Main Engine Cut Off - T+18: Robert Zubrin on Mars Exploration and Colonization Internationally, within NASA, and at SpaceX

Episode Date: August 24, 2016

Dr. Robert Zubrin, President of The Mars Society, creator of Mars Direct, and author of The Case for Mars is on the show this week to discuss Mars exploration and colonization internationally, within NASA, and at SpaceX. The Mars Society The Case for Mars, by Robert Zubrin Mars Direct - 1st Public Presentation 5/28/1990 - YouTube Mars Society President Tours Russia | News & Announcements | The Mars Society To Mars! - Dr. Robert Zubrin - TEDx Moscow - YouTube Email feedback to [e-mail] Follow @WeHaveMECO Support Main Engine Cut Off on Patreon

Hello and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. I am Anthony Colangelo and today on the show we have a very, very special guest, Dr. Robert Zubrin. Dr. Robert Zubrin. Dr. Zubrin is the president of the Mars Society, the creator of Mars Direct, and the author of such books as The Case for Mars, The Plan to Settle the Red Planet, and Why We Must. Before we get started with the interview, I just want to say thank you to all of the supporters over on Patreon. Patreon.com slash Miko is where you can go to support the blog and the podcast. You can also head over to mainenginecutoff.com to read what I'm writing on the blog and also to get all of the show notes for this episode. I've got a lot of links in there to different things that Dr. Zubrin has done, different talks that he's made, different videos of those talks, the books that he's written, the Mars Society things that are interesting to follow

along with. All of that can be found over at mainenginecutoff.com. Without further ado, let's get started with the interview. Thank you very much, Dr. Zubin, for coming on the show and welcome to Main Engine Cutoff. Thanks for inviting me. You created the Mars Direct plan back in 1990 with David Baker while you were still at Martin Marietta. And there are some videos out there, Mars Society posted a video on YouTube of your presentation back in May of 1990. And I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes because I would highly recommend people going to check that out for two reasons. Number one, it shows that you are still and have been forever the most passionate person

in spaceflight. The excitement you had in that presentation 20 some years ago at this point is still unmatched in a lot of people when they talk about spaceflight and things like that, but also because how relevant everything that you talk about in that presentation still is today, both the technical side of the mission, but also the criticisms that you have for the way that plans are typically developed for human spaceflight programs. So this is something that has been around for my entire life, and it's something that you've talked about through generations of plans to go to Mars through the Space Exploration Initiative and all the way through Constellation and where we're

at today with NASA's and everyone else's plans. So to have something like that, that kind of spans this era of spaceflight is something that I think is pretty amazing and a testament to that original idea of Mars Direct. And recently you were on a trip to Russia. You were there at the end of May, gave a bunch of talks, did some interviews, had some meetings and things like that. So I would be interested to hear about that trip, who you talked to, where you went, and what some of the feelings were about exploration of Mars today and human spaceflight in general.

Well, I gave a series, I believe, seven talks in Moscow and St. Petersburg. I spoke to a variety of universities in Moscow, including Skolkovo and Bauman State and several others. I spoke at the Planetarium and at the Cosmonautics Museum. And in St. Petersburg, I spoke to the Cosmonautics Federation. Museum. And in St. Petersburg, I spoke to the Cosmonautics Federation. I also gave a number of press interviews with various Russian media in both Moscow and St. Petersburg. I also had a meeting at the Institute for Biomedical Problems, which is the people who did the Mars 500 mission. And I also met with some leaders in the Russian aerospace industry. Okay. Now, at my talks, I was mostly talking up the Mars Direct Plan or variants thereof. And, you know, it's quite interesting. Russians are extremely proud of their own accomplishments in space. But it might

surprise Americans to learn that the large majority of Russians, including those that are very conservative and might be very suspicious of American motives or activities in other spheres, are enthusiastic about American space accomplishments. In other words, this is the part of America they like. Russians have, or many of them, anyway, have a belief in the importance of human expansion into the cosmos. And so when we are pushing forward that goal, they may be wishing that they were the ones who did it first. But I saw, I was in Russia in 1969 when we landed on the moon, and the people I met were enthusiastic about it. And people I met this past summer were

enthusiastic about the idea of going to Mars and that Americans have an innovative idea. And I think would virtually all of them like to see greater cooperation between the United States and Russia in space exploration. That's something that I've brought up a lot in the past couple of weeks, because China has been reaching out to more and more people, Russia being one of the people that China is talking to the most. And the U.S. still has this attitude of shutting China out entirely from cooperation in space. of shutting China out entirely from cooperation in space. So there's this whole thing going on right now where Russia and Europe and China and other players are talking more and more about collaboration in space, not just in low Earth orbit, but beyond as well. And the US kind of puts up these walls and kind of just walls themselves off in ways that I don't think is productive at all. And it's great to hear that that spirit kind of comes through when you're traveling in Russia. Yeah, well, it certainly does. And, you know,

I was interviewed by Izvestia and a variety of TV shows and so forth, and RT and others. And yeah, this is, they're very keen on human expansion to space, and they are favorably, well, enthusiastic, actually, about American accomplishments in this area, just as we would greet a Russian medical breakthrough as a positive development. Recently, there's been a lot of talk and focus back on the moon, both from Europe and even people within ESA have talked about a lunar village of sorts with people contributing different parts to that village. Russia has sort of turned some of its focus to the moon, and at least in what they're talking about for the future. China's eyeing up the moon.

And even so far as the US is concerned, the next 10 years of their, quote, journey to Mars happens around cislunar space for some reason. What do you make of that kind of shift in focus back towards the moon? I know what you think about that shifted focus, certainly from what you've talked about in the past. But where do you think that comes from and what do you think might come of it? do you think might come of it? Well, you know, for Russia or China or Europe, for that matter, they've never sent people to the moon. Sending people to the moon for them would be a major step outward. But for the United States, I would say it reflects a lack of vision. I mean, the idea, and it's very defective because if you're talking about using the space program in terms of its most profound near-term consequences, which is inspiring a generation of youth to learn science and master it, it can be part of the great adventure. You're not going to inspire a generation of youth with the challenge of repeating what their grandparents did i mean that's wrong now furthermore for the long term it's also wrong because mars is

the closest planet that has on it all the resources needed for life and therefore human settlement so that for the coming age of space exploration mars compares to the moon as north america compared to greenland in the previous age of space exploration, of maritime exploration. That is, you know, European seafarers reached Greenland first, it was closer, but ultimately it was not a place where a new civilization could develop. North America was. So, you know, they could set up outposts in Greenland, we can set up outposts on the moon, and we should, by the way, in parallel with the Mars program. There are things worth doing on the moon.

And if you have the capability to go to Mars, you'll also have the capability to go to the moon. But Mars is the new world. Mars is the first step in the human future of becoming a multi-planet species. On the NASA front of things, they have this, I would hesitate to call it a roadmap because it's very vague in a lot of areas. But if you look at the individual components that are scattered throughout this program

that's kind of mired in politics and the old ways that decisions have been made, there are a few pieces that I find interesting in that the pieces for a Mars Direct plan are kind of scattered throughout and could be coalesced together in interesting ways. So let me just list off a few of these things that I've been kind of following along on this show the last few months. We'll take SLS first, regardless of all of the problems within that program itself. By the mid-2020s, the thing that they are saying will

be flying begins to approach the launch capacity that you've stated is necessary for a Mars Direct program. It doesn't quite get all the way up to that 140 metric tons range, but... It's in the ballpark, yes. It's in the ballpark. We could make it work. Probably, especially today with some more advancements in lighter materials and things like that we could probably swing it with that bigger beefed up version of the SLS. Masten Space Systems right now is working on a contract with NASA for a methane engine that they are saying is a Mars ascent and descent engine in the range of 25,000 pounds of thrust.

So that's something that you know it's kind of there to be used as a lander or ascent vehicle. And then recently, NASA had some programs for the low-density supersonic decelerator, some other types of inflatable decelerators, which the funding kind of got cut due to some politics. But those pieces were a little bit in development. And then last week, they announced this Next Step 2 program for some ground prototypes for future deep space habitats, none of which involved artificial gravity, which I went on a rant about two weeks ago we might get into here. But the graphic they used to announce that had a very tuna can looking design to it. The design aesthetic in the graphic, granted, you know, it's a graphic, not an actual

thing built, but the design aesthetic there looked very close to a tuna can type of habitat that would be used on a Mars direct program. So you kind of see these bits and pieces scattered throughout what is otherwise a completely unfocused roadmap type of thing. Do you see any hope in that? Imagine if in the 1960s, John F. Kennedy had not announced a moon program, just a general sentiment that some way, someday we should go to the moon. And you had some people develop the Saturn V rocket. And maybe some other people develop the Apollo capsule, but no one developed the lunar ascent and descent vehicle. So you have

a Saturn V without anything for it to launch. and so they schedule it to launch for demonstration purposes once every four years. And you have this capsule that can't really do anything of importance because it doesn't have the rest of the required mission elements. You know, in the meantime, you're spending, in today's money money the equivalent of $10 billion a year on running a human spaceflight program, but without any concrete plan. So it doesn't make any sense. It's like people planning the D-Day landing without the landing craft, you know, or something of this sort.

I mean, you need to have a plan. NASA does not have a plan. NASA has a random set of activities, and fortunately they are sufficiently random that a few of them by chance are actually useful, and a few of them, by chance, are actually useful. And a lot of them are totally useless, however. And the things don't fit together, and it doesn't lead anywhere. Now, there's an exception to this, which is in the robotic spaceflight program, where they exercise plants. In other words, they don't build things. They exercise plans. When they built the Mars exploration rovers, they were built with a certain launch vehicle in mind.

They developed the airbags for it. They didn't fly rovers to Mars in order to have a chance to use airbags. They designed a mission as a totality, and then they saw certain technologies they needed to develop to execute the plan. Whereas in the human spaceflight program, what we have is a random set of activities that are supported by various constituencies that want their piece of the action, and they don't fit together. And in consequence, it's extremely inefficient. We're developing an SLS without anything for it to launch. The consequence is extremely inefficient.

We're developing an SLS without anything for it to launch. You know, we're developing a Mars Ascent engine without the Mars Ascent vehicle. I mean, you know, now you could say that if we proceed in this manner, then, you know, 10 years from now or 20 years from now, there'll be more pieces of things lying around that you might put to work as part of a plan, but you will have wasted an enormous amount of money. And it's quite possible that some pieces of present technology would have been lost in the meantime. If you were to say to someone, let's plan a human spaceflight program that gets humans to Mars in the shortest amount of time at the lowest possible cost, you would not put into that plan a mission to extract a 500-ton boulder from a near-Earth asteroid and put it in lunar orbit. It has nothing to do with anything. lunar orbit. It has nothing to do with anything. You know, and, you know, NASA is currently insisting that solar electric propulsion is essential for human Mars missions. In fact,

solar electric propulsion is not particularly useful for human Mars missions. And if they try to force the mission to use solar electric propulsion, it's like forcing someone who wants to fly from New York to Chicago to go through, you know, Saskatoon because you want them to go through Saskatoon. Well, you can get to Chicago through Saskatoon, but it's not to your advantage to do so. So that's the interesting spot we're at now. I mean, I guess it's not that interesting since we've seen it, you know, probably more than a handful of times before. seen it probably more than a handful of times before. But we've got this random non-plan type of NASA right now, and we're heading into an election year. I don't want to get too far off into the election itself, but elections typically bring about a transition team, a new administrator,

kind of a shuffling of contracts, because the last three times that we've seen this, they pretty much came out with the same hardware on the other side of the transition team as they did beforehand because of congressional issues and presidential issues and things like that. Is this just as hopeless as every other time and we're going to get a transition team that's going to shuffle around instead of this launch vehicle that's shuttle derived and the same orbital ATK, you know, manufactured solid rocket boosters and things like that? Do you think we're kind of going to have the same sort of thing happen this fall? Or do you think that they're going to continue on this particular random plan that they are on now? Well, it will be random until the president says that she wants a plan that actually goes somewhere.

You know, if Hillary is hands off, you'll continue to have entropy. You know, in the beginning is the word. NASA was not going to go to the moon by itself. John F. Kennedy stepped in and said, this is what you're going to do. And you're going to do it by essentially the end of my second term. And if we want to have a space

program that is worthy of the American people, that is worthy of its budget, and that meets the challenge of today, because just like in the 1960s, we're being challenged again. We're being challenged by Putin, by the Chinese, by the Islamists, by various authoritarian forces who say we are the past, they are the future, and we have to show the world that we are the future. We have to once again take it upon ourselves to astound the world with what free people can do. And if we're not going to have continued retreat and acceptance of American decline, this is what they have to do to step up. This is what they have to do to step up.

Now, there's no guarantee that that's what they'll do. This isn't destined, but there is a chance because the wonderful thing about this country is we do shuffle the deck every four years or so. And we can get someone there who actually wants to do something with a space program. The space program, okay, the robotic space program has been active and made many things because once again it is mission driven, it is not constituency driven, okay. The human spaceflight program has wandered all over the place and not accomplished anything for 40 years because it has not been mission driven. Give it a mission, it'll do the mission. Give it a mission, and all of a sudden you will find, or very quickly,

you will find that the people in NASA who join NASA to really do something profound, that they will rise to the top and the deadwood will head towards the doors. And people say NASA can't do it. NASA's not the NASA of the 1960s. It's not, you know, mission driven. It's not daring. It's not bold. Give it a mission and you'll get the daring and bold and visionary people will come in, the people who want to do it. This is how the American people will get a return for their space dollar. So on that, let's focus a little bit on some things that have happened recently that I think are astounding people in profound feats of engineering and things like that. Let's talk about SpaceX for a little bit here. to land these first stages. Eventually, they will start to reuse them, hopefully later this year. A lot of that work that they're doing with the Falcon 9 is directly applicable to landing on Mars. They're doing some engine firings in exactly the type of atmospheres that we see at Mars.

So they are doing research directly. They're even giving some of that research back to NASA. They did announce this past year that Red Dragon is going to head to Mars, hopefully in 2018, if Falcon Heavy does get off the pad in a few months here. It doesn't seem like it will happen this year anymore. But once Falcon Heavy starts flying, Red Dragon can become a reality.

It'll fly in 2018. And then beyond that, it could fly two or so every launch window from there forward. So have you been following along with that? Have you been excited by some of those developments? Or what are your general thoughts on what they've been doing? Well, the SpaceX is certainly the most exciting game in town. And up till this year, they had done something that was profound in that they showed that they could develop things that the mainline aerospace

industry had developed, but doing it in one-tenth the cost and one-third the time. And now this year, they've gone beyond that in developing things that the mainline aerospace industry has never developed, period. And so not only are they going to introduce a heavy lift launch vehicle, probably next year, I would say, which is something that the Augustine Commission estimated would take NASA 12 years and $36 billion. And believe me, Musk hasn't spent $36 billion or $10 billion or $5 billion on Falcon Heavy or anything of the sort. He is not doing things to spend money. He is spending money to do things, which is the fundamental difference in approach, which is why he's accomplishing things at one-tenth of the sorts of budgets that people discuss. Not only is he going to have a heavy-lift launch vehicle, he's going to have a heavy-lift

launch vehicle with reusable first stages. So it's going to be a radical increase in capability and a radical decrease in cost is going to be coming online. I don't know if Red Dragon's really going to fly in 2018. Frankly, I would not bet on that. I think it's possible 2020, certainly by 2022. You know, Musk frequently promises things before he can deliver them, but he eventually does deliver them and he eventually is going to deliver the Red Dragon.

And then you'll have a system which will be able to deliver payloads to the surface of Mars in the 8-ton class. It's an 8-ton increase over the Curiosity landing system, which is the largest so far, a 1-ton delivery system. It is a system that I'd like larger, but nevertheless, with 8-ton class payloads, you could do a manned Mars mission, pre-landing a habitat or two, land a Mars ascent vehicle, make its propellant on the surface of Mars, and then land a crew in one of these things. And I have a pamphlet called Mars Direct, which does outline such a plan. And I don't know if it's the exact plan i'm sure it isn't the exact plan that musk has in mind but something like that could be done now so as these systems materialize

um this is going to say to the political class look you want to do humans to mars you don't have to wait 12 years and 36 billion dollars for heavy with launch vehicle it's available right now and further, each launch is going to cost, I don't know, $100 million or something. And with three or four or six at most of these launches, you could send people to Mars. So we're not talking about doing humans to Mars for hundreds of billions. We're talking about doing the whole program for tens of billions and individual missions for a billion or two, the cost of a shuttle mission. And at that point,

the opposition to doing humans to Mars evaporates because nobody opposes humans in the world. Very few oppose humans to Mars in principle.'s not like the iraq war or something which there are people who oppose it not on the basis of cost but on the basis that they oppose it okay whereas this is something people say well this would be great but we can't afford to spend that much on this we got other things if we could do humans to Mars, humans to Mars missions for 10% of NASA's budget, which we can, and which will be evident that we can once Musk introduces these hardware elements, I think it's a go. That's kind of what I was getting at, where I see Red Dragon as, you know, aside from it being a pretty fantastic platform for science and learning about supersonic retrovolution on the Martian surface and being able to land payloads there very cheaply, I think the visual of a spacecraft that, once it does get to Mars,

it will be flying humans into space, the visual of a spacecraft that we can see humans getting in and out of every day, we can see them flying these up to the ISS or wherever else they'll be heading with Dragon 2 spacecraft. To see that spacecraft set down on the surface of Mars has a real chance to be a change agent in that way, in the way people think about space. Because if you, you know, as we've talked about here,

if you start to put together this series of things that we haven't done in the past decades and you see somebody come do it cheaper and actually do the thing, that does have a potential to be a pretty big change in terms of policy and things like that. So I'll be interested to see what that shakes up when it happens. And you mentioned you want something bigger in terms of architecture. And this September, Elon Musk has said that they're going to be announcing some bits of their Mars architecture for their Humans to Mars programs and potential or future colonization of that. They've dropped a few hints here and there in a Reddit AMA that Elon Musk did a couple months ago at this point.

He dropped a couple of hints about what that would look like. And he had said that they are targeting 100 metric tons of useful payload to the surface of mars they're developing this raptor engine they have a contract right now with the air force as a methane engine as the upper stage for a falcon class vehicle but there is a bigger size of that that they're going to use for this vehicle that would be in the 500 000 pounds of thrust, the methane engine that would power the first stage on Earth and the lander stage at Mars, which they're calling the Mars Colonial Transporter. And he's also said that the methane engines that they're going to use would have an ISP of around 380 seconds, which is the value that is used throughout the case for Mars and the Mars REC

program that you've written about. So there's all of these hints that are adding up to something that could be pretty incredible. Again, it's an announcement. It's not an actual flight hardware. But last week, Gwen Shotwell said that the first Raptor engine has been shipped out to their test facility in McGregor. So there is an actual Raptor engine out there, a methane engine that SpaceX has built. So we're beginning to see these pieces come together for something much, much bigger from SpaceX. Okay. Well, certainly a hundred ton payload landed on Mars. Fantastic. In Mars direct, all we needed was a 30 ton payloads. And I think that that is adequate. And I think we'll probably see 30 tons before we see a hundred. see 30 tons before we see 100. And of course, the development of the methane engine is key because methane is the easiest fuel to make on Mars out of local resources. And it's also the

highest performing space storable propellant. Hydrogen is much more difficult to store in space and certainly on the surface of Mars, but methane is a very doable thing. It's basically LNG. And now I don't have inside knowledge on Musk's Mars Colonial Transporter, but I've heard people speculate and one of the speculations has been a fully reusable giant vehicle that could deliver 100 tons to Mars and then fly back to Earth. I actually do not think that that is an appropriate concept for Mars colonization. The essence of colonization is flying one way. The essence of colonization is flying to Mars not only with people one way, but with as much stuff one way as you can and come back with as little as you can or not at all. And the cheapest way to travel somewhere is to ride the freight. Okay. So if you're sending cargo modules, which could be

habitat modules, for example, houses for Mars, you send the people in those houses and they land on Mars with their house. You don't need to have, I mean, what is your return traffic? How many people are you flying back from Mars? So that doesn't make sense to me. So I'd like to have a large caliber launch vehicle and preferably with the first stages reusable, perhaps sometime the second stage reusable, although that's a lower priority because it's much smaller than the first stage and there's a larger penalty in making it reusable. Every pound of thermal protection you add to the first stage only takes away one tenth of a pound of payload. Every pound of thermal protection you add to the second stage takes takes away one-tenth of a pound of payload. Every pound of thermal protection you add to the second stage takes away a pound of payload. So it's much more burdensome to do that. So Musk is doing the right thing by starting with reusing the first stage and leaving

reusing upper stages for later. And that goes even more on something that's going to go round trip to Mars, which you might view as a fourth stage. Okay. That's even less important to make reusable. Um, so, uh, my concept for Mars colonization would be a heavy lift launch vehicle, um, a step up, perhaps another factor of three more powerful than the Falcon Heavy, 150 tons to Leo, being able to land 30 or 40 tons on Mars one way. And that you ride the colonists out to Mars in that. And then much smaller systems for ascent and return. So we'll see what comes of that in September once they do make that announcement. Also happening in late September that I wanted to get some thoughts from you on is the Mar Society Convention down in

Washington, D.C. Could you tell us a little bit about that, who you're excited to hear from there? Oh, yeah. Well, okay, Mar Society is having its convention at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., September 22nd through 25th. We've got something like 100 talks, including, I don't know, about 25 plenary talks for major speakers. We're also having a series of debates. We're going to have a debate on the utility or lack thereof of the asteroid retrieval mission. We're going to have a debate on space law and establishing private property rights in space versus the concept of space

as the common heritage of mankind. We're going to have a space on the utility of NASA's planetary protection program. And I must say that one of the great things that the Red Dragon mission is going to do, it's going to shove it in NASA's face that this planetary protection program has got to go because you cannot land people on Mars and be guaranteed that you're not going to release biological material on Mars because there's always a finite possibility of a

crash, in which case you're going to be sending microorganisms all over the Martian landscape. And you can't do a return Mars mission without running the risk of taking Martian material back to Earth. And furthermore, that concern is stupid because we the risk of taking Martian material back to Earth. And furthermore, that concern is stupid because we get 500 kilograms of Martian material landing on Earth every year through natural processes. So this idea of quarantining a rock from the Mars sample return that we bring back from Mars is as silly as inspecting cars on the Canadian border to make sure people aren't bringing Canada geese across the border. And the Canada geese are flying across the border all the time. And so that's got to go. And we're going to have a debate on that program. And then there's a fourth debate. Oh, yeah, Trump versus

Clinton, who's best for space. So that ought to be fun. And then we're also having the finals of the Gemini Mars contest. We had an international university student engineering design contest to design a two-person Mars flyby mission. And this is not constrained by the concept that Dennis Tito came up with a couple of years ago, which is a problematical concept because you're required to use a trajectory that only happens once every 15 years and which is a very high energy and difficult trajectory to use. Instead, we left it open to the student teams to define their own trajectory. And, in fact, there's much easier trajectories. And the idea is that this is a mission that could be flown by 2024 at the latest. We're not interested in futuristic concepts.

We're interested in something that the next president can do by the end of her second term. And we're having these presentations in Washington with the hope of reaching the political class and showing them 10 different ways they can do that mission. And so we could start having a space program that really goes somewhere. And then we're gonna have a banquet addressed by Pete Worden,

former head of NASA Ames Research Center. And before that, the Strategic Defense Initiative Technology Development Program. He did DCX. And I think he's going to talk about Starflight. So that ought to be a lot of fun. So it's going to be a great convention, and people can register for it online at MarsSociety.org. It sounds like a fantastic collection of people and at an especially well-timed phase in the political cycle. This is going to be pretty great to follow along with. So if you're interested, go over to MarsSociety.org and check that out. And also check out Dr. Zubrin's book, The Case for Mars.

I'll have a link to all of those things in the show notes for everyone to check out. So thank you very much, Dr. Zubrin, for coming on the show. I really, really appreciate it. Thanks for inviting me once again. With that, that'll be it for us today. If you want to get any of the links that we've talked about, links to his books or his talks or anything else like that, head over to mainenginecutoff.com. Check out the show notes there, and you can get links to the videos of his talks that he's done, his books like The Case for Mars, links out to the Mars Society and the Mars Society Convention, and anything else that we talked about within this episode. Also head over to patreon.com slash miko to help support Main Engine Cutoff. And if you want to

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