How A Realistic Mars Mission Will Play Out

Excellent interview, Fraser! (Sit there and let the other guy talk lol.)

When thier is a civilization on Mars, will there be a President on Mars to just like Earth?

People spending all this time thinking about how to mars colony without addressing the actual barrier to entry, which is funding the huge mass of rockets you will need to do it. Even with starship working perfectly, that is the tall order. Worrying about the psychology of the astronauts is cart before the horse. Or horse before the cart really, lol

I'm a bit concerned that the light-hearted and overconfident view of all this masks huge technical scientific and biological challenges. Not the least of which is how to create a viable ecology on a planet where there is no magnetosphere and therefore the ecological system (self-sustained and synergistic and self-organizing relationships between microbiomes, plants and animals) would have to be shielded and probably underground.

Mistakes on Mars will be lethal and big mistakes probably cannot be recovered from. If you lose your Air Supply on Mars you are dead, if you lose your water supply you are dead, if your grow house collapses you are dead, and there is no relief team coming from Earth to rescue you. Every essential system will have to have backups, and if those fail again, you are dead. The initial teams will be exceptionally vulnerable because there will be no redundancy of the kind that I'm talking about.

So much of the fundamental science of how to create a viable ecology on an alien world has yet to be discovered because we've never done it before. We're far better at killing ecologies than we are at stabilizing them, so in a very literal sense the things that will be required to sustain life we have never done before and since science is mostly about learning from failures, we are caught in a very difficult situation in which the necessary and unavoidable failures when you are mapping out groundbreaking and never done before technology are also Mission threatening and potentially lethal. This challenge of how to learn without lethal failure is simply unacknowledged by all the people who are gung-ho to go to Mars.

Cleaning up our planet and addressing environmental challenges here on Earth would be akin to a summer camp compared to the monumental task of establishing flourishing colonies on Mars.

Wot was the question when will we land on mars ?Thats an easy answer NEVA Low earth orbit is where we got to and as far as we get one day truth will out the fermament is real

Realise that no one will ever live on Mars..high radiation levels, freezing temperatures, no atmosphere almost a vacuum, no earth to grow plants in,and im willing to bet that there's little or no water there,it just won't happen !!😂😂

He said "yumans"

What a great conversation - refreshing and doable attitude.

Please make it work

I know it's old and I've probably already committed on this video. I just want to say he is literally describing the game Surviving Mars.

Logistics is what makes the US Army so dominant. Look at Russia when they first invaded Ukraine. Could you imagine if they had pushed through Germany and France? It would have never happened. Their clusterfuck of logistics left them entirely exposed. The invasion would have been over before it began. Whereas, the US can make sure their soldiers are eating steak and lobster, while drinking near-beers and Rip-Its in one of the most inaccessible places on earth.

we NEED to figure out a Comms array that we could stage in locations along the way to mitigate the time delay for comms.. we should have been on that with the FIRST rover mission...

wouldn't it make more sense to have appendectomies be standard requirements for astronauts to remove that particular risk?..

Thanks Fraser, this is one of my favorite interviews on your channel so far I think.

Actually, a 44 minute round trip in the best case.

If they use the Musk-Trump model, everyone will be dead before they get there. Let's purge NASA of the stupidity of God Emperor SpaceX.

It costs around 10 to 15k to put one pound in orbit around earth. Imagine sending 10 million pounds even further, to Mars, for starters. Imagine living in a large bubble building, not being able to get out, because of radiation and lack of oxygen. Imagine having to work continuously to grow basic food and upkeep the system that prepares water and oxygen. Imagine your muscles not being able to adjust being back on earth after living on one sixth gravity. Imagine having a 6 year time to round trip. Living on Mars is one of the stupidest ideas ever proposed, mostly a scheme by one man to keep the US government funding him to keep his organization going.

The reality is; Can't afford to go collect a spoonful of dirt from mars...

Why presume using rockets to land on Mars?

Why not use one enormous hydrogen-filled blimp to slowly lower the craft?

It will not be sustainable or possible to create a permanent base either on the Moon or on Mars with current rocket technology. Humanity must first of all go a big step further with regard to kinetic energy before this becomes possible. It could happen this year, next year, in a thousand years, or maybe never. The planets offer enormous amounts of free energy, and free gravity. I do not believe that we will move forward until we have learned to use this power. Nikola Tesla was perhaps on the right track.

Why can't they communicate with Lazer light ? I'm n

we need to develop a comms relay network to speed up the data transfer

I literally cannot listen to him say "wotter" or "umans" anymore.. I'm out.

To be honest this felt like you guys either aren't quite objective what comes to critical analysis of Starship or you just lack of courage to criticize Musk. And of course Boeing launch was just a basic launch and Starship is amazing when it has failed to reach all it's objectives. Of course when It finally on a third try went to space and came back without payload is Amazing archivement. I'm hoping that Starship would someday do what SpaceX promised it to do but you got be objective and critical when there's reason to be. Starship was "just a launch". All the real challenges what comes to Artemus, payload etc. are the toughest problems to solve and none of em are even close to be solved.

Could we really live on Mars? 100% no. Solar radiation would kill you before you get here. It is too cold, too dry and too toxic a place.

Send Indians from overpopulated states first (starting from me).

Oh goody.... advocating for diversity hires?

How weak would 2nd & 3rd generation humans become living on Mars with its gravity?
Maybe a centrifuges could simulate earths gravity in habitats?

Most support will have to be done on AI. Support must be trained on possible scenarios of danger , use and repair of equipment to survive in a harsh climate .

How many failures and loss of life would it take for NASA to lose the will to continue or would nothing stop the effort?

It will be quite a few years before Starship can successfully land on Mars. In that meantime, Tesla and Boston Dynamics can advance and refine their robotic designs to be used for the initial phase of Mars development. Using robots to perform initial delivery and infrastructure development which could take quite a few years would mitigate risks of human lives. So when transport to Mars become reliable and some preliminary infrastructure already in place in Mars, then it will be safer for humans to go there.

While this is going on and with Starship's 100 (current to eventual 200) metric tons payload capabilities, we can economically expedite the development of Lunar and space cities.

This guy is a liar. The Moon Landings never happened.

Jeez. Did the guest grow up next to Sidney Powell? 👀 He sounds just like her but wayyyy smarter and not like a complete hick…

Have the researchers sufficiently looked at data from remote WW2 military observation posts--posts both for spying and meteorological data?

If I remember correctly, many of those posts involved only 2 people. And they learned to function.

Maybe previous military training will help if future Martian outposts have to work with fewer than 6 people. (Though I like the minimum of 6.)

Great Interview

Apart from Musk, no one seems to be in a hurry to live on Mars. A waste of time and money, to go somewhere that will kill you instantly.

What an incredible interview. He takes it so seriously and has so much experience

Can't wait for Human habitats, perhaps cities or colonies on Mars. To speed the process up, please reduce the NASA footprint on all Mars missions.

Seems a bit boring in mars to me

Id like to know if there’s any work being done on the sexual dynamics between crew members, the potential for conflict, jealousy, resentment at who is getting what, and how this might impact survival.

@Fraser Cain... Another Amazing Informative Interview.. This is what I like about the most - the questions are well composed and to the topic - even more so when the person you are interviewing says "I Love Your Questions"...

I'm looking forward to a future where we have ammonia fueled nuclear thermal rockets combined with ion engines for mid course boosting/adjustments and high performance methane engines for landing and taking off from bodies and docking with other spacecraft. Oh and strap some solar sails on them too...

$100 says it won't be anything to do with Elon Musk, in fact, $200 says he is in jail by the time we end up on Mars

THIS IS NONSENSE..EVERY TIME NASA FEARS BUDGET CUTS, THE NONSENSE COMES OUT...

Nice job

Best interview ever 😊

Humanity

Mars will only be a place to die.