 Hello, welcome to tomorrow. In this special space pod, we're entering some of your space questions that were submitted with the hashtag AMA Superpod, submitted to our subreddit r slash tmro, or sent to us through email via spacepods at tomorrow.tv. Both myself, Lisa Stojanowski and Jared Head are going to be answering some of your questions for this very special Ask Us Anything Superpod for August 31st, 2016. So first up from our email account, Jan Strom asks, I believe his name is Jan, it might be Jan, so please correct me if I'm wrong. For any name case, Mr. Strom asks, will SpaceX ever make a crew dragon full orbital reentry landing on solid ground without parachutes? We know that NASA do not like that, but asking anyway. Good question. So the short answer is yes, eventually. The long answer is that NASA is going to require them to prove themselves and is going to want SpaceX to land the dragon capsule successfully under rocket propulsion multiple times before they'll ever let a living crew member step inside that thing to land on ground with it. That being said, they might do a lot of landings with maybe some sensitive experiments or maybe even living animals on board first as kind of a step-by-step approach to being safe enough in order to land crews via rocket propulsion, but I mean, this is something that they're going to need to do anyway. If SpaceX is seriously going to do the red dragon mission, sending a dragon capsule to Mars and landing it under rocket propulsion, then they're going to need to do this at least once here on Earth to prove that they can do it. I mean, it looks like so far that everything looks like they could do it, but they haven't actually done it yet, so I think that they'll do it here on Earth at least once. Whether or not we'll ever see crews on board just depends on whether or not NASA will be satisfied with the safety requirements, but in any case they will at least land a dragon capsule with rocket propulsion at least once. The next question comes to us from Reddit user Brandon Mark who asked, if you had money to fund two specific missions, crafts or experiments, what would they be? So the first experiment that I'd like to fund is really cool, but it's also really important for helping humanity to expand their presence across the cosmos. The Mars plant experiment is a proposal to send a cube-sat-sized box on the Mars 2020 rover. Now the Mars 2020 rover is based on the construction of the Curiosity rover, and the plan is to put the cube-sat-sized box on the spot where the sundial currently sits on Curiosity but on the 2020 rover. The box will contain over 100 seeds of the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, including cameras and sensors to see whether the seeds can germinate and grow on Mars. The inside of the box will be very earth-like containing earth-like air and water as well. The water will be taken with the spacecraft, so the only thing the experiment is testing is whether plants can grow in the conditions of Martian gravity and radiation. The problem is, however, that the Mars plant experiment hasn't been confirmed as a payload for Mars 2020. In my last spaceport I was talking to the program scientist for Mars 2020, Mitch Schulte, and he didn't even know the proposal existed. Anyway, I think it's still really important to fund this experiment because growing plants on Mars is essential if we're ever going to be sending humans there to live permanently. In fact, I love this experiment so much that my second experiment coming back to the original question would be to fund a successor to a Mars plant experiment where we tested the conditions of Martian atmosphere as well, perhaps with a little bit of modification like pressurizing the atmosphere. Anyway, thank you so much for your question, Brandon The first question that I'll be answering comes from Twitter user Albertina. What could the weather of a tidally locked planet look like? Assuming that this planet has an atmosphere, shout out to Proxima B. The weather on a tidally locked planet would be quite interesting. And just so that everybody knows what a tidally locked planet is, that means that it goes around its star and it rotates at the same rate as it orbits. Basically, one side of that planet is always facing the star as it goes around it. Now, that would obviously lead to some really weird weather patterns. Obviously, the side closest to the sun would be a lot warmer than the side opposite of the sun, where it would be a lot cooler. But if you have an atmosphere, you can actually distribute heat through the atmosphere. That means that it's somewhere like Proxima B. You may actually be able to have heat from that side closest to the star distributed on the far side of that planet. So that may end up meaning that the life on a hypothetical planet like Proxima B may actually be found on the nighttime side as opposed to the daytime side. This next question comes from Twitter from the user Ross Trower, who is also one of our patrons. Thank you very much, Ross. And his question is, should we consider the Venusian atmosphere over Mars for colonization? Very interesting. In my opinion, I don't think that we should consider Venus colonization over Mars colonization. I think that we should do both. And the whole idea of colonizing the Venusian atmosphere is super interesting, because most of the atmosphere in Venus has the same density as water. And there's a particular layer that is actually kind of cool. It's not as hot as the rest of the Venusian atmosphere. And we could easily send stuff to float on that layer. And with the temperature being pretty nice compared to the rest of Venus and us being able to send stuff to float on that level without having to worry about sinking, it actually might be pretty cool. We could have like cloud cities on Venus, but without that giant pole that holds up the city in the Star Wars movies, they would actually just be floating on the atmosphere. So I think that we should be looking at Venusian colonization. But whether or not we should look at it over Mars, I don't think so. I think Mars still might be the easier target. But I think that we should do both. And my final question for the Superpod AMA comes from J.C. Warp on Reddit. Proxima B makes me wonder about the habitable zone of our sun, especially considering radiation and sunbursts. How far does it reach? Well, J.C. Warp, that is an excellent question and one that most people assume with Earth being the only planet inside of our sun's habitable zone. But actually there are technically three planets inside of our own sun's habitable zone. Venus, Earth, and Mars. Now Venus is on the inner edge of the sun's habitable zone. That means that if there was liquid water there would be a very warm place to be. In fact, when people were initially studying Venus, they thought it would be a tropical paradise. Turns out it's actually sort of these very hot volcanic lands. So not exactly the best place for life. Now Earth isn't necessarily smack dab in the middle of the habitable zone. It's a little bit further out in the middle of the habitable zone itself. And then finally at the very, very edge we have Mars. And Mars is right on that edge of the habitable zone. So liquid water actually did exist on Mars. We have direct evidence of that thanks to our surveys from orbit and our rovers that we have landed on the planet. So Venus, Earth, and Mars, they're within the sun's habitable zone. And that's about the extent at which it is in our solar system. Now the habitable zone will change. As our sun gets older, that habitable zone will actually move out. And within about a billion years Earth will be out of the habitable zone. It will continue outwards into the outer solar system. So we've really only got liquid water oceans here on Earth for about another billion years. Which I think is enough time to leave the planet. So in closing, thanks to everyone who submitted your questions for our AMA Superpod today. We hope you learned a little bit more today than you did yesterday, thanks to tomorrow. Keep submitting your questions and maybe we'll be answering them on our next Superpod. But until then, keep moving onwards and upwards. Keep on discovering and keep exploring. Now Venus is on the inner edge of the habitable zone. So if Venus didn't have that wild atmosphere at 860 degrees, ooh, I used imperial units. That's bad.