Destination Mars (2015–…): Season 1, Episode 3 - The Journey - full transcript
(Rushing air)
(Dramatic orchestral music)
(Roaring rocket engine)
(Dramatic orchestral music)
(Roaring wind)
(Drumbeat)
(Cars and traffic)
(Orchestral music)
The human mission to
Mars will be the most exciting
most adventurous, most ambitious mission
that humans will go on next.
And that is my dream that
I'm trying to turn into reality
and it's basically who I am.
I'm in D.C. to talk about Mars One
at the Mars Society Convention.
The overall project of
getting humans to Mars
is almost impossible to oversee,
but if you take it one step at a time,
one conference at a
time, one meeting at a time,
one supplier at a time,
one investor at a time,
then it's actually something
that can be achieved.
I'm convinced of that.
(Orchestral music)
Hi Bas Hi, how are you?
Good to see you.
So how are things with Mars One?
Going well Oh yeah?
Yeah. A lot of exciting stuff happening.
Welcome Mr. Lansdorp.
(Applause)
Thank you, thank you.
I want to focus on the journey.
So how are we going to
get stuff from Earth to Mars?
We want to send humans to Mars in 2027
on a mission of permanent
settlement. One way.
How do you get to Mars?
We have designed our
mission around a rocket
that is not existing yet.
The rocket needed to
bring everything to Mars
is not there yet.
It's indevelopment.
It would be great if we can use something
like the Falcon Heavy,
which hasn't flown yet
but it's a combination
of three of the rockets
that SpaceX is currently using.
Around 2016, 2017,
the first flight of the Falcon
Heavy will have occurred
Which is in time for our needs.
And this Falcon Heavy is
capable of putting 53 tons
in a low Earth orbit.
We will use low Earth orbit
to basically construct
the final spacecraft.
I think the Falcon Heavy
will be an extraordinary
capability when it's available.
The question, of course, is
going to be whether Mars One
will be able to use it for
its exploration objectives
or whether that's going to be constrained
to SpaceX's objectives.
Do you have a commitment from SpaceX
to use the Falcon Heavy?
I... well we have... I've
been there a couple of times.
They have been to our office.
We're in good contact
and it's very easy. You
pay them, they get you there.
(Audience laughter)
(Music)
Our plan is to assemble a small,
cozy little space station
in low Earth orbit
consisting of one of our landing modules
and a small transit habitat,
a small space station.
The spacecraft which
will bring humans to mars
consists of a number of elements
which will be launched separately
One element is the habitational volume
the second element is the propulsion stage
which will bring the
whole stuff towards Mars
and then the final is the capsule
which will bring people up into spacecraft
and then later will bring people down
on the surface of Mars.
For our Earth Crew to flourish on Mars
they're gonna need a lot o' stuff
That ship is going to be quite large.
And so, we have to launch
and assemble that ship
probably in orbit around the Earth
much like we've already built
the International Space Station.
Now it took us... by the
way... it took us about a decade
to construct the
International Space Station.
It could take us up to a
decade to assemble that ship
in low earth orbit to get it
ready to go on this journey.
With the funding that
appears to be available
I don't see that advancing on a time scale
put forward by Mars One.
(Orchestral music)
The transit vehicle
most likely will consist
of an inflatable habitation module
which is designed in the U.S.
One of the companies
doing it is Bigelow Aerospace.
Now the good thing about
this inflatable structure
is that you can have
a larger transit vehicle
than what you would normally have.
With an inflatable you
can have large diameters
where you create more space.
That becomes easier for people to live in.
They are testing these
inflatable structures
at the moment as we speak.
They have already two in orbit,
two scale models and
they still work perfectly fine
and another one will be attached
to the International
Space Station late this year
maybe beginning of next year.
The transit habitat itself has no means
to go further into space so we will add
a propulsion stage and we will dock that
to the transit habitat.
Then, at the right moment,
we will launch both elements together,
using the propulsion stage, to Mars.
Mars One has talked about using
most of the entrepreneurial
companys' systems.
It's important to realize
that while these systems
are being worked on,
and I think that within the next decade
these systems will be available,
very few of the systems
that Mars One is talking about
are available today.
You can't just go buy a Bigelow inflated...
inflatable habitat
for a Mars transit.
Columbia to Houston,
negative return (Beep)
Roger that, negative return
(Building orchestral music)
On the way to Mars, the
astronauts are exposed
to galactic cosmic rays,
radiation of all other forms
with the result that they
can have an increased risk
of dying due to cancer years in the future.
So we've got to come up
with a way to mitigate that risk
and there are ways to do it,
but they take some time to develop.
I'm actually of the opinion
that radiation is not
one of the big problems
for humans going to Mars
and it's a very acceptable
level of radiation
it will give them about
1½ % additional chance
of developing a tumor
during their lifetime.
That's not great, but
it's a lot less than...
for example, smoking and
we still allow people to smoke.
Space radiation is
different than Earth radiation.
We have a very good understanding
of how Earth radiation affects humans.
However, given that
space radiation is larger,
heavier,
more energy-packed particles,
we don't understand the radiobiology.
We don't understand the
effect of space radiation
on biological tissue.
But it's very predictable.
I mean, we know how
much radiation there is,
the Curiosity Rover
has actually measured it
in a lot of detail now and we know
exactly how much
radiation our crew will get
on the way to Mars.
The Curiosity Spacecraft and Rover
were very helpful in
terms of trying to determine
what the actual space radiation exposure is
en route to Mars.
There was a detector on that spacecraft
which measured the
radiation on the way to Mars
and the good news is that
the level that it's detecting
are lower than predicted.
However, what it did not do
is it didn't give us a good idea
of all the different types of radiation
that people could be exposed to
or how that radiation
may affect biological tissue
because as we know,
there was no biological tissue
onboard that spacecraft or rover.
So we need to put two things into place.
One, a general protection
of the spacecraft itself
which you could do by
adding a water layer around it
So basically store water
around the living area
and what you also should
implement is a radiation shelter
So if there is a solar
burst, a solar flare,
you know that that one is coming,
people can be warned in advance
and they can sit inside
this radiation shelter
for a couple of days and
basically endure the storm.
(Orchestral music)
from a medical perspective, we're not ready
to go into deep space at the moment.
We have a lot of work to do
to learn how to keep
people alive and healthy
in deep space on long-distance
space transportation.
Mars One's plans are not feasible
from a health perspective
at least in terms of timing.
They can build us a rocket.
They can build us a spacecraft right now
that will take us to
Mars, but can they ensure
that they people inside that spacecraft
are gonna be alive when they get there?
(Applause)
Kind of two-part question.
First off, today you presented
the plan that's been on
your website for three years
that we believe was shown to be infeasible.
So my question is: What
is the Mars One plan
and when do you intend to present evidence
for the feasibility of that plan?
Mars One is at the pre phase
A stage of a mission plan.
Every plan starts there.
Every plan starts at the drawing board.
We are of the opinion
that Mars One mission plan
as it is currently presented
and as it has been presented
for the past three years is not feasible
and is inherently unsustainable.
The key element here...
the key elephant in the room
is the landing.
If you can't land on
Mars, nothing else matters
if your plan is to go one
way and land on Mars.
Once we've reached Mars,
the spacecraft will basically be separated
into two elements:
one is the lander in
which the people will be in,
and the other one is
basically the spacecraft
which brought them to Mars
and that one will not land
on Mars. It will be discarded.
If you've overcome the challenge
of launching to mars, traveling to Mars,
you've still got to reach
the surface of Mars
and even though it's only
a few hundred Kilometers
from orbit to the surface,
that's probably the most
dangerous part of any mission.
(Dramatic orchestral music)
The spacecraft is traveling super-fast.
When it comes to Mars, you've
got to remove all that energy,
all that speed through
the atmosphere itself
and you only have a
very short time to do it.
Mars is a thin atmosphere,
just enough to heat up the
spacecraft but inconvenietly,
not enough to slow it down
and make that landing effective.
It's the worst of both worlds.
(Music)
The lander comes out of the full spacecraft
and then it goes into this entry,
descent and landing phase.
So it has very high
speed (Rushing air)
So it will first go hypersonically
into the atmosphere of Mars.
It will use its heat shield
to get rid of most of the energy and speed.
We've built these heat shields before
and they work well for smallish rovers
for example, up to a metric ton,
but we don't quite know how to do this
for something as massive
as the human vehicle's going to be.
And then it will slowly get into a phase
where the speed of the
vehicle is between supersonic,
say Mach One and Mach Two.
During that time, we will use
supersonic retropropulsion
to reduce the speed of
the spacecraft, or the lander,
even more such that in the end
the spacecraft can be
fully propulsively landed
on the surface of Mars.
(Roar)
To land humans on Mars, we're gonna need
to employ propulsive descent
at much higher velocities
than we have previously.
Those kinds of technologies
have certainly been analyzed today,
those technologies have been proven
in Earth-based testing today,
but none of that technology
has ever been proven
in the space envoronment,
let alone at Mars.
(Gentle music with bells)
The Curiosity Rover
was about one metric ton
that was landed.
We need to land between
2½ and 5 metric tons,
so that's a step, but
it's not unlike the steps
that NASA has been taking before.
A scale up of the current
landing systems to what we need
is definitely one of the
biggest technology challenges
for our mission.
But because it is a mission
of permanent settlement,
and we don't need to
land the large components
for the return mission,
it becomes a lot closer to what
NASA has been doing before.
NASA's the only organization
that's landed things on Mars
not crash-landed...
and even they have had
some trouble sometimes.
All we're saying is the
schedule and the costs
that you allocated doesn't solve them.
So I don't believe that
the Mars One timescale
for landing humans on Mars is consistent
with the technology readiness
of the systems required
to land humans on Mars.
Scientists, engineers,
always want more detail
and so do we, but we
can't make those details.
We're not an aerospace company.
We are the management
bureau of our own project
and aerospace companies
need to implement it,
but we need to secure the
financing to make that happen.
I think that Mars One should
start paying more attention
to working out the technical details.
It's quite true that Mars One
at this stage of its
development cannot be expected
to have a fully detailed design.
That would take tens of
millions of dollars to develop.
But to have a more
thorough conceptual design
in which they can lay out
"this is how we're gonna do this,
this is how we're gonna do that"
I think that can be laid out.
Well when we have the funding secured
for our first mission,
then NASA will be knocking on our door
to be able to be part of
that but we're not there yet.
You can't do a mission to
Mars without receiving criticism.
It's simply impossible
and what we do is learn
from it and move on.
(Music)
(Dramatic orchestral music)
(Roaring rocket engine)
(Dramatic orchestral music)
(Roaring wind)
(Drumbeat)
(Cars and traffic)
(Orchestral music)
The human mission to
Mars will be the most exciting
most adventurous, most ambitious mission
that humans will go on next.
And that is my dream that
I'm trying to turn into reality
and it's basically who I am.
I'm in D.C. to talk about Mars One
at the Mars Society Convention.
The overall project of
getting humans to Mars
is almost impossible to oversee,
but if you take it one step at a time,
one conference at a
time, one meeting at a time,
one supplier at a time,
one investor at a time,
then it's actually something
that can be achieved.
I'm convinced of that.
(Orchestral music)
Hi Bas Hi, how are you?
Good to see you.
So how are things with Mars One?
Going well Oh yeah?
Yeah. A lot of exciting stuff happening.
Welcome Mr. Lansdorp.
(Applause)
Thank you, thank you.
I want to focus on the journey.
So how are we going to
get stuff from Earth to Mars?
We want to send humans to Mars in 2027
on a mission of permanent
settlement. One way.
How do you get to Mars?
We have designed our
mission around a rocket
that is not existing yet.
The rocket needed to
bring everything to Mars
is not there yet.
It's indevelopment.
It would be great if we can use something
like the Falcon Heavy,
which hasn't flown yet
but it's a combination
of three of the rockets
that SpaceX is currently using.
Around 2016, 2017,
the first flight of the Falcon
Heavy will have occurred
Which is in time for our needs.
And this Falcon Heavy is
capable of putting 53 tons
in a low Earth orbit.
We will use low Earth orbit
to basically construct
the final spacecraft.
I think the Falcon Heavy
will be an extraordinary
capability when it's available.
The question, of course, is
going to be whether Mars One
will be able to use it for
its exploration objectives
or whether that's going to be constrained
to SpaceX's objectives.
Do you have a commitment from SpaceX
to use the Falcon Heavy?
I... well we have... I've
been there a couple of times.
They have been to our office.
We're in good contact
and it's very easy. You
pay them, they get you there.
(Audience laughter)
(Music)
Our plan is to assemble a small,
cozy little space station
in low Earth orbit
consisting of one of our landing modules
and a small transit habitat,
a small space station.
The spacecraft which
will bring humans to mars
consists of a number of elements
which will be launched separately
One element is the habitational volume
the second element is the propulsion stage
which will bring the
whole stuff towards Mars
and then the final is the capsule
which will bring people up into spacecraft
and then later will bring people down
on the surface of Mars.
For our Earth Crew to flourish on Mars
they're gonna need a lot o' stuff
That ship is going to be quite large.
And so, we have to launch
and assemble that ship
probably in orbit around the Earth
much like we've already built
the International Space Station.
Now it took us... by the
way... it took us about a decade
to construct the
International Space Station.
It could take us up to a
decade to assemble that ship
in low earth orbit to get it
ready to go on this journey.
With the funding that
appears to be available
I don't see that advancing on a time scale
put forward by Mars One.
(Orchestral music)
The transit vehicle
most likely will consist
of an inflatable habitation module
which is designed in the U.S.
One of the companies
doing it is Bigelow Aerospace.
Now the good thing about
this inflatable structure
is that you can have
a larger transit vehicle
than what you would normally have.
With an inflatable you
can have large diameters
where you create more space.
That becomes easier for people to live in.
They are testing these
inflatable structures
at the moment as we speak.
They have already two in orbit,
two scale models and
they still work perfectly fine
and another one will be attached
to the International
Space Station late this year
maybe beginning of next year.
The transit habitat itself has no means
to go further into space so we will add
a propulsion stage and we will dock that
to the transit habitat.
Then, at the right moment,
we will launch both elements together,
using the propulsion stage, to Mars.
Mars One has talked about using
most of the entrepreneurial
companys' systems.
It's important to realize
that while these systems
are being worked on,
and I think that within the next decade
these systems will be available,
very few of the systems
that Mars One is talking about
are available today.
You can't just go buy a Bigelow inflated...
inflatable habitat
for a Mars transit.
Columbia to Houston,
negative return (Beep)
Roger that, negative return
(Building orchestral music)
On the way to Mars, the
astronauts are exposed
to galactic cosmic rays,
radiation of all other forms
with the result that they
can have an increased risk
of dying due to cancer years in the future.
So we've got to come up
with a way to mitigate that risk
and there are ways to do it,
but they take some time to develop.
I'm actually of the opinion
that radiation is not
one of the big problems
for humans going to Mars
and it's a very acceptable
level of radiation
it will give them about
1½ % additional chance
of developing a tumor
during their lifetime.
That's not great, but
it's a lot less than...
for example, smoking and
we still allow people to smoke.
Space radiation is
different than Earth radiation.
We have a very good understanding
of how Earth radiation affects humans.
However, given that
space radiation is larger,
heavier,
more energy-packed particles,
we don't understand the radiobiology.
We don't understand the
effect of space radiation
on biological tissue.
But it's very predictable.
I mean, we know how
much radiation there is,
the Curiosity Rover
has actually measured it
in a lot of detail now and we know
exactly how much
radiation our crew will get
on the way to Mars.
The Curiosity Spacecraft and Rover
were very helpful in
terms of trying to determine
what the actual space radiation exposure is
en route to Mars.
There was a detector on that spacecraft
which measured the
radiation on the way to Mars
and the good news is that
the level that it's detecting
are lower than predicted.
However, what it did not do
is it didn't give us a good idea
of all the different types of radiation
that people could be exposed to
or how that radiation
may affect biological tissue
because as we know,
there was no biological tissue
onboard that spacecraft or rover.
So we need to put two things into place.
One, a general protection
of the spacecraft itself
which you could do by
adding a water layer around it
So basically store water
around the living area
and what you also should
implement is a radiation shelter
So if there is a solar
burst, a solar flare,
you know that that one is coming,
people can be warned in advance
and they can sit inside
this radiation shelter
for a couple of days and
basically endure the storm.
(Orchestral music)
from a medical perspective, we're not ready
to go into deep space at the moment.
We have a lot of work to do
to learn how to keep
people alive and healthy
in deep space on long-distance
space transportation.
Mars One's plans are not feasible
from a health perspective
at least in terms of timing.
They can build us a rocket.
They can build us a spacecraft right now
that will take us to
Mars, but can they ensure
that they people inside that spacecraft
are gonna be alive when they get there?
(Applause)
Kind of two-part question.
First off, today you presented
the plan that's been on
your website for three years
that we believe was shown to be infeasible.
So my question is: What
is the Mars One plan
and when do you intend to present evidence
for the feasibility of that plan?
Mars One is at the pre phase
A stage of a mission plan.
Every plan starts there.
Every plan starts at the drawing board.
We are of the opinion
that Mars One mission plan
as it is currently presented
and as it has been presented
for the past three years is not feasible
and is inherently unsustainable.
The key element here...
the key elephant in the room
is the landing.
If you can't land on
Mars, nothing else matters
if your plan is to go one
way and land on Mars.
Once we've reached Mars,
the spacecraft will basically be separated
into two elements:
one is the lander in
which the people will be in,
and the other one is
basically the spacecraft
which brought them to Mars
and that one will not land
on Mars. It will be discarded.
If you've overcome the challenge
of launching to mars, traveling to Mars,
you've still got to reach
the surface of Mars
and even though it's only
a few hundred Kilometers
from orbit to the surface,
that's probably the most
dangerous part of any mission.
(Dramatic orchestral music)
The spacecraft is traveling super-fast.
When it comes to Mars, you've
got to remove all that energy,
all that speed through
the atmosphere itself
and you only have a
very short time to do it.
Mars is a thin atmosphere,
just enough to heat up the
spacecraft but inconvenietly,
not enough to slow it down
and make that landing effective.
It's the worst of both worlds.
(Music)
The lander comes out of the full spacecraft
and then it goes into this entry,
descent and landing phase.
So it has very high
speed (Rushing air)
So it will first go hypersonically
into the atmosphere of Mars.
It will use its heat shield
to get rid of most of the energy and speed.
We've built these heat shields before
and they work well for smallish rovers
for example, up to a metric ton,
but we don't quite know how to do this
for something as massive
as the human vehicle's going to be.
And then it will slowly get into a phase
where the speed of the
vehicle is between supersonic,
say Mach One and Mach Two.
During that time, we will use
supersonic retropropulsion
to reduce the speed of
the spacecraft, or the lander,
even more such that in the end
the spacecraft can be
fully propulsively landed
on the surface of Mars.
(Roar)
To land humans on Mars, we're gonna need
to employ propulsive descent
at much higher velocities
than we have previously.
Those kinds of technologies
have certainly been analyzed today,
those technologies have been proven
in Earth-based testing today,
but none of that technology
has ever been proven
in the space envoronment,
let alone at Mars.
(Gentle music with bells)
The Curiosity Rover
was about one metric ton
that was landed.
We need to land between
2½ and 5 metric tons,
so that's a step, but
it's not unlike the steps
that NASA has been taking before.
A scale up of the current
landing systems to what we need
is definitely one of the
biggest technology challenges
for our mission.
But because it is a mission
of permanent settlement,
and we don't need to
land the large components
for the return mission,
it becomes a lot closer to what
NASA has been doing before.
NASA's the only organization
that's landed things on Mars
not crash-landed...
and even they have had
some trouble sometimes.
All we're saying is the
schedule and the costs
that you allocated doesn't solve them.
So I don't believe that
the Mars One timescale
for landing humans on Mars is consistent
with the technology readiness
of the systems required
to land humans on Mars.
Scientists, engineers,
always want more detail
and so do we, but we
can't make those details.
We're not an aerospace company.
We are the management
bureau of our own project
and aerospace companies
need to implement it,
but we need to secure the
financing to make that happen.
I think that Mars One should
start paying more attention
to working out the technical details.
It's quite true that Mars One
at this stage of its
development cannot be expected
to have a fully detailed design.
That would take tens of
millions of dollars to develop.
But to have a more
thorough conceptual design
in which they can lay out
"this is how we're gonna do this,
this is how we're gonna do that"
I think that can be laid out.
Well when we have the funding secured
for our first mission,
then NASA will be knocking on our door
to be able to be part of
that but we're not there yet.
You can't do a mission to
Mars without receiving criticism.
It's simply impossible
and what we do is learn
from it and move on.
(Music)