Alice Carruth (9:46)

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Maria Varmazas (10:34)

Just before the Thanksgiving break, T minus producer Alice Carruth spoke to Robert Zubrin, president of the Mars Society. We've cut the chat into two parts, starting today with Robert explaining what the Mars Society's mission is.

Robert Zubrin (10:51)

I'm Dr. Robert Zubrin. I'm president of the Mars Society and the author of several books, including the Case for Mars.

Alice Carruth (10:58)

And I believe that the Mars Society kind of came out of that book. Could you tell us a little bit about the foundation of why you started the Mars Society and why what it is you're trying to achieve with it?

Robert Zubrin (11:08)

Let me begin at the beginning. In 1989, President George Bush I got up on the steps of the National Air and Space Museum with Armstrong and Aldred and Collins, the Apollo 11 crew, and he said, look, this is the 20th anniversary of the moon landing. That was great. That's what America's all about. And therefore I asked President of committing us to go back to the moon and onto Mars and this time's to stay. It's great stuff. So NASA went off to conduct a study on how this might be achieved. And it took them three months to do it. So this became known as the 90 day report. And they came up with the most complex plan you could possibly imagine because they really weren't trying to figure out how to get to Mars. They were figuring out how to use the imperative to get to Mars to justify every spending program that they wanted. So they designed the most complicated mission plan. It had a price tag of $400 billion, which immediately killed the program with sticker shock in the Congress. So a number of us engineers at Martin went to the management and we said, look, this is ridiculous. We can come up with a much better plan than this and someone has to if we're going to save the program. So they initiated a group within the Martin Company called the Scenario Development Team, charged with coming up with an alternative plan. I was a member of this group and because there were a lot of creative spirits in this group, we couldn't Agree with each other. There were three plans generated, one of which was the Mars Direct Plan, which I was largely responsible for, along with another engineer named David Baker. And we came up with this plan. Management said, let's float all three. They didn't try to reconcile them, which would have been impossible. And it rapidly became clear that the Mars Direct Plan had the greatest potential to break the stalemate, to change the game. It immediately became extremely controversial. We had a lot of support and a lot of opposition from across the aerospace community and NASA. In 93 or so, NASA decided to take a serious look at it. They did a study of doing the basic concepts of the Mars Direct Plan. But done their way, it is somewhat enlarged scale compared to how Baker and I had designed it. They had a crew of six instead of a crew of four, and so forth. But. And then they costed out the program. And these were the same people that had costed out the program of $400 billion before, now costed it at 55 using the same costing models. And Newsweek got hold of it. And so on 1994, July, the 25th anniversary of the moon landing, it was the COVID story. There's now a way to get to Mars at a price that is doable. And a literary agent heard about this. So I'm sitting at my desk at Martin, and the phone rings, and it's a literary agent named Laurie Fox. And she says, do you realize you have a book here? And so the book the Case for Mars was published in 96, and it was very successful. And I got 4,000 letters from people all over the world. And I showed this incredible display of interest from around the world to some friends of mine who had also been, you know, Mars advocates, that we had this informal network at that time called the Mars Underground and said, look, if we could pull these people together, we would have a force that could actually do something to help make this happen. So we called the founding convention of the Mars Society and Boulder, Colorado, in 1998, and 700 people showed up. And we got worldwide coverage. And boom, we had a society. And so that's how the Mars Society got started. And we decided we would do three things. One, just spread the vision. Two, intervene into the political process to defend the various Mars programs that were in play in the political government sector. And three projects of our own, of which the most significant was the starting of the project to build a Mars Practice station, what's called a Mars Analog Research station, which we built. The first one on Devon island in the Canadian north. And the second One in the desert in Utah, in the American western desert. And they were both built and they've been successful. We've had over 300 crews in them at this point.

Alice Carruth (15:48)

So you've covered a lot of what the Mars Society does and what it is you're aiming to do, and you have done an incredible amount. So as you say, since you started back in 1998, and I've been reading through your website and been blown away by the amount of projects you've got ongoing, everything from a wiki page, all about Mars information. So people have got one source to go to to get all their information about what goes on in Mars all the way through to open source data, virtual reality, so people can experience Mars. But really the question I think most people really want to know is why Mars? You're the leading expert when it comes to why we should be going to explore the red planet. Why is it you think that humanity should invest in exploring Mars?

Robert Zubrin (16:29)

Well, there are three reasons for the science, for the challenge and for the future. So let me explain. First of all, the science. The early Mars and the early Earth were twins. They were both rocky planets with liquid water, oceans and other bodies of water, and a CO2 dominated environment and the right temperatures to have liquid water, which is to say the right temperatures for life. Now we know that life appeared on Earth. Did it also appear on Mars? If the theory is correct that life naturally evolves from chemistry wherever you have appropriate physical and chemical conditions, then life should have appeared on Mars. And since we now know that most stars have planets, this planetary systems around stars are the rule, not the exception. And fully 20% of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy have Earth sized planets in the habitable zone, that is to say the right distance, where have good temperatures for liquid water. So if life appears wherever the conditions are reasonable, then life's everywhere. And furthermore, since we also know that the history of life on Earth is one of development from simple forms to more complex forms, including forms with greater capacities for activity and intelligence and ever more rapid evolution. If life's everywhere, it means intelligence is everywhere. It means we're not alone. This is stuff that thinking men and women have wondered about for thousands of years. Are we living in a fertile universe or a sterile universe? And so these are important questions. And we can resolve this by going to Mars, by sending explorers to Mars and find fossils on the surface. Because we don't expect to find extant life on the Martian surface right now. Conditions have deteriorated. There's no liquid water there now. There's Frozen water. There's plenty of ice on Mars, but there could be fossils, and if you found them, that would show that life appears where it can, which means it's everywhere. Furthermore, while there's no liquid water on the Martian surface today, there is liquid water underground on Mars. Underground it's warmer, just like Earth. And life, if it had existed on the surface, could have retreated there. And there's many life forms that once existed on the surface of the Earth that can no longer live there because they cannot tolerate oxygen. Oxygen in the Earth's atmosphere is an artifact from green plants. It wasn't originally there. And we like oxygen. Not everybody does. For many of the early organisms that inhabited the Earth, oxygen was toxic, and so they retreated into the underground. And they've been there for the past 3 billion years. So Martian organisms could have retreated from a hostile surface as well. And so if we send people there, we can set up drilling rigs, bring up some water, and then if there's living organisms in the water, you could see not only that there was life on Mars, but what it is like. For both theoretical reasons, aesthetic reasons, it's worth knowing. But it's also worth knowing for practical reasons because, you know, biotechnology is going to be one of the premier engineering fields of the 21st century and beyond. Okay, because biotechnology is nanotechnology, it's self replicating machines. This microscopic level. We're learning to read the genetic code. Soon we're going to be able to write the genetic code. But what if there's a better operating system? I believe that civilizations are like individuals, that as we grow and we challenge ourselves, we stagnate when we do not. A Humans to Mars program would be a tremendous positive challenge for every society that chooses to participate in it.

Maria Varmazas (20:40)

We'll be right back. Welcome back. You know, when your show's name is T minus, you don't have to twist my arm to take a moment to appreciate excellence in rocketry. And USC's Rocket Propulsion Lab at the one and only USC Viterbi is exceptionally exceptional. USC RPL was the world's first and as yet still the world's only student organization to launch a student designed and built rocket past the Karman line back in 2019. Not too shabby, right? And last month, USCRPL passed now smashed the world record for amateur altitude with their Aftershock 2 rocket, reaching an astonishing 470,000ft on their October 20th flight. That is a whole 90,000ft higher than the previous record set back in 2004. Aerospace at Viterbi with so many notable alums in space history then and the space industry now, it's really not a surprise. The record smashing Aftershock 2 rocket features the most powerful solid propellant motor ever fired by students. Clearly titanium coated fins to endure hypersonic speeds, and a thermal protection system that kept the rocket largely intact even when it hit Mach 5.5. Weighing in at 330 pounds, the rocket also showcased custom avionics that enabled live tracking and data integration and they were able to recover the rocket after its ascent. And there is a pretty fantastic photo of the rocket in space. Curvature of the earth below the rocket with a nose coin pointing right at the moon as if pointing to it and saying, hey, you're next. Honestly, that feels like this team's trajectory, so I wouldn't be surprised if that happens. Congratulations to all the student engineers at USCRPL on their fantastic achievement. Onwards and upwards, literally and figuratively. And that's it for T minus for December 3, 2024, brought to you by N2K CyberWire for additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcasts like Team Minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. This episode was produced by Alice Carouse. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazas. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T minus.