Dean gets to the root of this question with guest Oliver Morton, Senior Editor for The Economist and author of the book The Moon: A History for the Future. They discuss Musk's likelihood for a Mars landing, and what the future of private space travel could mean for present Earthlings.
Should you be on the rescue-ship to Mars? Tell us what you think by writing to us at lookingup@wvxu.org and let us know what job skills will get you to Mars someday.
Additional resources referenced in this episode:
- Can Musk Put People on Mars? (The Economist)
- Gayle King Says Her Space Mission Was 'Surreal' (Inside Edition)
- William Shatner's first remarks back on Earth (CNET)
- Valentina Tereshkova, the first ever spacewoman, recalled piloting Vostok 6 (BBC)
- Katy Perry, Gayle King & All-Female Crew on Blue Origin Space Launch (CSPAN)
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
Looking Up is transcribed using a combination of AI speech recognition and human editors. It may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting in print.
[Blue Origin Launch]: Good luck and Godspeed. Ladies, we're cheering you on. Let's launch This Rocket. Direct
Termination System is armed, t-minus ten… nine…eight…seven…six…five…four…command engine Start...2…1...
Dean Regas: Blast off! Blue Origin the rocket company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos has, as of this taping, launched 11 missions with humans into space.
[Blue Origin Launch]: New Shepard has cleared the tower.
Dean Regas: Anyway, the most recent mission saw the first all-female crew since Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova flew solo around the earth in 1963. This is a big deal. On board this mission in 2025 were celebrities like Singer Katy Perry-
[Katy Perry]: I think I'm gonna sing. I'm gonna sing a little bit. I've gotta sing in space.
Dean Regas: And TV personality Gayle King.
[Gayle King]: It was surreal for me, but I feel so proud that I did it.
Dean Regas: And in 2021, William Shatner, you know, the actor who played Captain Kirk on the original Star Trek also went up and found the experience so moving…
[William Shatner]: What you have given me is the most profound experience I can imagine.
Dean Regas: But what's really going on here? Are these astronauts? Space tourists? I don't know, what do you call them? Are they even really going into space? And what are private space companies contributing to the greater mission? Could all this be one small step on the way to a larger leap to Mars?
From the studios of Cincinnati Public Radio, I'm your host, Dean Regas, and this is looking up the show that takes you deep into the cosmos or just to the telescope in your backyard to learn more about what makes this amazing universe of ours so great.
My guest today has delved deep into the world of private space travel. It is Oliver Morton, a lead editor at The Economist and author of The Moon: A History for the Future.
So, if you sensed any hesitation in my voice when describing the Blue Origin missions, I'm sorry. I'm not completely on board with all this stuff. I mean, I don't think this rocket, called the New Shepard after American astronaut Alan Shepard, I don't think it really goes into space. I know, I know.
I'm being really untechnical because technically it's high enough, it goes into space but come on. It doesn't even go around the earth. It just goes up 65 miles. Which I know is space. Don't tell me, I know, I know it's space, but they're only up there for 11 minutes. It seems like it's just going where some people have gone before.
I want this to be cool. I so want this to be something where we're sending people into space and that maybe someday I'll go into space. But, uh, let's just say that the, um, the public reaction to the all-female astronaut mission, uh, perhaps did not go as intended.
[Stephen Colbert]: Perry and Lauren Sanchez have vowed to go full glam. Which will mark the first time anyone has ever journeyed to space in full glam.
Dean Regas: So, for me, I recommend, if you want to really look for inspiration, it's made me revisit that space flight of Valentina Tereshkova. This was the first woman in space, the youngest woman in space. She spent three days up there and orbited the earth 48 times. In 1963, 60 plus years ago!
[Valentina Tereshkova]: For me, the most memorable moments were when I piloted the spacecraft manually. Just knowing that such a complicated machine actually abate feminine hands made me happy for womankind. It proved that they can be equal with men, not only on Earth, but in space as well.
Dean Regas: So, can private space companies send people to Mars? Or at least help governments get to Mars? Most sky watchers were kind of betting on Elon Musk and SpaceX to lead the way, but uh…hmm. A number of fiery mishaps have, uh, led to dramatic rocket explosions strewn above the Caribbean. And, you know what, it kind of led more people to wonder when we could actually see humans on the red planet.
Our guest today has pondered this more than most.
Oliver Morton: Hi, I'm Oliver Morton. I'm a senior editor at The Economist, and I'm also the author of some books about space, including Mapping Mars and The Moon: A History for the Future.
Dean Regas: Well, Oliver, thanks so much for joining me today.
Oliver Morton: It's a real pleasure. Dean.
Dean Regas: I want to start off with an article you wrote for The Economist that tries to answer the question, Can Musk put people on Mars? I mean, this is the stated goal of Elon Musk, but in your analysis, can he or any individual corporation accomplish this?
Oliver Morton: I think yes, in principle, but no, in terms of the timeframe that he's currently talking about. And the Starship vessel, which Elon Musk and SpaceX are working on, should it work as they wish it to work, should in principle be able to get people to Mars.
And it's possible in principle to build things on Mars that might allow them to come back. So, yeah, it can be done in principle, but I don't think it can be done in one presidential term.
Dean Regas: And I mean, there's so many obstacles. What are the main obstacles you think Musk and SpaceX specifically face?
Oliver Morton: Ooh, it would be quite a long list. First, they need to get their Starship to orbit, which hasn't yet been achieved. They then need to show that they can refuel the Starship on orbit. They need to get the Starship on orbit with enough capacity to take cargo and people to Mars. They need to show that the Starship.
Can get through the atmosphere of Mars and can land on a rough bit of Martian dirt that has not been prepared in any way without any sort of human control because Mars is too far away to sort of like flight by remote. And that's for actually getting there. They also need to get there in a way that keeps the astronauts moderately fit and healthy during a reasonably long exposure to very low gravity to microgravity.
And they also need to protect those astronauts against radiation during the journey to the extent possible. And then eventually they need to bring them home.
Dean Regas: Oh, just those few things. That's no problem.
Oliver Morton: I mean, I skipped a few things. I mean, they need to get the refueling systems to work, they need to be able to fly starships on a really regular basis. They need to be flying these big old spaceships as frequently as they're currently flying their much smaller Falcon Nines. There's a lot to be done.
Dean Regas: Well, those are the downsides, but are there things that you would say that these private space companies are doing well? Are there things that they're contributing to the greater goal here?
Oliver Morton: Well, it's certainly true that we wouldn't even be having this conversation if it weren't for the fact that SpaceX has done remarkable things that no one would've expected of it.
And the idea of taking what was originally a scrappy little startup and not only making a world-class rocket from scratch, developing a system for reusing that rocket on a regular basis and then getting to the stage where you can launch them a couple to three times a week from Spaceports on both sides of the United States…
You know, that's not something that, looking at the history of Boeing or Lockheed or any of the other big space companies, as were in the nineties and zeros I, no one would've expected a company to do that, more or less off its own bat. And they've been brilliantly helped by the fact that NASA encouraged this sort of entrepreneurialism setting up a system whereby they would pay for services rendered rather than just agree to pay whatever it costs to get the rocket that they said they wanted.
And that has been a huge breakthrough. But no company has done anything as well out of that, opening up of the system as SpaceX has done. They really have done remarkable things.
Dean Regas: Well, and then, you know, low earth orbit, it’s one thing going to the moon, another thing, but Mars, is a Mars mission maybe in some ways too big for a private company? You kind of indicate that Elon Musk has maybe seen some writing on the wall and is aligning himself with the current administration for a little help.
Oliver Morton: Oh, well, even if you're the richest man in the world, if you are sort of like deeply involved with the administration, you certainly wouldn't say no to a little bit of help. But SpaceX's stated goal has always been to put people on Mars. It’s one of the reasons that he's never taken the company public. And so yeah, they could do with some help.
Going back to your question about is Mars much more difficult? It's much longer. Going to Mars, staying on Mars coming back. That's, you know, a mission measured in years rather than days or weeks or months. It's not technically, in some ways, that much more difficult than going to the moon.
The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once said, “Once you get to Earth Orbit, you are halfway to anywhere,” and that's kind of true. The amount of energy you need to get up to Earth orbit is very high. Once you've got up to earth orbit, it's basically more or less as easy to go to Mars as the moon, and that's largely because Mars has an atmosphere that will slow you down once you get there.
And at the moon, you have to turn on your rockets and slow down yourself. And landing on, on getting slowed down on Mars is really doing very much the same sort of thing as getting slowed down when you reenter the Earth's atmosphere as it's meant to do in its normal operations. The difficulty is that you have to sort of like keep people alive for months and years while this is all going on.
But the real thing is the length of time people have to be out in space and vulnerable. That's really difficult to deal with.
Dean Regas: You're also the author of the book, The Moon: A History for the Future. What does exploration and habitation of the moon offer us, you know, perhaps better or worse than Mars?
Oliver Morton: The thing about the moon is that compared to everywhere else in the cosmos, it's easy to go to and that's why it was hard to go there in the 1960s, but it would've been harder to go to anywhere else.
And that's still, I think, one of the main reasons why the moon is attractive to people. Thinking about space settlement, it's also true that the moon has what we might call resources. It has water-ice, it probably has some other ices as well. It has an awful lot of sunlight.
But the moon plays a big role if you think that there's gonna be a space-based economy, which is large enough to make it worth your while to build mines and extraction plants on the moon, rather than lift everything up from earth. I don't honestly know if I think that's true, but I think people are definitely going to go back to the moon and see what they can see.
The power of the moon is the idea of having something close by the earth that is so deeply, utterly different. The moon is so lifeless, it's so lacking, so, “magnificently desolate,” as Buzz Aldrin put it. And I think it's that poetry of the moon as not a world, but an un-world from which to see the world, that for me, drives the idea of going there and seeing and experiencing the moon as a place from which to think about life in a completely different perspective.
America's program for putting Americans back on the moon is called Artemis after the sister goddess of Apollo. And when it was started in the first Trump administration throughout the Biden administration, one of the key points about Artemis was that it would expand the experience of Americans on the moon to include American women and people of color.
And all that language has now been stripped off the NASA website because the idea of the value of a diversity of viewpoints is no longer one that government agencies are allowed to endorse. And I think that's terrible because what I really want from people going back to the moon is that sense of humans, of all sorts, looking back on the earth and looking around them at a cosmically ancient emptiness and understanding those two things together.
Dean Regas: Well, Oliver, this has been great chatting with you. This has been great getting your insights. I know you've talked to a lot of people about this in the know and thought a lot about it. We really appreciate it.
Oliver Morton: Oh, it was a great pleasure talking to you, Dean. Take care.
Dean Regas: I think one of the common arguments made for establishing a human presence on Mars is that it can be our only refuge in case, you know, things really go bad here on Earth.
Well, I personally have huge problems with this, because number one, Mars is not a life raft for us. It is completely inhospitable to humans. Like the best day on Mars is still way worse than the worst day on the most extreme part of Earth. We'd have to change Mars to make it more earth-like, this is called terraforming.
And I don't know about you, but that idea of changing an entire planet gives me, uh, all sorts of feelings. I mean, like, change a planet? Why wouldn't we just improve Earth instead? I mean, that would be a lot easier.
We also just heard about how difficult, expensive, and dangerous it is to go to Mars. And I gotta be honest, I gotta look at this from a personal perspective. If Mars becomes our safety valve, not everybody's gonna get to go. I'm sorry. We're not gonna be able to transport 7 billion humans from Earth to Mars. And so the question is, am I special enough to get a seat on that escape pod?
Here's my question for you. Are you rescue worthy? Tell us what you think by writing to us at looking up@wvxu.org and let us know what job skills will get you to Mars someday.
[William Shatner]: I hope I never recover from this. I hope that I can maintain what I feel now, I don't want to lose it.
Dean Regas: Looking up with Dean Regas is a production of Cincinnati Public Radio. Kevin Reynolds and I created the podcast in 2017. Ella Rowen produces and edits our show and is totally rescue worthy. I mean, Mars needs producers, am I right?
Jenell Walton is our Vice President of Content, and Ronny Salerno is our digital platform's manager. Our theme song is Possible Light by Ziv Moran. Our social media coordinator is Hannah McFarland, and our cover art is by Nicole Tiffany. I'm Dean Regas. Keep looking up!
