We are entering what I call the next golden
era of space exploration.
The first golden era was back in the 1960s,
but it was unsustainable.
In 1966 the NASA budget consumed five percent
of the entire federal budget!
It was impossible to sustain that level of
spending; now it’s about .5 percent.
However, now with the injection of new ideas,
fresh enthusiasm from the private sector,
from Silicon Valley billionaires, have a whole
new different landscape.
Just recently we had that sensational launch
of the Falcon Heavy rocket financed by zero,
zero amount of taxpayer’s dollars.
Costs have dropped since the 1960s.
For example, take a look at India, developing
nations like India and China they’re already
dreaming about Mars.
In fact it has already sent a probe to Mars
is just a few years ago.
And it shows you that the economics have changed.
And now with the introduction of reusable
rocket we’re now talking about opening up
the heavens to perhaps a whole new economic
landscape that is ten percent the cost of
the past.
To put me in orbit around the earth costs
about $10,000 a pound; that’s my weight
in gold.
Think of my body made out of solid gold, that’s
what it takes me just to go around the earth
in near orbit.
To go to the moon would cost about $100,000
a pound.
To put me on Mars would cost at least a million
dollars a pound.
That is unsustainable and that’s where the
reusable rockets come in because we’re now
talking about dropping the cost by a factor
of ten.
Instead of $10,000 a pound, SpaceX wants to
bring it down to $1000 a pound.
December of 2019 NASA will send the LSL booster
rocket and the Orion Module around the moon
on a robotic unmanned mission; just a few
years after that the first astronauts will
go back to the moon after a 50-year gap.
Late in the next decade we hope to have a
lunar orbiter, a lunar orbiter that gives
us a permanent presence in outer space.
Not just the space station, but a lunar orbiter.
And from that we want to go all the way to
Mars.
And so NASA has already now looked at the
blueprints, made by Boeing aircraft, concerning
what it would take to send probes to Mars.
In fact, we may even have a traffic accident
around Mars because of the fact that SpaceX,
not to be outdone, they’re proposing their
big rocket to take us not just to the moon
with the Dragon space capsule and the Falcon
Heavy rocket, but a new rocket, the BFR rocket,
to take us all the way to Mars—even bypassing
the lunar orbiter.
So we’re talking about a whole new political
and technological landscape that, by the 2030s,
sometime in the 2030s we will be on Mars.
We have not just new energy and new financing
and money coming from Silicon Valley, we also
have a new vision emerging.
For Elon Musk of SpaceX is to create a multi
planet species.
However, for Jeff Bezos of Amazon, he wants
to make earth into a park so that all the
heavy industries, all the pollution goes into
outer space and Jeff Bezos wants to set an
Amazon type delivery system connecting the
earth to the moon.
And so he wants to lift all the heavy industries
off the planet earth to make earth a paradise
and to put all the heavy industries in outer
space.
Now, I once talked to Carl Sagan and he said
that because the earth is in the middle of
a shooting gallery of asteroids and comets
and meteors it’s inevitable that we will
be hit with a planet buster, something like
what hit the dinosaur 65 million years ago.
We need an “insurance policy.”
Now, he was clear to say that we’re not
talking about moving the population of the
earth into outer space, that costs too much
money and we have problems of our own on the
earth like global warming.
We have to deal with those problems on the
earth, not fleeing in outer space.
But as an insurance policy we have to make
sure that humans become a two planet species.
These are the words of Carl Sagan.
And now, of course, Elon Musk has revived
this vision by talking about a multi planet
species.
He wants to put up to a million colonists
on the planet Mars sent to Mars by his rockets
financed by a combination of public and private
funding.
And remember he has the vision, the energy
and the checkbook to make many of these ideas
into a reality.
