NASA could put humans in orbit around Mars
in the year 2033 – 2033 is not arbitrary.
It’s when there’s a pretty good orbit
- there’s pretty good orbits happening often
enough - but 2033 is a real good orbit of
the Earth and Mars.
So you could get humans in orbit around Mars
without raising the NASA budget beyond letting
it increase with inflation, which is an increase
but not an extraordinary one.
Furthermore, in order to pull this off without
any increase in the NASA budget, everybody
has to stick to these agreements that NASA
will no longer be the lead funder or supporter
of the International Space Station.
They’re going to retire the space station
or let commercial entities take it over.
But if you did that, really stuck to the agreements
and you let the NASA budget increase with
inflation you could have humans orbiting Mars
in 2033.
If the Mars 2020 rover is enabled to land
in a place where there might be salty water
- or ancient salty water - and were to discover
evidence of life, perhaps we would accelerate
that schedule.
And as we say if you really have a plan to
really put humans orbiting Mars in 2033 which
would enable them to land two, three or four
years later to land on Mars.
People would come out of everywhere to volunteer
for that mission.
We’d have astronauts.
We’d have mission controllers.
We’d have engineers.
We’d have venture capitalists enabling new
technologies to be sold to NASA or other space
stations.
If you included other space agencies around
the world – Roscosmos, the Russian space
agency.
Chinese space agency, even which is politically
difficult but nevertheless possible.
Any space research organization – JAXA,
the Japanese aerospace exploration agency.
If you included all those guys you could lower
the price for NASA and then really enable
humans to get there in new, cool ways.
The reason though, everybody, is not to go
live on Mars.
That’s just beyond – they just haven’t
thought through how difficult that is.
When there’s nothing to breathe, not just
nothing to drink or eat but nothing to breathe
it makes it complicated.
But if you were to find evidence of life it
would change the course of human history.
Not overnight but over the course of months
and years.
Everybody would get to thinking about what
it means to be a living thing in the cosmos
and it would change us.
