"I have no information from anyone in space." "I mean, this is important." "Ground Leader checking in." "I was directly told that we cannot land on Mars before we do a med check." "Meteor shower incoming!" "We have a meteor shower!" "CAPCOM, come in." "Guys, just stay calm." "We believe the orbiter can survive the meteor shower." "I believe we have a leak." "OK, pressure's going down." "This is bad." "What do we do?" "Get them out of here!" "No!" "Oh my god!" "Throw them in the FEMA hallway!" "Moderate cabin pressure onboard the Station." "Cabin leak check." "Losing air pressure." "Are we dead?" "Are we OK?" "All in a day's work!" "Space for me is one of the things that defines me most, I think." "It really is a central part of who I am." "I am a space nerd." "Yeah, I would say that I am a space nerd!" "I am the biggest space nerd of all the space nerds ever." "It may not look like it, but I am." "Because space is space and it's awesome." " Up here we may be slightly..." " OK, stand by." "We have you go for orbit." "You're go for orbit." "When we look at the night sky, we think" ""Are there any planets out there that are possible homes for humanity?"" "The spacecraft almost seemed to grow stronger as the days went by." "Going to Mars will foster an entire revolution in how people think about how they will invest their brain energy in their lives and in their careers." "By the way, this next generation wants to do it because they know it's cool." "Go for landing, 3,000 feet." "You're looking great, so we know it will be a good flight." "Astronauts report it feels good." "It's been over 50 years since we've done something significant like this." "Having a man, or woman, walk on Mars is just the most badass thought in my mind." "Liftoff." "I think Mars is an interesting planet and it would be fascinating to do science there." "We just had word from Houston we're ready to have you get out whenever you're ready." "OK, we've got our go now." "Is that right?" "Affirmative." "This is where people are going to live, on another planet, close enough to get there in under a year." "So yes, it's dangerous!" "Yes, it's never been attempted." "Yes, you're probably gonna die." "But you can do it still." "Howyoudoing, Mission Control?" " Good." " Telcom?" "Guidance, happy?" " Go!" "  Final go!" "2,000 feet. 2,000 feet." "Into the air, 47 degrees." "Roger." "Does anyone regret going to the Moon?" "Does anyone who lived in the 60s say, "What a waste of time," "I wish we hadn't done that."?" "No." "Going to the Moon was awesome." "Everyone's happy we went to the Moon!" "Mars is even cooler." "Mariner is the spacecraft." "Mars is the destination." "Americans could once again  look up towards their future with faith and with confidence." "We're focused on Mars." "That's NASA's ultimate goal." "To lead other nations, and particularly ourselves, with humans to Mars." "The retrograde rockets will be tested in space." "The antenna housing will transmit telemetry." "Ever since I was little, I've always had a passion for space." "It would be so amazing just to see the Martian surface with my own eyes." "T minus 25 seconds." "We will go to Mars." "Let's go out there and explore." "Let's make discoveries." "Let's change the world." " Is this the PCS right here?" "  OK, the L Cone..." "A couple of things you need to know." "When the launch happens going to Mars, what are we going to say to the press?" "I mean, I'm sure Neil Armstrong had a ton of time to think what his first words would be." "I know what I would say." "What do we want?" "Oranges." "When do we want we want them?" "Oranges!" "Fantastic." "That's a great monologue." "However, we're going to transition to practicing your checklists now." "Everybody has a checklist that was either on their seat or around their space." "It's under your suits." "It's what happens when you start before the mission starts." "Coming to Space Camp is the closest I can really get to space, at least emotionally and psychologically." "7A on." "Do you guys feel good?" "C auto." "Tank 9." "Reset." "This is the suiting up process." "We'll transition over." "Grab the book." "You got it?" "If people want to call me a space nerd, they can call me a space nerd." "And I'll say "Yeah, so what do you want to know about space?" "You want to know about SRBs, egress, ECLSS?"" "And they'll be like "What?"" "And I'll be like "So, wait, which one did you want to know about?" "Cause I can give you at least five, maybe ten minutes of conversation for each one." "Come at me, bro!"" "Let me out of this." "Come on, Josh!" "Today, we were the first group ever to test out this new Mars Mission." "This mission is a futuristic mission, obviously, because we haven't gone to Mars at this point." "This is MEB, the Mars Elysium Base." "And this base has been delivered to Mars already with all the gear that you guys are gonna need to set it up, OK?" "The Mars Mission is something that they've had in RD for a while." "It's exhilarating, the fact that we are simulating a mission to Mars." "You got your guy out there." "Pull it up." "We are training to go to Mars." "We know that there will be problems because it is dangerous." "We need to have the simulator as close to a nominal mission as possible." "This is gonna be intense!" "Space Camp was designed to simulate the peak of NASA." "This is cool!" "Woah!" "Here at Space Camp, we learn a lot about space history and what it will be like to be an astronaut." "All of the simulators here, NASA has been recruited to help design." "So, they're as close as we can get to what the astronauts actually use." "Oh my God!" "This is my third year at Space Camp." "I said, "I'm going to apply for a scholarship,"" "because being an astronaut is something I don't want to give up on." "I'm going up whether I want to or not!" "I had to get three letters of recommendation," "I had to write two essays, and I had to do a science experiment and break it down in the scientific method." "Oh!" "Good job, Victoria!" "I believe that the people who come here are the future of the space program." "It's really giving us an education on how to be a person who works with space on a daily basis." "When I grow up, I would like to be CAPCOM for NASA." "I want to become a mission specialist." "Be a machine toolist." "I want to be an engineer." "Aerospace engineer." "It would be amazing to construct engines for a mission to Mars." "When you enter the base and turn on the emergency power, it turns to red lighting." "That's what we're wanting..." "The base that they've designed up there is fascinating." "The base is all powered down." "They have to turn on the communications array, set up the solar panels, set up all of the ECLSS systems, and also set up a greenhouse because somebody might want to eat up there." " Activate the power." " Hey, guys." "The hydro popo is in here." "The fact that people are now even teaching children, 16 year-olds, 15 year-olds, saying, "Hey, we're going to Mars" and simulating how it would work out, means they'll grow up and we'll grow up to believe: hey, we're going to Mars." "So let's go to Mars." "I'll go there in a minute." "Well, good luck." "Of all the planets in the solar system," "Earth and Mars, the third and fourth planets from the Sun, are the most similar." "But despite the similarities, Mars is essentially like no other planet." "One of the greatest  allures of Mars is that Mars is nearby." "Mars is a planet, and it's a planet with potential." "It once had water." "It once had oceans." "Surely, we tell ourselves, it once had life." "Sciencefictionwriters populated the cities with terrible creatures of heroic size, with skills beyond earthman's dreams." "This is a place that touches us in a very basic way." "Another thing is that it's always had the power to scare the daylights out of us." "Itwasalwaysthe bloodredworld  that was just nearby, that, through telescopes, appeared to have canals, which presumed people or some kind of organisms." "And since the only model we know for intelligent organisms is organisms that eventually try to grab land and resources and go to war," "Mars used to frighten us." "WelcometoMars." "There's a whole endless string of movies and television shows and stories about aliens, alien life." "Now, this is the plan:" "get your ass to Mars." "When people hear the word "Mars", they think of science fiction, of geeks talking about Martians and Mars." "And as soon as we go there and there's humans there, that changes." "This is not science fiction." "This is now something we do." "This is part of life." "This is real." "I had no idea that The Martian would have mainstream appeal." "It never even occurred to me." "I thought I was writing it for this tiny niche audience of hardcore space dorks." "We fell in love with Mars a long, long time ago and our goal now is to be a part of Mars, is to live on Mars." "Doing something as hard as going to Mars doesn't just happen." "You need like a perfect storm in many ways." "You need the right moment with the right funding, with the right people or person." "Wernher von Braun is a famous German scientist and he took these ideas about how to operate liquid-fueled rockets and he made these extraordinary spacecraft that went on to put humans on the Moon." "Wernher von Braun, when he designed and built the Apollo program, in the back of his mind already, he was way past Apollo." "He and his team were talking about:" "how do we get to Mars?" "We knew that the city of Huntsville was solidly behind us, and with your continued support" "I will see you back in orbit with that new space station, to which we will all ride in the reusable launch vehicle, and maybe one day we'll have a man on Mars." "Thank you." "Von Braun was a Nazi." "Von Braun was in the SS, which is the dreaded element of the Nazi party." "And von Braun was Hitler's top weapons maker." "From a man who held a dark and hateful cause, came a missile that gave America one of its greatest historical inspirations." "So Wernher von Braun is...a mixed bag." " You tightened the valves?" " It works." "Dude, wherever I cut one I should cut the other, right?" "Yeah." "So what do you say?" "One, two, three, four, five, six." "How about six runs up and six runs up?" "So it's one, two, three four." "So it's the fourth one down." "If you could combine nerdy and cool, I hope you could get something like me." "How's it going?" "It's a little rough." "The X-Acto knife slipped twice, as you can see." "Just got little duct tape bandages." "Here, use better duct tape." "Yeah, that's a good point." "Nerdiness has kind of taken a bad rap over the years." "And nerdy is the new cool." "But that doesn't mean you have to start wearing Jordans or anything." "But I feel like the egg should be standing up in the compartment, though." " It will." " Like standing vertically." " I know." " All right, cool." "I'm hoping one day to run for office and work my way up in Washington, and ultimately get NASA the funding it needs to, you know, do these great things like go to Mars." "We usually just, I think we should fold it in a way that it will definitely deploy." "The model rockets is a good challenge for the group." "Of course, rocketry is directly connected with NASA." "Sotheawesomething about rockets, I'd say, is that they're handing explosives and a whole bunch of, like, firing power to teenagers." "And they're like, "Here, go make it, go up into the air and if it explodes, have fun with it."" "So it's, like, yeah, I'm definitely going to do this." "We're gonna have to find a way for it to disconnect while keeping the shot cord inside of the body..." "Oh yeah, definitely." "Somehow..." "I enjoy building rockets." "Later today we are launching our rocket with our eggstronaut Egbert in it." "And it has been so much fun just building it and tossing around ideas." "Put the hot glue on the edges of these and stick it down." "Thetwothingsyou 'relearning from these model rockets is crew survivability and aerodynamics." "Everything else is intact." "We just can't get this stuff tangled up." "As soon as this gets tangled, we're kind of done." " Let's see how this drop goes." " High check, science geeks." "Very nice." "Youhaveto keep your precious payload alive, and you want it to pierce through the air in a beautiful parabolic trajectory." "Ooh!" "That fits there really well." "It's really important that we see the big picture." "It's important that the whole system, including our eggstronaut, are safe and reliable." "No, no, no." "That means we have 250 left." " And then we have 150-- - 150 left." "And then we just used 100 for the motor tube." "So we would have 50." "In our engineering challenges, we're assigned a budget for what we do and you can't overspend it." "And sometimes you don't even have enough to begin with." "Dude, we made a mistake for the first item." "This 150 is actually 200." "So then now we're left with 100." "The money is a big constriction for humans in real life." "So, they decided to make it a constriction for us, too." "How much money have we spent?" "Jace, I'm gonna go glue these together, OK?" "They put a limit on it to say," ""Hey, we're not gonna give you all the materials, because if we did you could do so much."" "So the way these rocket engines work is it propels downwards." "When we deploy it, the parachute's gonna unfurl and it's gonna float down like this." "And our egg's gonna survive." "Good stuff, guys!" "This was a productive session." "Ballin' till we drop!" "The V2 rocket was built by Wernher von Braun and his team of engineers." "It hits randomly." "You don't really know what you're hitting, what you're killing, what you're destroying." "That was what the V2 did." "The "V", for goodness' sake, stood for "Vengeance"." "It was the weapon that resulted from a tantrum, in this case the tantrum of the führer." "He wanted to lash back, as all losing causes do." "They flail at the end." "The President of the United States." "General Eisenhower informs me that the forces of Germany have surrendered to the United Nations." "The flags of freedom fly all over Europe." "At the end of World War II, the Cold War had, in essence, already begun." "It was clear to the Allies that we could not coexist with the Soviets." "If we didn't get von Braun, then the Soviets would." "We had to have him." "Oh my gosh!" "How soon we forget how evil the communist empire was perceived to be in that day and in that time." "And how much of a motivating factor that was to do anything we could to not be bested by our arch enemy." "Not a lot of Americans know that we took a...a Nazi, someone who helped designed rockets that were intended to kill us, relocated him and his team eventually to Huntsville, Alabama, where they became founding fathers of the spaceflight program." "He became such a vocal figurehead for space, for exploration, for the red planet." "In the early to middle '50s, von Braun became famous." "He began writing long magazine articles about travel to the Moon and to Mars." "And he even signed a deal with Disney." "When the day arrives for construction to begin, the thousands of parts for the space station will be transported to the orbit by our multistage rockets." "It's a real moment in American history when 42 million Americans tune in to watch von Braun talk on a Disney television program about space travel." "If we were to start today on an organized and well supported space program," "I believe a practical passenger rocket could be built and tested within 10 years." "Today, a new moon is in the sky, a 23 inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket." "500 miles up, the artificial moon is boosted to a speed counterbalancing the pull of gravity, and released." "The whole applecart was overturned when the Russians put Sputnik into orbit, causing a national nervous breakdown as a consequence." "The Soviets had Sputnik up in the sky and you could hear the beeping going by." "The entire country was in shock by Sputnik." "Sputnik orbited the Earth on what you would say in military terms was the ultimate high ground of space!" "The reaction was one of astonishment and concern." "For it was now known that a potential enemy was at least temporarily ahead in developing means for space travel." "We were scared to death when Sputnik went up." "And then we were scared to death when the Russians beat us to orbit with a human." "It seemed at once that this competitive style of government was producing technology faster, outstripping the United States." "And so, a civilian space agency was formed, and that's the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA." "Welcome to the Marshall Space Flight Center." "Our special task here in Huntsville is to develop the rocket powered systems necessary to orbit man in an Earth satellite." "You might say we are the long distance movers." "All effort was given toward making sure that America got into space pronto." "And that is where von Braun began his ascent as kind of the American space savior." "And from there, he became the prophet of space exploration." "For we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance." "The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds." "When you think of the Apollo program, when you think of man on the Moon, no doubt von Braun is a huge piece of JFK's legacy." "The vast stretches of the unknown, and the unanswered, and the unfinished, still far outstrip our collective comprehension." "To be the first person on Mars, it would definitely put you up there with those big names that most people know about space." "Alan Shepard, Yuri Gagarin, Neil Armstrong, and von Braun." "It would definitely come with a bit of infamy." "Surelytheopeningvistasofspace  promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward." "So, it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer, to rest, to wait." "To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time, in manned flight." "But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade we shall make up and move ahead." "Building something from scratch is a double-edged sword." "You can't design a perfect launch vehicle from scratch and put it up on the pad the very first time and expect things are gonna go well." "This generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space." "We mean to be a part of it." "We mean to lead it." "Since NASA was formed in 1958, we've had a pretty small number of different missions that we've undertaken." "The first program was the Mercury program, just to see if an astronaut could survive in zero gravity." "This is Flagship 7, radio loud and clear." "Over." "We went on to the Gemini program, sending two astronauts up in a capsule." "We learned how to do rendezvous and docking." "And we learned how to walk in space, to float there." "OK, yeah?" "OK." "You're right in front, Ed." "You look beautiful!" "I feel like a million dollars!" "So I'm gonna kick off!" "We put together everything we learned from Mercury and Gemini in the Apollo program." "But why, some say, the Moon?" "Why choose this as our goal?" "And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain?" "Liftoff!" "We have a liftoff!" "Manyyearsago, the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it." "He said "Because it is there."" "Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it." "And the Moon and the planets are there." "And new hopes for knowledge and peace are there!" "Going to the Moon, many people just considered outright impossible." "Four forward, drifting to the right a little." "Once the impossible becomes possible, that opens the floodgates of human imagination." "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." "Wechooseto go to theMoon!" "We choose to go to the Moon!" "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." "We should probably check it, cause last time we had a pretty bad angle." "Dude, come on, let's check it." "No, I just want to make sure ours is positioned so we won't die again." "As a kid, I would love to witness one of our presidents challenge NASA to land on Mars in a deadline that may seem impossible." "Because I feel like few things motivate humans." "I mean the Soviets motivated us, but that was out of fear." "I swear, if ours doesn't work" "I'm crying!" "Oh crap, dude!" "Ours looks all bent up and everything." "What is he doing?" "Dude, now look at it!" "We're bent to the side now." "Oh my god." " It's going to go that way." " ...two, one..." "Please, please deploy!" "Do it, do it, do it!" "Yeah!" "Rub the orange!" "Rub the orange!" "Rub the orange!" "I think we should go to Mars because we would learn so much along the way." "Forget about actually stepping on Mars." "I think the journey there is far more important." "We're checking the payload to see if it's still intact." "See any juice?" "Oooh..." "This chute idea might have saved us." "It's cracked." "No!" "I think we made it!" "Oh my god, we made it!" "Whoa!" "Yes!" "Wow, that was so ratchet." "Bob, this is Gene and I'm on the surface." "I'd like to just say, what I believe history will record:" "that America's challenge of today has forged man's destiny of tomorrow." "As soon as the first landing on the Moon seemed inevitable, and certainly after it happened, every single story written about that success included a secondary story that said "So, what's next?"" "And as we leave the Moon at Taurus-Littrow, we leave as we came and, God willing, as we shall return:" "with peace and hope for all mankind." "God speed the crew of Apollo 17." "Inthatmoment,von Braun reveals his true ambition as a scientist." "This is a great moment." "We've gotten to the Moon." "But actually it's a stepping stone to the red planet, to Mars." "Wernher von Braun talked about a Mars mission and he talked about a possible presence, permanent presence, on Mars by 1981." "That sounds insanely ambitious:" "11 years to have a permanent presence on two planets." "But the fact is, it was equally hubristic to say" ""And we're gonna put a man on the Moon by 1969."" "Except we did it." "So everything we were talking about doing in extremely short order, by 1981, getting people on Mars, was actually perfectly consistent with the extremely short order work we had done to get to the Moon." "The plan to go to Mars was complicated in the '60s because the way von Braun saw it, this was gonna be a symbol of the future." "But the way the public interpreted it was entirely different." "Now, of course, there are many other things competing for public interest." "There is an election coming up, and there is a war going on in Vietnam, and there are problems in the cities." "And quite a few people seem to believe that we are taking money away from the public purse." "We prefer to see our space program in a somewhat different light." "We believe that we are actually producing values, and we are producing values at a faster rate than we are taking money out of the treasury." "Nixon had a choice to continue the program to go on to Mars." "The infrastructure for planetary exploration was in place." "The NASA personnel infrastructure that had gotten us to the Moon was prepared to get us to Mars." "Mr. Speaker, the President of the United States!" "I gotta tell you, everybody, this longing for the Apollo era is not well advised." "It's not coming back." "We're operating now not under the Kennedy doctrine, but under the Nixon doctrine." "In reaching the Moon, we demonstrated what miracles American technology is capable of achieving." "And now the time has come to move more deliberately toward making full use of that technology here on Earth." "President Nixon and his advisors felt that U.S. public interest in space exploration had waned." "It was a very expensive undertaking." "Let's do something else." "Sunday, April 12, 1981." "Kennedy Space Center, Florida." "The Space Shuttle." "Fourteen stories high, 2,000 tons, poised on the pad for its maiden flight." "Nixon's goal was to contract America's space footprint." "To make getting to and from orbit routine, affordable, and ultimately profitable." "But the Nixon doctrine, the idea of monetizing and simplifying access to orbit, did not work." "...two, one, starting motor ignition and liftoff!" "Liftoff of Columbia!" "The shuttle has cleared the tower." "Columbia, you're negative seats." "And liftoff." "Liftoff of the orbiter Challenger and the sixth flight of the Space Shuttle." "What's been happening at NASA has been a very long term drift in terms of the manned space program." "After we went to the Moon, it was the carousel of shuttle flights around the Earth for 30-some years." "That was it." "We have ignition and liftoff of Atlantis and the Galileo spacecraft bound for Jupiter." "Roger roll, Atlantis." "The Space Shuttle can't reach deep space." "The Space Shuttle was only designed to go whizzing around the planet Earth." "And so we began to realize that NASA lost its way." "And liftoff of Space Shuttle Discovery to complete NASA's constellation of tracking stations in the sky." "I understand things are being done by NASA right now." "But I feel like after the '60s, the acceleration of the program just declined to a sad point." "And liftoff of the Space Shuttle Endeavour." "Roger roll, Endeavour." "We are no longer advancing a space frontier." "A space frontier is:" "how far have you gone lately?" "Where are our farthest astronauts?" "They're 250 miles above our head, driving around the block, boldly going where hundreds have gone before." "That is not advancing space frontiers." "Low Earth orbit is about putting  stuff in space to look back down on Earth." "It's about support for Earth industries." "The Space Shuttle sounds like this big exciting thing." "The Space Shuttle!" "We're exploring!" "But actually what the Space Shuttle was was kind of a cargo delivery vehicle." "It would bring astronauts and equipment, back and forth from low Earth orbit." "The Shuttle drained NASA's resources." "It was a financial sinkhole, essentially, from 1975 up through 2011." "Any dreams of going to Mars during the Shuttle era were impossible because all of the money was going to the Shuttle." "NASA is kind of at a holdup." "We haven't gone places." "So don't go to space." "But what you can send to Mars are non-humans and non-living things, like robots." "Before you leave this table," "I need you to figure out what your robot's primary task is going to be." "You can't just send all of them in there and have all four of them try and do the same task." "That's not going to be productive." "All right, guys, we got everything up here, so..." "Is that everything?" " Yes, it is." " Can we get a picture?" "We do robotics at Space Camp because robotics is a huge part of the space program." "Exploration done today isn't done by humans." "It's done by robots." "NASA's unmanned exploration of the solar system is the great unappreciated crown jewel of the space agency." "It began here at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida." "Viking 1 and Viking 2 were readied for their separate journeys to Mars." "A robot is important for forerunner exploration, where we send a robot first." "It lets us know it's OK for us to go there." "The planet Mars right now is entirely populated by robots, which is an interesting thing to think about." "Curiosity's designed specifically to look at past habitability and present habitability of Mars." "That's really taking the step of where we understood there was once water on Mars to whether that water could have supported life on Mars, or maybe even still support life on Mars." "And liftoff of the Atlas 5 with Curiosity, seeking clues to the planetary puzzle about life on Mars." "The thing that makes Mars so incredible is that it's this sister planet of ours, and the possibility that life could have arisen there some time in the past, that maybe life is more prevalent than we thought in the past." "At 10.13 local time we'll initiate the descent stage thermal batteries, and from that point on EDL ops will take over." "I'm a little partial to the Curiosity rover." "We're down to 90 meters per second at an altitude of 6.5 kilometers and descending." "I worked on that mission for almost 10 years." "UHF is good." "Touchdown confirmed." "We're safe on Mars!" "I think the longer you spend working on them, the more attached you are to them." "They become kind of like kids." "We are going to need a button pusher." "I can do that." "Jace!" "Jace, just a heads up, that's priority numero uno!" "Jace is a good programmer." "We can't afford not to" "Jace, are you programming right now?" "Yes." "With these robots, you have to learn how to program them to work without a human being at the controls." "Can Bucky hold one side of the yellow doors?" "Which side do you want?" "I can program for both." "Jace is so good at programming." "He just went right to it!" "He's got a ton of patience when it comes to testing that robot." "A lot of times in retrieval, the things are in a very specific place every time." "So we can make a rough program, go out, figure out what happened wrong then just make it more and more and more and more precise so we can perfectly execute that when the mission comes." "Activate COMS." "Right now I'm learning how to code in Python." "I'm new to it." "I'll admit, I can't make something really complicated." "I can make a game of Pong work!" "That's about it." "But I'm learning." "A little nervous." "It should work." "I programmed it for a long time." "With Curiosity, what was amazing was that the first drill hole we drilled we found evidence of past water on Mars and that that water was kind of relatively fresh and could have supported certain types of life as we know them on Earth." "The next questions are really of whether life could exist on Mars." "Future missions can go and actually look for evidence of life." "And maybe the best way to do that is with humans, where they can bring samples back, like the Apollo missions did." "When we put a robot on Mars and we give it a name called "Curiosity", and we have it send down automatic Tweets, and we love it and we call it names like "plucky" and "tough"." "We're on the ground." "Just don't move yet!" "We gotta wait for Jace." "Five, four, three, two, one!" "Begin!" "We humanize robots because it's the next best thing." "But in the case of explorers on other planets, humanizing, anthropomorphizing our machines are because we don't have real people to get there." "All right, lost a wheel." "Humans can do in a day what it takes a robot months or sometimes years to accomplish." "Curiosity's been on the surface for a little more than three years now, and we guess that a human could do that within a week." "All the science that we've done so far in that three years, a human could walk around, chisel rocks, look at them, investigate them." "Don't move that." "Don't move that." "Patrick, don't move it!" "Patrick, don't move it!" "I can get it." "Just kind of disappointed that our bot didn't function how we wanted it to." "It was only able to complete two or three tasks, rather than the about six that we had planned for." "Oh no!" "It's broken." "Oh no!" "I've yet to see a ticker tape parade for robots." "Or a high school named after a robot." "So, there's the vicarious value that one of us experiences that and comes back to talk about it." "You can touch that person." "And that person carried out the dreams of a civilization." " No!" " Yo, man." "Just keep going!" " Ten seconds!" " Nine, eight, seven, six five, four, three, two, one..." " Zero!" " Stop all your robots!" "Programming error." "Bot didn't function properly as how it was intended to." "It didn't perform as it did during testing." "It was really kind of down to me, and I kind of failed at the last second." "ThebestthingaboutMars  and why everybody wants to go to Mars is because we have rovers there." "We have machines, examples, everything from it that says, "Hey come, come to Mars, come to Mars."" "Can this be one of our layers?" "Yeah!" "You can use that as one of your layers!" "OK, we're naming it Neil Applestrong." "Applenaut training, so that's where we have an astronaut that's a green apple and we make a space suit for it." "Areallygoodway  to look at a space suit is it has to keep you alive with oxygen and pressure." "So a one-minute test." "When it comes out you're gonna blot it dry." "We'll walk over to the hot box." "Go." "Down, down, down." "When it comes to space, I know a lot." "Stop!" "Hold them up." "Oh, no!" "This is unfortunate." " What?" " I think there's water inside." "People living in space for a year  now, that's huge for me." "I love it." "And it's like, whoa!" "I want to live in space for five years now!" "To apply to become an astronaut, all you have to do is go to the NASA website and you'll find a PDF that you can download, fill out, send back in." "The basic requirements to be an astronaut are not actually that difficult to achieve." "You need to have a four-year degree in a related field of STEM:" "Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math." "You need to have things such as general good health, reasonably good eyesight, hearing, those types of things." "But it's when you look at the requirements that aren't stated that things become more difficult." "The original group of seven folks, they were all military background when they came into the office." "But of course the mission of actually going on to Mars really requires a wide range of experiences, and so that includes medical doctors, it includes scientists, pretty much everything under the sun." "I think I get smarter as I get older!" "My time here as an astronaut and my ability to have gone to space two times has helped taken some baby steps to take that next generation of space explorers even further." "I'm way too old to go to Mars." "25, 30 years from now, I'm gonna be 85, 90 years-old." "No way is NASA sending me to Mars." "The Mars Generation, is the generation of today." "It's in their DNA to become the astronauts, to explore the red planet." "Ever since I was a little kid, I've wanted to be an astronaut." "Going to Mars is definitely something that would help NASA to draw public interest and to reignite that fire we have for space travel." "We were born at exactly the right time." "We will be in our early 30s around the time we are predicted to set foot on Mars." "And Neil Armstrong was only 38 when he set foot on the Moon." "The age you should really start focusing more and becoming really serious about becoming an astronaut is for me, would probably be now, so around 14." "Mainly because I'm starting to get those certifications that I'll need in the future, such as SCUBA diving certification, pilot's license and sky diving certification." "When I got into space heavily, I was probably about 13." "If I had the chance to go to Mars, I would absolutely take it." "Like, I wouldn't even think about it." "I love space." "I want to be an astronaut one day." "If I died on Mars, it would be sad, obviously." "But at least I would have died achieving my lifelong dream!" "It takes a certain kind of person." "Most of us aren't those people." "We are fortunate, we've always been fortunate as a species, that there are people like that." "We have to be honest with the young generation of astronauts." "And that is, yes, there are dangers, dangers that can be quantified, but nonetheless dangers that will involve perhaps injury, perhaps even death." "All pilots learn how to escape from a crashed helicopter." "Because if you crash, what's gonna come save you?" "A helicopter." "What rescued the Apollo and, before, astronauts out of the ocean?" " A helicopter." " A helicopter." "When you go in, you'll receive a number, like you were told before:" "one, two, three, four, five, six." "You will exit in the reverse order:" "six, five, four, three, two, one." "There's only one place that you will exit." "Wedowatersurvival so that we can learn what to do if something goes horribly wrong." "We're going down!" "If something happens and the hatch  blows off of our spacecraft, it starts flooding, you have to learn how to get out and get out fast." "Thank you, Instructor!" "If you're in a dangerous situation where you're inside of a metal cage and it starts filling up with water, you better know how to swim and you better know how to get out." "Because you're gonna die." "Metal doesn't float." " Everybody out!" " Six out!" "Five, go!" "You have to rely on your team to swim out before it goes all the way under." "And it's all about getting people to work together." "Because nobody can go to space alone on their own." "Nobody has so far, and I don't believe anybody will." " You all ready for this?" " Yeah, I'm pumped." "I would definitely be willing to die to go to Mars." "My life is worth all the things that the human race as a whole gain from that." "When we went to the Moon, we lost three astronauts before we ever got off the ground in the Apollo 1 fire on the pad." "It was all over in one stunned, horrifying second." "An electrical spark apparently shot out and ignited the 100% oxygen in the cabin that they were breathing, as in a real spaceflight." "The crewmen never had a chance." "Now we come into the Space Shuttle, and it's supposed to be routine." "And it's supposed to be this low incident." "Well, it almost happened to us on the 24th flight." "Four scrubs, any one of which, had we launched, it would have not been a good day." "But then it happened to the 25th flight." "Three, two, one, and liftoff." "Liftoff of the 25th Space Shuttle mission and it has cleared the tower." "Sothe25thSpaceShuttle mission is now on the way, after more delays than NASA cares to count." "This morning it looked as though they were not going to be able to get off." "1 minute 15 seconds, velocity 2,900 feet per second." "Altitude 9 nautical miles, downrange just at 7 nautical miles." "I want to say something to the school children of America who were watching the live coverage of the Shuttle's takeoff." "I know it's hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen." "It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery." "It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons." "The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted." "It belongs to the brave." "What we're seeing here is very ominous indeed." "These are pictures which tell the story that is clearly the Shuttle breaking up." "Somebody once asked me," ""Is it possible to write an article on three ways to make the Shuttle safer?"" "And my answer is "Yes, I can write it right now." "Don't fly Discovery, don't fly Atlantis, don't fly Endeavour." "Problem solved."" "But we flew." "We lost no more people and the program ended in something close to triumph." "But 14 people died." "All three engines up and working." "Two, one, zero." "And liftoff!" "The final liftoff of Atlantis." "On the shoulders of the Space Shuttle." "America will continue the dream." "I really feel that it's a part of each of our legacies to carry on that piece that those  astronauts that we lost started." "Their legacy is that we can continue the journey." "If we don't, we won't be able to continue to evolve our presence in low Earth orbit and on to Mars." "The Space Shuttle  spreads its wings one final time for the start of a sentimental journey into history." "One of the big ideas for why to retire the Shuttle became this idea of going to Mars." "Let's leave low Earth orbit and let's start going out further to explore Mars." "Hello!" "This is the International Space Station!" "Well this is President Obama." "Who am I talking to?" "Hello, Mr. President!" "You're talking to the increment 28 crew and the crew of the Space Shuttle Atlantis." "Well,thismissionmarksthe final flight of the Space Shuttle program." "It also ushers in an exciting new era to push the frontiers of space exploration and human space flight beyond Earth, and ultimately sending humans to Mars." "One of the reasons that the Space Shuttle had to be retired is that it was so expensive to operate that we couldn't afford to invest in the development of its successor." "That's why we've actually had a gap." "Having fired the imagination of a generation, a ship like no other, its place in history secured, the Space Shuttle pulls into port for the last time." "WhentheGeminiprogram ended, no one shed a tear because the mighty Saturn 5 rocket was sitting in an adjacent launch pad ready to continue that mission, and we knew that was going to the Moon." "When people shed a tear for the last Shuttle landing," "I accuse them of shedding a tear not because they'd miss the Shuttle, but because there was not a next spaceship to continue this adventure that we could all then turn to and say, "Mothball the Shuttle," "we're going to the next suite of launch vehicles."" "There was nothing there, it was an empty launch pad." "I'm a little embarrassed that to get into space we gotta hitch a ride with the Russians." "We're not even hitching a ride, we're buying the seats on the Soyuz vessel to get to and from the International Space Station that we built." "So it's a little embarrassing!" "I'll be honest with you." "Who'd have thought that with all the intense rivalry with the Russians to go to the Moon that we would be dependent upon hitching a ride on the Soyuz spacecraft?" "Let's say there's a crisis that erupts some place on the planet Earth and all of a sudden we're in this awkward situation of being beholden to them for access to outer space." "Perhaps that's not such a good policy." "It's been costly to  buy seats on the Soyuz from the Russians." "We don't like being absolutely dependent on one other country for anything as important as being able to get our astronauts into space." "I think the idea that we have to pay Russia $70 million to send astronauts, our astronauts, American astronauts, to the ISS is absolutely ridiculous." "If you talk to the average person on the street, they think the space program is over." "They associate our space program with Americans flying on American rockets." "Not flying on the Soyuz that we fly on right now." "Liftoff." "Liftoff of the Soyuz TMA-05M carrying Suni Williams, Yuri Malenchenko and Aki Hoshide on a two-day journey to the International Space Station." "The reason why we put the International Space Station up there in the first place is so that we could start doing long-term experiments on how a human will be able to survive in space." "Because the journey to Mars is going to take a long time." "You ready?" " Yeah, go for it." " Set?" "Go." "Two, three, four..." "All right, so when an astronaut goes into space, their body has a hard time adjusting to the fact that now everything in their stomach is floating around." "The fluid in their ears is floating around and that's how we sense motion." "...twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen." "Your ears are telling you that you're moving, you know, you're not standing still." "But your eyes are telling you different, and astronauts have gotten sick from this." "...41, 42, 43, 44, 45." "Take off the blindfold." "What?" "Dude." " You feel super disoriented, right?" " I'm still spinning!" "Space, in general, is a very dangerous place to go." "Space wasn't really meant for humans to kind of be in." "Hello!" "I'm Suni Williams." "I'm up here on the International Space Station." "All right, come on back." "There's more to show you." "One of the things we do is we exercise." "We have some exercise equipment onboard the Space Station." "A lot of our research up on  the International Space Station right now is looking at ways to minimize muscle loss, to minimize bone loss, to minimize the effects of radiation on the astronauts." "And why do we do this today?" "It's all in regard to these future missions going to Mars." "Youmighthavenoticed a little moon on the outside." "This is our orbital outhouse right here." "It serves for two functions." "And, of course, you do have your privacy." "There's a little door." "One of the really important things about living and working in space long term is to learn how to recycle all the things you need, rather than bring them up from the Earth." "Some of the obstacles that we face heading to Mars is we need water." "Water is a major resource." "Right now, we're working with the ECLSS system where we can turn our own urine into water." " Oh, lost volume, OK I got you." " We lost like a few milligrams." "The thing is, if we were to use the cotton we would lose so much." "ECLSS is the Environmental Control and Life Support System." "It is the way that astronauts breathe and it purifies the water on the ISS for them." "It's still at 100." "Where's ammonia?" "Somewhere." "Yeah, ammo chips." "Mars is the next place that we should explore, because we've already been to the Moon and Mars just seems like the next step." "I want to test the pasta cause it could absorb some of the color." "That's what I'm thinking." "Mars has so many cool things." "Like it has water and the possibility of old extraterrestrial life that doesn't exist there anymore." "So it would be great to see if we could find some answers to all of that." "I think maybe gravel and then charcoal." "And then ammonia and then sand." "Oh look at, look at the color in this itself." "It doesn't actually retain any of the water." "Right now we're filtering water." "So we have this terrible mix of water." "It's got like a pH of three." "It's not even water." "It's just like poison." "They hinted that we are going to take this water, make our own filters, and then drink it, and hopefully it's not terrible and kills us." "That'd be very much appreciated if we don't die from it." "Water used to be delivered in water-filled bags like this one." "But since 2010, we got a system onboard that can purify the water real time." "We have filters and a keg-size distiller that, with it, we can recycle about 6,000 liters of extra water each year." "Right now, we're holding acidic water." "And our hopes are that lima beans are basic and will counteract the acidity in this disgusting mess." "We're running it through the lima beans three times, and then we're gonna test the pH afterwards." "By some miracle, the water will be slightly more basic than we started out." "I actually care a lot about this." "I feel like clean water is probably the most important thing ever." "Just because, at least here on Earth, we still have over a billion people who don't have access to clean water." "I want to say four." "That's a solid acidic of four." "We can accomplish so much in such little time, like landing on the Moon." "People need to understand going to Mars, it's gonna be an expensive mission." "But the technologies that we'll develop from that itself will pay off all that cost because it'll pump new technologies and more industries into our economy." "Most people don't realize how much NASA has done for us and for our society." "When you look at the lives that we live right now, they wouldn't be possible without NASA." "CAT scans, MRIs, the small cameras in our iPhones." "All of this has originated in our U.S. space program." "The Apollo program alone was the reason computers took the advances to where they are." "So if we go to Mars, I'm sure we're gonna get tech advances in ways that we can't even fathom." "One of the things Mars can offer us is growth and stimulation of the economy." "People say "Oh, what is the space program really doing for us?" "We spend all these tax dollars into NASA." "What does it give us?"" "Space travel has one of the highest rates of return on money that we put into it." "The space program has more than paid for itself." "Telecommunications, the internet, weather satellites, all of it done in outer space." "In fact, if you shut down the space program, we would be hurled back almost a century into the past." "Everybody in space, please listen up." "Whenever we approach whatever that payload is, we need to be wearing protective gear." "Make it very clear we will wear protective gear in the search for the payload." "I think we should go to Mars because we can." "We can do all these things." "And it's just, I feel like it's kind of sad that we haven't already." "Because we have developed technologies to do things like this." "We definitely have the intelligence." "The biggest thing we're missing is public support." "I'm gonna write down some information for you." "If they have to do an ISS reboot..." "Get a piece of paper ready." "I know people who think that NASA was mothballed." "NASA doesn't exist anymore." "NASA's out of business." "That, in and of itself, is sad." "I think right now we should be monitoring, cabin pressure, O2, that kind of stuff." "And I'm gonna be needing to do med checks soon, just to see." "All right." "And use all the computers to monitor vital systems." "Space is always there." "Space is a constant presence." "When people ask me, "Isn't that not really a thing anymore?" "We don't go to space anymore." I'm always taken aback." "It makes me feel like people are losing touch with their human spirit." "Is there any information of what this confidential payload may look like?" "The information we have is that it's experimental." "It can pretty much go anywhere, do anything." "It is not contained and it is dangerous." "You need to protect yourselves and be very careful." "We're on the look." "We don't have a shuttle." "We don't have any way to get to space ourselves right now." "But I do believe that the U.S. space system, it's still a force." "I know there have been a number of questions raised about my administration's plan for space exploration, and these questions come at a time of transition." "And in order to reach the Space Station, we will work with a growing array of private companies competing to make getting to space easier and more affordable." "The next President of the U.S., they will have two American companies, Boeing and SpaceX, that will launch from the space coast carrying the first-ever commercial crew vehicles that are gonna carry Americans to the International Space Station." "By buying the services of space transportation, rather than the vehicles themselves, we can accelerate the pace of innovations, as companies, from young startups to established leaders, compete to design and build and launch new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere." "Wecannotdo  deep space exploration, particularly with humans, without these partnerships." "They're carrying our astronauts to the International Space Station." "And all of this is in preparation for, or as a part, of the journey to Mars." "We expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space." "Because exploration will once more inspire wonder in a new generation." "The SLS Space Launch System is a new way for people to get to space." "There's a lot more of space to explore, and a lot more to learn when we do." "The Space Launch System is the new rocket for the agency." "It can take us to Mars." "It can take us to deep space." "We'regonnahavethe largest, most powerful rocket ever known to man." "I don't think there is another vehicle on the drawing board that matches the capability that SLS has." "The way NASA is planning on getting to Mars is using the SLS Space Launch System rocket." "The SLS crew compartment will go to space." "And then the Orion capsule, which will be on top, will separate and start heading towards the trajectory of Mars." "When you look at the Orion crew module, you notice that it looks like the shape of the Apollo capsule." "But the reason that shape is used is because the physics haven't changed." "We're going to Mars." "It'll be in the decade of the 2030s." "And we're building the systems, the hardware, that will get us there." "By the mid 2030s," "I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth." "And a landing on Mars will follow." "And I expect to be around to see it." "Let's have one person from each engineering team come and get your tray." "Right now, NASA is working on the Orion capsule which is going to take us to Mars." "Two things of aluminum foil, a cork, and some spackle." "OK, so this is how thick we have." "Can I take this for a minute?" "We'll come back to that when we spackle." " Yeah." "Do we just spackle it right here?" " Is that everything we have?" "That's everything." "People have been talking about going to Mars pretty much since we landed on the Moon and discovered that Mars is another solid surface." "Thanks." "OK." "Great." "Build this thing, baby!" "A little color." "Liven it up!" "Ablative shielding is a very basic demonstration of thermodynamics." "Do you want to go get it?" "I got it!" "OK." "Have fun." "The pasta actually works pretty well." "And I'm not sure why." "Therearedifferentmaterials that work in different ways, things that you'd never even think of." "Who thinks of using a sponge to stop a 3,500 degree Fahrenheit flame from burning through a spaceship?" "Who thinks of that?" "I feel like this is very sturdy." "On Orion you're going to Mars, so not only are you entering and exiting the atmosphere in the Earth, but you're also entering and exiting the atmosphere on Mars." "So it's twice as important that you have it because you need to be safe!" "I feel like NASA's gonna call us..." " ...after this." " Future rocket scientists." "The reason the heat shield is so important is because when you go to Mars the heat generated is very intense." "So, a lot of care goes into the heat shield." "Theheatshield gets almost 4,000 degrees, as it ablates all of that energy." "Yet inside the crew module it's room temperature." "It's just like in here." "I think we're feeling pretty confident." "Ours is destined to survive." "Failure is not an option for us." "Hey, I believe in it." "So far so good!" "That's how good ours is!" "Propane's afraid to start." "Yeah, really!" "My team this year is really amazing." "I could not have asked to be put with a better group of kids." "The vast commonology of space does bring us together." "OK..." "Oh, man." " Ooh, it's very concentrated!" " It's cooking." "Look at that heat dispersion." "See that?" "I'm seeing some smoke!" "At school I do sometimes feel like the odd man out, because I'm very much into space." "Come on, come on..." "Yikes!" "We're hitting steel." "I was bullied since third grade, and that has definitely taken a toll." "Don't jinx it!" "The foil is starting to come out, like the heat." "One time, we were doing an experiment in science class and my partner picked me because she said apparently I looked smart." "I wound up doing all the work." " Oh, that's not good." " That's not good." "When I would ask her about something, she would just be like, "Don't fail me and I'll be fine."" "No." "That's how much we've gone." "I was like" "It's only been 46?" "!" "Wow!" " Wow!" " Wow!" "But then I come here and I just meet these people and it's like you can just be yourself and be goofy and be funny, while still learning about space." "I am definitely a space nerd." "It's just this weird love and excitement and, you know, geeking out about certain details of space exploration." "You know, being impressed and excited by it." "I think that's what being a space nerd means to me." "It's a real honor to be recognized by your peers." "And, honestly, to be recognized by this group of people and the entire Space Camp community is..." "It's pretty awesome." "So I went to Space Camp in the summer of 1995 and it was, you know, definitely a life changing experience." "So I'll begin with a story." "I had my first kiss at Space Camp." "One of the amazing things about Space Camp was finding all these other space nerds, finding my, you know, my group, my people." "Honestly, you know, like so many things, being here helped open the path for me to do things that I really wanted to do, to be, you know, the engineer that I am today," "to work with the amazing team of people that I get to work with." "To have this community is great, and so thank you so much." "And to that girl that I kissed," "I'm a lot better kisser and engineer nowadays, so thank you." "Eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one!" "Parachutes deploy!" "Reentry!" "Success!" " We didn't land in the swamp!" " Wait" "He's alive!" "Whoo!" "Way to go, Egbert!" "Did it burn through the shield?" "Are they going to crack it to see?" "It didn't even burn through the shield." "Pretty cool to the touch." " The yolk even survived!" " Yes, you're good." "Good job." "All right!" "What layer did it get through?" "High fives all around." "High fives all around!" "Where was your..." "what was your second layer?" "The coolest thing about space?" "I don't exactly know." "It's really hard to say the coolest thing about space." "One of my favorite things to do is sometimes when I'm out late at night, is to look up at the night sky and try to find the little red planet in the sky if I can." "WhenI lookat Mars, in some sense I see our future." "Because it's practically a law of physics that one day the Earth will no longer be able to sustain life as we know it." "The Earth is not a safe place." "On a scale of millions of years, there could be a killer asteroid." "And just remember, the dinosaurs did not have a space program." "On a scale of thousands of years, there could be another ice age, another ice age that will force humanity to live, perhaps, deep underground, or even leave the Earth itself." "Our entire species is contained to Earth." "If something happens to Earth..." "Poof, we're gone." "Think about what that means." "That means all music is gone." "All laughter is forever gone." "Shakespeare's gone." "Mozart's gone." "Basketball's gone." "Everything that has to do with humanity is just gone forever." "That's it." "We as a species need to live on multiple planets." "As it sits, we're all on one planet." "There could be a war." "There could be a plague." "It is possible for humanity to be wiped out." "On a scale of decades, we also have climate change." "If you take a look at all the signs, all the signs point up, in terms of temperature." "Our space assets monitor carbon dioxide, they monitor the thickness of glaciers." "And we can see that humankind is changing the climate." "We're not dumping a lot into alternative energy." "We're cutting down rainforests, we're using up a lot of natural habitats." "A lot of problems with climate change are alarming because we're finding these things are not reversible." "So, by exploring space, we can either find somewhere to go, or we can develop technologies that will help us repair what damage we've done." "T minus ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one." "It's not clear that the Space Launch System is still on schedule and still on budget, and this is a concern for everybody." "The SLS, it's an interesting machine, to say the least." "Almost all of its technologies are derived from the Space Shuttle." "Its engine's the RS25, the same engine that we were running for 30 years on the Space Shuttle." "I'm a little bit disappointed that no new technology really went into making it." "TheSLScanget ustoMars." "The SLS most assuredly can get us to Mars." "But the problem with the SLS, the Space Launch System, the 21st century Saturn 5 and Orion, which is the 21st century Apollo program, is that there simply isn't the money to get them built and tested and flying" "in any kind of near term timeframe." "NASA can say that Mars is in our portfolio." "We're gonna send astronauts there in the 2030s." "OK, show me the money." "Talk is cheap." "So we can talk about going to Mars, but until I see the launch pad with the spaceship equipped to accomplish that," "I'm not gonna run around saying "Yeah, we are the Mars people."" "No we're not." "Not until that happens." "Goahead." "In my industry one of our biggest victories was putting a man on the Moon." "Yeah." "What do you think about humans on Mars?" "Honestly, I think it's wonderful." "I want to rebuild our infrastructure first, OK?" "I think it's wonderful." "Go ahead." "NASA's not in charge, it's at the whim of government." "So every time there's a change in presidents, there's a lot of changes at NASA,  automatically." "Thank you, everybody!" "We're not, we are not going to be taking any questions." "Thank you, guys!" "We are building the SLS, but at the rate we're going right now, it won't be done until I'm like 40 or 50." "They keep saying my generation is the Mars Generation, but we're not at this rate." "We could be if we gave them the same support we showed the Apollo program." "DuringtheApolloera ,everybody," "NASA was funded at 4% of the federal budget." "Today, it's 0.4%, almost exactly a tenth of what it was during the Apollo era." "And that's not gonna change." "That's the way it is right now." "NASA is handcuffed to the U.S. budget." "The U.S. budget has a thousand claws on it trying to get the money." "For NASA to innovate, for NASA to do amazing things that it would like to do, it needs an insane budget." "It needs a far different budget than the other kind of agencies." "NASA,allof themoney they have ever received from the government combined, is still less than the yearly budget of the D.O.D." "Which is kind of appalling to me." "SLS and Orion are cool." "I mean, if you like rockets, they're gonna be awesome." "They're gonna have immense amount of thrust." "But they haven't done the important innovation, which is that they're still super crazy expensive." "If every time you flew in an airplane, you landed, the passengers got out, and the plane was thrown away cause planes flew once, well, it would cost a million and a half dollars for a coach seat." "No one would fly." "It would be a zero industry." "It would be for crazy billionaires only." "That's the current state of our aerospace industry." "There is a nasty four-letter  word that has haunted the space program." "It's the "C" word." ""Cost"." "Imagine your body made out of solid gold." "That's what it costs to put you up in outer space." "That's why we have to drive down the cost." "Youcanimproveincrementally when it comes to getting off of Earth with cheaper rockets and maybe better fuel." "But what was needed was like a giant leap forward in the cost of space travel." "And there really was one way to do that." "And it was the fact that every rocket was used once." "There's a debate as to whether private enterprise or the federal government can create innovation." "Privatizationofspace." "This is a very interesting subject, to say the least." "Theprivatespaceindustry is a direct result of NASA not being able to fund everything it wants to do." "I don't think it's a bad thing, it's a good thing." "NASA has a lot of leadership  potential and a lot of budget potential." "And it can use it to partner with these companies." "Rather than fight against these companies and make its own rocket, let the private companies fight for who has the best rocket, and then NASA will use that best rocket to do its business in space and in Mars." "Welcome to the live webcast of the SpaceX launch of the ORBCOM mission from Launch Complex 40 out of Cape Canaveral, Florida." "Elon Musk of SpaceX, he asked, "What is it we need to do to go to Mars?"" "And people told him, these are experts told him," ""We need to lower the cost of getting into low Earth orbit."" "Elon thinks of Earth as a hard drive, and he thinks of humanity as a very important file on that hard drive, and Elon looks at the history of mass extinction events and sees the hard drive has a tendency to crash." "Some people think it's fine, just stay on Earth forever." "And some people don't." "Creating a self-sustained civilization on Mars to provide insurance for life as a whole, a future where we are a space-faring civilization and out there among the stars is infinitely more exciting and inspiring than one where we are not." "The goal of SpaceX is really to build the transport system." "It's like building the Union Pacific Railroad." "What SpaceX is trying to do is to build the first reliable interplanetary railroad." "Using today's standard technologies, it would cost about $10 billion per person to get to Mars and to live there." "That's pretty absurd." "Not many people on this planet that can afford that." "And if we're going to build a real civilization there where we have thousands, if not millions, of people living, working and thriving on Mars, we're gonna have to get that cost down significantly." "Tminusoneminute." "Theideais therockettakesoff, pings a spacecraft into space, either into low Earth orbit or towards Mars." "The rocket comes back and lands vertically, gets some maintenance, gets refueled." "Boom!" "Pings another thing out into space." "It can do this all day." "It can send 15 things out in a day, one rocket." "Liftoff!" "While the U.S. plans to get human beings to Mars sometime vaguely in the 2030s, he believes he can cut that time by 10 years and get them there in the mid 2020s." "It never pays to rule out Elon Musk." "But, also, it never pays to get so seduced by the Tony Stark side of Elon Musk that we think he can do anything." "He's gonna come up against the same obstacles every other rocketeer in history has." "Private industry is willing to take risks that NASA isn't." "This could be economically." "They could try to throw a lot of money at something that might not work." "But if it does work, boom." "You have something amazing." "The first stage is returning to land." "The second stage powers the Earth satellites into low Earth orbit." "If rockets aren't reusable, then humans don't go to Mars this century or next century, or maybe ever." "That is the first stage." "Coming back down and landing!" "I was just...not shocked, because I knew we had what it would take to do this, we had come so close in the past." "But feeling all of these things that we've been talking about, all this effort, blood, sweat, and tears that went into this to succeed, it was now real." "It was there in front of us." "Being a part of that unique moment in history was just mind-blowing for me." "Elon's idea is not to make the Mars thing happen by himself." "Elon is trying to start this chain reaction, he's trying to start a forest fire with a match." "By solving this one giant problem, the fact that you had to build a new rocket for every launch in the past." "By doing that, he thinks he can ignite an entire new era of space travel where we become a genuinely space-faring civilization." "The vision of building a civilization on Mars, it's such a big, huge endeavor." "It's not something one single company can do alone." "You need another perfect storm, you need some perfect storm of resources and technology and the right people." "And it's exciting that I think maybe we have that." "What SpaceX is trying to do is create a situation where all these industries and governments suddenly start saying," ""Well, now this is an option we want to get in the game."" "And suddenly, all this money pours into rocket innovation, into Earth/Mars industries." "Then that's what empowers the big push to get a million people there eventually." "Now,youcanonlygoto Mars every 26 months." "The orbits have to be oriented." "You can't just fly over the Sun." "We don't have enough rocket fuel for that." "Sometimes Mars is really close to the Earth, sometimes it's really far, because planets orbit in an elliptical path." "And we'll stay on Mars for about a year or two, depending on its orbit." "We have to wait for Mars to come all the way back around to its closest point for us to come back." "Onceyou'rethere, you have to be prepared to stay for an extended period of time." "And once you're prepared to stay for an extended period of time, and the first handful of people, four people, six people, eight people, learn to live off the land to the extent that that can be done," "learn to make Mars their home for more than a few days, once you do that, you've hammered your first piton in the great mountain of colonizing another planet." "If you establish first a cargo route and then a human transportation route, you have to imagine that by a year like 2060, you have a thriving civilization on Mars." "It's gonna be this normal part of life." "There'll be people going there for college, people are going to be in long distance relationships." "There will be people born on Mars who want to go to Earth for a stint to see the Eiffel Tower in the flesh, to see the Sphinx in the flesh." "If we could have a Mars colony, that would just be so cool, to put footprints on Mars and now we are having life living there." "We can put people there." "We can have people live there." "We could even terraform it if we really tried." "What we're talking about eventually is a blue-green planet with maybe 7 billion of its own people on it." "And you could look at a picture of a gorgeous green mountain and a lake and not know what planet you're looking at." "It'sa brandnewplanet, who knows what future economies await us on that planetary surface?" "Even if you can't think of one now, it doesn't mean there isn't one." "And especially given the history of exploration and discovery, there probably will be." "Whenyougo somewhereelse and live in a wild, rustic life, you've made the decision that that kind of life, the world you're building, is more valuable to you than the world that's already built." "Your motivation is to live here, to settle here, to die here." "Because what you have in mind is three, five, a hundred generations beyond you, and you've made the decision that you're going to be the first stake in the ground of that new world." "Tell Orion that you're gonna start  their primary ingress checklist for Commander and Pilot and DDP 1 and 2 and B 1 and 2." "All right, so...you first, Orion, on F1." "Primary ingress checklist for Pilot and Commander..." "All right, IDP CR22 power is on." "Major functions set to DNC." "We ordered that pizza 45 minutes ago." "It's been over 30 minutes." "It's free now." "No it's not." "They stopped doing that anyway." "I want my free pizza!" " All checklists are done." " Yay!" "Ascent procedures." "Everyone switch to ascent procedures." "Five, four, three, two, one..." "Oh my goodness!" "That is amazing." "One thing that's impressed me the most, of anything else, is that kids today have that same drive, that same interest, that same passion for space exploration that I had as a young boy watching the first American launch into space." " That's a lot of retro." " All right, listen up Orion." "Now we're done with launch so start focusing on our checklist again." "Our engines are turned off." "We are good to unbuckle." "I'm floating around in the most peculiar way." "Early this morning, the Space Launch System launched from Cape Canaveral, carrying along with it the Orion capsule and six brave Americans on their way to go boldly where no man has ever gone before." "Let's do this!" "Exploration is absolutely embedded in our DNA." "If we are on this hill, we want to know what's on the next hill." "We cannot help ourselves." "There's no reason for us not to surrender to that impulse." "The first steps on Mars won't just be a national moment of pride, but really a worldwide moment of pride, and ultimately, I think, kicks off this sense of exploration on the right foot, of one that is as an entirely global experience." "Ihavegoodevidence that space matters to the hearts and minds of people." "There's something special, I think, about the night sky and about the universe that lives within us." "There are two questions that get everybody." "The first one is: where did we come from?" "Where did we all come from?" "How did we get here?" "And the other question is:" "are we alone in the universe?" "If we were to discover evidence of life, or stranger still, something alive on Mars today, it would change the course of human history in the same way astronomy has humbled us in the past." "The Earth is not flat." "We are not the center of it." "The Sun's the center of it." "Wait!" "The Sun's not the center of it." "We're just one more sun in this galactic disc." "And we're not the only galaxy!" "We're not by any means!" "We're just these specks on a speck orbiting specks in specklessness." "We're nothing." "Yet, we can understand that." "Humanshavelived a thousand centuries so far." "This century is the first time where suddenly going to Mars is an option." "I think it's awesome that we have an entire generation of people who want to go to into space, who want to go Mars, who want to be STEM fluent." "But I can tell you that all of that will fall on fallow soil, if there isn't some big mission on the other side of that educational pipeline where they can apply this energy and this enthusiasm." "It's our duty to breathe life and fire into the imagination of these young people so they will say, "Yes!" "I want to become an astronaut!" "I want to explore outer space!"" "Because our true place is among the stars." "Oh wow, we're landing." "We're landing." "Guys, we're landing." "We are frickin' landing on Mars right now." "Dude, dude, dude." "We just landed." "We're on Mars." "I hope that my generation will be defined by Mars." "I can't think of a better thing to be defined by!" "Somebody from my generation will step out of the lander and put their footprint down in the Martian soil." "If I could contribute to that in any way, it would be an amazing experience." "This date will go down in history." "After a long 183-day journey, six Americans have finally exited the all-terra lander and put their boots in the red Martian soil." "The Mars Generation is...us." "Explorationis ingrained within our DNA." "Human beings, they want to learn about the cosmos." "We know so little about space." "There's so much to do and so much to learn." "And I want to do it all." "Like, can you imagine if there was just nothing else?" "That we had found everything there is to find?" "Life would be so boring!" "Let's go." "Let's go to Mars." "It'sbeenlongenough." "We need to go for it, full speed." "Because humans need to do significant things, because that's just how humanity is." "We gotta get off this planet and we gotta land on Mars."