 Thank you all so much for joining us today. My name is Tori Bosh, and I'm the editor of Future Tense, which is a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. And our goal is to explore emerging technologies and sciences and their implications for public policy and society. This exploration takes two forms. We have events like this, and then daily commentary on technology and science news on Slate. And you can find us on Slate at www.slate. And before I introduce the event today, I'd like to invite our first panelists to take a seat up here and get mic'd up. So we're here today, of course, to discuss the giant leap, the race to Mars and back. Mars has haunted human beings for a long time. It's so close and yet so far. Now it looks increasingly possible that humans could step foot on Mars within the next couple of decades. But before that can happen, there are enormous challenges. We'll need the science and technology to carry the modern day explorers safely to their destination and hopefully back. We'll need to cut through bureaucratic red tape. We'll need the money and more. Today we'll discuss all of these issues. I'd also like to thank our underwriters, Lockheed Martin, for making this event possible. Just a quick housekeeping note. This event is being live streamed on the New America website. So when you ask a question during the Q&A portion, please wait for the microphone so that people here and online can hear you. We also ask that you introduce yourself and make your question a question if possible. Our first panel will be A Day in Deep Space, Technology, Research, and the Human Condition. It gives me great pleasure to introduce the panel's moderator, Phil Plait, who you may know from his Bad Astronomy blog on Slate. He's also the author of Death from the Skies, exclamation point. Phil has a PhD in astronomy from the University of Virginia and worked on the Hubble Space Telescope as a NASA contractor at the Goddard Space Flight Center before beginning his blogging career. Welcome. And thanks, everybody, for coming. It's interesting to be back in Washington. I grew up in this area. I grew up in northern Virginia. Went to Lake Braddock. Yeah, great. Everybody here is from Wilson, I guess. All right, that's fine. And so it's nice to be back, especially when the weather's cooperating and the flowers are blooming everywhere. It's lovely here right now. And it's a pleasure to be here. I'd like to thank the sponsors as well and, of course, Slate for, well, for paying me, but also just to be here and to moderate this. I'm very excited about this. A big enthusiast for space exploration, I'm very excited that after all these years, we may actually be going to Mars. This is something that is now being taken seriously again, even though it may have been started in decades and decades ago. Once Apollo came and kind of went, those dreams sort of were put on hold, but now we're back in a situation, I think, where we can take this sort of thing seriously. And we're building rockets big enough to do this. We're going to have them very soon. A lot of people are crying doom and gloom about the space program. I am not one of them. I think we're doing just fine. I wish we were doing better, but things could be a lot worse. So the future is actually looking, I think, fairly bright for going back to the moon and going on to places beyond. And that is what we're here to talk about today. We talk a lot about the architecture. We talk a lot about what happens when we get there. But it's not that often that we spend a lot of time talking about what's it going to be like on the way? You know, when you're on a road trip, you're always thinking, oh, we're going to go to Disneyland, but it's like, yeah, but it's a 27-hour drive. You've got a lot to do. You're not going to be playing license plate and go the whole time. So we have to figure out what's going to happen on the way. And that's what our panelists are going to talk about today. They are lettered enough that I'm going to read from my notes because otherwise I would never get this right. To my immediate right is Tara Rutley, who was, associate or is, associate international space station program scientist. Everybody here has like way better job titles than I do. I'm blogger. What are you going to do? And I love this too, lead hardware engineer for the ISS health maintenance system and for the human research facility. I was. The human research facility sounds nefarious. It's fantastic. It was, but nothing horrible, I would assume, no? Okay. No, we're the government. I saw Planet of the Apes. I know what human research facilities look like. And also an aquanaut with the NASA extreme environment missions operations six or Nemo. And we're going to want to hear about that because I know that's going to play in immediately into what we're going to be talking about today. Great. Next to her is Josh Hopkins, a space exploration architect with Lockheed Martin. Works on possible configurations for spacecraft and that includes crude. And I say crude, not CRUDE, like, you know, made of balsa wood. Crude with a crew on them, which is now the preferred term instead of manned for obvious reasons. And I wish we could come up with a better term for that because I don't like crude because it sounds better. At humanned, you need some sort of... Human spacecraft. Astronaut spacecraft. Ooh. Astronaut. Because there could be an astronaut as well. Astronaut. Yeah. So you work on possible configurations for those types of spacecraft going to Moon, Mars, and beyond. And like me, an asteroid and orbital mechanics enthusiast. So that's cool. We'll have lots of Delta V talk later. That'll be awesome for the audience, I'm sure. And on his right, we have Kate Green, who is a science technology journalist who's written for such venues as Wired, Discover, New Yorker, and U.S. News and World Report, as well as many others. I'd heard of all of them, so that's cool. Congratulations. And I love this, too. Your crew writer for the Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation. It's a NASA-sponsored mission, four months in a geodesic dome on Mauna Loa at 8,000 feet. Or as we call that in Boulder, Colorado, sea level. But 8,000 feet, that's pretty good. Is that the longest anyone has spent in Hawaii without going to the beach? Might be, it might be. And I saw pictures of that, and that, I mean, it's supposed to be a Mars analog. Yeah, it absolutely looks like. And it's amazing. Yeah, red rocks, desert, dry. So if we could have found three better people to talk about what it's like to go to Mars, I don't see how. So, we wanna talk about what it's like to be on a spacecraft going to Mars. And to do that, I think we first have to sort of define what the spacecraft is gonna be, because there are different architectures for getting to Mars. You know, are you building a giant spaceship or something very small? And Josh, you're sort of the expert here. First, even before we get to that, I just wanna spend a minute. What do we need to do between now and launching a rocket or a series of rockets that will take astronauts to Mars? Well, I think that figuring out how to get to Mars is a long list of challenging new technologies and capabilities. And I tend to group them into two categories. There's things that are sort of unique to operating on Mars itself. So landing, getting down through the Mars atmosphere, you know, supersonic parachutes and all those sorts of things. Figuring out how we're gonna deal with planetary protection, which is preventing Earth microbes from colonizing Mars or Mars microbes from colonizing Earth. Figuring out how you provide power on the Martian surface at night and so forth. So those are the things that are specific to Mars. But then there's a category of things that are sort of general purpose skills you need to operate in deep space, no matter where you wanna go if it's a long distance away. So that's things like figuring out how the human body handles microgravity and how do we protect against that. Figuring out what we're gonna do about deep space radiation. Figuring out things like how do you keep the crew happy and healthy and productive when they're locked in a tin can for a long period of time. People keep looking at me. We'll get to that, we'll get to that. Four months, four months. We'll get to that, right. You know, propulsion, communications from great distances and so on. So I think the thing that's important about that category of stuff is that those are useful skills for other missions as well, going to the moon or going to asteroids. So those are probably the things we'll learn to do first. And a lot of that is happening on the International Space Station right now. So, you know, questions like how big a habitat do we need for the astronauts over that period of time and how much exercise time do they need to spend during the day? So everybody knows that the astronauts have to exercise to keep their muscles and bones healthy. But a consequence of that is that they eat more and they turn more oxygen into carbon dioxide and they sweat more. And so that actually is a major driver for the life support system. One of the things I didn't actually know until quite recently talking to a former Apollo astronaut is that you couldn't exercise on an Apollo spacecraft because the life support system couldn't keep up. So. Once there's no room. Yeah, that too. So figuring out how we design those spacecraft is one of the things that we're gonna be focusing on in the next 10 or 20 years at the moon and an asteroid. It's funny you would bring this up or answer that question this way because one of the things I was trying to think of when I was preparing for this, the hard part about a moderator is coming up with either enough questions or not too many questions. And as I was thinking about this, as you're going to Mars, how you get there is going to define a lot of what we're gonna be talking about. Just what's the spacecraft going to be like? So to even discuss this on a panel, are the crew gonna be weightless for four to six months or nine months, however long it takes to get there? Or is there going to be something that we're going to use to simulate artificial gravity, not like inertial plates or anything like in Star Trek, but spinning the spacecraft to mimic gravity? I wonder if we should take those two ideas separately? We haven't actually discussed this. Should we take that separately or just talk about them together? Talk about them together, I think that'd be... Well, you're the expert. Yes, so from my perspective, in my work with the space station, I firmly believe that whatever the next, whatever the vehicle is to get us to Mars, I feel pretty strongly that it's likely not going to be rotational. I feel like there's going to be microgravity involved. And so that's why we do so much work on the space station right now and understanding the human body changes in microgravity because we have to figure out what systems change and how you mitigate that so that you're healthy when you get to Mars. And we're all beings of the 1G environment. I mean, that's what we're built for. So the second you take that away, we've become new and changed and the body is really efficient at getting rid of what it doesn't use, things like your muscles and bones if you're not standing up against gravity anymore, things like your blood volume, your plasma volume goes down because you don't need all that fluid anymore and your heart's not pumping as hard because you don't have the gravity to pump again. So your heart starts to atrophy. So you have all these changes even in the immune system, the immune system becomes suppressed. So with all that being said and know that the engineering challenge would be too great technically and I think monetarily, financially and also vestibularly for a rotating vehicle. I think that's too many challenges. We're facing the fact that it'll be microgravity based and so we've got to get all these things figured out now with this laboratory that we have in the Earth orbit. Right, and we have two astronauts on board right now. We're gonna spend a year specifically. There have been astronauts who have spent a year in space before, I think four in total. But this is where this is specifically designed to look into long-term effects. And so just to give everybody a sense of perspective, a Mars mission is probably about a six to nine month trip to Mars and something like 18 months at Mars and then another trip back. So you're talking about a two and a half year mission and typically a space shuttle mission was about two weeks. A typical space station mission has been about six months. So we need to prove that we can safely operate for much longer than we have in the past and these one year missions are kind of a first step in that direction. Well, given all of the problems you just listed which is a terrifying litany of how your body can go wrong, it's like, I know how my body can go wrong in 1G. You say we're sort of adapted to 1G and it's like, that's cool, you're young. Let me tell you about my L5S1. With all of those, does it still make sense to keep them weightless or at least in microgravity on the way to Mars when they're gonna have to land under roughly a third of a gravity and work on that? When we know it's difficult for them to come back to Earth even after six months. Yes, and so I think to answer that question we can look to the first big advancement we've gotten through space station is an understanding bone loss. We've made some significant advancements in mitigating bone loss. I mean ever since I was a kid, we knew you lose bone in space but now we've got the right countermeasures in place that we have found that we've been able to maintain bone mineral density. Now we don't know about the inside of the structure of that bone, it still may be weak but I think it's a really good example of how we are doing things right now in ways that we can mitigate, potentially go into Mars in microgravity because I think the other side of that vehicle spinning is such a huge financial and engineering feat and probably as an engineer, the more you introduce that's new and non-tested in history before, it's kind of like you don't know what you don't know so you may be facing other challenges that we've not faced before with such a complex vehicle. At least the human body, we've got years and decades behind us of understanding what happens in space and we feel like we're on a burned down path with risk in terms of mitigating those changes in the humans. What are the, what have you done to make sure bone loss is minimized? Those things include resistive high impact, resistive exercise, so things like weight lifting and obviously it's a little different in space, the machines they use. There's treadmill, so the heel impact on the bone. You need load on the bone, that's what you need. We've also figured out a good nutritional mix for the astronauts so they gotta eat all their calories and take, I think it's 800, so it's twice, I think the daily dose of vitamin D that you would take on Earth. So they, all those things and we're finding out that these things seem to be working. So diet and exercise. Right, exercise. Yeah, right. The advice for astronauts is the same as for the rest. Same for you. You can make millions of dollars selling diet books that have all kinds of crazy things and they all kind of wind up, the ones that work, burn more calories than you take in. So you were asking about artificial gravity and somebody said something interesting in a recent study of artificial gravity that it, you have to think of artificial gravity as a little bit like artificial turf and artificial sweeteners, that it's almost like the natural stuff but it's not quite the same thing and there's some subtle differences like you were getting to that cause challenges both in the biology and in the engineering. So one example is if you've all seen the movie 2001 where they've got the rotating centrifuge in their spaceship and one of the astronauts goes jogging around the spaceship. Well, the apparent effect of gravity is a result of your angular speed around the rotation. If you start moving in that direction, you're changing your speed. So for example, if you jog with the motion of the spacecraft, you would get twice as heavy and if you jog the other direction, you could become weightless. So the astronauts have to figure out how to function that way and the engineers have to figure out how to make the spacecraft really big and rotate really slowly so that those effects disappear. That's great for sci-fi writers out there. I can see people taking notes. I won't give anything away but a friend of mine who writes science fiction actually has a story similar to that and he asked me what would be the effects of moving and I said basically what you just said. So I'm glad you said that because I feel better that I wasn't wrong in giving my friend advice. Yeah, and there are also effects, there are also just daily effects. Like I always think about what it would be like to pour tea and have the stream seem to move away from you or just miss the cut because- Things don't drop in a straight line in a rotating spacecraft. And I get sick on it, literally on a kid's swing. If I go in a backyard and go on a swing, I will feel like I can't eat anything for the rest of the day. So I won't be in a rotating habitat on my way to Mars anytime soon, which is fine with me actually. Okay, so they're gonna be weightless, that's good. Now we've established that. It's a six to nine month trip. Is this gonna be a one-shot deal? Are we launching multiple ships that they're going to have to rendezvous with fuel and water and air depots on the way? Or is it, are we basically loading them up with a backpack full of supplies and saying hope you get there? What do you think? So it's a lot bigger than a backpack. I think one good exercise for this is if you've ever packed the car for a family vacation, imagine packing everything you'd need for, say, a family of four for a two and a half year camping trip and just thinking of the food and there's no water there, so take the water and the toilet paper and, you know. Like a trailer for your gasoline. Right, so it very quickly becomes a really large amount of stuff. So you're not likely to be able to launch that all in one shot, even with the biggest rockets we can build. So it'll be a conglomeration of several loads of stuff and then the question is, do you aggregate all of those things in Earth orbit and send them all off to Mars together? Or do you send some of the things to Mars first so that they're waiting there when you get there? One advantage of that is that you don't have to launch everything fairly close to it at the same time. You can launch some things a few years ahead of time. The disadvantage is how confident are you that it'll still be there and functioning when the astronauts get there? So then you start thinking about things like, well, let's not pack anything that they have to have to come home and send that first. We'll send all that stuff with them, but then does that mean that you have too much stuff? So it turns into a pretty complicated packing problem, but it'll almost certainly be several launches and at least some things going out to Mars ahead of time. Right, so that strikes me that your crew is going to have to be fairly confident in what they're doing and certainly able to handle any sort of contingency that comes up. And that is, I think, probably one of the most hand-fisted segues I've ever made. And in the next section, which would be, okay, so now we've decided the hardware. It's not going to spin. We're gonna be throwing stuff out there. They're gonna be taking a lot of stuff with them, multiple launches. We have to pick a crew. How, I've seen a lot of designs and the crew always seems to settle around four people. Does that sound about right? Four to six? Yeah. So if you go back to, say, Werner von Braun's studies, I think he had, I don't know, 75 people or something, but when you start figuring out how to do that, it gets really hard. And so the engineers wanna turn it into like two people, two astronauts, and then the crew and the scientists say, that doesn't, you know, you can't do that. That's not enough. And then you start figuring out, well, what's the minimum? Is it three? Is it four? Is it six? I think six was established, didn't have it. Costello go to Mars. So I think that's probably... That's a good baseline. That's the way to go, as opposed to... Whereas the three Stooges, of course, clearly believe the three is the right number, so... Did they go to Mars? I don't remember. But, well, that brings Kate into the conversation now. Not for the three Stooges, not having Costello angle necessarily, but for crew selection. You have four or six people that you're about to send on a trip to Mars. It's gonna take two and a half years. This is not Apollo anymore. This is a whole other game. How do you do this? How do you even begin to think about crewing a vehicle like this? That's a good question. I don't know if I have the answer to that, but I do know... I do know that our high seas crew had six members, and we were selected out of 700 people worldwide for these astronaut-like characteristics, which are education, some background in science or engineering, attitude, can-do attitude, and experience, sort of being willing to go out into the world and try things, or go out into other worlds and try things. So, like I said, we had six people on crew, three men, three women. And actually, in the audience right now is one of my crew members, the chief scientist, Jaheda Sarah Sastra. She wants to raise her hand and wave. So, one-third of the high seas crew is here today. And we were brought together in a sort of a pilot... So, high seas was about a food study. So, we were exploring different food systems, and we were brought together for a sort of cooking lesson before the main mission. How do you cook with freeze-dried foods? How would you cook on Mars? This was the question. And so, there were nine finalists for this mission, and we all came together at Cornell University, and we learned how to cook with freeze-dried cheese and crystallized eggs and that sort of thing. And that's when we got a chance to get to know each other and see is this gonna work or not. And we actually all got along pretty well. And even after the mission, we all get along pretty well. So, it's a testament to the selection process of the PIs of the high seas mission. They were really looking for a crew that was fairly diverse. Only half of us were native English speakers. So, our crew commander was from Belgium, and we had a Canadian and a guy who was born in Russia and moved to the U.S. when he was 11, and Jahida grew up in Puerto Rico. And I'm from Kansas, so. I'm warm. I'm warm. Right, so. We were a pretty diverse crew, all with science backgrounds, but some of us were, like in my case, more creative professionals, so I'm a writer. And our crew commander was actually an artist. And so, we had geologists and engineers and pilots and scientists. It was just a real great mix of people. Kind of, it's a way of looking at building a tiny community and sending this off to another planet. Who do you want in the mix? And diversity is a really good thing in that regard. And I think it's important that you brought up the whole international angle, because it's likely that this would be an international mission. And so, you have, in addition to, kind of at the planning phase, that means you've gotta be satisfying the goals and objectives of lots of different countries and people and agencies. And then at the individual level, you have these challenges of different cultural expectations about how people work together, language barriers. I find even that people who speak English fluently, but from a different country, there are certain words that mean different things, right? So, you think you're communicating really well and you discover that there's a miscommunication going on. Right, I mean, in some ways, a diverse crew can be more challenging at certain points, but like in our case, I recognize that we're constantly relearning each other's habits and language quirks and preferences and that can feel like there's a little bit of friction, but it also keeps you on your toes. And if you're in a group of people that are just incredibly similar, you don't know what you don't know. But if you have perspectives that are from kind of all over the place, then yeah, then the problem solving, your potential to solve serious problems, which can seriously happen with these systems and on a two and a half year mission. I mean, your potential to solve problems just increases significantly. And I write case writing and also a publication that came out last year about gender, sex and gender in space and the fact that the diversity, a good part of the diversity comes from a mixed gender crew too. So there's practical reasons that Kate wrote about ascending women into space. They eat less, you know? And so, you know, they may be cheaper, they're lighter, they're smaller, right? But also, the behavior perspectives and different ways of thinking between male versus female, I think brings a lot of strength. So the workshops that were held last year and the publication that came out from NASA indicated that there should be more female flyers and there should be a mixed crew. And that difference in perspectives is really important. And sometimes the diversity and the sort of what it is that defines the diversity is not obvious. I was fortunate enough to work for an astronaut a number of years ago who had been in the astronaut class that was selected in the late 70s, which was the first one when essentially the all white male pilots were being joined by women, minorities, international participants and so forth. And his comment was that there certainly were some issues that had to get figured out, but really the biggest difference was that that was also the first time that scientists were joining the astronaut corps. And the biggest difference in the group was not male versus female, it was military pilots versus scientists. And wanted to make a decisive decision right now versus study the problem as long as you possibly can. And really the gender issue wasn't that big a deal. And the introversion and extraversion, that's another issue. Flexibility as sort of a rigid mindset. There are all sorts of ways that people are diverse. And I mean that sort of thing just gets sussed out as you are going through the selection process. Well, one more question about that then, because I read your article about sending an all female crew, which I thought was really interesting. In Apollo, for example, those spacecraft were so small that the astronauts had to be a certain height. And even with the shuttle, they weren't supposed to be too tall, except for Mike Massimino, who's like 18 feet tall. Stunning how tall that guy is, I wasn't expecting that. But the idea of an all women crew sort of seems to go the other way as far as diversity goes. Would you then, would you recommend if you're trying to balance sort of logistics and everything else, would it make more sense to have maybe more women to reduce consumption and all of that, but still have enough men for diversity? That's an interesting question. Or four and two, maybe something like that. So just to give you some background, I wrote a piece for Slate that proposed sending an all female crew to Mars. It's got some attention because it's not your typical Mars crew. But when you look at the numbers, women, small women in particular actually require half the calories or less than larger men. And historically men have been sort of the de facto astronaut. But when you require fewer calories then you can send half the food. And on a two and a half year mission, half the food is a significant weight savings. And when you save weight, when you save weight, you can save fuel and costs. So a number of people agreed with me. I found this out while I was on the high seas mission. I was looking at the body media data. It's all anonymous, but I could see that the women on our crew were consuming. I mean, we would rarely break 1500 calories of expenditure a day, whereas some of the guys were, I mean, 3400 calories day in and day out. And you could see it on our plates, who went back for seconds, who had plates piled high of food, a full of food. So that was the basis for this article. Now, an all female mission, that's kind of out there. But what I liked about it was it turned our idea of what Amar's mission could be kind of upside down. And I'm not sure what the answer is to having more women than men. I think it's interesting to consider it when you're thinking of a craft design because you have to, if you decide to go with a smaller astronaut, that has a ripple effect all the way down the line. And so is that really the choice that you want to make from the very beginning? It's a question that should be asked. So I think one of the big differences between the old days and today and the future is that when you look back to Mercury and Gemini, those were, for example, the Mercury seven astronauts. There weren't very many of them. And you could pretty easily apply a criteria that says you can't be more than five foot nine and five foot 10, whatever it was, and still get plenty of qualified candidates. With the space shuttle program, there was a deliberate effort to broaden that because there were going to be hundreds of people flying and they didn't want to exclude people. And so on the space shuttle and on the space station, the design requirements basically say you have to be able to design the spacecraft for a fifth percentile, i.e., very short woman, or a 95th percentile man who looks like a football player basically. So not only does that mean you have to design things to be very big, but it also means that things like the seats or the reach to the switches has to also be designed for someone with very short limbs. So it's not just the, it's not just the too big, it's also the too small dimension. For something like a Mars mission where there probably will be a much smaller number of people going, I think it would make sense to narrow that range, not necessarily an all female crew, but a sort of reapplying the five foot nine, whatever criteria or a metabolic criteria and say you can't be eating 3,500 calories a day if you want to go to Mars. And there's some interesting physiological differences between men and women in space too that's documented, but the end result is, you know, the recommendation is to fly more women now. So send more women to space. Out of over 500 flyers, only 57 of them have been women in the history of the US space program. So we don't have a lot of data that's statistically significant as much on women as we do on men. So that's more things that we need to study and understand. What's the trend? Is it, I mean, clearly in the beginning, there were no women, now there are more. So is that, is that going in the right direction? Yeah, and in fact, the last year's astronaut selection class, there were eight new astronauts selected and four were female and four were male. Cool, yeah. All right. But there's another difference that's interesting too in this whole selection issue, which is that the data suggests, and I'm not sure how conclusive it is, that women are more susceptible to damage from radiation in deep space than men are. And so then there's this question of what does fair and equal mean? Because the way that rule is being applied essentially means female astronauts may not be able to spend as many days on the space station as male astronauts would, at least over the course of a career. So is that unfair? Is that applying sort of a more fundamental constraint equally? I mean, it's an interesting topic for discussion and particularly in deep space missions that's going to be a challenge. There's also issues of age. Older people tend to be less susceptible to radiation, cancer induced by radiation than younger people. So a Mars mission may have an older crew than we are perhaps used to thinking of, particularly from the right stuff days. Wow, I hadn't thought about that. I mean, I know there are physiological differences, of course, but some of them are clearly going to be weighted more heavily than others. I think mass requirements are probably going to play a big role in this. And if women eat less, that's probably going to be more highly rated than something like radiation resistance. I'm just guessing, because in that case, you want to make your spacecraft as radiation resistant as possible, but still lightweight. So it would be interesting to see a list of sort of prioritized. How do we make the crew optimized? And of course, there probably isn't a single most optimal crew. There's going to be a wide range. But here we are. It's 2040. We've chosen our crew. It's, let's say, it's six people. However, we've done that. And we're on our way to Mars. 2040. I thought it was 2030. Well, we've done this before. I don't want this to be the first one. This is Apollo 16, when the public doesn't care about it so much anymore. It's a little more routine. I love Lucy's on. We've got stuff to do. But just so my point is that perhaps, again, for a conversation like this, you have to think about the architecture. Is there an existing base on Mars? Is this the first crew to go? And when I was trying to think about questions, I thought, well, if it's the first crew to go, that's going to introduce a tremendous number of other questions, although maybe they're of interest. But let's assume that because this is a day in the life of going to Mars, which suggests a routine sort of an idea, let's say it's been done before. Now we have our crew of six. They're weightless. They're on their way to Mars. What is a day like when the alarm bell goes off and they get up for their shift? What do they do with it? Science. Really? Yeah. Well, not astronomy, I assume. So less interesting science. But science, so what kind of science are they doing? So you say they're on the way to Mars or they're there already? They're on the way to Mars. They're on their way, yeah. You could do microgravity science. Any kind of investigations that you could take that would be a sample type that you don't need to necessarily return or return right away? The small things. You could do fluids demonstrations or study behavior of fluids. And microbial behavior is a big one, especially when we're talking about planetary protection. You can study those guys. Any of the small stuff that gets you some fundamental discoveries along the way, I think, and radiation, too. Radiation is one of the big things that we will still be learning about in part because it takes a lot of, you're mentioning, statistical sample size. You want a lot of astronauts to experience that. And the radiation environment in deep space is different from what almost all of our data is based on so far, which is low Earth orbit, the International Space Station, which, although it's outside the Earth's atmosphere mostly, it's still inside the Earth's magnetic field. So the radiation environment is only sort of roughly half as bad at the space station as it is in deep space. And the kinds of radiation you're exposed to are a little bit different. So we'll still be learning about what the effects of radiation on the human body are in deep space, even on the third or fourth Mars mission. And then I had some discussions with Kate just before coming up here. In addition to the work, there's the full life that she could tell you more about here. But ideally, you want the crew to feel, and reading through the journals, the experimental journals, you want the crew to feel like they're focused on a mission, something, not just hanging around all day and waiting, right? They got to feel like they have a purpose. And so Kate, if you want to expand on your experience, I think. Right. Well, I mean, as you mentioned, the ISS crew is highly scheduled. And so they have to hew to this very rigid schedule and every minute is accounted for. And we had something similar on high seas, but we were able to kind of determine our own schedule. So we had this level of autonomy that our PIs believed is going to be true of a Mars mission because you're far enough away from Earth. I mean, no human has ever been that far away from Earth. And not only are you disconnected culturally from your home planet, but communication back and forth, there's going to be a delay, a maximum of 20, 22 minute delay. And so you can't be checking in with mission control all the time. So we'd call that mission support. And the crew itself has to be quite autonomous. So creating your own schedule and feeling like you have some sort of control over that, I think is really important, especially for eight months, going someplace. But as you were saying, having a purpose. So of course, you're going to get to Mars. And that's the ultimate goal. But in the meantime, you have to have a sense of what you're doing isn't just busy work. I think that's actually quite crucial. So you might have some role in creating your own projects. You might have some role in figuring out the rotation of those projects. Our crew scientist did a great job bringing with her a list of microbial studies that she was going to do. Every two weeks, she changed it up. She had a different study that she was working on, so she wouldn't get bored. And I think that that's a really good way of looking at things. Is boredom going to be a problem? It could be. So it's a big question for astronauts and the people who study astronauts do astronauts get bored. And if you ask astronauts and the people who study astronauts, they will say no. Because no astronaut wants to admit to being bored in space. It's a privilege to go. And you might not go again if you said that it was a boring experience. But I think a lot of it depends on how we define boredom. This relates to a piece that I wrote for Aeon last year about my own experience with boredom. I didn't think I was bored. We had plenty of discussions about it as a crew and no, of course we weren't bored. We had so much to do. We were constantly busy. We were working out. We were making meals. We were eating the meals, having conversation. We were working on our research projects that we brought along. And I brought two projects. I was a writer and I was doing a sleep study. We were filling out surveys. We were donating data to NASA to help get future astronauts to Mars. There is great purpose here, and we had a ton to do. But over time, I realized that there was a monotony that settled in with me. And it was a pretty serious kind of boredom. I didn't think that I was a person who got bored. I really like finding new things and being interested in things. And I can do that all the time. But what I didn't realize is that that actually might be an indicator of being easily bored. And so I think that we have to really think about how we define boredom and how we get at that question, is this person prone to boredom? And if so, what are some countermeasures to that? Because I don't think that that should preclude people from going. But I think it should be considered that astronauts don't want to admit that they're bored, and they might actually be bored with the routine. And we should try to figure out a way to liven it up for them. One of the other things that will be different is that on the space station of the Space Shuttle, when astronauts have a few spare moments of free time, the thing they almost always want to do is look out the window. And it's just spectacular looking at Earth and you see things, you recognize, and things are constantly changing, and the light is different, and the weather is different. It never gets old. Well, if you are on a spacecraft halfway between Earth and Mars, you're tens of millions of miles away from anything. There is nothing to see out the window. And so figuring out what is it that the astronauts are going to do when they have five minutes of me time, that's going to be a little bit different than we've seen before. The void probably isn't the best idea. For psychological help. Your iPhone and all that. Well, it sounds like the ideal candidate then is a short female amateur astronomer who would then be happy to put her nose up against the window and just look at the Orion Nebula by naked eye for months at a time. So to wrap this up, just a final question. Does this, the routine day, I guess we've talked about that a little bit, but does that change as they're approaching their destination? And then after they've spent x number of months on Mars and have to come home, does that psychological situation change? Right. So I mean, when you're coming home, it's a completely different goal now. Getting to Mars is one thing, but coming home is another. So we've all taken that road trip where we're coming back and there's just sort of deflated emotional sensation. The air in the car is different for a few reasons. But yeah, you have to really change your focus. So I think questions of motivation and value in the work are going to be really important. And I don't think the answer is obvious to how you can keep people motivated and keep people excited. Yeah, I don't know. So there's a lot of things we've mentioned that we don't really know the answers to. And I think one of the things that's important to recognize is we can study them on Earth, and we can do simulated missions. And we learn a lot from that. But the way we're really going to know the answers to these questions is by going and doing it. So some of the first missions probably won't go all the way to Mars, won't be a two and a half year mission, but doing something like going to lunar orbit for six months or going to an asteroid that might be a 12 month round trip mission. That's where we're gonna start learning. What is it really like to go so far away you can't even see the Earth anymore and so far away that you can't talk to mission control and get help in a prompt amount of time? I guess that brings us back to how we started, which was what steps do we have to take before we go? And I guess they're very similar to what we're going to experience when we get there and coming back. So there you go. Going to Mars means doing a hell of a lot more than just going to Mars, which I'm all for because in the meantime, that means exploring other places that I'm personally very interested in, like the Moon and near Earth asteroids. And I'd love to see that happen. So I've always said I think we should go to the Moon first and keep in mind Mars as we're doing it. It seems like I have to broaden my perspective a little more and say there's a lot more we have to do. I actually support an idea of going to Mars and it sounds like by going to Mars we're going to do everything that everybody wants to do anyway. So it strikes me as being a pretty good idea. So that's all the formal questions I have. We can throw this to the audience now to see what you all want to know about going to Mars. We've covered everything, nobody has any questions. Oh, okay, excellent. Hi, thanks very much. My name's Edward Hoyt with Nexent. One thing that I don't think has been given enough attention or maybe it's a non-issue is the whole question of the habitat and how that relates to life support and also the possibility once on Mars of growing food as opposed to eating MREs and stuff that you packed in a can. And I mean, is that something that is being discussed? Is that really a secondary issue for further research or experimentation or what is the state of thinking about that given some of the experiments that have been done here on Earth to create an enclosed biosphere? Those are actually, that's a really good question. Those are actually primary issues that we're focused on with space station. How do you keep plants alive from seed to seed in a crop that has nutrition and the appropriate microbial balance? And sometimes fluids behave so differently in space that we drown our own plants. And we still haven't gotten a full crop of edible produce to keeping crew alive and that's ongoing science that's happening on space station. Even the ECLIS system, there are some parts of the system that are tried and true on station. We've proven them out and we feel really, really good about. Others are still, they're not performing the way you expect. And so space station is the proving ground for those types of experiments. I think you can do them better there than even anywhere on Earth and that's what we're gonna need to keep doing until we can get to this next phase. Go from Earth dependent to the proving grounds where then you go out beyond. There has been a fair amount of work on growing food in zero gravity. I'm not sure there's been very much, there's been a little bit on growing food on the Moon and Mars, but probably less. There's two maybe non-obvious things that they've learned about that. One is that the first trick is to pick food, to choose foods that are easy to process. So for example, there was some work done on growing wheat in enclosed life support systems and then somebody figured out that okay, great, you've got wheat, how do you turn that into something you'd actually eat? Now you need to be able to mill it and bake it and it turns into a whole, whereas something like potatoes are much simpler. You grow a potato, you dig it out of the ground, you scrub it off and you can eat it, which is probably why in the book The Martian, which we were talking about earlier, there's potatoes. The other thing is that, so when you start trying to figure out how food and plants interact with the rest of the life support system, if you try to treat that as a life support problem and meeting a certain part of the calorie requirement and are you relying on the plants to produce the oxygen, it all gets very, very complicated and you might decide that it's not worth the trouble, but there's a whole lot of psychological value for the astronauts in having something fresh and green to eat and also in having something that they grow. So even if all you're growing is a little window box full of lettuce or something, you're not gonna feed the astronauts on that and keep them alive for a thousand days that way, but they are gonna get some nutritional value, they're going to enjoy their meals a whole lot more. I can access that. Yeah, and they'll appreciate the experience of actually being involved in food production and seeing something come out of the work that they're putting into it. Because of the constraints of our food study, we weren't allowed to grow a lot of food, we did have crop of sprouts and that was really something special. You got a different texture in your mouth which is surprisingly important. You're used to the same sort of chunky broccoli all the time and so to have something crisp that releases this cool water all of a sudden it really is quite different than normal dehydrated beef but you also asked about habitat design and we lived in a large geodesic dome about the size of a two bedroom apartment. We each had our own state rooms but there was really something interesting about the architecture of it because we had a feeling even though it was an enclosed space that it was spacious because we could look up and we saw all the space and there's some thought that inflatable habitats might be a good way to go because their mass can be minimal but then the volume once they're inflated can be quite large and in particular then you might ask well what about radiation shielding? How does that work? But there's also some thought into looking at the lava tubes that are on Mars and the moon and maybe using those as natural radiation shields so these caves and putting an inflatable habitat within the cave. So that's one answer to your question. And next year a station is gonna have an inflatable habitat attached to the outside so we're testing those kind of technologies. Last year we grew lettuce, the crew couldn't eat it, they had to send it back to the scientist for evaluation. Well they were supposed to not eat it. I'm sure 100% of that got sent back to Earth, right? So I heard a story about the Russian space program on the Mir space station that the botanical scientists sent up these onion plants to do plant growth experiments and the cosmonauts didn't quite realize they, well didn't know they weren't supposed to eat them and so the scientists called up and said how's that experiment going and they're like, it's going great. It's going great now. It's delicious, yeah. Like the wildest of space stations in the country. All right, hello, my name's Andrew Burns. I'm a fifth grade science teacher from Atlanta. Cool. Yay, thank you. What I'm wondering about and I think that I might be representative of a lot of the general population and that my perspective is colored by science fiction horror films. Have the high seas program or anything else like that begun to develop maybe a list of personality traits or tendencies that specifically should be excluded from a mission like this? Well, NASA already has that. I mean, there are things, there are red flags that you like out. Yeah. The whole psychological profiling is pretty rigorous right now. You don't want, you want people who are pretty even keeled. So we were selected for our lack of drama. You don't necessarily want people who would be good on a reality show. So that's one way of looking at it. I'm Jerry Telles. I'm a retired NASA navigator. And I'm just wondering, has NASA and other space agencies resolved itself to something of the order of a six-month transit time to Mars or are there technologies, R&D, going on for hypervelocity travel, to get it down to a few weeks instead of a few months? So there are technologies being researched. I would, I guess I'd summarize it by saying it's a really hard problem. And there are some, there are some things that are physically plausible. So nuclear thermal propulsion is one option that's been talked about a lot. The word nuclear in there causes some challenges. But one of the things that makes it difficult is even supposedly you develop the technology that gives you the really fast propulsion system to get there. If you're going to Mars really fast or coming back from Mars really fast, that also means you have to slow down a lot. And so, yeah. So the technology, it's sort of a doubly hard problem in that the faster you are able to go, the more you need a fast propulsion system to be able to slow down. And the greater the risks are if something goes wrong. So for example, we're looking a lot at when we come back to Earth from Mars, how fast can we be going without destroying the heat shield when we hit the atmosphere? And it turns out, for example, that we don't have any way to test on the ground, the environments that you see when you come back that fast. So you start extrapolating with the math. And in theory, we get the math correct, but we'd certainly like to test it. So that's one of the reasons why we're doing some of the test flights we're doing is we're learning things from those test flights that we can't simulate in a wind tunnel or an arc jet test facility on the ground. So I guess the answer is yes. There are testing things. And that would change, of course, the entire inflection of everything we've been discussing. If you can get to Mars in a week as opposed to, or I guess I've heard 90 days is a decent estimate using advanced technology propulsion. But that's a long time from now. And certainly the way things are going right now, it looks like we'll be going to Mars using conventional chemical rockets first. Actually, quite possibly using solar electric propulsion, which is essentially using the solar panels like on regular satellites to electrically charge propellant and spew it out the back, which is a very fuel efficient way to travel, but it doesn't produce a lot of thrust. So it doesn't necessarily get you there faster, but it reduces the mass of your spacecraft a lot. And that's being thought about for the first missions? Yes, and one of the reasons it's being thought about is that it's actually being done for a lot of missions now. And so one of the reasons why we haven't developed warp drive or ultra-spiffy advanced propulsion technologies that are great for Mars is if Mars is the only application where you really need that, then NASA has to do all the technology development. And a fairly small part of the space program has to cover all of that. But there's other propulsion technologies like electric propulsion that are used on other space applications. So for example, if you have satellite television, there's a pretty good chance that the satellite that's beaming that signal to you has an electric propulsion system on board. And that means that we in industry want to invest in better solar panels, better power processing units, better thrusters, because we have all kinds of other uses for it. So that technology is advancing faster than some of the really far out there stuff. Well, then let me close on this thought then, as you're saying that. Right now, we have a spacecraft called Don, which is orbiting or is about to enter. It's sort of orbiting the asteroid series. It's lowering its orbit right now. That is a fully ion propulsion drive where it basically throws atoms individually out the back at very high speed. It's very low thrust, but very high efficiency. We've been using this type of drive for quite a long time for station keeping, for satellites, just to move them around. As a main propulsion, we've been using it for a while as well. It's a very nice technology. It allows you to do a lot of stuff that you can't do with chemical rockets. The thing I love the most about it of everything that I've heard is that way back when in the 1960s in Star Trek, there was an alien that they are trying to chase. And Spock says they're using an ion drive. And he says, there are 100 years ahead of us in technology. Yeah. And that takes place 200 years from now. And Spock is saying, there are 100 years ahead of them. In fact, we have that now, that technology. Going to Mars may seem like science fiction, but what was science fiction 50 years ago is happening today. The future is now. And the time to be thinking about this is now. And I'm really glad you all are doing that. So I'd like to thank our panelists, our Rutley, Josh Hopkins, Kate Green for sharing your brains with us about this. And I hope that this becomes a reality pretty damn quick. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.