 Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming to join us as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. It's been a really big week for the moon. Most of you know we just passed this incredible milestone. Yes, woo! This last Saturday. And I'm really honored to have a chance to introduce a fantastic lineup who's going to tell you about moonshots, past and future. I'm Ariel Ekla. I'm the director of the MIT Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative. And to kick us off today, we have Dr. Maria T. Zuber, the vice president for MIT, vice president of research for MIT, and Joey Ito, director of the Media Lab. Thank you so much. OK. Hello, everybody. Glad you're all here. So as Ariel noted, we had an incredible anniversary this past week of 50 years since human beings first walked on the moon. And now we're talking about going back to the moon. We're teaming with Blue Origin as part of their Blue Moon program to take a payload to the moon. So watch for that opportunity. And we hope that many of you will propose to be a part of that and compete on it. But I want to turn the clock back 50 years to talk about John F. Kennedy's speech, which I think you're going to see in a few minutes. And so John F. Kennedy gave that speech, and it's an incredibly famous speech where he challenged Americans to land on the moon and return safely within a decade. And at the time, we didn't have the faintest idea how to go to the moon. So if you were one of the first astronauts, you had a 50% probability of living through your mission because we had launched two vanguards. Didn't work the first couple of times. The next two were to put an astronaut in the third one. So the probability was 50% at that point. And yet we went. And so while this speech is incredibly famous, this was just the first of many speeches. So last month, there was an event at the JFK library commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. And throughout the day, we saw clips of many JFK speeches talking about the importance of going to the moon. And what we had during that era was first and foremost leadership. And second of all, we had the desire to learn both science and technology. So interestingly, the JFK event was all panel discussions, except for one part where there was a talk about climate change being our next moonshot. And there are so many people who think about climate change. It says it's a global problem. It's so difficult. How are we going to do it? Well, the fact of the matter is we didn't know how to go to the moon either. And that didn't hold us back. And I see no reason why we should be held back on the climate change issue. So as we think about the role of space today, I want to raise the issue to you that space is going to be an important aspect of us getting a grip on the climate problem. And all of you, I ask you to think in the back of your mind about how you're going to contribute to this because it's going to take all the smart people to do it. But let me tell you, I think we can get it done. And I'll turn it over now to Joey. Yeah, so I'm not the space expert. But I've been thinking a lot about what it was like 50 years ago. So 50 years ago, there were hundreds of police and students on these streets protesting the Vietnam War. 67 was the summer of over 500 race riots and the Detroit riots. It was also the summer of love. And it was a really interesting moment where you have JFK and then after that, Lyndon Johnson, who brings both parties together to attack both this moonshot but also really going after all of the problems that we had that are in really weird ways, very similar to the divided nation, divided world that we have right now, the wars and things like that. There's this really interesting historical symmetry that we have, but our problems are different, right? Our problems are now climate and the Earth. And like Maria said, I was just at this conference where people were just talking and talking and talking about climate. But it was clear that no one had the solution. And as Maria said, I mean, no one really knows how we're going to figure this out. But it was clear that something had to be a scientific breakthrough. And so I think that's one essential piece. I think the other thing when I think about 50. So my first company I worked at was called Energy Conversion Devices, where we developed the first nickel metal hydrate battery, the first amorphous solar cell. And the company is bankrupt, right? It's gone. And most of the people who worked on energy 50 years ago. So we actually had a thing that our CEO drew in 1950 that showed the hydrogen economy. It showed photons, batteries, hydrogen. And the problem is I ended up getting what I call energy fatigue. Because I was on the board of this company until it was basically wiped out in the 90s. And I think a lot of people who work into energy, we were talking about this 50 years ago. It's not a new problem. And I think one of the things is I don't want to be agist. But the professors in this field, the people who have been fighting the energy worse, they're all kind of pooped out. And I think one of the other important things about celebrating the 50th anniversary and then thinking forward is we need to kick in the pants. I think that the people who used to care about advanced nuclear, about solar energy, it's gotten kind of old. And I think it needs a new generation to come in. And so I think part of the other thing about thinking about the next moonshot is how do we bring a new generation of people into this conversation? And then how do we reframe it? Because it was like about putting a man on the moon. And now I think we really need to think about this in a much more pluralistic way and thinking about all of the diversity and thinking about Earth. And so I do want to take this as an opportunity to kind of reset our energy, restack our boosters, and take off for the next phase. Because this time I think if we screw up, it's not just half the anisternats that are going to die. It's half of us are going to die, too. I don't want to end on a non-chirry note. But I think all of our lives are at stake, so... We can do this. We can do this, yes. All right. Thank you so much, Joey and Maria, to have kicked off the day for us. Our next speaker is going to be Stephen Rothstein. He's the executive director of the JFK Presidential Library and has these troves of both historical and modern impact from the JFK legacy. He is on his way here and stuck in traffic in the tunnel. So I'm going to talk to you for about two to three minutes. And what I thought we would do is just maybe field some questions from the audience about what is MIT up to, what is MIT Media Lab up to in the context of space, give you a quick overview of the space exploration initiative here at the Media Lab. We are trying with the incredible advisors like David Newman from MIT AeroAstro, Katie Coleman from NASA, a retired NASA astronaut that you'll meet later, Maria Zuber and Joey, to build the artifacts of our sci-fi space future. So if you think about the things that you see in Star Trek or Star Wars, we have this incredible moment here at MIT to begin building those really rigorously and fleshed out what human life could look like in interplanetary civilization. Some people would say this sounds very far out. Why is this important when there are so many other critical, more existential threats to humanity? And something that Joey told us last year really is stuck with me. One of the reasons, among many, that we go and explore space is it helps expand our circles of awareness. There's a fantastic quote from Bill Anders from the Apollo 8 mission when he was describing being on the way to the moon. They were on a mission for the purpose of exploring that celestial body. He looked back, saw the Earth, that classic photo of the Earth rise when we see the Earth from space, and said something along the lines of, all this way to discover the moon and what we really discovered was the Earth. And so there's a certain impressive ability and a certain need to be able to get that kind of perspective when you've left the Earth and can look back and see how beautiful and fragile it is, which I think some of our directors fellows spoke really beautifully to earlier in the day as well, that need for perspective. If you're more on the practical side and you don't want to hear about philosophy of why we care about expanding perspectives, there's a lot to be gained from the rigors of space and how we then design for artifacts that are useful for a much broader swath of the population here on Earth. So I assume many of you know about NASA spinoffs. Can anybody name one of the many, many NASA spinoffs that came out of the space race and came out of modern space work from NASA, but is now really broadly used? I know you can have a couple. Sorry, Velcro, yep, Velcro. Say it a little louder. Computers, so MIT is very proud to have worked on the guidance computer for Apollo 11. Not all of computing came out of the space race, but yes, a really large chunk of rigorous prototyping for computing did. Memory foam, that's another famous one, yeah. Lasik, I recently learned that some of the precision docking movements and damping of movements that are required for really strong and precise docking in a space context have been used for controlling the surgical movements in laser eye surgery in Lasik. And now we're thrilled. We have Stephen Rothstein who's absolutely a champ walking in behind you as we speak. Give you a moment to catch a breath. Enjoy yourself as you take your way to the podium. Any final thoughts or questions about some of what I just shared? Any other NASA spinoffs that people can think of? What do you say, Chilly? Say again. It should be working. Oh, as a kid, I know in school, a lot of the kids talk about being astronauts, but they don't know how to become an astronaut. So I've been thinking, how will we be able to teach the Mars generation how to become astronauts? I think that's a fantastic question. You should be part of that answer. I think all of the creative people in the room can have some contribution to what is it gonna take for a different astronaut experience on Mars, and that's a great question for Katie Coleman, who's gonna be up here later. And without further ado, I'd like to welcome the executive director of the JFK Presidential Library, Stephen Rothstein, up to the stage. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, and I'm sorry I was a few minutes late. I was at another event. I truly apologize. But this is a very special day. It's a very special year, and there is literally MIT is, was it the start in the center of it at the beginning and it is today. So it's really a pleasure. And some of your speakers that you'll hear from in a few minutes, we were honored to have speak at the Kennedy Library last month. What I wanna do though is start with a very briefly go back to President Kennedy, when he spoke at Rice University on September 12th. And so if we could cue the Rice speech and we'll listen to just a short segment of that for a minute. But why some say the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills. Because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone. And one we intend to win. And the others too. We shall send to the moon 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston. A giant rocket, more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses, several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission to an unknown celestial body and then return it safely to Earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that on the temperature of the sun, almost as hot as it is here today, and do all this and do all this and do it right and do it first before this decade is out, then we must be bold. It's always a hard act to follow President Kennedy's remarks, but just to put it in context, there are 80% of the people alive today, including most of you, who were born after the Kennedy administration. So when John Kennedy said that speech, the word computer software had not been invented. There was no such thing as software. That no college, not a single college in the country had computer science as a major. Some of the alloys needed for that capsule had not yet been invented. There was no one in government or private sector who not just said we could get to the moon, but showed the President Kennedy that there was a plan. In fact, the only capsule that had been up was Alan Shepard's, which the capsule actually, if you wanna come to the library, you can see it, it's there, had been up for 15 minutes. And so we were talking about, he was talking about going a quarter of a million miles away. So it was the literal moonshot when you think about that. Not just was it technologically challenging, but financially. When NASA started in 1958, it was the first few years when John Kennedy was first inaugurated. It was a $100 million agency, small by federal standards. And the first 17 people that the administration interviewed to run NASA turned it down. It was a do nothing agency. They didn't know what the mission was. They weren't sure where it was going. What about the moon? Would it be manned or not manned? None of these have been resolved. So John Kennedy heard about this. President Kennedy heard about it. He says, I'm gonna interview, who's the next person? And it was this guy named Webb. And so President Kennedy interviewed him, which was actually very unique for a president to do kind of a sub-capital level at that point. But, and Webb went to Washington telling his wife, says, I don't really wanna do this, but the president wants to meet, so I have to go meet. And President Kennedy convinced him. And thank God he did. He did a great job in terms of that. President Kennedy worked on the public awareness in terms of why do tic-a-tac parades to kind of get people's hearts and minds? Why give colleges, computer science scholarships, some of the first grants came from NASA? Cause he needed computer science people and let's do it now. So in four or six or eight years, they'll be ready. And then in terms of the money, we went from $100 million a year to billions of dollars a year and over 400,000 people in NASA, public, private sector working on this, including some of the folks at MIT and some of the folks at Draper and others that did a great job. So John Kennedy had a vision, but what his brilliance was in galvanizing people, bipartisan business and universities, you know, why is NASA in Houston? Because A, it was a great place, but B, because there was a right congressperson on the right committee that would have an influence on dollars and he wanted to get their support too as well as the vice president. So he understood all the tools to make it happen. At the John Kennedy Library, and if you haven't been there, I encourage you to come, we're trying to keep that spirit alive. We had some of your amazing folks that are here today. They were fortunate. We were fortunate that they spoke a month ago and it's on our website, the space summit. We also, so we've had this year 10 different astronauts in the course of the year and highlighting work and we've also done educational work and things like that. But I'm gonna show you another brief video that gives you one of the things that we've done. It's an augmented reality version of Apollo 11 that I encourage you to join us with. So for the other video, please. Good morning and welcome to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library. We're here in Boston, Massachusetts today to celebrate a very special event. 50 years ago today, the Apollo 11 mission was on the launch pad. The Saturn V rocket carrying the first humans to touch the moon was ready to go. And it really was about inspiration, wasn't it? It was, absolutely. It was about one man's vision for what could happen and then pulling it all together. John F. Kennedy gave this speech and had this idea and it was sort of this thing, this seemingly impossible task that we were attempting to accomplish. They didn't think this was gonna work. They didn't know that this was possible. And maybe it made other people think, well, if they can do that, what can I do? Absolutely. Right? And then maybe that's what it's all about. That's what it was about 50 years ago and that's what it's about here today. It was a moonshot. Absolutely. And today we're gonna do it again, except through augmented reality. So we've actually got the full scale length of the rocket in front of us and you can play all kinds of different games. We also have a really special guest with us today. We've got Dr. Lupo. He is a big deal. Kind of a big deal, honestly, yeah. You said you wanted to be an astronaut when you were a kid. My dream job, you know, we all have, yeah, a lot of you wanna be veterinarians and doctors and stuff like that. I wanted to go to space, NASA. I called you a national. Let's do it. Are you allowed that? Like, is that okay? It's a once in a lifetime experience and to be able to recreate it, it's pretty magical. Let's do this. We're gonna get the countdown. All the phones up in the air. There's 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. There it goes. The Saturn V rocket, straining against the bounds of humanity. This is people coming together, what we can accomplish whenever we work as one. This was amazing. This was beyond what I ever could have expected to feel it, to see it. It's just amazing to be here at the JFK Library. It's that much more special. So you can download that. It's free, JFK Moonshot. But before I sit down, I want to ask all of you to think about, what is your moonshot? What is your really big idea? And we have actually a site on our website at JFK Moonshot that we're encouraging people to submit their big ideas, because we think our country has to come together again and think of whatever the next big idea is. So again, thank you for all that you're doing and I look forward to listening from the back. Thank you so much. As we prepare to get the stage swapped out for our panel, I'd like to introduce to you David Newman. She's the former Deputy Administrator of NASA and is the Apollo Program Professor of Astronautics here at MIT, a fantastic mentor to the Space Exploration Initiative and also my PhD committee member, one of my members. And thank you, David, and if you can then introduce the panel. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, thank you. Great to be here, everybody. We're so glad to be here. Well, this is about my favorite thing in the world to do. Talk about Apollo, talking about the moon and getting on to Mars, which you're going to hear a lot from our great panelists. So they're going to come up here, but we have a great diverse crowd from you. Yeah, you guys come up and join me. I'm lonely. I'm David Newman, the Apollo Program Professor. So I'm from MIT. Alex McDonald joins us from NASA. He's a chief advisor, an economist. We're going to ask him about what the plans are, the very current plans for Moon and Mars. Dr. Katie Coleman has previously been introduced, MIT alum, deployed Chandra X-ray telescope and a great friend, and thanks for joining us, Katie. I have lots of questions for her as well. And Jesse, I'm so glad to have you join us. Career at NASA and in the private sector. And I'm going to ask her about policy and anything you want to tell us about... But we'll start off with Apollo. So can I have this Apollo in real time? I have my rocket. I have Stephen's rocket in AR here. I have too many gadgets. If you haven't been, I think the nice folks behind us are going to... Oh, am I supposed to? Glad we didn't get feedback. That's Katie. We'll talk about Apollo. She's on a stamp. Oh man, spoiler alert. Spoiler alert. That's coming up next. And so where were you? Saturday, July 20th. Oh, cool. Yeah, this is awesome. This is actually 50 years ago to the second, because this is day nine of Apollo 11. This is day nine. We've landed. The crew's back safe. We're going to get all of our moon rocks back. They're just getting checked out. So all of the science photography, all of the other photography, and all of the audio realms, because as people have mentioned, we know the three astronauts, but what about the 400,000 people that were behind them and propped us up? That's how we do moon shots. So this is Apollo in realtime.org. I just wanted to kind of give a shout out to the NASA folks who put this together. It's all the science. It's all the photography, all in one, and in real time, which is pretty awesome. We're going to jump right into our panel, because I can't wait to talk to these guys. And we'll have plenty of time for audience questions as well. So you guys get your questions ready for us, please. Okay, Jesse, can I start with you? Sure. What do you think is hard about us getting to the moon next? What do we have to figure out? Well, I think that we tend to talk a lot about the engineering challenges, and of course they are great. But I also like to draw the analogy between engineering challenges and socio-political challenges. And I think that we often don't give ourselves enough time to ask questions about how we might design collaborative frameworks to make sure that we see peaceful uses of space persevere into the future as we send humans there, but also how we enable cooperative structures that will reflect back to the Earth and support the sort of climate change and science that we need to see happening here. So it's not that the socio-political challenges are more challenging than the engineering. It's that they're getting a lot less attention. I think we tend to assume that we can wait until we've solved all the technical stuff. And then we'll just, you know, put an LLC around it and, you know, call it a day. And I think there's a lot more to it. Do you think we have any good examples of socio-technical models, global cooperation that might service well? Oh, well, small steps that we've taken maybe. Yeah, I mean, I think the world is full of a lot of diverse examples. I think the main thing for us is looking at each of the specific projects we undertake as not homogeneous and uniform, but as needing their own sort of specific treatment. So when we look at, for example, early activity on the moon, I think one of the questions is going to be to look at having a small group of companies or governments who are going there and what kinds of cooperative frameworks make sense for small numbers. So we're not talking about, you know, the entire international community of actors. In that particular case, we might be looking at five or six companies and how they're going to interact. It makes me think of lessons that we learned with the Marsh Rover with having virtual reality where it used to take a bunch of scientists all over the world, most of their day, to decide what the rover was going to do the next day. And once they established a VR environment where they were all, you know, literally looking at the same rock, instead of going, well, don't you think that's going to be too steep and, oh, it's so far? And then everybody is looking at the same thing and the readings that took most of the day were like 15 minutes every day, leaving those valuable scientists to actually do science and not deliberating. So I think that's interesting what we can do to get ourselves on one page. And bring everyone with us, I think, for all of our missions, because we want to bring all of the public, all of you, but we want to bring everyone. Okay, Katie, so I have to ask, everyone wants to know what's it like up there? And why come? What's your favorite part? I mean, it's been actually really wonderful hearing about the anniversary and living through it. And I think I spend most of my sort of waking life trying to help everybody understand that all of us can achieve the things that we want to do. And I feel very lucky to have had this job. I loved it. It killed me to leave it, although I find that I'm busier in the mission of exploration now that I've left NASA. That's not a comment on NASA, but it's actually about the mission. It's about what all of us are, you know, on a mission. And so I love that we're reliving every second of Apollo because it's making people realize, oh, these were like normal people taking real steps. Except up there, we do not take steps, and that would be my favorite thing. Those of you that knew me any time, like before I was like, you know, 18, no, I was never the most coordinated in junior high gym class. And I am, you know, a space gymnast now. I won't actually say I'm the best in the category, but seriously, I loved living in a place where you fly from place to place, and life is different, and every idea that you have about, well, what if we did it this way is one you never would have had down here. And so I really, I loved flying everywhere. If you look on the web, you can see the floating hairs in gravity is a video that's out there, it's a little tiny video that Karen Nyberg made because she has really long, blond hair, and you can literally take one hair from your head, pull it between your fingers, and use it to like push off of something and fly across the whole space station. So it's magical, but it gives you ideas about how life could be different. And just having you up there, so a follow-up since we already had the spoiler alert, tell us about your new stamp. We come back from Ireland. So I tell you this about the stamp and bring it, and maybe we can show it. Steve, now I want my picture. This just came out last week. It's a commemorative series of stamps in Ireland. They wanted to feature four people that were of Irish-American descent, and it's Neil Armstrong, Michael Collins, Eileen Collins, who I flew with when we launched the Chandra X-ray Observatory 20 years ago, about two days ago. So we were up on a short mission, and actually 20 years ago, I was still in space on STS-93, having already launched the Chandra. Two women, first woman commander. That's true. So, yep, first woman commander, and which from whom I really learned a lot. But what's significant to me, the reason I show everybody this who will look, is that it's not really about me. It's about the planets aligned that the time they decided to do an Irish-American series was with the commemoration of the moon landing. So these stamps are just gonna have more of a life than, you know, if they were April Fool's Day stamps or whatever. I mean, they're really gonna have a life. I think many of them are gonna be stamped on the moon landing day. And there's two women and two men, and three people out of four that are alive. It's not so often that you have people on stamps that are still living, can speak, and can make you realize that this could be you. And so just the fact that those two faces, it's not about the fact that one of them is mine, that a bunch of girls are gonna grow up thinking that they could do anything. And it takes art, it takes storytelling, it takes imagination, and it takes bravery. Like you were talking about, you know, people have to treat every sort of task that they have with what more could they do, what more one step could they do. And the people who were making these said, let's have women and let's have people that are still here to tell the stories. And Alex, we're glad you're here too. We also invite men. And so my dear pleasure to turn it over and ask Alex McDonald some questions. I had the great pleasure to work with him at NASA headquarters. And as deputy, good thing is he's there as a civil servant, doing amazing work. And he's really the best person we can hear from to talk about the Moon and Mars, the strategy going forward. Paulo 11 inspired us. Oh, I was five years old. But now he has an amazing job to really, let's put that strategy in place, a real solid strategy about looking forward. That you're all the Mars generation. How you doing? Can I explain to anyone that every time I wanna know anything about this subject, I call Alex. And as an economist, I mentioned before, because not everyone's an aerospace engineer, scientist, or even policy. So that's a really important message for everyone, that we need every single discipline. That's how we get even Canadians. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, thank you. That was very kind as an introduction. You know, thinking about the strategy for getting back to the Moon and getting on to Mars, I actually can't think of a better place to start that conversation than with the anniversary of Apollo. This past week, there was this absolutely incredible event, which was a sound and light fantastic celebration on the Washington DC Mall, where for the first time, an entire narrative was projected onto the Washington Monument, and half a million people came down at night to DC to sit on the lawn and watch the story, not just of Apollo 11, but the story of how our species emerged out of the caves. The Lascaux Cave paintings is actually how they start that narrative. Then through the invention of writing, through the discovery of electricity, to the point where we evolve a global technological civilization and a nation that can actually muster the efforts of its people to achieve something that previously had just been myth and legend, taking ourselves to the celestial object of the Moon. What was so amazing about that event was that people just bastionated and felled so united on that Mall. It was one of the best feelings I've ever had in Washington DC, which may tell you something else about DC, but it was just so freeing for everyone who was there, and that was what was so special about Apollo, and I think actually special about space exploration in general. It speaks to this deep chord in all of us to go and explore the unknown, and not for profit, not for necessarily geopolitical competition, although that may be why the funds are provided for this activity by the nation, but that's not why Katie went to space, right? You didn't go to space to compete with people. You wanted to go and be part of the global civilization that is exploring the cosmos. And it never stops. Right, and it never stops. And so getting back to the Moon is something that we're now focused on very seriously at NASA. The goal is to get American astronauts to the lunar surface by 2024. It's been very clearly stated that one of the core parts of that is going to be to have the first woman on the surface of the Moon. But we don't stop at the Moon. The goal is to go to the Moon to learn what we need to know about how to operate far from the Earth for the periods of time that are going to be relevant for getting on to Mars. And that's going to mean living on the Moon for at least weeks and months, the kind of minimum amount of time you can imagine living on Mars in the kind of quickest Mars mission. The longest we were ever on the lunar surface was about three days. Apollo 11 was less than a day. I think it was 21.5 hours, right? So learning to live for exploration relevant durations on the Moon is going to be hard. And I think what's really exciting is that now we're doing it with more international collaboration. We're doing it with private sector collaboration. And we're going to be putting all this together, over the course of the next five years, to get to the Moon, and then over the course of hopefully not very long after that, putting it together and getting to Mars. And that's not the only moonshot we can think of, but I think it is a relevant one, right? The idea that once again we are going to dare to do something incredibly challenging, but that has a real significance. Going to Mars, searching for Martian life, and then returning people safely back to Earth. My favorite quote, and I'll just kind of, in my comment with this, is that Arthur C. Clarke said that when people see humans standing on the ridge of the Valles Marineris, a canyon system on Mars that extends the entire length of the United States of America, then once again, humanity will be destroyed in happiness. And I really like that idea. And I'd say that's a good enough reason to go to Mars by itself. That's great. Thank you all. We have some students I see in the back and we have some people standing up. There's some chairs right here, so I am going to break in. I'll be back. But if you're standing up or if you're students, I can't see you because you don't feel free to come up in the front. Take a one-minute break. Come on up and join us, folks. We have some seats up here. I want to make sure that we have a good long 45 minutes to keep interacting. And we're going to take questions. We're going to take questions. There you go. Come on up here, students. We're not quite ready for questions yet, but I'm just trying to get people moving. There you go. You guys, come on up here. Come join us so we can be intimate. There's a few chairs. If you're quick, you can grab one of the chairs. And then there's a lot of floor space right up here for you to come in. So thanks for joining us. We appreciate it. So you guys, come on. Come forward. There's a lot of carpet space up here. And then we can see you and we'll be able to hear you when you ask questions. Come on, gentlemen. You come up here. Come on. Come join me. We're really frightened. There you go. Right here. Just hang out here. You're not going to block anyone's vision if you just pop yourself down here. There's chairs, but you can just sit on the carpet. Yeah. Just sit on the carpet. It's pretty possible. Yep. Alrighty. Good. Come on in. Okay. If you guys from the back want to come on in, come on in. This is your opportunity. Lots more questions. It's more fun this way. Yeah. Exactly. Thank you for joining us. We're glad you're here. Okay. Can you continue? So, all right. I have to ask you a little bit about the technology, right? This is MIT. Okay. So, what are a few of the showstoppers? You know, what do we really need to focus on and invest? Again, we've heard Kennedy, you know, President Kennedy's speech. We didn't know how to do any of it. As Maria said, we had to invent heavy lift launch. You know, we had to have the capsule. We had failure, a major failure, Apollo 1. We lost three crew. That was really tragic, but guess what? At a failure, we become better. We become a lot better. So, we had to get all this technology. Today, we don't exactly have that capability. We're working on our technology. So, I want you guys to talk about your favorite piece of technology that needs some work to get us back to the Moon and Mars. Yeah. I mean, I think right now one of the key pieces is going to be a lunar lander, right? So, one of the reasons we think particularly is that a lot of the pieces are already in development, right? We have the Orion spacecraft, which is the analog to the Apollo spacecraft to take the crew out to lunar orbit. We also have a heavy lift launch vehicle under development, the space launch system. We have the ground infrastructure already established at Kennedy Space Center. When the Apollo program started, none of that was there, right? Kennedy Space Center, of course, wasn't the Kennedy Space Center yet. So, we have so much infrastructure built on, but we don't have until very recently a lunar lander in development, equivalent of the lunar excursion module, the LEM. And we've now just come out with our very first solicitations to start industry-building these lunar landers. So, we're really on the way already. Great. Katie, did you have one? I think about the human systems in terms of the bathroom. I mean, some of you laughed, you know, people say, you know, well, how come you haven't gone to Mars yet? And I haven't been on the space station for a few years, but when I was there, the bathroom and the system that recycled the air and recycled the water and Alex, you can tell me if they're doing a lot better, but they break more than once a month, one of them. And that's not ready for Mars. And it's not because, you know, people didn't design them with enough heart or thought. It's because it's a really complicated problem that we're learning how to do those things. And what excites me about solving those problems is that if we have them solved to go and be living on the moon and then going on to Mars, it means that we have actually solved a number of really compelling and valuable earth problems. Recycling air, recycling water, learning how to grow food in places that it's hard to do that and enough fluid physics to have a bathroom that really works. I mean, there are a lot of challenges down here on Earth, so that's exciting to me. And, Jesse, you have a bit of a background in computer science as well. How does that fit in all to this to our future plans? Well, I mean, actually, I was going to riff off of what Katie was saying because there's a really kind of iconic challenge that we haven't even tried yet, which is mammalian reproduction in space. And we don't even know if humans can just state that that hasn't happened with rats. It hasn't happened that I know of. Well, in the radiation challenges, I thought would be the radiation. So I think there's to talk about the core challenges that we're facing. I think that's a really big one. And then, of course, the challenge of what's called in the space world ISRU in situ resource utilization. So how do we live off the land when we go to the Moon and Mars? That's something that we have a lot of ideas about, but the science isn't quite there for us to know exactly where to look or exactly how to build the mining equipment that we might need. And so there's a lot of details. There's a lot of questions that we need to answer and that takes time and iteration. And I think that there's things that, like in terms of 3-D printing, we're thinking about like what do we need to really bring to the Moon and what could we build there given what we find there. I think somebody like me that learned about 3-D printing when they were 50 is able to have a certain number of ideas, but you, who grow up thinking it's normal to think, I'd like to have this, I think I'll make it. You know, those, that's why the game, the sort of playing board is going to be very different is that I think Joey Ido and I had this discussion about synthetic biology. And we needed to teach kids about this because we have sort of ingrained ideas that first you have to do this and probably this is hard and you don't have those ideas and that's actually how we're going to get there. So we have a lot of basalt on the Moon and Mars so you have to make your maker, this is literally the transformer so the challenge to the students is make the maker bot for the Moon and for Mars, right? So we can't bring it all with us so that's a big ask but I'm sure we have enough smarts in this room But it's also important to remember that for the first missions we may bring everything with us, right? We may bring everything to Mars. We may bring everything to Mars. We didn't make things on the Moon in Apollo and I think the first applications for things like 3D printing is going to be in sparing for different pieces for the deep space transport that goes out to Mars so you can make a real mass difference and limiting your amount of mass going to Mars is vitally important to keep the cost down to keep the amount propellant down but things are going to break that means you've got to repair them that means you've got to have spares and if you have to keep spares for two to three years of a mission then that eats up a lot of mass and that's where I think actually we're not that far in terms of current 3D printing capabilities to think about that sparing philosophy but that's a really challenging project in itself to do the statistical analysis to figure out when something's going to break what can you afford to have less spares of and a lot of that analytical work is still yet to be done it's been happening it's been happening and right now I can give a shout out to Mars 2020 in one year we're launching the next big rover to Jess's point about ISRU in situ research research utilization we're going to make oxygen on Mars first planet we're going to make oxygen for the first time and that's the MIT Moxie experiment that's already all buttoned up delivered to JPL and it goes next year in 2021 because it takes us eight months to get there so I'm going to ask a few more questions you guys getting your questions ready but I'm going to switch a little bit and I just actually I love the name of our panel to the moon to stay I guess we're going to stay we can talk about that but most importantly from the moon with love with love for humanity I'm going to turn it back over to Jess and say let's talk about that let's talk about the emotional the personal connection from all of exploration and we might also and reflecting the moonshot reflecting back on the earth interesting well I think the going off of your comment about Mars actually I was just thinking we often hold the moon and Mars as kind of either or and you know the space community often there's the moon people and the Mars people and where do we go first and who's right and the same I think sort of dichotomy exists between the earth and the moon especially these days as we become more aware of the urgency of climate change and of fixing the problems that we have here and they're not just climate change problems they're also political problems or problems of scale and coordination on earth and so when I think about it's a little bit of a riff on your question but the kind of the meaning of space and it's also I mean you talk to this as well I think this this kind of playing them off of each other it doesn't have to be one or the other it's not an either or choice and somehow I think that space often gets described as something that is an either or choice when we don't talk about other forms of kind of advanced science and intellectual exploration as an either or so if I think about biology or chemistry it's not that we would choose to either solve our problems on earth or do material science you know we would do both and we would sort of naturally say well of course the material science will probably inform solutions to our problems on earth but we often somehow I think maybe because space is territorial I don't know space is a physical place so it's easy to think about it as either going or not going and so I really I'm interested in ways of thinking about space that don't don't make it an other that don't that don't treat it as some other place but that relate it back to the earth as a kind of more unified system Katie what do you think the human aspects I've been interested in say it again the human yeah talk about the human aspects of we watch President Kennedy's speech right I don't know but I almost cry every time I mean to me you know that's again it's just the best that brings out the best in people it's incredibly emotional you know so I don't think we have to have hard skins this can really move us and there's something and I'm looking at our friend from the JFK Library in that speech when he says you know we choose to do these things not because they're easy because they're hard we're going to accept these challenges we're unwilling to fail and there's a line after there I can't quite remember but it's basically and hopefully these things will be the basis of collaboration between nations and I see that is you know that's what we're doing right now and it's interesting that you talked about space in this physical way and I've been answering some questions lately about you know everybody thinks about the next 50 years and things like that what will be humanity's greatest achievement and those kinds of things and I realize that to me if my fist is the earth you know we thought that here's the earth and then that's space and it's a place that other people go but now we've figured out how to go there and as someone who's been there I realize that it's a continuum it's always been part of who we are and how far out you go whether it's to the moon or to Mars or the edges of the universe or whether you're a chandra scientist you know studying black holes you know very far away it's all our neighborhood it's all the place that we live it's a continuum and one of the ways I think to share that is you know modern communication and better and better video and storytelling and ways to share in your where's Ariel her last panel from the Media Lab one of our astronauts came and we don't get to hear each other talk very much it was Tony Antonelli and he said something that very much surprised me he said we have done all of you a huge injustice and that is that we talk about the view from you know what it's like but we have not communicated what it feels like to have that view and here's a pretty straight ahead engineer kind of guy I really was impressed by that so I think we have to work at ways to do that and your VR way to experience Apollo what you talked about on the mall I've heard about from others I mean so we have the tools and we just have to point them in the right directions the love exactly I love Mike Nassimino says this as well and it's a true story it's in his book when he looked after Apollo I mean it was in when he turned away you know with the tyranny's eye that's how emotional that's how beautiful and so wait a minute no wake up I've got to look but that's how all-encompassing it can be you know call that the overview effect yeah I mean it just it makes me to give a couple of things one is in addition to the event on the mall there was an event at the Kennedy Center that the National Symphony Orchestra put on and you want to talk about kind of coming back from the moon with love the most amazing moment for that night for me was a song sung by Neil Armstrong's son and granddaughter called Flight of Fancy that they'd written and it was not about their father and grandfather going to the moon it was about the love that they saw in his heart when he flew gliders of just being free an engine-less plane soaring catching the thermals and it just filled the Kennedy Center with just one of the most wonderful feelings and it reminds me of kind of Buzz Aldrin's kind of statement which was that you know essentially once he got there is like man they should have sent a poet right because he didn't feel adequate to describing the sense of emotion that just overwhelmed him and of course he's done actually an incredible job actually subsequently to explain to humanity kind of why it was so important and of course we think of another astronaut Alan Bean who of course was so moved by this experience he became a painter right and so what I think is so amazing is that something inside us kind of gets transformed by these other worldly experiences and what's exciting about the future is that we're going to have that opportunity and I'm really excited to see what's going to happen to humanity as more and more and more people start to have that personal transformation through exploration and travel into the cosmos transform hopefully our mind our hearts and that hopefully goes a little bit full circle in this discussion Maria and Joy we're here and again back to Earth you know for sure a moonshot there's multiple say always teaches us more about ourselves on spaceship Earth we're all astronauts so we don't know how to be an astronaut we're all astronauts I'm here to tell you because we're going pretty fast around our sun right now so we're all having this amazing journey we're all astronauts and then again but you know what's your passion what's your big moonshot was put out before mine's getting people to Mars and trying to save the planet that's worthy of some time you guys want to say yours real quick a moonshot you want to throw out there and then I'm going to turn to the audience next I think mine goes back to the first comment I made about finding new ways to coordinate to coordinate groups of people that give them more of a voice in the systems that they live in so I'm actually about the boring next steps I mean I think that it kind of goes back to what Jesse said about each of us having you know something that we can do and I think that if you left with anything and other folks might have suggestions after we do moonshots but you know what is the thing that you can do that can change the way other people think about their abilities their ability to contribute or the solving of a problem right then and for me I mean I happen to have you know a high presence just because of the job that I have and so doing a PBS thing where you know they end up for asking me for a comment about all the different kinds of people who made Apollo happen and I start talking about Catherine Johnson the mathematician and Margaret Hamilton the woman who coined the word software engineering and on and on and they said well you know we'll be showing Apollo footage and back you I said let's show Margaret and Catherine and you know and they're like well we have to have do you have photos I go I have photos I go we can have this afternoon and good resolution absolutely you have me and five little girls that don't look like me and so it's having the bravery to ask people to do hard things for a cause that's bigger than all of you and so I urge you to think about what are the things that you can sort of speak up about and make happen because that is how the moonshots that we're talking about will be achieved and to end you know my moonshot usually has to do with if we've done all these amazing things in space I'm really excited about what it means for both of us and their ability to be inclusive of one another down here on Earth because if we don't have inclusive teams we're not we're not going to do any of the things that Alex talked about none of them yeah I mean as a bureaucrat in Washington DC I'm not sure I'm allowed to have dreams dream away but you know seriousness you know one of the reasons I work at NASA is that it is NASA's still fulfill the role of inspiration and discovery and exploration 50 and 100 years in the future just like it does today because if it can do that if NASA can be an institution it's only 60 years old right 61 years old this year but what happens if NASA is an institution that is 350 years old right what will that have meant for us until NASA's existence as a symbol and an institution continuing to progress at the frontiers of science technology and exploration that is a dream right we are not guaranteed that that's really important to remember we have NASA because the people of this country pay their taxes and they want some of those taxes to go to technological investments in the nation right and that was not a thing that existed right prior to these kind of Kennedy like moments of course it emerges from the Eisenhower administration but it reaches the scale of social impact under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and so it really is actually a dream to see NASA for all of us continue to be a global leading organization that stands for science and technology and international cooperation excellent science we're opening it up to you all please tell us who you are oh throw we have this nice media lab square microphone that we throw in it it's soft let's go on some go ahead hi how does this work oh okay I see how it works automatic alright my name is Julian I'm a rising sophomore here at MIT and my question kind of concerns private space companies like you know Virgin Galactics SpaceX Blue Origin and it seems to me that a lot of these companies are synonymous with the billionaires that kind of are behind them whether you know it's like Elon Musk Richard Branson Jeff Bezos and so my question is is there a fear that space will similarly cater to the ultra rich how do we address how do we make sure now that space development doesn't end up being the same inequalities that we see here on earth yeah great question Julian who wants to take it I mean how long do we have to talk about that and that is one of the really important questions that I think we have to think through as a society you know I've spent a lot of my time researching the economic history of space exploration and when you look for example at the large observatories for example the Harvard College Observatory that actually had the largest telescope in the world in the 19th century well who funded it well it was wealthy individuals but they funded it collectively and the idea was that you could publicly use that telescope that changes by the late 19th century early 20th century when it becomes kind of individual what we would now call billionaires funding these telescopes NASA of course is not like that it is a public institution right and as a result it is I often think about who the stakeholders are of NASA right people kind of will often try to use business logic to think about how to manage NASA well the reality is the stakeholders are all the representatives in congress right you are representatives and that is a very unique function in the world right that is not how the Chinese space program is organized right there is not that kind of democratic mechanism for ensuring funds, programs and runs them in manners that are commensurate with society's desires but what I will say about the specific billionaire element of the current programs is that frankly to achieve these goals we need whatever resources we can get right we can either increase the amount of money that we pay for space exploration through our taxes if we want to achieve these large goals or we can partner with private entities to this day still though this is primary source of funding is NASA and that is the reality of where we are at the same time we want to see a flourishing of private capabilities and as I have said before this is the balancing challenge how do we ensure that our space exploration programs both serve public ends if public dollars are being used to support them while also allowing individuals to explore and spend their funding in ways that are commensurate with the public right and this balancing problem is not a new balancing problem it is the balancing problem of all of society and social life so yeah well just to play with that a little bit it is a balancing problem but I think your observation is also kind of appropriate in the sense that the balance of actors is certainly changing pretty significantly today and so that has a lot of implications but I think you might be kind of out there taking various kinds of first steps in the next decade or two and it's not just that they're not necessarily governments but there also might be a lot more of them it might be that there are more and smaller actors it is also the case that the billionaires can probably build infrastructure or sort of set the stage in ways and so I think a lot of people are asking the question that you're asking and I certainly don't have that answer but some thoughts and some kind of conversations that I think are happening in the industry right now are that what we see are folks referring back to something called the Outer Space Treaty which is a very lovely treaty it's only about five pages I highly recommend reading it and it is something that we have in the international community for governing activities in space and it's not very specific so in terms of what we can do now I think it's looking at how we can flesh out the open questions that the Outer Space Treaty kind of leaves open and ask how we can actually kind of get to the specifics of regulating and governing ourselves in space when and if governments are not necessarily the only or the dominant actors there I was going to say that Alex mentioned that we kind of need everything and I'm more of a I'm sort of not more of a but I'm a glass half full percent that and some of these billionaires that fly on the Soyuz and come to the space station and in my experience and there's been about a dozen something in that number in my experience every single one of them comes back here and tries to see what they can do with that experience to spread it around it's really pretty wonderful to have this kind of diversity like when I was at NASA I was in charge of supply stuff supply ships for the astronaut office and I would tell people you know those SpaceX folks sometimes they make a decision and they don't even have a meeting I mean we have a lot of meetings at NASA and it's very inspirational to us to do things in a more direct way to kind of go maybe we'll try some of that but more importantly they can take risks with hardware that we can't take you know we have some big thing happen on the pad there's going to be an investigation things are going to stop people are going to question oh should we be taking those risks what if we failed I mean all those things right and they can take bigger risks and when they leap ahead they bring us with them and in every every person that I have encountered in this business even if they're talking about you know there's some profit we all seem to be about a common mission of humanity leaving the planet maybe from different points of view great thanks I thought of one other thing to say throw it in and then toss the ball around we'll get back to the hand of the bag just a quick one but I think it's a bit tautological perhaps but I think sometimes what we see as a narrative that this future will be for the billionaires and therefore people decide not to engage in the topic of what should by participating in the conversation we will see a much wider diversity of perspectives and those billionaires will build off of that yeah so a great perspective so the democratization of space is here it's real and so depending what part of space you look at because we've been talking about human spaceflight which is really expensive and hard and getting heavy left but guess what all the communications on your phone that you're dealing with respect to the the treaty go to the UN if you're not familiar with the treaty it's the United Nations committee on the peaceful uses about our space and Daniel what is today 85 countries 192 we have 92 countries who are part of that that's 92 countries so it's not that you have to be a spacefaring nation not everyone today you can be able to CubeSat you're a spacefaring nation so this democratization is real it's tangible and puts it kind of right in your hand so it's great to see 92 nations saying war in I think the somebody have the beanie back there oh great hi I'm Chloe and I'm going to be a sophomore in high school in terms of space exploration what do you think has been our greatest failure and what can we learn from it okay you guys can think I'll start that's a great question at NASA I gave an award for failure because people run around with this t-shirt that says failure is not an option and that was great for Apollo 13 it was really important but it's become kind of a risk averse and so I wanted to make sure and say no no we do our best actually we fail, fail, fail and then we get it right so I know about lots of failure engineer I fail all the time you guys have your favorite your favorite failure the most important one the they're not my favorite at all the shuttle accidents the Challenger accident and the Columbia accident are really we're really I guess important people sacrifice astronauts sacrifice their lives the loss of life life on those missions is almost unthinkable but you know the end result of those failures we can't make a perfect aircraft we can't make a perfect space shuttle so we do our best but when they sacrifice to me that's the ultimate sacrifice when we have our astronauts have lost their lives I wake up every day and say guess what I have to do better I have a better engineering solution because you're trying to always do better and so that's those are failures that have been pretty critical in the NASA space program not telling all to tell all the stories because so many it takes so many creative ideas to solve the challenges that we have today and you know to look a little harder to take I mean take more pictures take pictures of each other as you're in school and you're solving problems and you know always show the team and value the people on the team and it wasn't the you know I think about the hidden figures movie you know I say you know Catherine Johnson was a woman of color in the movie wearing a dress of color and in a picture that shows her in a sea of white guys wearing white shirts and black ties there's really nothing hidden about her you can't miss her right but we did and I like to look forward from that and just say that in every picture that you can take whether it is you know Alex and ten people that look like him there's somebody in that picture that feels everyone in that picture feels like there's something that they have to bring to the table it's hard for them to bring to the table or they don't quite believe or they don't know and so it's not just about color or race or gender it's about what's inside you and I don't think we're very good at telling those stories and it takes going to the trouble to do so you guys want to comment you don't have to yeah please the thing that came to mind for me something around our failure I mean actually I'm going to step back and say similarly failure is hard because I think there's two ways of defining failure there's something that you don't do correctly and then there's something that you've maybe failed to learn from and I think that's a deeper kind of failure and maybe a more interesting one to inspect and I as a post-apollo generation person I think I feel a failure of humanity to build off of the Apollo program and to keep some continuity happening I mean we almost don't know how to go back to the moon we don't have the same technology we had during the Apollo program we don't have the same capability sorry we have the same technology but not the same ability and I think that's a huge loss like if we could have even incrementally kept building off of what we did in the Apollo program I think we'd be in a really different place today and I agree with all of this and I'll just add failure to be patient which is very common in people it's almost the opposite of what I was saying well right but you know in classic fashion both can be true simultaneously right because I think there's a lot of folks who get very frustrated that we don't already have the moon base right and yet the reality of how we got to the moon is a story that almost begins in the 1630s when the first stories about traveling to the moon and building machines that could do that start and so that process of getting to the moon you could either think of it starting with the Kennedy speech which is one way to think about it or you can think about it as a story that starts 300 years earlier right and people had to iterate on the idea and wait for conceptual I think that's true for all of space exploration the story of space exploration is not going to be what happens the next 50 years or 100 years it is in theory a story that has no end it is a story that extends out into eternity right and if you think about those time scales it's really very challenging to then get frustrated and ask a change of direction of a $21 billion agency because something didn't happen within that first 300 years or so was also mostly through art yes I mean it wasn't the engineering it was the visioning it was the ability to construct these potentiality potentiality of the future see yourself there we all have to see ourselves there and if they hadn't done that then the engineers probably wouldn't have actually gone and tried to solve the problem when they could actually brag about Dave all the time what you do when you have a new project is you hire a graphic designer yes look at this amazing artwork going on there because that's the story we're up here shout out shout out to our graphic illustrator artist those pictures are what will stay for the time but if people don't have a vision how do they know that they should be on that team it's not always visual but there's a spirit and that's where we actually come back to from the moon to gaze at the moon and as somebody has been separated from her family quite a bit something that kind of comforts us in a way is that we all see the same moon same moon exactly from everywhere on earth right and it's beautiful next question hello okay my name is Joseph Zhang and I run a program called Future Hack and we have 50 students from 14 countries kind of ask kind of in this narrative in this politics and narrative of you know kind of more isolation instead of more openness can you tell us about like how space exploration and space tourism is going to open so much more opportunities for these young people yeah sure I can I'll start but you're not going to start with fun I want to know what we have here so we're going to do a race of the countries okay we have US here yeah shout out you students tell me where you're from shout out your country Japan Hong Kong cool Hong Kong guys if you hear them shout them out China China Nepal Nepal Germany Germany do we have Pakistan Pakistan Canada Poland Hungary Turkey South Africa ah South Africa cool we're close to 14 not quite there come on India yep to leave back there good so welcome welcome to everyone so I love the question we can talk about it it's it really is for everyone it's global you know this is a I don't think it's a space race anymore in my opinion because the world is too connected not too connected but we're very connected we know what each other are doing and because in the spirit of love and doing things together you know why don't we try the model where we can all work together you mentioned the rhetoric that's going on I say that conversation is cheap and easy it's easy to say what separates us but you know we're all humans we all come from the same place and for 99.999% the same then I'm very optimistic I think we can get this done and I think we do it together or you work on the things that you have in common or that you can work on like with China it's actually a little bit it's restricted in some areas that we can't talk about so I like to talk about the ones we can but maybe Alex will have a more pessimistic view of that no I don't even want to touch that subject currently the optimistic story I think is that CubeSat technology has fundamentally transformed access to space around the world back in the day in the 60s and 70s people would develop space capability you know every few years a new nation would expend significant amount of effort and have their first satellite nowadays we're literally seeing you know new countries every single year build their first CubeSat personally my favorite story that's going on right now is the all girls team in Kyrgyzstan that is building their country's first satellite they will build their own CubeSat and send it out it's for everybody it's for everybody in this audience for sure right and what's so amazing about that satellite project and it's again it's to build a CubeSat it's about this big it doesn't do too much more than send a radio transmission but the girls who are building that satellite in Kyrgyzstan it is creating significant social change because that country does technology and advancement and that's just one story there are dozens like that so I think anyone who's from a country that has never built their first CubeSat and you have the ability to go back home start an effort to build a CubeSat there it is one of the greatest ways to actually democratize space access because it's not about just traveling into space it's about learning the community into space next up is United Arab Emirates to Mars so a country that hasn't been in space but it's a concerted effort with everyone working together Hope is the name of the Mars satellite that the UAE will launch on a Japanese launcher and it's going to succeed so that's just another example everyone really is better when we all work together and we want to see everyone succeed so all resources in the commercial world is kind of an interesting element of this where this might be a positive introduction or contribution from the commercial space in the sense that you have again this actors that can collaborate in ways that nation states often can't whether they're non-profits for profits and I think that also means that we'll see more diversity so different kinds of interest different kinds of science and engineering so it might be that there's a positive contribution from that aspect as well Right behind you Hi I'm Julie I'm a sophomore going into high school My question is dealing with Mars What's your opinion on the habitats that we're going to be building because there's multiple things that are getting involved such as 3D printing habitats using concrete which is actually called Mars is the project and then also I know there's another project that's being worked on using biological organisms and making like a biological organism inflatable habitat thing so I was wondering what your guys' opinion was on that Yeah, great question David I mean that's your wheelhouse come on So literally learning how to make construction out of basalt so it's kind of concrete out of Martian regolith that's Martian dirt inflatables I love inflatables I'm here with my partner kind of invented a lot of space inflatables for the moon because you can pack them up it's origami right we need habitats that are kind of like origami so shrink them all up maybe we can take a little bit of mass with us synthetic biology we're going there to search for life it's not gonna be art life we're going there to search for life but the people and all of our rovers and machines we need places and actually isolated places to live and keep studying the biology and thinking about that because how are we gonna find life how do we know we found life organics things like that when we get there and biology and synthetic biology is just a big picture just you know that's technology going forward a little story today is actually one of my students is looking at boron nanotubes why? because they might have radiation protection for humans so it's a different way to look at it rather than living underground in lava tubes to stay away from the radiation you know maybe we can think about these interesting solutions habitats in the suits all of that kind of stuff that help keep our astronauts and people alive great question do you want to work on it? okay cool so you have your own podcast look at this astrophysicist and she's gonna help us with the Mars habitats that's awesome Julie yeah just one thought on that as well is you know we don't quite know exactly what habitats are gonna look like on a Mars how we're gonna build them but one cool idea is that what if the habitat was actually a mobile habitat so you could where the moon circumnavigate right? we're not going there to stand around we need to the panel that you were on last week I think with Fred Charman I think so Fred made a really interesting comment about the habitats that we saw drawn during the Apollo era versus the habitats that we see in renderings from architectural companies and competitions now and pointed out that in the past there were these sort of communal shared spaces and now if you look at a lot of the renderings these kind of like individual pods with streets in between them and they're very sort of separated spaces and so I think it's an interesting question how we how we design those those habitats will have an impact on the ways that we interact with each other how easy it is to interact with each other to communicate to make dinner together to watch a movie together so I think it's a good question we have time for one or two more questions who has the great cube back there yes so hi I'm Christof I'm from Poland I'm one of the guys from a future hard camp and my question is do you think that the space exploration should be more in the hands of governments or public or private companies and why okay let's all take a quick shot at that both again we can do both we're smart people we're in multilateral partnerships so definitely it's governments roles to invest in science and technology exploration that's the government role so I hold the highest for our government investing in science and technology just when why because it's about all of you Education to me that's about for communications services these business cases seem to close so we're all in yeah not either or and again the public right it's government which is kind of public and it's the private companies but the public we need we need all of you we need we know the the kids in public to tell us what to do as well I think that it's more about seeing long-term commitments which that can come from government it doesn't always come from government and the way that we want and political wins I think can undermine those kinds of long-term commitments so whether it's from the private sector or from government I think what we need to see are commitments on a sort of 50-year time scale and an example that was just used in another event I was at recently was looking at Alaska the purchase of Alaska and how actually I think this might have been Alex's example so sorry it wasn't when I was at the same discussion yeah but it was you know the purchase of Alaska looked like a really bad investment in the kind of typical venture capital return time scale so on a you know five or even ten-year time scale it didn't return very much value and but on a 50-year time scale it's returned huge values so how do we create constructs in whatever mechanism government or private sector to to kind of have the patience to hold out for that 50-year time scale say all of the above and to keep in mind she done pet at one of our astronauts but it told me I've been reading about you know when we first had railroads crossing the country and people would ask questions like why would you do this like what are you gonna do when you get there and what what advantage is there to go there and and yet you know now it's it's everywhere and we think it's really normal and we's airplanes and things like that too and so you know always challenge your imagination I mean prep public-private partnerships are hard and government operations are hard they're all hard and yet they just take our imagination to kind of figure out that little way to make things happen absolutely I mean I would agree all the above but I'll also just you know remind us that private doesn't always just mean corporate so the origins of kind of funding at a public level in the US for astronomy you could kind of argue that they started with an organization called the Cincinnati Astronomical Society which was set up in the 1840s by a guy named Ormizby McKnight Mitchell and he went to the city of Cincinnati and he encouraged the people to fund the world's largest observatory by public subscription because he argued that because American was a democratic country and had no kings or queens the traditional patrons of astronomical observatories that the American people would have to fund the telescope themselves and so they formed a private society it wasn't the government it was people by association coming together to work on a shared outcome right they weren't there to make profit they were there to create a capability for the city and they didn't get the world's largest telescope they only raised enough money for the third largest telescope which is pretty good for Cincinnati in the 1840s and as a result for a brief period of time the citizens of Cincinnati had access to the third largest telescope in the world that they themselves could use not to do science but simply to access the heavens to use it to look at the wonderful nebula to look at the planets right and so that's a model that's neither corporate nor is it a kind of federal government right so there's a huge range of ways to organize to achieve space exploration and so it's going to have to be all of you above great so to the moon to stay and from the moon with love Alex Katie Jesse thank you so much and thank you to the audience for your questions now we are at the end of our afternoon thank you so much to all of you for coming and participating in our small way of celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing we hope you'll stay in touch we large and hope to have a large community of space cadets that join us in a modern conception of Starfleet Academy please stay in touch please reach out and enjoy your time in the media lab we're really happy that we had so many students coming today as well thanks