🚀 Mars or bust! My chat (+transcript) with aerospace engineer Robert Zubrin

In his famous 1962 address to Rice University, President Kennedy declared,

We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . .

The current administration has chosen, among other things, to go to Mars. Some, Elon Musk included, are looking for a backup planet to Earth. For others, like Robert Zubrin, Mars is an opportunity for scientific discovery, pure challenge, and a revitalized human civilization.

Today on Faster, Please — The Podcast, Zubrin and I discuss how to reorient NASA, what our earliest Mars missions can and should look like, and why we should go to Mars at all.

Zubrin is the president of aerospace R&D company Pioneer Astronautics, as well as the founder and president of the Mars Society. He was also formerly a staff engineer at Lockheed Martin. He has authored over 200 published papers and is the author of seven books, including the most recent, The New World on Mars: What We Can Create on the Red Planet.

For more, check out Zubrin’s article in The New Atlantis, “The Mars Dream is Back — Here’s How to Make It Actually Happen.”

In This Episode

* Colonization vs. exploration (1:38)

* A purpose-driven mission (5:01)

* Cultural diversity on Mars (12:07)

* An alternative to the SpaceX strategy (16:02)

* Artemis program reform (20:42)

* The myth of an independent Mars (24:17)

* Our current timeline (27:21)

Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Colonization vs. exploration (1:38)

I do think that it is important that the first human mission to ours be a round-trip mission. I want to have those people back, not just because it's nice to have them back, but I want to hear from them. I want to get the full report.

Pethokoukis: Just before we started chatting, I went and I checked an online prediction market — one I check for various things, the Metaculus online prediction market — and the consensus forecast from all the people in that community for when will the first humans land successfully on Mars was October 2042. Does that sound realistic, too soon, or should it be much further away?

I think it is potentially realistic, but I think we could beat it. Right now we have a chance to get a Humans to Mars program launched. This current administration has announced that they intend to do so. They're making a claim they’re going to land people on Mars in 2028. I do not think that is realistic, but I do believe that it is realistic for them to get the program well started and, if it is handled correctly — and we'll have to talk a lot more about that in this talk — that we could potentially land humans on Mars circa 2033.

When I gave you that prediction and then you mentioned the 2020s goal, those are about landing on Mars. Should we assume when people say, “We're going to land on Mars,” they also mean people returning from Mars or are they talking about one-way trips?

Musk has frequently talked about a colonization effort, and colonization is a one-way trip, but I don't think that's in the cards for 2028 or 2033. I think what is in the cards for this time period on our immediate horizon is exploration missions. I do think that we could potentially have a one-way mission with robots in 2028. That would take a lot of work and it's a bit optimistic, but I think it could be done with determination, and I think that should be done, actually.

To be clear, when people are talking about the first human mission to Mars, the assumption is it's not a one way trip for that astronaut, or those two astronauts, that we intend on bringing them back. Maybe the answer is obvious, but I'm not sure it's obvious to me.

From time to time, people have proposed scenarios where the first human mission to Mars is a one-way mission, you send maybe not two but five people. Then two years later you send five more people, and then you send 10 people, and then you send 20 people, and you build it up. In other words, it's not a one-way mission in the sense of you're going to be left there and your food will then run out and you will die. No, I don't think that is a credible or attractive mission plan, but the idea that you're going to go with a few people and then reinforce them and grow it into a base, and then a settlement. That is something that can be reasonably argued. But I still think even that is a bit premature. I do think that it is important that the first human mission to ours be a round-trip mission. I want to have those people back, not just because it's nice to have them back, but I want to hear from them. I want to get the full report.

A purpose-driven mission (5:01)

In the purpose-driven mode, the purpose comes first, you spend money to do things. In the vendor-driven mode, you do things in order to spend money. And we've seen both of these.

So should we just default to [the idea] that this mission will be done with government funding on<a target="_blank" href="https://www.spacex.com/