Hey Justin, you ask a really neat question
about Elon Musk.
There have been wonderful things that he’s
been talking about colonizing Mars, obviously
putting a Tesla in space, which is playing
David Bowie, which I love.
He’s a really wonderful person and an inspiration
to a lot of us.
And one of the misconceptions that a lot of
people have is that federal space programs
like NASA and commercial space programs like
SpaceX run by Elon Musk are in some type of
a competition.
I am a fan of all things space and one of
the things that has been so fun for me in
the last few years is the collaboration between
those two different realms of space travel.
For example, NASA routinely buys SpaceX rockets
to put our payloads and our satellites up
into space.
And that means that as a NASA scientist I’ve
gotten to go to several launches and landings
of these Falcon rockets.
And that’s amazing.
It used to be that you would go to a launch
and a big rocket would go off and everybody
would cheer and then you would get in your
cars and you’d drive home and it was all
done, the amazing thing now is seven minutes
later everybody just walks to the other side
of the building and watches the first stage
of that rocket land.
And that is something that is mind blowing.
Your eyes basically it does not compute you
cannot believe what you are seeing because
this giant thing comes down from space faster
than you can imagine.
And this is something that’s a several story
high building it’s a big thing it comes
careening down and just before it gets to
the ground it stops, settles down and then
gently lands.
And one of the things that I love is that
you don’t even hear the sonic boom until
after you see it land.
You watch this thing come careening down then
stop, land gently and then you hear boom,
boom because it broke the speed of sound coming
in.
And that is something that I am just really
amazed I lived to be able to see.
I love SpaceX and I love NASA’s collaboration.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize
is that NASA is one of SpaceX’s major customers.
We actually buy the rockets and we’d even
paid for some of the development of the rockets
as well.
So it was never a question of one or the other,
it was the idea is that we’re collaborating
the more companies going into space, hey the
better for us the lower the cost of the rockets
and the more efficient an industry we have
and hopefully the more people that think space
travel and space exploration are good things.
Then there are the questions about whether
Elon is going to build a giant rocket that
can take hundreds of people to Mars, and this
is something that as a scientist I am naturally
skeptical person that’s how I was trained,
right now what I see is a really cool idea
it reminds me a lot of my favorite science
fiction stories, but it’s basically just
that, an idea.
I think there’s a long way to go before
we actually see any significant colonization,
any significant number of people going to
Mars.
First we need to get one single person to
Mars or a small team of people.
And that is something that has proven very,
very difficult.
It’s not so much a question that we can’t
build rockets to take us there because even
today we have rockets that might have the
capability of doing that, the problem is how
you would keep a crew of people alive for
the journey to Mars and then also alive on
the surface and get them back.
That would be very expensive and because the
astronauts would not be protected from the
radiation of space right now we really don’t
know how to keep them alive.
It’s not impossible, there’s a lot of
work that can be done, but when I see people
thinking that SpaceX is almost ready to send
people to Mars that’s where I have a bit
of a wait and see attitude.
I would love to see people on Mars.
I would love to see SpaceX take people to
Mars.
I think the Tesla up there heading out toward
the asteroid belt is so cool.
But, there’s a long way to go and it’s
not easy.
I think we’re not going to get there from
a single company or a single nation.
I think that for something as large as a mission
to Mars we need to collaborate on a global
scale, work with the Europeans, work with
other emerging space markets, maybe work with
several different companies not just one.
It’s not a single entity, it’s a planet
going out and exploring something as big as
colonizing Mars.
I mean it’s an amazing civilization scale
activity.
I am somewhat skeptical that in my lifetime
I will see people walking on Mars.
I hope we do.
I’m not holding my breath.
