give us insights into, uh, into how planets are formed,
(24:14):
how Mars is different from Earth, what happened to the
Martian atmosphere, could give us ideas about astrobiology, you know,
all kinds of different things that we could learn from Mars.
But unmanned rovers are doing a pretty good job so
far doing planetary science on Mars. So I wonder what
are the added benefits that having humans on site will provide. Yeah, um, well,
(24:40):
I want to add a third thing to your list,
on top of science and on top of inspiration, which
is technology, which is that you know, sometimes these these
challenges to meet these challenges means that we develop new technology,
new approaches to various problems. I guess I would have
lumped that in with inspiration in a weird and that
(25:00):
just that it gives us an impetus to to go
further right, and it does mean that we can stand
to benefit in in indirect ways to the efforts to
get to Mars. I mean the if you look at
a list of inventions that were either created during or
or popularized by the Space Race, there's a lot that
(25:25):
end up being really fundamental to the way we rely
on technology today. In fact, the development of the transistor
in large part has UH the Space Race to thank
for it, because there was a there was a strong
incentive to continue to develop to miniaturize electronics that you
could create these space capsules that could keep people alive.
So so another thing that you know, another potential benefit
(25:47):
down the road to getting to Mars is uh technology.
We'll talk more about the various benefits at the end too,
But anyway, so why would you want to go human
versus rover? One thing is that humans can a vice.
That's totally true, and I remember I wrote about that
in a video episode. We did a while back about
the future of space exploration should it be entirely unmanned,
(26:10):
And I think there is a big role for unmanned
exploration because there are a lot of places humans just
can't shouldn't go, it's just too dangerous. Where you can
pair robot and humans together so that the humans can
do things that humans are really well suited for, and
the robots can do the stuff that humans are not
really well suited exactly. But the one I'd say, the
(26:33):
main thing that I I think humans can do that
robots can't do is figure out what to do in
a situation where you've been presented with unforeseen circumstances. I mean,
a robot can very easily get stuck. It just doesn't
know how, it doesn't know how to get out of
the problem that faces it, and and it may be
(26:56):
a long time before someone back on Earth is able
to one ascertain what the problem actually is and to
come up with a potential solution, and then three enact
that solution, and then four evaluate said solution to see
if it actually solved the problem. So you're talking about
potentially something that could take days depending upon what the
(27:18):
nature of the problem is, or sometimes it could just completely, um,
you know, close the door on an entire project if
the problem is is severe enough for the robot. But
humans are really good at recognizing situations and either overcoming
them or working their way around them so that it's
not a problem in the first place. Right. So one
(27:39):
big example in this would go back to something we
talked about a minute ago, like, so, what if you're
on Mars and a very crucial piece of equipment breaks,
what do you do? Robots so far are just not
very good at fixing things. Fixing what what is it
about the concept of xing that it's just an inherently
(28:02):
human task to mend or repair, to you know, see
how a thing should be and put it back in
that state, right, or even just jerry rigging something to
do the same function or building a replacement that's also
very human. Hard for robot to do something like that
maybe impossible. And when you're on Mars, like we were
talking about, you may not even have the option of
(28:24):
getting sent a new one. It might be that it
would be a year before it gets there, and if
you don't have one by next week, you're going to
be dead. Right now. There are times when when robots
have been able to quote unquote improvise, but that's all
due to the direction of the people back on Earth
right where something did not work the way it was anticipated,
and so uh we had to you know, essentially switched
(28:47):
to Plan B. But that kind of improvisation takes lots
of time and in the meantimes, you know, the situation
can change, whereas humans can do that on the fly.
So that's a big one. Mobility obviously a big difference.
You know, depending upon how you've designed the robot, it
may be very good at going across certain terrain and
terrible ago at encountering anything else. So humans are really versatile.
(29:11):
We can we can deal with all types of terrain. Uh,
the regions that we would probably visit on Mars are
somewhat limited in the types of terrain that we would encounter.
We wouldn't necessarily be going to the polls um. So
we're pretty good at again, adapting to that situation and
and conquering it. So that's another reason why humans would
be a good choice because they could. That means that
(29:33):
we could do a lot more science in the same
amount of time as a robot could. You know, we're
able to adapt if we see something interesting on our
way from point A to point B, we can go
out of our way really quickly and check it out
or even collect samples that kind of thing, and then
continue on our way. That's a lot easier for us
(29:53):
than it is for a robot um. Also, any human
human visit to Mars would likely take some time, and
this is largely in part because of that that situation
we're talking about with the various orbital paths of Earth
and Mars. When they are approaching one another, that's when
you ideally want to launch from one to get to
(30:15):
thegether because it will take the least amount of time
um if there. If they are moving away from each other,
then as you know as you're traveling that your destination
is actually moving away from you, so you have to
counteract that, which means you have to spend more energy
to get there and it's going to take you more time.
So any visit to Mars is likely going to take
a long time, just because in the in the duration
(30:37):
of going from Earth to Mars, the position of the
planet's change, and by the time you land on Mars
is no longer ideal for you to turn around and
go back to Earth, you have to wait, So any
visit to Mars is going to take a long time.
If you're trying to be really conservative with fuel and
all that kind of stuff, that means that you're gonna
be spending more time on the service of Mars than
your average rover project is to outlast. They often exceed projections,
(31:08):
and I think part of that is just being conservative
with projections so that way, should the worst happen, it's
not as it's not as a big a blow. Like
if you have very specific parameters and you get that
approved for your project and then you go beyond it,
everyone's happy. If you set very specific parameters and you
don't make those, everyone gets upset. So you want to
be conservative with what you can achieve and hope that
(31:31):
the situation is such that you can continue to operate
long after the planned into the project has coming on um.
But with humans, you know, we would be stuck there essentially,
is what what it really boils down to, and it
would mean that we'll be able to do a lot
more science in that time. Yeah, okay, so let's say
that there is a good benefit to taking humans to Mars.
(31:52):
As we've just established that there may very well be
who's talking about going these days. We've mentioned Mars one,
maybe we should focus on them for a bit. Okay, sure,
so Mars one this is like a you know, I
don't I want to be fair, I want to be objective,
I don't want to be snarky. That being said, Mars
one thing makes me think of a circus act. It's
(32:15):
like if P. T. Barnum were we're arranging a trip
to Mars. That's that's the implication I get. Maybe I'm
just too cynical, It's it's quite possible. But the premise
behind Mars one is is got some showmanship behind it. Yeah,
I will say that they're having read a lot of
their materials, they sound extremely optimistic in a way that
(32:38):
slightly confuses me. So so then again, I mean, we're
always trying to encourage scientific ventures and optimism on this show.
I mean, we don't want to throw a wet blanket
on anybody and say don't try. But the best thing,
the best thing we can say here is that even
if Mars one does not ultimately succeed in their endeavor,
they will at least in some way a contribute to
(33:02):
our understanding of the difficulty of getting the Mars right.
So no matter what, we're gonna learn something. Now, what
we learned might not be, you know, how to get
to Mars. It might be hell not to get to Mars.
But let's hope that maybe they've got this planned out
way better than we can anticipate. Here's the pitch, though, Yeah,
let's bracket all the wet blankets stuff right now. Try
not to be a bummer. Just what are they talking about.
(33:24):
The pitch is they want to create a permanent colony
on the service of Mars, meaning that there's no necessary
plan to get people back, So anyone who wants to
be part of this has to be prepared that this is,
you know, potentially a one way ticket. Uh. They have
crowd funded and crowd sourced a lot, so they they're
essentially kind of holding auditions to be astronauts that would
(33:47):
participate in this, narrowing it down to a certain pool.
And then here's where the showman thing comes in. They
want to have essentially a reality television show that has
them settle on the final list of astronauts who will
be attempting this um, including alternates in case one of
the top picks is not able to make it this. Yeah,
(34:10):
they also want to have essentially like a reality television
experience while the astronauts are in training and preparing for
what they would eventually be doing UM, and that they
would raise money through various means like trying to get
people to invest, crowdfunding, selling merchandise, and this television series
(34:32):
would also be part of the way that they would
plan to finance the trip. Keeping in mind, like I
said at the top of the show there, their estimation
of the cost is six billion dollars for those first four.
They do plan on doing this in stages, so it's
not like they would immediately launch four people into space
and say good luck. UM. The first stage would involve
(34:53):
actually doing some demonstration missions to make sure that they
could get to Mars safely, that they would be able
to set up a communication satellite to help facilitate communication
between the colony and back here on Earth. But in general,
the plan is to send human beings to Mars by
they would actually land in so the year would change
(35:15):
over here on Earth between when they launched him when
they landed on Mars, and then the six you would
have a second group before joining the first before that
you would actually send up several missions where rovers would
land on the surface of Mars. You would also send
up cargo, including the habitats that people would be living
in the rovers. Their responsibility would be to prepare the
(35:37):
landing site, really preparing the habitat site, so that astronauts
would have a place to kind of check in, you know,
after their long road trip. They have their own little
Mars motel, the check in UH. Like Joe was saying,
this is the approach where you would the rovers would
theoretically dig UH and bury these habitats so that the
(35:57):
soil would provide the protection against solar radiation and cosmic radiation,
so that the UH, the astronauts would have a safe
place to stay in between doing science out on the
surface or working within the context of the habitats. They
would have to grow their own food UM, so there
would be they would be bringing plants along with them
to UH to grow in one of those habitats. The
(36:18):
food the plants they grow would also help provide some
of the oxygen they would need, although they would have
to generate more oxygen by extracting UH possibly water from
the soil of Mars and then using electrolysis to separate
that out into hydrogen and oxygen. Ah. Yeah, there are
a lot of things you have to take into consideration.
I mean, there are a lot of of steps to this.
(36:40):
I mean a lot of things that have to happen
for this to work. Um. So they also have to
produce you know, not just the water, but the oxygen,
the food. Uh, they would end up being there forever probably,
I mean, unless Mars one came up with a plan
for creating a return ticket. See that's super tricky because
not only do you have to have something that can
(37:00):
get all the way to Mars Land safely, it then
has to be able to launch back off of Mars
and come back to Earth. Um. Now, some of the
other plans involve ways of generating fuel while on Mars,
which helped get around that because otherwise you just have
to carry twice as much fuel. Well not twice as much,
but you get what I mean. You have to carry
enough fuel to get two Mars and then you have
(37:22):
to have enough left over to get back. So it's really,
like you said, really ambitious, really aggressive, really optimistic, and
uh uh, you know, I don't know what what people want.
NASA have to say about this. I don't know what
their opinions are of this particular initiative, but based upon
the plans I've seen, which are much more kind of
(37:44):
methodical and um, you know, they're they're looking further ahead
than as the first date to send people to Mars.
You know, I don't want to put words in their mouths,
but I would imagine that most of them feel like
it is a very aggressive and very optimistic approach. Some
might say, uh, some might go so far as to
say unrealistic. That's that's the way I feel about it.
(38:06):
It just seems like, based upon what we know of
the challenges of getting there and landing and making sure
people are safe. I mean, we're assuming here that the
approach will actually work and that everyone would be alive
and and maintain living conditions on Mars. It's I mean,
that's a that's an enormous endeavor. So, but they're They're
(38:27):
not the only ones, right. There have been other private proposals.
There's actually one from Dennis Tito, right, yeah, Inspiration Mars Foundation,
which Dennis Tito has been to space. Right he was
was he the first space tourist. I don't know if
he was the first one. But he was a key
was let me look it up right here, right Well,
I'll talk about what he was doing while you look
that up. So yeah, he talked about According to glance
(38:51):
at Google results, he was the first space tourist. There
we go. He has proposed a manned fly by of Mars,
originally set for two thousand eighteen because as again you're
talking about when Earth and Mars are are aligned well
enough to to do this with the least amount of fuel. UM.
Now it's been adjusted to one, which would be the
next time that this would work. It would be a
five and one day mission for two crew members, a
(39:15):
man and a woman aboard a modified Ryan spacecraft. Uh.
It would just orbit Mars and then come back. It
wouldn't land on the surface of Mars, so fighting here
in one days to go all the way out and
all the way back. UM. And originally he had hoped
to raise this money through philanthropic efforts to have people
donate money to it. UM I think I think one
(39:36):
of the costs they estimated was around two billion. But
again they're not talking about landing on the planet. They're
just talking about flying by and coming back. So those
costs are largely in the stuff you have to have
in the capsule keep everybody alive, and the fuel costs obviously. Um.
But he went to look to Congress to get additional funding.
(39:57):
But that's when the government said, UM, yeah, no, we
will let you have access to all the experts that
we know endlessly. You can talk your head off to him,
but we're not going to sign a check. We're not
gonna give you any money. And he said that he
was not willing to um to go ahead with this,
(40:20):
to ask for money from more investors until there was
an official mission on the books, like there was like
this is going to happen, this is the date of
the launch, etcetera. But on the flip side, no one
wants to put a mission on the books if it
hasn't been funded already. So you're in a catch twenty two, right,
you can't he's not gonna ask for He says, I
don't want to ask people for money for something that
(40:42):
may not ever happen, because no one ever gives me
to go ahead. Meanwhile, they're saying, well, we can't give
you the go ahead until you can prove you can
pay for it. So it's it's kind of this, this
sort of stalemate that we're in right now. Then there's
the boldly Go Institute. Obviously, so they put the split
infinitive right in the name, paying tribute to Star Wars.
(41:05):
I guess, except no, it wouldn't be split. It's like
a severed infinitive with no too, and it obviously wouldn't
be Star Wars at a Star Trek. That was a test.
Oh I didn't even pick up. No, that's fine, I'm
sure I did that specifically just to tweak listeners. I
do know the difference. My parents wrote books for Star Trek,
so um. Anyway, this nonprofit has a plan to send
(41:25):
a spacecraft in an orbit around Mars, and this case
it would do be another kind of fly by mission,
but it would also scoop up some of the dust
from Mars atmosphere and return to Earth. Because so far,
the stuff we have studied from Mars, it's all been
rovers that have analyze the stuff on the surface and
then send the data back to us. Right, it's not
(41:47):
like we've got Martian rocks that have been collected and
brought back. We haven't brought anything back. This would be
a change to that. So that's kind of cool. Uh.
The type of mission would be a sample collection for
investigation of Mars, also known as skim because they're skimming
the atmosphere. That's cute, But it's skim with the CEA.
(42:09):
It's kind of like scum or or sim Okay, okay, okay,
private ventures. We've talked about them. What's the deal with NASA?
What are they saying these days? Everybody wants to know. Well, first,
let's let's look back at the plan, the one that
supposedly would have cost four hundred fifty billion dollars, not
(42:30):
according to NASA itself. Right, Well, NASA didn't put a
budget to it. They were saying this is what they
this is what the proposed plan is. They didn't go
so far as to say here's how much it would
cost the Space Exploration initiative. It laid out an incredible plan,
like it kind of makes Mars one seem quaint in comparison. Um. So,
their plan was to build a thousand ton Mega ship
(42:54):
in orbit at the International Space Station. Thousand tons and
it is capable of carrying a thousand tons of cargo,
so enormous, right, talking like like we've talked about per
pound launch costs before which in the past, Well, in
this case they're talking about building it, still have to
launch it. Yeah, you'd have to. You'd have to launch
all the materials. But it has to be it has
to be capable of carrying a thousand tons. It doesn't
(43:15):
itself have to weigh a thousand tons. You have to
be misunderstood, you, Yeah, it's the the old way of
describing ships, like it's a sixty ton frigate. Well, that
would mean it could carry cargo up to sixty tons,
not that itself weighed sixty tons. Anyway, it would um
it would be this enormous vessel that would take astronauts
(43:36):
to Mars. It would land on the surface. Part of
that vessel would be able to take off back from
the surface of Mars to head back towards Earth. The
final part of the plan was using Venus to slingshot
around Venus, because it would actually be closer to get
to Venus at that point than back to Mars. Slingshot
around Venus to get to that final leg back to
(43:59):
Earth and this land. Yeah, that's total Star trek right
uh at Star Trek four voyage home. Anyway, that was
kind of once once you've got people estimating, like, well,
based upon the the enormity of this plan, it would
cost you four billion dollars whatever, even if that were
just a number pulled out of the air. Yeah, well Congress.
(44:21):
Congress's reaction was essentially saying that's way too expensive and
we're not gonna fund any of it. So there's some
people who have said that this initiative actually caused more
harm than good, because what essentially did was tell politicians, hey,
this is going to be so expensive that you're never
going to get the approval for it, and they said, well,
we just won't support it at all of them. So
it makes it harder to sell it in the future
(44:42):
because you've already presented like this enormous, this enormous package,
and they've said, no, we can't. You know, we've already
established we're not gonna pay for that. Couldn't they just
sell this under the guys of starting a war on Mars?
Well again, you know, it's hard to it's hard to
to mention it, it's hard to promise things that haven't
(45:02):
been developed yet. But it is true that any time
we were to if we were to take that plan,
there's so much that we would have had to advance
in order to make it possible that there would have
been enormous benefits in multiple industries. But it's hard to
to say these things that don't yet exist and we
cannot anticipate are totally going to be due to this project,
(45:23):
and therefore it's going to pay for itself. That's that's
like it's too nebulous, right, you can't really sell that. Yeah, okay,
So what's the new plan? Much more methodical? Uh. In fact,
if you were to read the release that's on NASA's
website that's all about traveling to Mars, it really focuses
most on asteroids. Going to asteroids. First step, it is
(45:44):
the first step part of this would be capturing and
moving an asteroids. So actually relocating an asteroid and uh,
either an asteroid or part of an asteroid. Some asteroid
mining companies have already talked about this. Actually, instead of
just going to an asteroid where we find it orbit
and then coming back with the materials, they've talked about
finding a real small one just bringing it straight to
(46:05):
Earth to maybe orbit the Moon or orbit the Earth.
And in fact, this is what NASA proposes, is to
bring the asteroid into a lunar orbit so it orbits
the Moon. And this would provide a testing ground for
a lot of approaches and technologies that would be necessary
for us to send people to Mars and have them
be safe so they in order for us to be
(46:26):
able to one capture the asteroid to move it, we
would need to help develop more approaches for things like propulsion.
A big development would be in solar electron propulsion. That's
essentially an ion drive. It uses solar energy to convert
into electricity to generate ions. It emits these ions and
(46:47):
that's what creates the thrust. So it's a low power thrust.
It doesn't it's not like it gives you the sudden zoom.
You're not going to be thrust back into your seat,
you know, light speed style or or ludicrous speed style,
depending upon your sci Fi of choice. But it's the
kind that can continuously allow you to accelerate in the
the wonderful uh medium of space. And it also is
(47:12):
a low energy propulsion system. It means you wouldn't have
to carry as much fuel. Um, you know, you'd have
to have enough to do certain maneuvers, and you'd have
to have enough to you know, launch a vehicle into space,
but then once you're in space, you wouldn't need tons
of fuel to get around. You can use this too
in theory any way to get around. So it would
require developments in that. It would require developments improvements in
(47:34):
space suit technology um as well as the capsule technology,
because the environment of lunar orbit is different than just
if you're in low Earth orbit. You're getting to the
extremes of the magnetosphere. You are more susceptible to things
like solar radiation and cosmic radiation, so you have to
build that stuff into making this project work. So essentially
(47:56):
what they're saying is we want to go to Mars.
The first step to going to Mars is manipulating these asteroids,
which could be a huge benefit to us for multiple reasons,
and what we learn as we do that will help
us get on get the next step, which is to
go to Mars. So if we sell this idea of
the asteroid first, that step one, yeah, because it is
(48:20):
very methodical, right, It's instead of just saying we want
to go to Mars and here's what's going to take
to get there, it's saying we want to be able
to manipulate asteroids. This has enormous potential benefits for us
in the future, including being able to get a resources
that we just can't get here on Earth easily, So
that's an easier sell. And then once you have established
all that and say, hey, look at all the stuff
(48:41):
we learned, look at all the technology we developed as
a as a result of having this goal. This is
stuff we can apply to going to Mars, then you
can sell that idea. So it is interesting that you know,
there's this whole thing about let's go to Mars, and
then as you read it, it's all about asteroids. A
little on there about Mars itself, because I think NASA
(49:04):
has has I think they're a little wary of trying
to make too big a goal too quickly and and
make it seem like it's it's unreachable, where they say, no,
it's totally reachable, but we have to concentrate on the
specific steps so that way we can get to our destination. Well,
I think space exploration is kind of like what the
(49:29):
mayor of Amity says in the movie Jaws. He says, no, no, no,
he says, you know, you say Barracuda. Everybody says what
you say, shark, then you've got a panic on your hands.
And it's right. I think the same thing is sort
of true in space. This asteroid plan to me sounds
(49:49):
very smart, very useful. But if you say asteroid, everybody
says huh what, But you say Mars, then they know
what you're talking about. The public becomes much more susceptible
to your pitch. It's interesting. So in one sense, you're saying, like,
if we say this, if we frame this as this
is our our roadmap to Mars, you get and it
(50:11):
actually is part of the I'm not saying it's like
a diversion. Well, I just mean it's interesting because if
you present it to the public as this is our
roadmap to Mars, the public is, oh, that's really cool.
If you present it to the to the government saying,
look at this practical use of technology that could benefit
us in the future, Oh and we could also get
to Mars, and it's like it's it's like you're using
the same strategy, but you're framing it in two different
(50:33):
ways depending upon your audience, right, which is kind of interesting.
It's it's very savvy actually, um, anyway, it's gonna mean
that we're going to see lots of different improvements, not
just in technology, but in approaches, things like how do
we develop stuff that is uh, maintainable and reparable out
in space by astronauts because a lot of the stuff
(50:56):
that exists right now, you know, International Space Station. Obviously
you have to stuff that's reparable by astronauts because you
can't bring that back to Earth to fix it. But
things like space suits haven't really changed that much over
the decades. So in order to repair a space suit,
you generally have to bring it back. Then you have
experts who maintain it or do repairs or whatever, and
then it can be sent back up into space. Obviously,
(51:19):
for something that's a long term mission, you know we're
talking about maybe uh, if you're talking about landing and
spending time there and coming back, it might be nine days.
That's you know, that's a long time to spend out there.
You obviously need to have equipment that can be maintained
and repaired by people when it needs to be. You know,
(51:40):
you can't just say, well, I guess I'll just live
with that for two and a half years. Who needs oxygen?
You know, obviously you need to have ways of addressing that.
And it's also true that whatever tech they develop for
this kind of stuff will ultimately need to be useful
on Mars, because the stuff that's useful in space is
not necessarily ideally suited for what's gonna what they're gonna
(52:02):
encounter on Mars. Right, So what your encounter in micro
gravity is different than what you encounter in a thirty
eight percent Earth's gravity environment. So these are a lot
of things that they have to address and challenges they
have to meet in order for a NASA trip to
Mars to be feasible. So to me, it's really interesting,
(52:24):
like they may even incorporate some elements of plans like
Mars Direct. It's not like a a project to send
people to Mars independent of NASA. It's more of a
proposal saying, here is a way that we could do
this that would be UH, that would not be economically unfeasible,
and would address a lot of the issues that UH
(52:46):
that are that come up as concerns in a trip
to Mars. So it may be that the future real
plan to go to Mars from NASA incorporates a lot
of those elements. Totally, We'll have to see, so The
cool thing is there are tons of resources online if
you want to read all about NASA's plans about Mars,
(53:09):
the incredibly thorough research that's been done to the feasibility
of a MANDA Mars mission. There there are huge documents online.
We looked at several of them. There are more than
a hundred pages long for several of these that are
very interesting, uh, extremely thorough. There also, the Mars Direct
Initiative has a great website where you can learn all
about the proposed plan. Mars One has a website that
(53:33):
uh will either fill you with optimism or leave you
scratching your head, like like it does with with us. Uh.
So uh, There's there's lots of stuff online where you
can read more about this. But ultimately, I think, um,
I think when it comes down to it is the
question of is it is it in fact a good
idea to pursue the goal of sending people to Mars. Joe,
(53:54):
what is your take? I wouldn't want to rush to it,
especially not if you can't find a good way to
make it safe for multiple reason. I mean, number one, obviously,
you just don't want people dying on Mars or on
the way to Mars. I mean, that's horrible, But even
apart from that tragedy in itself, I can see that
(54:15):
being a blow to exploration in the future. Um, if
you have a tragedy on the first major mission to Mars,
I can see public support for continued exploration being much lower. Sure.
I mean, we we saw that with previous tragedies in
the space industry, where things projects get get shelved indefinitely,
(54:37):
sometimes to the point where they're never brought back because
in the duration between the tragedy and when everything was
given the all clear, it lost the support it needed
to continue. Yeah. So I am very in favor of
sending people to Mars, but I think it's something that
we need to be very sure we can do before
(54:57):
we try to do it. Um, I'm not as I guess,
maybe I'm not as bullish on this as I am
about a lot of things on space exploration, just because
of that problem, like the fact that we need to
be very careful and and the asteroid thing could actually
teach us a lot there. Yes, I see, I think, Um,
(55:18):
I feel that it would be great to really pursue
the goal of landing humans on Mars. Uh because the
the benefits we stand to gain in advances in science
and technology, as well as inspiring future generations to go
into those fields, you know, various fields like engineering, science, whatever.
(55:40):
I think that would be incredibly beneficial to us as
a whole, even if we ultimately came to the decision
that we're putting off an actual man mission to Mars
because we just don't we don't have the infrastructure in
place to make it a safe uh project, or at
least within the excel upable levels of risk. I think
(56:03):
that just having it as a goal for something to
strive for will provide a lot of incentive to people
to innovate in various ways. And so for me, I
think it's incredibly important that we at least attempt to
send people to Mars. Maybe you know, maybe that actual
(56:23):
the actual pressing the button and launching the rocket into space,
that to me is actually less important than than having
that goal there, so that people have something that is
all right, I know what I want to achieve, How
is the best way to achieve it? Because that's what's
going to specifically focus a lot of innovation, And like
I said, we all stand to benefit from that in
(56:44):
ways that we cannot anticipate, and maybe the next commonplace
technology that revolutionizes some aspect of consumer life comes from
discoveries made in this project. That to me is that
means that there's a real value to this that goes
beyond Even if you don't care about science. If you
(57:05):
have you just want a better Panini press, it might
come from Mars. It could. I will say that anyone
listening to this, if they don't care about science, I
don't know how they found the show because uh boring, Yeah,
you were like, you know, I like to have a
way of punishing my kids when they act up in
the back of the car. So I'll turn you guys on.
(57:26):
But I mean, I think most of you guys are
probably really in twenty minutes of photonics, I think most
of you are really into into science, and therefore you
are you probably have a similar mind. You might you
might have even stronger opinions. You may be thinking, you know,
we need to have the money on the table to
send people up asap because X, Y and Z. If
(57:47):
you have those kind of opinions, if you have strong
thoughts one way or the other, maybe you think manned
space missions are ultimately not the way to go, and
you disagree with what Joe and I said, I really
want to hear what your thoughts are, so you can
share them with us on Facebook, Twitter, or on Google Plus.
Our handle at all three of those locations is f
W Thinking and We'll talk to you again really soon.
(58:15):
For more on this topic in the future of technology,
I visit forward thinking dot Com, brought to you by
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