/begin/ This is a transcription of a tele-conference interview with ROBERT ZUBRIN Pioneer Astronautics, President conducted on March 30, 2001 by the class members of STS497 I, "Space Colonization"; Instructor: Dr. Chris Churchill; technical aspects of conference call by Bob Jones; location: Wartik 108 at Penn State. Transcription by Dr. Jane Charlton. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Nahks: First question. We're going to start off with some scientific and technical issues for a Mars mission. Our first question come Wally. Dimachkie: Dr. Zubrin, Mars at this stage seem like a long shot. We don't have the needed propulsion system, the technology, or enough knowledge about the planet to be exploring it anytime soon. Why do you think there are so many shortcomings in achieving this goal? Is it the government's fault, the public's, the private sector, or all three? ZUBRIN: Well, I disagree with your assertion that we don't have the technology to do Mars. We don't have the specific hardware set but the general level of technology that we have for space at this point is sufficient to do Mars. We are much better prepared today to send people to Mars than we were to send people to the Moon in 1961 and we were there 8 years later. In 1961 we had 15 minutes of space flight experience; didn't even know if people could eat in space. We really know everything we need to know right now to initiate a Mars program. We can do it with chemical propulsion systems. It will take six months, but we've done six month space-flights to fly one way to Mars and six months back. A year and one half on the surface. So from a technological point of view we are ready. Now, the hang-up is that the political system is currently senile and it needs to get an impetus from the public because I believe the American public very much believes this nation should continue to be a nation of pioneers and that needs to be conveyed to the politicians in Washington. Yuda: Moving on, our next question is from me. What method of propulsion will be most practical to get to Mars and what barriers do we need to overcome to develop and use this? ZUBRIN: Well, the initial Mars missions I believe will probably be done using chemical rockets which are sufficient to do Mars missions on medium or low energy trajectories. They take about six months to fly each way to Mars. There are superior propulsion systems that are in the offing: nuclear thermal propulsion is possible and could probably come into play downstream in a Mars program and should. And beyond that ultimately I think fusion propulsion will support the human settlement of Mars. Christopher Columbus ventured the Atlantic in ships that even fifty years later no one would have attempted the Atlantic again because there was no reason to develop truly Atlantic capable ships until there was trans-Atlantic traffic. But after that then people developed competent three master sailing ships and clipper ships and steam ships and ocean liners and Boeing 747's. If Columbus had waited for a 747 he would have waited a long time. Similarly, the first people to go to Mars will go there under relatively primitive conditions. They will go in relatively small spacecraft propelled by chemical propulsions on six month trajectories. And their grandchildren live on Mars will be used to commutes between Earth to Mars in a month and a half in comfortable fusion powered space liners will hardly believe the stories about what the early passages were like. So that is how it has to be. It is going to be done the hard way the first time. Nahks: Continuing on scientific questions, our next question comes from Lauren. Chung: If we send people to Mars how will we circumnavigate the radiation exposure problem that astronauts will face on their travels? ZUBRIN: Well, there are two kinds of radiation that you have to deal with in space: there are solar flares and there are cosmic rays. The solar flares occur infrequently and unpredictably, perhaps a big one about once a year. And they can deliver several thousand REMs of radiation in the course of a few hours. But the solar flares are made out of protons with energies on the order of a million volts and they can be shielded with five inches of water or things that are like water from a thermonuclear point of view such as food or wastes. So we can basically take the pantry of the spacecraft, use the consumables to create a shielded area, and if a solar flare happens you go in there and you are protected against solar flares. Cosmic rays you can't shield against because they have energies of billions of volts but they only occur as a thin rain as it were, about 50 REM for every year you are in interplanetary space in the Earth/Mars portion of the solar system. And you'll be in space for a year on the early Mars missions, six months out six months back. You'll be on Mars a year and one half but we can do heavy shielding when you are on the surface of the planet. You actually get the dose in transit. 50 REM over an extended period of time like that represents about a 1% risk of getting a fatal cancer at some time later in your life. An average American, if you do not smoke, you have 20% chance of dying with cancer right now. This would make it 21%. An average American smoker is 40%. So in fact if we recruit a crew of smokers and send them to Mars without tobacco we'd be reducing their chance of getting cancer. But the basic point is that the cosmic ray dose is an acceptable risk and solar flares can be shielded against. Yuda: For our next question we go to Matt Hughes. Hughes: How accurately did the movie "Mission to Mars" portray the base the astronauts set up? ZUBRIN: The exterior views of the spacecraft at the base "Mission to Mars" were fairly realistic in fact they were designed on the basis of the figures in my book. But of course the fundamental premise of the movie "Mission to Mars" was not terribly realistic, that is in terms of the alien presence at the base on Mars. They had an attempt to be realistic with the surface base and an attempt to be plausible, although I don't think realistic, with the interplanetary spacecraft. There were major technical errors in "Mission to Mars" and I was actually technical consultant for the movie and I pointed them out to them but they ignored the advice. They felt that the audience wouldn't notice them. In fact the audience did catch several of them most notably when Woody is drifting free and he just drifts out of range and then stops. Terry goes after him and she drifts almost as close as she needs to get to him and then stops. Of course neither of them would actually stop in space without expending propellant to do so and it would have taken no more propellant to get as close to him as she needed to get as it took to get almost as close to him as she needed to get. So that was obviously flawed and that was actually caught by audiences and viewers. And there are other flaws that I could go into as well. Nahks: Our next question comes from Josh Brosious. Brosious: You said in 1998 that the technological innovations from 1963 to the present are insignificant. Without the opening of a new frontier on Mars continued Western civilization faces the risk of technical stagnation. Is going to Mars going to increase technology so much to make it seem that all we've done in the last forty years is insignificant? ZUBRIN: Well, I just have to tell you that having grown up as a child and a teenager in the 1960's. And having seen the incredible transformation that the 1960's represented compared to the world my parents were born into or my grandparents were born into, I am not terribly impressed by the degree of progress that has occurred since the 60's. In the 60's you saw the event of color television and computers and jet airplanes that could take you anywhere. In fact they are pretty much the same jet airplanes you fly in today. While we have a few new things I am not all that impressed with the progress that has occurred in the last 30 years. And indeed it does not compare to the progress that was projected in the 1960's for the remainder of the century. I think that opening up a new frontier that places fundamental new demands on our creativity and our technology will be a tremendous spur to a renewed age of progress. Technology comes from challenge. And you talk about opening up a Martian frontier. Yes, we'll go there with chemically propelled spacecraft but to really colonize the place we'll want fusion powered spacecraft. I think that is what's actually going to get fusion power into business on the ground. It is interesting that nuclear power was first used in submarines before it was used in civilians power plants, and steam engines were not really made practical until they were used in ships. So it would not be the first time that a key technology was forced into being for a critical transportation application which then applied to conventional land based urban use. But all sorts of thing ranging from: robotics -- there will be a tremendous labor shortage on Mars - you are going to need a tremendous amount of labor-saving machinery; genetic engineering -- we're going to want hyper-productive crops to use in our greenhouses on Mars and we're really not going to have much patience with people with lawsuits who are questioning whether these kinds of tomatoes could really present a catastrophe to the rest of the plants in the greenhouse. This kind of challenging situation forces one to be practical. It forces one to be creative. There is no better driver for creativity than an open frontier. Yuda: Back to Matt Hughes. Hughes: What technologies would work better on Mars and why would they? ZUBRIN: What technologies on Earth might work better on Mars. I've never thought about it in quite that way. There are certain technologies that people have thought about on Earth that would be more critical on Mars and therefore there would be a greater stimulus to perfect them. I just named a few: fusion power, robotics, bio-engineering. But even things like dry hot rock geothermal power. People talk about an energy crisis and this, that, and the other things. There are vast amount of energy stored in the Earth. You drill down a kilometer and you get to places that are very hot and you can actually create power off of that. But given the plentiful fossil fuels, or the perception of the plentiful fossil fuels that we have on Earth there has been very little incentive to actually do the work to develop that. The same has been true with fusion power. So that's why I think Mars is going to be a crucible of invention. There are certain things that work better on Mars. Human powered flight if you had domes in which you had a terrestrial atmosphere would certainly be much easier to do on Mars. But I think the big thing on Mars is not the things that would be easier to do there, but things that would be more important to do there. Nahks: New section about Martian life. Our first question there comes from Laura Yingling. Yingling: What will be the implications for Mars colonization if the explorers who go to Mars find evidence for past or present life there? ZUBRIN: If we find evidence for life on Mars the key question really is: does it have separate origin from Earth, or a prior origin to Earth. There almost certainly was life on Mars in the distant past if for no other reason than that Mars has been bombarded by unsterilized material from Earth for the last 3.5 billion years. The Earth has been shedding material due to meteoritic impact here and Mars has gotten splashed. Three billion years ago when there was liquid water on Mars there was no question that bacteria transferred from Earth to Mars could survive there for a time. So it is extremely probable that there was once life on Mars. But the more interesting question is "is there life on Mars that either represents a separate origin from terrestrial life such that we could see if the general forms that we see of life on Earth are characteristic of life everywhere or whether we are just one esoteric part of a much more varied and interesting tapestry. Or another possibility is that we could find life on Mars or fossils of life on Mars that is more primitive than any life that we've ever found on Earth. You see it is very interesting that the earliest life forms we've found on Earth are bacteria. And those are the simplest free-living life forms we know about on Earth today. And bacteria, as simple as they may be in comparison with animals and plants are actually extremely complex molecular machines and could not possibly represent the initial form of life as it emerged from chemistry. It is a very interesting question that while bacteria were the first form of life on Earth, it is difficult to believe that bacteria were in fact the first form of life. So if we go to Mars and find samples of pre-bacterial organisms what you'd actually be able to view there is the history of the development of life from non-life. In other words you actually read the book of life itself. On the other hand if the simplest forms we find on Mars are bacteria as well, that could easily suggest that Earth and Mars were seeded by bacteria traveling from interstellar sources, which would mean that life is extremely wide-spread in the galaxy. Because if life can be transferred across interstellar distances, then life is everywhere. Yuda: Thank you. There were some very interesting ideas in there. Continuing with the Martian life theme we have a question from Brock Pronko. Pronko: My question is about back contamination. In the July/August 2000 issue of Planetary Report you wrote an essay that dismissed the danger of back contamination from Mars and said that experts in the field supported your position. And in the November/December issue some of those experts from NASA and JPL adamentaly disagreed with your assessment. I was wondering what you thought of their counterarguments, and also how could anyone be considered an expert on extra-terrestrial life when such life has never been confirmed or studied. ZUBRIN: Well, people who made those arguments are members of the so-called "planetary protection community" who are bureaucrats who promote this putative threat. But it is very interesting in the very same issue of Planetary Report that you cite, the November issue, there was an article by Weiss and Kirshing about the Allen Hills meteorite in which they show (and it is described in detail there and I suggest you go look at it) that the Allen Hills meteorite never went about 40C during its entire period of ejection from Mars, passage through space, and reentry and landing on Earth. It means it was not sterilized. In fact there are numerous papers now - there is a wonderful paper by Nicolowski et al. in Icarus June 2000 which discusses the natural transfer of material across interplanetary distances and they show that of the material ejected from Mars about 10% of it manages to get off without being sterilized by shock heating. And what that means is that if there is life or ever has been life on Mars it has been repeatedly transferred here and is being transferred here right now. We get about 500 kilograms a year of unsterilized rocks from Mars and they probably get a similar amount of material from Earth and so there is natural transfer of material between Earth and Mars. These two places are not quarantined from each other. And it doesn't matter what rules various high level government officials have about the NASA spacecraft. They can put a Maginot line around the NASA spacecraft. Mother nature is sending rocks both ways merrily laughing at all the bureaucratic regulations that anyone could pass. And all the king's horses and all the king's men can't stop that. So if there is life on Mars it has had plenty of opportunity to be transferred here and it continues to have plenty of opportunity to be transferred here. If you want to get a sense of this. Close to two trillion kilograms of Martian material has been transferred to Earth over the past 3.5 billion years in which the surface of Earth could support life. And from at least a thousand different sites on the surface of Mars. And so the stuff about back contamination simply has no scientific validity whatsoever. Yuda: Just a followup on this. There was speculation with Mir splashing down about the possibility contamination from Mir and most people didn't seem to give any credence to this. Was there any possibility of something maybe having evolved on Mir or something being brought back with it? ZUBRIN: Sure, there are diseases in Russia and Russians could bring diseases to Mir and it could land in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and make a fish sick I suppose. But the notion of catastrophic contamination of the Earth from Mir is ludicrous. Everything on Mir came from the Earth. Churchill: I'd like to followup on your idea of Mars and the Earth being quarantined. You know I'd just like to have you address the issue that maybe things aren't shock heated and destroyed by the heat, what about the mere fact they are in the hostile environment, wouldn't that be a sterilization in a sense. Wouldn't that assist in killing off anything that was alive on any rock that was ejected from Earth or was ejected from Mars? ZUBRIN: Well, it would kill off things that are on the very surface of the rock but not those that are on the inside of the rock. You should know that the Surveyor spacecraft that was sent to the Moon in the late-sixties, they recovered the camera from it in an Apollo mission in 1970 and low and behold there were bacteria still surviving in it after several years of hard vacuum on the Moon. In the 1980's we did this experiment ???Eldeath??? and the German biologist Greta Hornick did experiments with putting cultures of bacteria on surfaces on that. And that satellite was recovered and yes, substantial amounts of the bacteria did survive years in space in hard vacuum and cosmic radiation. So in fact there is very little doubt that bacteria can survive tens of thousands of years in vacuum space. You should know that we have recovered bacteria from Cretaceous amber thirty million years old and revived them and they are viable. There is also evidence, but it is disputed, of recovery of bacteria from Permian salts 230 million years old. Material transferred from Mars could come in as little as six months or it could take thousands of years, but either way it is a short amount of time as compared to the demonstrated ability of bacteria to survive dormant. Nahks: Thank you for your answers on that topic. Now we are going to shift to some of the economic issues related to the Mars mission. First question is again from Brock. Pronko: In "Entering Space" you told about your difficulty garnering support at Martin Marietta for your rocket plane "Black Hope". The Titan director told you "look Bob, it is a very clever idea but you've got to get the picture we build Titans. You sell one of these to the Air Force and we're out of business." With NASA entrenched in low Earth orbit operations and the big three rocket makers ingrained in defense work, how can space enthusiasts garner support from the government and or the private sector for new missions beyond the Earth's orbit? ZUBRIN: OK. That is a great question. There are basically two ways to do it. We can either try to do it through the political system or outside the political system. The Mars Society is attempting both tracks. That is, NASA is an agency that were it given the imperatives I believe is capable of getting humans to Mars. And it is a question basically of acting on the political system - on the president and on the congress - to make clear to them that we want a space agency - we want a space program that is actually going somewhere. We want them to commit to a humans to Mars program. It is an interesting point that on one level selling a humans to Mars program to the president is an easy sell. You are basically selling them immortality. The main question that they would have is "how can I get away with this?; would Congress go for it?". And so if Congress hears from enough of its constituents that this is the kind of space program they want see then they would get enough support to proceed. And so the Mars Society is attempting to act on the Administration and on Congress in this way. On the other hand, we live in a tremendously wealthy world, and the potential exists to actually undertake human space exploration privately. I don't believe for profit. If you approach people who are trying to make money - you say here is a business plan - we are going to go to Mars - we are going to make a lot of money by doing this and that is why you should invest - they are not going to listen to you. There are much more straightforward ways of making money - real estate speculation and internet and what have you. So that is not where you are going to get your interest. But when Pathfinder landed on Mars in 1997 there were 100 million hits on the NASA Mars website which incidentally is more than the number of people that vote in the United States. And I think it is quite clear that there are hundreds of millions of people in the advanced sector of the world (US, Canada, Europe, Japan, Australia) who believe passionately that humanity should expand into space. Well gee, 100 million people at 100 bucks each - that would be 10 billion dollars. That would be enough to send humans to Mars if you did it in the private world. So in other worlds the people who believe that humanity should expand into space have in their pockets more than enough wealth to do it - to finance it directly provided they can be rallied to undertake such an effort. Now if I were to go on the radio tomorrow and just say "everybody send in 100 bucks and we'll put together 10 billion and we'll go to Mars" most people would believe we would not get a sufficient response to assemble the required funds and therefore it wouldn't happen and they'd be wasting their 100 bucks. And therefore no one would send in any money and it wouldn't happen. So in other words the question of privately financed human Mars exploration and settlement for that matter is not primarily a material question. It is a moral question. And by moral I don't mean in the sense of right and wrong. I mean in the sense of morale, of rallying the troops. How do we propose to do that? We propose to do that by doing things that are real. Kind of a Jacques Cousteau approach. Do what you can with the money that you can. Use that to earn some credibility so that you can assemble more resources to undertake even more ambitious expeditions. Our first expedition, our first project has been the establishment of a simulated human Mars exploration station in the Canadian arctic. We were successful in building that last summer. This summer we are going to have a two month mission simulation out there. It is going to be heavily covered by the Discovery Channel and other media and we hope that will raise our flag high enough that we will be able to approach people for much larger amounts of money. That is the ??flagship?? station arctic is roughly a one million dollar project. We hope that this will put us in a realm of credibility where we can raise 100 million dollars and undertake a privately funded robotic Mars mission. And if we were to do that, if a private organization was to do a privately funded robotic mission to Mars. And if the pictures taken by our balloon say flying over the surface of Mars with cameras were to grace the covers of Newsweek and Time, then I think from that position it might very well be possible for us to mobilize billions of dollars. Enough to address the question of humans to Mars either entirely on our own or possibly on a cost-sharing basis with NASA. That is how we are intending to handle this. Yuda: Continuing with economic topics, back in the 60's the space program was built up largely using the industrial base we built up during World War II and then continued during the Korean War. Do we currently have the industrial facilities needed to construct and support Mars or multiple Mars missions or would we need a large amount of re-tooling? ZUBRIN: We do. We have a larger and more technically advanced industrial base than they had in the 1960's and we have a much larger GNP - about three times the GNP of John F. Kennedy's America in real dollars, inflation adjusted. So we certainly have the material base. But it is true that we run the risk of losing some of this. Precisely as you said, this incredible industrial base was built up under military imperatives: World War II and subsequent cold war. And that age is now apparently over. And I don't lament it at all. But what you have therefore is various capabilities, ranging from space launch capabilities to nuclear engineering capabilities for example, that will sooner or later be allowed to rust. That is say if the peace continues. If we continue to live in this world without significant military challenge. Sooner or later people are going to say: why do we need this? why do we need that? In fact we've already been saying that. The rate at which the US has been destroying its technical capabilities at its national labs in the 1990's is ??large??. Anyone who at anytime in their career who actually designed a nuclear reactor in this country has now got gray hair. Some of them, significant numbers, are still in the workforce, but they are all over fifty. If we continue in this mode the capabilities will decay. We are therefore in a situation where we either have to beat the sword into a plowshare or let it rust in the field. So its important to take up this new, and I would argue more noble challenge, with the capabilities that were built up to meet the older challenge. Nahks: We are going to move on now to some more social and political issues with regards to the Mars program. And our first question is from Jeff Cooper. Cooper: My question as written has already been hit on a few times, but I'd like to add something to it. My original question is "why must we go to the red planet now?". To that I'd like to add: "what do you see the driving force for the human population as a whole to be going to Mars?. Do you see it as a curiosity, as an issue of overpopulation of the planet, a need for an increase in technology as we saw in the space program in the 60's, or our dwindling resources here on each?" It seems to me that the general populous of the world or at least the populous of participating countries are going to be the group to target for support in the long run after we get initial investment. How do you see using these ideas of curiosity, overpopulation, need for increased technology, or dwindling resources as being a highlight towards a propaganda scheme to get people to back your ideas? ZUBRIN: OK. Well, there are two distinct parts to the first part of your question: what is the human drive to do this, and what are the rational reasons or benefits from doing it. And those are actually two different things. Actually the thing that is going to make us do it is the fundamental human drive that to go places we have never gone before, to explore possibilities we have never explored before, to see things we have never seen before, to build things that have never been built before. That is the fundamental human drive that has brought us from a local species in the East African rift valley to becoming a global civilization with hundreds of nations and cultures, and thousands of cities, and all the rest that we have. Now the reason we have that drive is because our ancestors did and we are alive because they did. It is adaptive to have that drive. It is not adaptive to stay where you are and settle for the possibilities that are in front of you because if you do that you continue to present no more possibilities to your descendants than you yourself had which intrinsically is an anthropic situation which will lead to a narrowing of possibilities and ultimately extinction for any group of people who over the long term behave in that way. And that is why we have that drive. Now if we want to look at it concretely therefore why is that drive beneficial to us in that instance as it has been for us over the course of human history - you look at what it means. First, there is new knowledge to be gained by going to Mars. Incredible new knowledge especially if we do discover either alternative forms of new life or more primitive kinds of life that would therefore enhance our knowledge of what life is and therefore our biology, etc. Second, there is challenge. Challenge is extremely important. It is extremely important that a civilization challenges itself. Human civilizations are like people. They grow when they are challenged. They stagnate when they are not. In particular, youth requires challenge. My observation of for instance the current Bush tax cut - the upper class tax cut - is that it will provide the money so that rich parents can buy their children designer label black trench coats. Those kids don't need extra toys. They don't need designer label trench coats. What they need is a challenge that will really give them some ambition and drive in their lives. To do something important with their lives. To develop their minds so that they can be part of this great adventure to do something that humans have never done before. The third reason is explicitly for the future. If we do not do this then Mars will continue to be a planet without humans. If we do this then I believe quite firmly that 100 years from now there will be a new branch of human civilization on Mars. Or perhaps several new branches, which will have their own cultures, their own dialects, their own literature. They will have experimented with their own social forms and possibly shown us possibilities we have never explored here on Earth that could lead to more human forms of civilization. They will certainly have made contributions to technology and invention. They will certainly have developed their own history of epic deeds that will inspire those who will attempt things further out. That is something extremely wonderful. That is something extremely healthy. That is growth. So we do it to grow the possibilities for human future. Yuda: For our next question in this category we go to Katie Miller. Miller: With the present administration, do you think a trip to Mars will take place in the next ten to twenty years? How will the possible cuts of the habitation module and the propulsion module affect human mission to Mars? ZUBRIN: Well, the present administration isn't going to be there for the next twenty years. The present administration's policies are yet undefined over the long haul. The restructuring of the Space Station I don't think is either a positive or a negative. The Space Station is not necessary to go to Mars. The sooner we reach closure on the Space Station, so NASA can move on to the next project, the better. Much less healthy are the cuts of the current NASA administrator, possibly acting on his own, or possibly acting on instruction of the Bush administration, recently terminated all of NASA's existing R&D programs geared toward developing technology for humans to Mars. That of course was a negative step. Now, as I said, I don't know if that was done on Mr. Goldin's initiative, or by Goldin under pressure from the new OMB or other such Bush personnel. That will be clarified very quickly once the new NASA administrator is appointed. Will the cuts be reimbursed or will they be reinforced? The man is welcome to fool me, but I don't detect in Mr. Bush the quality of leadership, for instance exemplified by John F. Kennedy, required to lead a bold humans to Mars program as Kennedy did with the Moon program in 1961. It would have been easier to believe that someone like John McCain would have had the stuff to do that. It would be very easy to believe that. Now McCain of course lost in the primaries in the year 2000. But he came reasonably close. If various things had broken in other ways he could have one. What I'm getting at is not a pitch for McCain but rather to show the nature of historical contingency. That is things could have very easily ended up another way. Things could have ended up another way with respect to the presidential election as a whole. They could have ended up very easily another way with respect to the Republican primaries last year. So in other words we roll the dice every four years in this country. There are people of superior quality out there in the political system in both parties and since we do have the technology and we do have the material resources. We have to put it in perspective. A humans to Mars program costs on order 40 billion dollars. That is about as much money as we are going to spend on the B22 ??chilled rudder?? aircraft which is of questionable value. So it is really easily affordable by this country. And given that the American people do still believe in the frontier, do still believe we should be pioneers, the passive political constituency is there that would certainly support a humans to Mars program. And it is just a question of rolling the dice enough times before we get the right politicians in the who would be willing to seize onto that and seize the challenge and seize the time and do it. So I think that while it is possible to do humans to Mars within the next ten years it probably is not that likely. It probably is likely within the next twenty. Nahks: We have another question from Chris Hynick. Hynick: Assuming that money has been allocated toward space exploration and the public is supporting space colonization, do you believe that we should try to colonize Mars first, or would a Moon base or colony be more beneficial at this point in time? ZUBRIN: If by space colony you mean one of the constructions advocated by Gerard O'Neil in his book "The High Frontier" I don't think that is an option. You are talking about billions of tons lifted into Earth orbit to build one of those things. It's not realistic at least not for the next fifteen years, maybe even not for the next century or two. It is much easier to colonize a planet than to build one. So the choice is really either the Moon or Mars. I guess it is no secret I strongly favor Mars because it is the place that actually has the resources to support life and civilization in a way that the Moon simply does not. So that for the future age exploration Mars compares to the Moon as North America compared to Greenland in the previous age of exploration. Greenland was closer to Europe. Europeans reached it before North America, but it was not a viable place to establish a colony in the way that North America was. So the same thing can be said of the Moon and Mars. And also clearly as a goal on which to inspire the next generation - recapturing the Moon or going to Mars - I don't think there is any comparison. It is very difficult to inspire young people with the challenge of repeating what their grandparents had done, which is what it would be to return to the Moon. Mars would really be covering new ground. Yuda: That concludes our social and political questions. One pre-planned personal question, and then if we have time we'll go to an open Q&A if that is OK. The question from Jason Camillo. Camillo: When did you first start to dream of going to Mars and when did you first become professionally involved? ZUBRIN: Well, I started dreaming about going to space in 1957. Sputnik happened. I was 5 years old and I was an early reader. I was already reading science fiction. To the adults of the world Sputnik was a terrifying event because it meant that the Russians had these capabilities and so on. But to me Sputnik was exhilarating because it said that the stories I was reading about the space-faring future were real. That this was going to happen. That this was this great adventure that was opening up and that I wanted to be part of it. And so I got myself a scientific education in both elementary school and high school and I have a science major in college. Two things happened in the early 70's that detracted me from pursuing the career at that time. One was extreme alienation from the government that occurred among me and most of my generation as a result of the Vietnam War. And also the termination of the space program by the Nixon administration. Aborting Apollo, aborting plans to put humans on Mars in the 80's which was NASA's plans. So I became a science teacher instead of actually going into engineering when I graduated college. But then in the 1980's the bugle started to sound for me again. I decided to leave off being a teacher. I went back to school. I got myself an engineering degree. And in 1988 I got a job at Martin Marietta Aerospace doing a preliminary design for planetary missions and I've been professionally engaged ever since that time. Nahks: Thank you for answering our prepared question. If you have any more time we'd like to open this up for any other questions people might have. Pronko: I have a question about reusable launch vehicles. As you know NASA just had its first round for funding for the space launch initiative and there were some small companies and large companies picked. You also know that the X44 and the X33 were cut. So I was wondering what you think about the future of reusable launch vehicles. When do you see this happening and how do you see it happening? ZUBRIN: I see it happening a long time from now. I don't think the space launch initiative is going to be successful. I think the program is a joke. It's quite true that the X33 was questionable. Lockheed Martin has never built a cheap launch vehicle and there was no reason to believe that they would. But having spent a billion dollars on that program and then cancelling it and now starting up a new program with a combination of companies that have never built anything cheap and other companies who have never built anything, I don't see anything happening from there. And furthermore if you take the 4.5 billion dollars that they are planning to spend on the space launch initiative and put it in the bank and took the interest you'd be able to buy eight or nine Delta launches a year. Enough to support a very ambitious program of planetary exploration with free launch vehicles. That's a ridiculous program and actually contrary to a lot of talk the primary obstacle to human exploration beyond Earth orbit is not launch costs. With respect to launch it is not lack of cheap launch vehicles, it is lack of heavy launch vehicles. That is rather than spend money attempting to replicate the existing launch capabilities cheaper which isn't going to happen. Really if we are going to be spending money on launch vehicles we should be spending money on heavy lift launch vehicles with Saturn 5 class capabilities. That would immediately give us the ability to send humans to the Moon, or Mars, or near-Earth asteroids. Vehicles in general are developed in response to science requirements. The problem with NASA is not that it doesn't have cheap launch vehicles. The problem with NASA is that it doesn't have a goal. That is why it is not doing anything. NASA needs a goal that is worthy of a 14 billion dollar a year space agency which at this point really could only be human exploration beyond low Earth orbit and I would argue humans to Mars. And once NASA has that we say here is want we want to do, we want to establish humanity on Mars. Then these are the technology items. These are the hardware items that we need: 1, 2, 3, 4, in order to do this. And you assemble a coherent set of hardware including not only the heavy lift launch vehicles, but also the crew transfer vehicles, the landing vehicles, the various life support systems, and so forth that makes for a coherent program where everything fits with each other and then you can go and really do something. Hughes: What is the reality of using a tether? You suggest in your book that the rocket booster would separate from the craft and the connecting tether would spin it around to decrease the effects of micro-gravity. How realistic is that notion considering that we don't really have that much experience with tethers? ZUBRIN: The notion is extremely realistic. We have a fair amount of experience with tethers. Yes, we'd want to have some more. But the failed tether of the Martin Marietta tether satellite was based on an electrically generating tether that killed a lot of power running down it which caused it to melt. This would be a much simpler tether. It would just be a piece of wire that would be a structural tether so you wouldn't have that problem. But the engineering problems associated with tethered spacecraft are much more tractable than the biological problems associated with long-term exposure to zero gravity. Churchill: I was fascinated by your response earlier about putting a coherent program together. And it started me thinking in terms of the way you used the example of raising your flag higher and higher to garner the money to put together a private program. I was just curious - certainly you could be thinking of startup at this stage of the game of the research and design aspects of building these launch vehicles. And this then brings me around to trying to understand better what Pioneer Astronautics, your company, is really all about and are you doing this kind of thing? Are you starting to think about these launch vehicles, putting them together in parallel with this idea of continuing to raise your flag and garner the monetary support to get this thing going? ZUBRIN: Well, Pioneer Astronautics is a research and development company. It is a small company. I pay full-time employees and we do R&D for NASA and a few cases the military. We've done research on rocket engines including some that are of specific interest for Mars missions. We've done research in making propellants on Mars out of the Martian atmosphere. We've done research on solar sails. We've done research on Mars balloons. We've done research on new kinds of breathing systems for space suits. So I don't see Pioneer Astronautics as a driver of the humans to Mars program. It is a player. Within the aerospace community different types of organizations have different roles. A small company like Pioneer (and I'm not the only company like this - there are many other R&D companies like mine) - NASA goes to us when they want new ideas, quick thinking, and quick and dirty demonstrations in other words without a lot of fuss and bother and acceptance requirements to show that some fundamental idea really works. In other words I'm kind of an inventor. I approach NASA and say: "Look - think about this - we could do this this way - some totally different way than you though about doing this before. And if you did it this way it would be much lighter or cheaper or more reliable or whatever than the way you are trying to do it now." And they look at it and say that would be true if it works. Can you show us that it would work? And then we attempt to do so. We don't build flight hardware. Flight hardware requires a different kind of organization such as that at a major aerospace company such as Lockheed-Martin. Because when you build flight hardware, and this is really going to Mars, you want to know the history of every screw that is in there. You want to know that this thing was never left out in the cold in Saskatoon through the winter where its structure crystallized became weaker than it should be according to its manufacture spec. In other words every single part has got to be tracked and you have a massive bureaucracy which, probably you could save some money on that, but you really need a significant chunk of paper manager who are tracking every part, and every requirement, and every circuit and making sure that everything was made and tested and after it was tested wasn't subjected to environmental conditions that would invalidate the testing. And that you have to do. And so it is a different kind of organization that makes space rated hardware. It is bigger. It's more expensive, but it's necessary for that stage. So there are different roles for different types of organizations within a Mars program. We're kind of like the scouts. They are the heavy batallions. Hughes: You suggested in your book that it would take about 900 years to transform the Martian atmosphere into something that would be more suitable for humans. If there was life found on Mars what level of life would have to be found for us to seriously consider not transforming the atmosphere, essentially polluting their atmosphere to make it something more breathable for humans? ZUBRIN: I would argue intelligently. Now there is no life on the Martian surface today. We know that because the Viking landers actually tested the Martian soil to less than one part in a billion - no organic material. There may be life deep underground on Mars in a subsurface water, and if so it is almost certainly microbial in character. The Earth has been progressively Terra-formed by life. The photosynthetic organisms that dominate the surface of the Earth for the past 3 billion years have put Oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere to the detriment of anaerobic organisms that previously could survive on the surface of the Earth but no longer can. Nevertheless those anaerobic organisms continue to survive underground - beneath the sea bed, beneath the land - and continue to be the dominant form if you look at it from the point of view of biomass. And despite the advent of green plants, trilobites, dinosaurs, mastodons, and whatever running around on the surface of Earth, they'd go on their happy way. And I believe if humans were to Terra-form the surface of Mars if there was Martian life deep underground today those microbes would neither know nor care, but continue as they always have. I don't think it is even within human capabilities to drive to extinction microbial life on this or any other planet. But furthermore if you are asking as a question of abstract ethics. I believe that ethics need to be humanist based. That is we judge Albert Schweizer to be a good man because he went to Africa and saved human lives albeit at the expense of billions of microbial lives. We judged Adolf Hitler to be evil because he killed human beings even though he put food on the tables of billions of microbes eating the decaying corpses that he provided for them. So ethics must be human based. And therefore I would say that as a fundamental form of ethics we need to do what is best for humanity. Now that is not to say that environmental considerations don't enter into this. It is important to save the rain forest because Earth with the rain forest is a better place for humans than Earth without the rain forest. But ultimately the question is what is good for humanity and that has to be the basis for ethics, and certainly not what is best for microbes. Yuda: Thank you for your time this afternoon for us to answer these questions and I believe Dr. Churchill has some closing remarks. Churchill: Actually we do need to close up and we want to thank you very much for your time today. I just wanted to let you know out of interest that we are going to be having Marc Milles from the breakthrough propulsion project do a video conference with us. So I was just curious what your opinion is of that program just before we signed off today. ZUBRIN: Well, it is important to keep an open mind as to the possibilities. Milles knows that he is playing a long shot, but I don't think we know everything there is to know about physics and I don't think we've read the complete book of nature. I think there are still some surprises waiting for us out there. The discovery of those new aspects of physics could lead to breakthroughs in propulsion and many other things. And so I think it is important to keep an open mind and keep looking because I think sooner or later someone will find something. /end/