NASA Wants to Go to Mars

Planet ever make the list? Is that a euphemism for Las Vegas? Know that that would that would be like 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, 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 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 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. 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, 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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, 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

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 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 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 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, 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,

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 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, 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,

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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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

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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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. 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,

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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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

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 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. 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 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

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 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 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, 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 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.

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 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 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 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. 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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.

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 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 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 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 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. 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 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. 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