Marina: I definitely think about it, because this year, NASA announced that it’s going to form a committee dedicated to studying UAPs. Isabel: Do you think about UAPs-unidentified aerial phenomena, or what many of us know as unidentified flying objects-at all? We’re going to try to go together.” The future of humans on Mars probably involves Elon Musk, whatever way you want to feel about that. And I could see NASA saying, “We can’t let Elon Musk go alone and beat us. When people do reach Mars, it might be a collaborative effort from NASA and SpaceX, because SpaceX has benefited hugely from NASA contracts and funding over the years. I talked to someone who used to work at NASA on Mars programs who said that he doesn’t think astronauts will reach the red planet until the 2060s. NASA right now is focused on the moon, and it has said that a Mars landing is probably going to be pushed to the late 2030s or early 2040s. It would be extremely difficult for humans to survive there, let alone feel pretty comfortable there. So when I hear people say, “Let’s make Mars our next home,” I think we really need to rethink the word home in that context. That said, Mars would be a terrible place to live. But we’ve seen what SpaceX can do with smaller rockets, and you really can’t count the company out. It hasn’t reached orbit yet they’re still in the testing phase. SpaceX is developing its own giant rocket to be able to go to the moon and to Mars. At the time, you could’ve been like, “Good luck with that.” But today, 20 years later, the man runs the most successful commercial space company in the world. ![]() Marina: Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 with the express purpose of using that company to get to Mars. Isabel: What do you make of Elon Musk’s ambitions to find a new home for humanity on Mars? But I think it’s more likely that we’ll discover signs of microbial life in our own solar system in our lifetime than that we’ll hear from some distant alien civilization. When we talk about the search for life, people might think of distant messages from faraway stars reaching Earth. This mission won’t land on Europa, but it will stay in orbit for long enough and with sophisticated-enough science instruments that it could potentially detect not life necessarily, but whether Europa is a good place for life to arise. Salty oceans are fantastic, because they could have the right conditions for microbial life to emerge. But scientists believe that beneath that icy exterior is a salty ocean. Europa just looks like a giant ice ball, completely frozen over. That probe is going to launch in October of 2024. Marina: One mission that’s particularly exciting is a NASA mission to Europa, an icy moon of Jupiter. Isabel: What are some big questions that space experts are hoping to answer in the next few decades? What kinds of discoveries are they anticipating? The Artemis astronauts won’t all be white men with military backgrounds, which was for the most part what the Apollo astronaut corps was. ![]() This time around, NASA wants to create a sustained presence on the moon, to have a few outposts that astronauts can visit regularly and do science experiments, and also learn how to live and work in a really hostile environment.Īnother key difference that NASA would mention is that they want to have diverse crews for that triumphant return. Why are we going back? The Apollo missions-six landings in total-were pretty “go there and come back”–type missions. But spaceflight is a long game, and schedules can shift. Marina Koren: NASA is mounting a new program called Artemis (the sister of Apollo in mythology) to get American astronauts back on the moon again within this decade. Why now, after 50 years? And how soon should we expect it to happen? Isabel Fattal: America is undertaking a program to send astronauts back to the moon.
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