This is Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Well more than half a century after Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon, another space race is definitely heating up. We talk about it all the time. This time it's about the promising new frontier for us Earthlings.
That's you and me. Mars is it? I do know? Okay, so NASA's got a rover up there. Elon Musk is trying to get SpaceX's starship Rocket up to snuff with the ultimate goal of getting people to Mars. But Carol, the question remains, is it actually a good idea for us even to be thinking about going to Mars and colonizing space?
I don't know, Earth Is, you know, having a rough time so we might need another place to live anyway. This is the question of our next guest, who set out to answer it in her new book. Kelly Wienersmith is the co author of City on Mars, Can we Settle Space? Should we settle Space? And have we really thought this through? She wrote this book with her husband, Zach, and she joins us on Zoom From Charlotte's Ville, Virginia. Kelly It's a subject we love to talk about. Elon
Musk loves to talk about it so many people. I'm the daughter of a rocket scientist. I love talking about this stuff. Tell us about this book. What you set out to do with your husband, Zach.
Well, So, after writing our first book together, we thought that space settlements might be a near term possibility, something that might happen in our lifetimes, and so we set out to write the guide for what the next couple decades are going to be like as we become a multiplanetary species. And after four years of research, we essentially determined that we are not ready to take this on yet. We don't know enough about a lot of different topics.
I'm happy to get into them, and that actually depression to it. There could be a lot of problems.
What do you okay, So talk to me about the idea, like the timeframes that you're thinking of of here, because I mean, should we actually be thinking about colonizing Mars within our life?
And can we just say, for those of you watching on streaming and YouTube, we're kind of loving your background. Is that Mars in the background? I'm not quite sure.
No, No, that's Earth. Those are the lights from Earth. So sorry, your question was, should we oh in our lifetimes? You know, I think that if it happens in our lifetimes, No, that's okay. If it happens in our lifetimes, I think that might be a problem. So, for example, we don't know nearly enough about how space impacts the human body. It turns out data from the International Space Station don't tell us what we need to know about humans living
on Mars. So I think if we sent them there there could be a lot of ethical problems, especially if they started making families and you know, exposing children to these environments that we don't understand very well sounds like a problem. And as you mentioned, there might be a race with China starting.
Okay, So hm, let's think about some of the challenges that we're not talking about, just like you know, logistical things like actually having families. We're talking about things that are pretty serious, like okay, once you get there, how do you get back?
Yeah, we're talking about poof food and closing the loose.
Yeah you said it, Carol, That's what I really wanted to get too. Okay, so just go for it. Carol's fault.
Sorry, so close.
Loop ecosystems Basically, if you're going to be living on Mars, it's going to be it's really expensive to get resources to you from Earth, and for a long time, it's going to be really hard to extract resources from Mars. And Mars is a two year trip there and back. It's six months to get there, and then you're stuck there for a while until Earth sort of comes back around again, and then it's six months to get home.
So you need to have a system that does not break for at least two years and ideally recycles things, and we just do not have that technology figured out yet. There was bios here too, which is sort of well known as being a bit of a catastrophe. And then they're like, right now, we've got facilities in China, for example, that try to run these experiments, and in a recent round they had to swap out two big guys for two smaller females because they weren't making enough oxygen. That's
where we are right now. If that happened on Mars, that would be death instead of just swapping out crew members.
Do you think we're actually like, is Elon Musk the guy who's going to do this? After doing all this research Is he the one who's going to be able to do this?
I hope not, so I have to I am very impressed with what Elon Musk has done with SpaceX and what he's done with Tesla, and I am coming to you right now from a Starlink connection, and so I love his projects. I don't think that he's the best person to lead us into becoming a multiplanetary species, but I'm not that worried about it because I think his timelines are way off. He's I think he's famously said that, you know, once the rockets have been figured out, the
rest is going to be easy. But I think the whole point of our book is that rockets are one hard part, but there's a lot of other hard parts, from figuring out, you know, the biology, to building the habitats that are still sustaining, to figure out the geopolitical hurdles that stand in our way. There's a lot more than just rockets. And so I don't think Mars is going to be leading our Musk is going to be leading us out there in our lifetimes.
Hey, Kelly, you have fun with this in the book. You and your husband. I mean, you've got a PhD. In ecology. You are a faculty member in the biosciences department at Rice Universities, so you're a serious You've got a serious side, but you have fun with this. Why was it important to lay this out? Is it because people are focusing too much time, money, and effort on this one. Maybe it doesn't quite make sense yet or may never well.
Well, so, I mean we started the book thinking that it maybe did make sense, But the more research we did, the more we discovered that there's a lot of a lot of topics that aren't getting, you know, for enough
airtime and enough of people's attention. And the topics you know, maybe don't sound as exciting as rockets and rocket science, and they're just sort of like boring long term work that needs to be done to try to understand things like how partial gravity impacts bone development across you know, the course of a lifetime. And we decided that we wanted to be funny in this book because we wanted
to get really deep into the details. So, for example, there's five chapters on international law as it pertains to space, And when we pitch that to our editor, she's like, I don't know that the general public is dying for five chapters on international law, so you better make it funny, and so we tried to do that.
Okay, So when you're thinking about what life actually looks like on other planets, is it something that humans should actually pursue if the timeframe actually gives us enough time? Or should we focus on I don't know, making the most of the Earth that we've got.
So I think that space is not going to be a near term solution for any of the problems that we have here on Earth. So you know, for example, folks like Bezos argue that we should move all of our heavy industry to space so that we're not polluting Earth anymore, and maybe we can you know, zone Earth as light residential. We'll move a bunch of people up to space too. I think the numbers just don't work
out for stuff like that. So, you know, if you think about moving humans off the planet to take care of population growth issues, you have to move two hundred and twenty thousand people to space every day. I don't know where you're going to get those volunteers, and we don't even know how to house them. So I think any problem that we're likely doers. He's looking for volunteers,
and I think he'll get a lot. I don't know if he's going to get that many, And again we don't have anywhere to put them because we don't know how to keep that many people alive in space. But if you're interested in a backup for humanity, I think a long term plan B could be good. So you know, if you start the settlement on Mars now, many generations from now, it might be self sustaining. And if you like humans, which I do, then it might be good to have a backup in case something happens on Earth.
But it's not going to save us anytime.
Soon, Kelly. One thing I would argue, though, is that many would say that the race to put a man on the Moon led to lots of innovation, Belcer, I know you're gonna set that no, but some really really important developments, right. It really kind of brought nations together, scientists together on a single mission, but it led to so much many offshoots off of that wouldn't Similarly, the
pursuit of Mars maybe lead to that as well. And it's a good kind of thing to focus on and have a goal of, as difficult as it may be.
Yeah, I think that's an interesting point. But so, you know, you talked about countries being brought together by the Apollo program, but the Apollo program was really fueled by a rift between the Soviet Union and the United States. JFK was sort of famously not even actually that interested in space, but it was a very clear thing that we could do to beat the Soviets. And you know, it's a
military prestige thing. The rockets that you're sending those humans to space and could also be delivering you know, missiles, and so I think a lot of times going to space is not necessarily about bringing people together and the new technologies. Historically it has also been about trying to show up our enemies, and that might be what drives
us to Mars or to the Moon. Again. You know, competition with China is heating up at the moment, and I think we should you know, yes, yes it might drive innovation and that's exciting, but we need to weigh that against you know, concerns with how this sort of this conflict might you know, spark problems down on Earth. But yes, you know, you might get some new technologies, but there's other things you could invest in to get these new technologies too.
Fair enough, fair enough, Kelly, thank you so much. Really fun and interesting. Kelly Wiener Smith, co author of City on Mars? Can we settle space? Should we settle space? And have we really thought this through? As we said? She wrote this with her husband, Zach, and she was joining us from Charlottesville for Jamie.
And today's the day the book comes out today.
It's very cool.
Yeah, I'd be sure to check it out