By MATT STAGGS | UNBOUND WORLDS
The National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” is a six-part global event series that depicts mankind’s first crewed mission to Mars in the year 2033. This reality-based drama is accompanied by unscripted interviews with today’s biggest innovators in the growing field of space exploration. Among them is aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin: a longtime advocate for a crewed journey to Mars, and author of several books, among them How to Live on Mars.
Zubrin recently spoke with me about the television program, the opportunities that a journey to Mars would offer, and the limitations of conventional thinking.
Note: This article is from November 2016 but republished here for its relevancy to current affairs in the space industry, NASA, and the recent formulation of a National Space Council via the Trump Administration.
UNBOUND WORLDS: I see that you invented three-player chess as a young man. What were you like as a kid? Have you always been someone who didn’t want to take accepted wisdom as the final answer to a problem?
ROBERT ZUBRIN: That was my first patented invention: I invented it when I was in high school. I would say that’s true. I’ve always looked for alternative ways to do things, and always asked why it can’t be done a different way. One thing impairs people from being inventors is that a lot of people have this idea that if they think something could be done a different way, and it’s not already being done that way, then they think there must be a reason why they’re wrong. My attitude has always been, “show me”, okay? They also think that if it was a good idea then someone else would have thought of it first.
There are so many inventions that you could look at, from bicycles to parasails, that could have been invented decades or centuries before they actually were. Did you know that the wheelbarrow wasn’t even invented until the 1200s? The Romans didn’t have wheelbarrows. It took until the high Middle Ages to invent wheelbarrows, but there was no reason why the Romans couldn’t have had them, or invented bicycles or at least scooters, but they didn’t. By World War II, people knew pretty much everything about subsonic aerodynamics that they know now, and yet they only had parachutes that could not be directed, as opposed to parasails, which were fully within their understanding, but no one had them.
I mean, look, the ketchup bottle you stand on its head so you won’t have to knock the ketchup out? We had that until 5 or 10 years ago when someone thought to put the ketchup bottle that way. There’s a lot of stuff that hasn’t been invented yet. People just need to have the guts to say, “Show me why I’m wrong.”
UW: How often have you been in that position? Do you get a lot of pushback when it comes to things like Mars and your plans there?
RZ: You get this throughout life. I always got, “You can’t be right because someone else would have thought about it first.” I recently published a critique of Elon Musk’s space colonization system. I said that he has this giant second-stage booster that he’s sending all the way to the surface of Mars and back. Seven million pounds of thrust? He should stage off of that just short of Earth escape and then it would be back in Earth’s orbit within a week. It could be used five times per opportunity, or every other opportunity, and you wouldn’t be sending it all the way to the surface of Mars and back. I published that.
Some people see what I’m saying, and then others believe that Musk must have already thought of that and rejected it. I don’t buy that argument. If you think that it’s wrong, then show me why it’s wrong. It must be wrong because otherwise Musk would have thought of it? People make mistakes. People leave things out. It happens all the time. That’s what you’ve got to do: Look at it with not cold reason, but brave reason.
UW: You’re an advocate of settling Mars by getting there and then developing what we need on the ground, is that right?
RZ: We’ll have to do it with what we have now, or what we’ll have soon. You have to understand that technologists are not the constituents of the Mars program, although they appear to some managerial types to be that. They are the vendors to the Mars program. You need some of them, but you want to need as few of them as you can.
It’s like running my business: I don’t run my business to please my vendors. There are certain vendors that I have and I make a lot of use of them, but I don’t run my business to give them maximum business. I try to economize. The problem that you have at NASA is that whenever anyone says, “Let’s send Humans to Mars”, then a bunch of people crowd into the room representing various technologies, and they say, “We love this idea because you’ll give our technology a job. We’ll support your program if you use our technology. On the other hand, if you don’t, we’ll hate you forever.”
The problem with the 90 Day Study wasn’t that the engineers who designed it were incompetent: It was that the managers who were leading that effort were trying to find key roles for everyone’s pet technology. It’s exactly the opposite of the correct way to do engineering: They designed the most complicated mission they possibly could. In contract, with Mars Direct, we said, “We want to send humans to Mars. What’s the simplest way to do it?”
UW: “Mars” is set a couple of decades or so in the future. Did you have much input on the program or the mission as it is portrayed?
RZ: I was interviewed and you’ll see various comments by me scattered throughout the series, but to the extent that I influenced the design of the mission, it wasn’t as a consultant to the program. It was through my contributions to our thoughts about space travel, more broadly. For example, you have this ship that lands on Mars: There’s no mothership, just like in Mars Direct. That’s a break from the Von Braun paradigm, and I think one that I’m significantly responsible for. I haven’t seen the future episodes, but I have to assume that they’re going to come back using methane and oxygen produced on the surface of Mars. The direct landing on Mars only makes sense if you’re going to use in situ propellant. If you try to land on Mars bringing with you all of the propellant you’ll need to go home, then you’ll blow the mission’s mass budget out of the water. It’s impractical.
UW: Were we able to come together as a species and use private and public resources, would we be able to make this happen sooner than we think?
RZ: I think we could have humans on Mars by 2024: not in 16 years, but eight. In fact, I just had a caller from a conservative publication who asked what I thought Trump should do. I said that he should commit the nation to land humans on Mars by the end of his second term. If Trump wants to make America great again, then great nations do great things. That’s what you have to do.
From a technical point of view, we are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than we were to being able to send them to the moon when Kennedy started the moon program, and we were there eight years later. Here we are, a country with twice the population and four times the gross national product of the America of the sixties. For us to say we can’t do this now — that we’re too poor, weak, or this or that — is to say that we’ve become less the kind of people that we used to be. That is something this country cannot afford. If you’re asking me if it’s realistic that we could be landing people on Mars in 2033 (the year that the Mars mission depicted in the program occurs), then, yes, absolutely. I think we could do it sooner.
UW: What frustrates you? What do you wish people would come together and solve right now?
RZ: What frustrates me is that we’ve had a number of swings at this. There was the original one when NASA landed us on the moon and said that we were ready to go to Mars. We could have been on Mars by 1981, but Nixon derailed the whole thing. Then the first president Bush, in 1989, said that we should go to the moon, Mars, and beyond, and then NASA totally hosed it up. Rather than embracing the goal and Bush’s desire to do that, they treated it as a way to justify a gigantic assortment of programs and that’s why they came up with that very expensive report that killed that program. I was fighting that and that’s how Mars Direct came about.
I was saying that we didn’t have to do it that way. We could be on Mars in 10 years, not 30, and it didn’t have to cost $400 billion. We could do it for a tenth of that. I did educate a fair number of people at that time and got NASA to embrace a Mars Direct-like approach. They then said, “Well, gee, we could have human beings on Mars in almost 10 years and it would cost $55 billion.” Yet, it didn’t go anywhere and most of those people have moved on from their jobs, so in 2004, when the second Bush announced an initiative for space exploration, I had to go in and educate a whole new group of people who then passed.
Now, here we are again. Maybe. We’ll see if Trump wants to do anything significant or not, because who knows what’s going to come out of this, right? I know that if he does announce it, then I’ll have to go in and re-teach everything: Why we don’t need giant, electric propulsion-driven space ships to go to Mars, and why you want to fly to Mars in conjunction class missions and not opposition class missions — that means a long duration stay and not a short duration stay. We’ll need people to finally look at the numbers and realize the radiation doses aren’t that great. As a matter of fact, we’ve already had a number of astronauts and cosmonauts with the same radiation dose by being on Mir or the International Space Station that they would get going to Mars and back.
This is not something to be done by Captain Kirk or Picard: It can be done by us, and it’s frustrating to have to keep digging it out. We’ll see you, know? Trump’s victory was a surprise. Most people, including me, thought that Hillary was going to win, and I had worked out a strategy to deal with that and get a humans to Mars program going because it would be a way to get millions of young people to enter science and engineering: to become technological entrepreneurs and inventors, medical researchers, and everything that would advance the nation. This would be a way to astonish the world and show what free people could do in a time when we’re being challenged by Putin, the Islamists, and the Chinese. They say that we’re of the past, and we need to show that we’re not. I think there’s still a message in there for the Trump crowd, assuming that he does want to stand up to Putin.
UW: What makes you hopeful? What are you excited about?
RZ: I think that in the long game we’re winning. Even though we’ve had all of these false starts, the fundamentals of the space program are much stronger than they were in the sixties. Right now, I would say that a significant fraction of the American population — it could be a majority, maybe 30 percent, but certainly not less than 20 percent — believe that it is essential for a positive future that humans expand into space; that we’re not just doing this for a temporary geopolitical purpose and that it’s something people really need to do. The mythos that has been developed through science-fiction and movies, as well as the missions themselves, has established this in people’s minds: This is where we’re going. That’s the fundamental driver on this.
We may have temporary reverses, but the fundamental technological foundation is advanced. We have wild cards like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, who have advanced technological innovation greatly through entrepreneurship. That’s caused by two things. The spread of the idea that it is essential to a positive human future that we expand into outer space recruited Musk and Bezos so that they are doing what they’re doing. They aren’t doing this to make money: They have other ways to make money. They are doing this because they believe this is the most important thing being done in the world at this time and they want to do it.
The other fact that lends itself to make itself possible is that there’s a lot more very wealthy people in the world today than there was a hundred years or so. A hundred years ago, there were maybe 10 people in the United States that were like Bezos or Musk. You could name Rockefeller or Morgan, but now there must be at least a thousand of them. Because the world has gotten wealthy as a function of the advance of technology, average people are much wealthier than they were a hundred years ago or 50 years ago. At the far end of that income distribution there are a thousand people like that where there were 10. Were there only 10 such people, then it would be much less likely that one of them would be recruited to this idea of devoting their fortunes and talents to human advancement into space. You’ve got Musk doing this thing, and he has now demonstrated the ability to build space systems at a third of the cost and time of the mainline aerospace industry, and not only that, but developing things that nobody had developed before, like the reusable first stage. He’s really pushing the envelope and he’s much more daring than any bureaucracy could be. He has a higher rate of failure as a result, but that’s actually a good thing. Only if you’ve got the guts to fail will you do things that haven’t been done before. Even if Musk fails completely, if he has as series of failures and fades, or his political opponents manage to knife him, there will be others. He’s showing how it’s done and there will be others.
There are millions who understand that this is the most important thing going on at this time in history; that it will be remembered by others because this is the time that we first set sail to other worlds. They want to be the ones who made it happen, or helped to make it happen. It’s going to happen. We’re going to win. Failure is impossible.
Images: NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC ‘MARS’
Thinking about moving to mars?
Well, why not? Mars, after all, is the planet that holds the greatest promise for human colonization. But why speculate about the possibilities when you can get the real scientific scoop from someone who’s been happily living and working there for years? Straight from the not-so-distant future, this intrepid pioneer’s tips for physical, financial, and social survival on the Red Planet cover:
• How to get to Mars (Cycling spacecraft offer cheap rides, but the smell is not for everyone.)
• Choosing a spacesuit (The old-fashioned but reliable pneumatic Neil Armstrong style versus the sleek new—but anatomically unforgiving—elastic “skinsuit.”)
• Selecting a habitat (Just like on Earth: location, location, location.)
• Finding a job that pays well and doesn’t kill you (This is not a metaphor on Mars.)
• How to meet the opposite sex (Master more than forty Mars-centric pickup lines.)
With more than twenty original illustrations by Michael Carroll, Robert Murray, and other renowned space artists, How to Live on Mars seamlessly blends humor and real science, and is a practical and exhilarating guide to life on our first extraterrestrial home.
Robert Zubrin is a recipient of the National Space Society’s prestigious Robert A. Heinlein Award and is the author of the bestselling The Case for Mars, as well as Entering Space, Energy Victory, and First Landing. He is the president of the Mars Society, an international organization committed to furthering the exploration and settlement of the Red Planet. With a doctorate in nuclear engineering and a master’s in aeronautics and astronautics, Dr. Zubrin led the Mars Direct project at Martin Marietta Astronautics (later Lockheed Martin) and is the founder and president of the engineering firm Pioneer Astronautics.
Source: @penguinrandomhouse
