Let's Die On Mars

So there's, I'm excited to share the stage

with some distinguished space experts as we look to,

as we look to space, there's a lot happening right now,

and there's a lot on the horizon as well.

We have, as we look up to Earth orbit

and the Moon and Mars and asteroids

and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn and beyond,

there's a lot coming up.

There's also stuff to be concerned about too

when it comes to environmental and ethical questions,

labor problems, political tensions.

So there's a lot to think about, but I,

what I always try to do when I approach these issues

is think about how can we make space safe,

sustainable, and egalitarian?

And those themes will come up today.

So I, let's bring on our guests.

I'll introduce them as they come up.

We have Ariel Ekblaw,

[audience applauding]

the

[audience applauding]

CEO, or the founder of the Space,

MIT Space Exploration Initiative

and author of Anthropocosmos,

which is an excellent title, I think.

And she's also working on

self-assembling space structures, among other things.

We have Jared Isaacman,

who is the CEO of Shift4 Payments.

He's also, was, led the inspiration for space flight,

the first commercial space flight into orbit.

And he's a benevolent space billionaire

promoting science there.

And as well as on Polaris Dawn,

which is coming up very soon,

which will include the first commercial spacewalk.

We also have Karen Nyberg, recently retired NASA astronaut,

and she's been to the International Space Station,

of course, multiple times.

And she's also a textile artist

and brought her art supplies to the Station as well.

And also Moriba Jah, who is a space environmentalist

and space debris guru at UT Austin.

And actually, I first wanted

to direct the first question to you.

As, as we -

Wow. Okay.

And, we can, and everyone else feel free to chime in.

But just starting with Earth orbit,

when in low Earth orbit we have, you know,

the debris problem and a space traffic problem,

which is persistent and getting worse.

Why is that?

And you know, can you,

can you tell us more about the problem?

What can be done?

Yeah.

I mean, look, I don't know if people here

really realize this.

And you can see all this stuff on, like,

this app called Wayfinder.

If you Google Wayfinder and space debris,

you'll find it.

But basically in 1957,

we launched our first satellite Sputnik.

And right now, in 2023,

we're tracking over 50,000 objects ranging in size

from your cell phone all the way to the Space Station.

Out of which, you know, 5,000, over five,

just a little bit over 5,000 are working satellites

that are providing services and capabilities

like communication, position, navigation, and timing.

Everything else is garbage.

So like 90% of all the stuff we're tracking is trash.

And out of the about 5,000 satellites that are working,

over half of those belong to Elon Musk, so.

Look, I'm just, it's just facts.

I'm not, there's no judgment there.

[audience laughing]

It's true.

And Karen, I wanted to ask you about what are your thoughts

on the role of science in, in space?

'Cause at the beginning, at the beginning of the Space Race,

it was a lot, there was a lot of,

it was basically a race between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

and science was taking a backseat.

And, now we have sort of, there's the rivalry between

the U.S. and China as well that sort of casts a shadow

in a way, on Moon exploration for one thing.

So what are your thoughts on

how science fits into all of this?

Well, I think certainly science is,

has been and will be, you know,

one of the fundamental drivers for space exploration.

I personally think one of the problems we have

is that a lot of the science can be very abstract

for those that aren't intimately involved with it.

And I think it can be challenging to find a connection

for the general public to understand, you know,

what the science is doing for them.

And I think in the future, to make, to make science

continue to be that fundamental driver,

I think it's important for those of us

that are flying in space and,

and exploring to make it a tangible,

a tangible thing for people.

And also I think science is also very good

at fostering collaboration.

But that being said, I think it's also important

that there's other things.

And sometimes it's the, sometimes it's the competition,

that really works to get things going.

And then we get science out of that

that we're not expecting.

You know, we don't, we don't know what we're gonna find.

That's one of the beauties of science.

And then also, I think space exploration needs to be,

that there's the human aspect of it that is so important

and the inspirational aspect of it that really needs to,

to come into play and then science comes out of it.

Absolutely.

Jared, I wanted to ask you, in what ways are,

would you say that commercial space flight

is expanding access to space?

And what more can be done in that way?

Yeah, I mean, I mean, first I could just go right

to the heart of it with reusability.

I mean, it's kind of hard to imagine that on your,

you know, flight to take the family down to Disney World,

you would throw the 737 away.

And, you know, reusability is a total game changer, right?

I mean, no one's arguing that accessing space

isn't still very expensive.

It, it certainly is,

but the costs have come down materially, right?

So much so that it, it's not just, you know,

that commercial, you know, space astronaut missions

are now taking place more routinely.

You actually have nations

that are sending up their astronauts in orbit

that previously never would've been able to do that

right now.

I mean, those, you know, I think Axiom's a great example

of that right now, that, you know, if you're,

if you're not of, you know, sufficient resources

to contribute into either NASA

or the European Space Agency, you were on the sidelines.

So, you know, reusability has changed the game entirely

for, in terms of opening up space for,

for more humans to go out and explore.

But also even just, you know,

commercial payload missions right now,

you can experiment so much more

with the different satellites or other payloads

that you're putting into space that previously,

at when, when the costs were in order of magnitude greater,

you had to be certain.

And this experimentation phase,

who knows what possibilities it'll create in the future, so.

That's a good point.

Ariel, what I'd like to ask you,

what would you say or what are your thoughts

on the role of artificial intelligence and robotics

in space flight and how astronauts

and autonomous systems might end up working together?

So I think that we'll see them be deeply coupled.

The role of robotics already is really well known

in space flight.

Of course we have Mars rovers,

we have probes that are autonomous

that go and help us explore beyond the reaches

of where we could currently send humans.

But now, even within the realm of human space flight,

my team at MIT and my lab at Aurelia,

we're already looking at integrating AI agents.

So, you know, a, maybe embodied personal agent

behind Chat GPT into the construction

and the operation of a responsive space habitat.

Part of this is because in the future,

instead of thinking about space habitats and life in space

as a domain where it's just about survival,

which it has certainly been until recently,

we're at this inflection point,

we can begin to think about thriving in space,

designing space architecture that is welcoming

to more of the public

that doesn't just look like a science lab on orbit.

And so to be able to do that,

we need responsive space habitats,

really capable integration of all kinds

of different systems.

And AI will have a huge role in that.

And then, personally, Ramin knows,

my passion is around robotics for self-assembly.

So it's all well and good if the costs dropped, you know,

drastically tomorrow to get humans to space.

We only have room for seven of them in orbit, period.

You know, 11 if you count Tiangong.

And that means that we actually have just a need

for more real estate in orbit.

And I think one of the best ways

that we can get to that is robotic self-assembly.

Imagine Legos building themselves in space.

My personal love is to do that with magnets.

But there's all kinds of different ways

you can achieve that future

and try to actually scale up in space construction,

so it's no longer dependent on just astronaut EVAs

when they go in suits outside or robotic arms.

So, this is a question for any of you,

are there upcoming space missions

or new technologies over the next couple years

that you're really looking forward to?

I have a couple, if I can pop right back in.

Sure, go for it.

To your comments earlier about the importance of science,

I think there's two fantastic opportunities

on the near term horizon to appreciate investment in space

for the benefit of life on Earth.

I think that there is a real need to balance.

Many of us, I'm sure have a space dream of, you know,

we're not really, wanna die on Mars,

but we would love to go to Mars.

But there's much more proximate benefit in orbit

for space science coming right back down

to benefit life on Earth.

Two great examples.

I think biotech will be an anchor customer

of future space stations.

One for novel drug discovery.

We already know that proteins fold

differently in microgravity.

Something NASA's been working on for many years on the ISS,

but we're finally seeing, you know,

pharma industry actually engage with the design

of a bio-station so that they could actually produce

novel drugs on orbit.

And then my second favorite example, artificial retinas.

Nicole Wagner, LambdaVision,

a founder who I'm really enamored with currently.

She's designing a new protein matrix

to create artificial retinas.

You can only do it in space.

You can't make artificial retinas on Earth in the same way.

Gravity kind of ruins the process.

And then they're able to bring the retinas back

and potentially cure macular degeneration.

So, I just think a really fantastic example

of the use of space for the benefit of life on Earth.

If I could just jump on every,

I love everything you've just said

in both your answers, by the way.

And I think, just for the benefit of the group,

first, just on the whole AI point right now,

I don't know if people appreciate,

you see like four people in a space capsule,

there's an army back on Mission Control, an army.

Like the entire operations of human space flight

is managed very much here on Earth.

When you get to 20 minute transmission delays,

if we're gonna get anywhere near Mars,

and that's communicating at the speed of light,

that doesn't work.

So you're gonna have to evolve to a system

with very, very smart technology on the vehicle itself

that can make decisions when you're going like,

you know, greater than eight kilometers a second.

And robotics absolutely on that.

And the second point, which I love even more,

is what is the economy that even requires us to be in space?

'Cause we don't have an answer for that yet, right?

You've got a vehicle on the horizon right now

that could be the 737 of human space flight,

with factories that could potentially create

hundreds of these vehicles

that each fit a hundred people in it.

And we don't know why they need to be there yet.

So, actually having a space economy,

which is pretty foundational

in almost every good sci-fi movie,

you know, whether it's the spices to fuel jump drives

or something like that, we don't have that figured out yet.

And it would be great if it's something as,

as noble, as important as restoring potentially eyesight

or other bio-manufacturing type capabilities.

Anyway, just awesome stuff.

Thanks.

Yeah.

For me, in terms of technologies,

I'm gonna bring it more towards environmentalism

and, and safety and sustainability.

And, I think to Jared's point,

this idea of reusability and recyclability,

right now we have a linear economy in space,

it's like the end state of every satellite

is to become junk.

It's kind of like single use plastics,

it's single use satellites and it's BS.

So we need to change that.

We need to have a circular space economy

that focuses first and foremost on prevention of pollution,

prioritizing reusability and recyclability.

And then for the things that have to be, you know,

single use, we have to come up with mechanisms

for proper disposal.

And so I think the technology to go

and do active debris removal,

there's still a lot to do there, so.

That's a good point.

There's a couple of missions coming up,

that I'll be writing about too for Wired

about debris removal and the,

and speaking of removing things from orbit,

there's the, a new FAA rule is coming out,

which will basically require U.S. companies

to make sure that, you know, rocket, rocket bodies

are disposed of instead of becoming

big barges in the ocean of plastic as it were.

Since Mars is in the theme of this session,

I feel like I have to ask a Mars question.

Do any of you have thoughts on what Mars exploration,

say in 2050 or so, what it could look like

or what it should look like?

I mean, look, from my perspective,

I just don't think that Homo sapiens is the species

to, like, thrive on other celestial bodies.

I think that we evolved as Earthlings,

smelling flowers, having pets, cats, you know,

fish and all that other stuff.

We didn't evolve, like, in submarines and crap like that.

So to me, all these movies about,

oh, we're gonna have these really cool, you know,

flight suits and live in bubbles perpetually

is, is bullshit.

Like, that's just not realistic.

So I think that the next hominid,

I'm gonna call it Homo machina,

which is like a fusion of humans and machines,

those will be able to withstand larger radiation doses,

stay in space for hundreds of years

to do interstellar whatever.

Like, I think the next hominid will be able to do that.

But I think that we still need to explore,

to basically develop the technology

to help the next hominid species be able to thrive

elsewhere in the universe.

That's a fascinating perspective.

I really like that.

[Karen laughing]

That's, yeah, I think, I think for living on Mars,

you know, the exploring and going there, there's so many,

after having lived in space for six months,

there's so many logistics just of storing food.

I mean, we have cargo vehicles coming several times a year,

bringing spare parts, food, you know, whatever we need.

And just, there's logistically just humans living.

And then the time delay for having, you know,

like Jared said, we have the Mission Control

that is basically running Space Station

and you have to figure out how to do that without that.

And, so there's, there's so much.

I would great, love to see it in the next 25 years,

but I don't know, I'm not sure.

Yeah, that may be unrealistic.

Yeah.

I think a couple things that I love to call out

about this prospect of human civilization on Mars.

One little fun fact is it's one third G,

we're not sure if a woman could carry a baby to term

in one third G.

It's a big open question.

So whether, you know, an outpost on Mars is replacing itself

or constantly having to be replaced by Earth.

Big open question as to what, you know,

that future kind of looks like.

And then Moriba has hit on some of the other challenges.

There's poison in the soil,

there's perchlorates in the soil,

so it's not gonna be like The Martian movie.

You're not gonna be growing potatoes in that direct soil.

You're gonna need a lot of other infrastructure

to be able to achieve a sustainable vision on Mars.

But, even before we get to Homo machina,

which I love that concept,

I do think that there is something really profound

about that human search for knowledge

and the meaning of going out and exploring.

There's a great quote from Apollo 8,

I think it was Bill Anders who said,

when they took the first photo of the Earth from space

on their way to the moon,

We came all this way to explore the moon.

And what we discovered was Earth.

And it really does expand our circles of awareness

as a species.

And so I think it's worth doing,

even when we are still very fragile,

odd little biological bags of water

to actually be able to explore

what life could be like on Mars

as long as we take care of Earth at the meantime.

It should not be an abandoning Earth

or a moral hazard type of approach at all.

I literally agree with what everybody has said up here.

Look, there's, I don't, I don't think anyone

is under the illusion that Mars is gonna be a better,

a better planet than Earth.

All these, rich billionaires can't wait.

We already destroyed Earth, can't wait to get to Mars.

It's not gonna be great there.

[all laughing]

There is a lot of problems with this

and there are no analogs on Earth.

Zero.

Despite what people may think.

There is nothing about it.

Going to Antarctica, you can, you can come back,

you know, during the Age of Exploration you go over,

you discover a new continent.

Deer is deer, you chop wood down, you fish,

it's all relatively the same.

No matter how hard you work on Mars,

you're destined to be in a bubble for forever.

And there are all the issues described

along the journey, right?

I mean, sure, certainly childbirth is,

we've never done an open surgery in space.

There are immense psychological issues

you couldn't even begin to imagine.

I mean, there's psychological issues

when you're 90 minutes from coming back to Earth,

or two or three days coming back from the Moon

versus six to nine months.

So, I think, I think that what it comes down to is

for the first time in human history,

it is now within the realm of possible to get there.

And when you get there,

you're gonna learn an awful lot along the way.

And who knows how that could alter, you know,

human's destiny here on Earth.

Whether it's the technology we develop,

or it's new sources of power that we might uncover,

or that we just simply have to do it

because others will try and do it.

And if they do it, I mean, throughout all of human history,

the high ground has been very important.

Believe me.

That is, that is the high ground.

And we appreciate that in low Earth orbit

and we will in Lunar, and certainly in Mars.

So there's a lot of reasons why we still have to do it.

Also, moving a little closer in time and distance,

how about the Moon where we have,

in the next, say 20 years, there may be a NASA outpost,

a NASA and its partners

as well as a Lunar space station.

There'll be a Chinese research station

and there could be, you know,

commercial tourists at least orbiting if not landing.

So like what, what is this future that,

like what do you think of this future

is of Moon exploration?

I'm frankly excited that we're get getting now closer

to the point where we're actually doing that.

I mean, I'll tell you, when I became an astronaut in 2000,

I literally thought that I would have a good chance

of going to the Moon then.

And you know, 23 years have passed

and we haven't been back.

And so now with the Artemis program

and what some commercial companies are doing,

I think it's, you know, it's now finally in the realm.

And that is a great place to learn some more

without traveling quite so far as going to Mars.

And there is still so much to learn.

So I'm really excited about seeing

what comes of that over the next decade or two.

The dynamics of getting there

are also changing drastically.

So about a year and a half ago I signed MIT's

first ever commercial contract to go to the Moon.

We didn't wait in a pipeline for NASA.

We didn't have to sign on

for a purely scientific experimental,

although we are doing two payloads.

We bought our way onto a mission with a commercial provider,

which NASA has done a really fantastic job

of incubating this CLPS program,

Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

And next spring, if everything goes well,

we'll actually be on the surface

with two different payloads.

And this is a remarkable speed-up

of access to that environment.

So I think that that is something to keep in mind,

is that it's becoming much more accessible to get there.

What that raises is a really interesting set of questions

about first precedence for first actors that get there,

principles that we're seeding it with.

And there's been some really interesting reports

that have come out of the Harvard Center for Astrophysics.

Most of the resources that we're really interested in,

the water, ice,

the really dark black sky for good astronomy, helium-3,

they're concentrated in the same small areas.

China knows that too.

India knows that too.

And so we are potentially setting up

a geopolitical tension area on the Moon

if we don't think ahead about some of the principles

and the norms of behavior that we wanna see

before a gold rush essentially sets in for the Moon

now that this access is so much more available.

Yeah, no, I totally see, agree on everything said.

I totally see the geopolitical tension rising.

You know, for me being on the Moon is kind of like,

equivalent to, like scuba diving

in the sense that you put on the suit, you go,

you check out the fish, it's cool,

you come back kind of thing.

So the ability to go, come back,

I think that makes a lot of sense.

I think, for most people it won't matter unless, you know,

somebody like Disney takes over

and then starts, like, getting people there.

But before people jump on that long Disney ride,

let me just say this, okay.

'Cause people keep on talking about,

oh, you know, just go to space, space tourism.

If you get on one of these flights,

just regular flights on a 737 whatever,

and you've experienced turbulence

and you're like, Ah, it's kind of bumpy.

17 hours kind of sucks on a plane.

Let me tell you, you have embraced the suck.

'Cause this whole thing about going to the Moon

is like totally, yeah, people go, Oh yeah,

my grandmother's just gonna walk on a rocket and just like.

That's not gonna happen anytime soon.

So I think people need to be a little bit more realistic

with the challenges.

And living in space is not glamorous.

Yeah I, first, completely agree.

I mean look, half of all astronauts get

Space Adaptation Syndrome.

It's not a pretty 48 hours.

So when they talk about the 737 of human space flight

and a hundred people, 50 people are throwing up

and the other 50 people are pretty unhappy

that they are throwing up.

[audience laughing]

So I'm totally, I'm totally with you.

But look, the more times we're going into space

and the more we uncover,

the more problems we're gonna be able to solve along the way

for being in space and also back here on Earth.

I do wanna just say, in terms of the Moon, right?

And I know it's not, it's not the great answer

because everybody wants everyone to play nice.

But look, the competition is good.

It's really good.

And right now our means to go to space or, I'm sorry,

the, the game plan for the U.S. to the Moon

is a four and a half billion dollar disposable rocket.

And competition, first of all brings down costs,

competition fuels innovation.

And we are not the only ones that,

that want to get to the Moon right now.

This is a big deal.

As long as space is super expensive,

you could go to the Moon

and then we don't go back for 50 years.

And that's what happened before.

I personally want my kids to grow up in an environment

where people are on the Moon all the time

and we're uncovering great things that, again,

change and make our lives a lot more interesting.

Competition is good.

China is certainly looking to go there on the fast track.

You have other countries looking to do it.

I think it'll force the U.S. to kind of reevaluate

how it looks at space exploration.

I think that's good for all humankind.

Yeah.

So the last thing that I wanna say, like, back to the whole,

'cause I'd love to see people just thriving on the Moon

all the time.

I think it's a great time to start thinking about

becoming an anesthesiologist.

'Cause you're gonna wanna be knocked out.

Like what kind of cocktail can I just, like,

you put me on the rocket, get put to sleep,

wake me up when I get there, kind of thing, right?

It's like, yeah.

I found most flight surgeons are anesthesiologists.

Okay.

So lastly, but before we go, is there anything else

that people maybe haven't thought enough about

as far as space or things that you think

people should think about more?

Yeah, I think, I think the main thing for me,

look, to me, space, we came from the stars,

we need to go back kind of thing.

I think you can see the natural progression.

You know, we explored, you know, land, ocean, air.

It's always been preceded

by those that have most resources, right?

You know, the billionaires, the kings and queens.

Then it became a common mode of transportation.

So I think seeing that billionaires are going into space

should signal to everybody,

it's gonna be a common mode of transportation

to the rest of humanity because the evidence shows that.

However, I think that we as a humanity

have forgotten about the

interconnectedness amongst all things.

We've forgotten what stewardship means

and what I, what I don't wanna see is us take

the toxicity that currently exists

and propagate that across the universe.

Like there's a, there's a way to not do that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We think about some of the same themes at MIT,

this notion of the Anthropocosmos.

So a little bit of a tongue twister,

but building on this notion of the Anthropocene,

having been a period of Earth's history where,

for better or for worse,

humanity has now become a really dominant player.

For the Earth, I think it's for better.

I'm a very happy human.

But as we move out into the near neighborhood

of our solar system,

we have a responsibility to the space commons.

And I think Moriba phrases it really beautifully,

and I'm really inspired by his work

because he's an example of someone

who is very actively helping us be a better steward

of the space commons.

But one of the things, the frameworks,

a mental framework that we could develop

is this notion of urban planning at planetary scale.

Everything from space debris, which is waste management,

to electromagnetic spectrum sharing, which is utilities,

to the sharing of different orbits.

And how do we make sure that we don't have forts

and garrisons in low Earth orbit,

but we actually have, you know, free travel

between the different space stations of all the nations.

There's about to be a really remarkable inflection point

as we scale up humanity's presence in space

on this cusp of interplanetary civilization.

And I think it's worth thinking about

in a systems manner of thinking,

like urban planning at planetary scale.

Well, we'll have to leave it there.

I think that's a good point to end on.

Thank you all, all of you.

And let's hopefully live together on,

in space instead of dying.

[audience applauding]