Mars Mission Quotes

I could have been a bomb-disposal expert, or a volunteer for the Mars mission, or a firefighter, or something safe and sensible. But no, I had to be an historian.

To the rocket scientist, you are a problem. You are the most irritating piece of machinery he or she will ever have to deal with. You and your fluctuating metabolism, your puny memory, your frame that comes in a million different configurations. You are unpredictable. You're inconstant. You take weeks to fix. The engineer must worry about the water and oxygen and food you'll need in space, about how much extra fuel it will take to launch your shrimp cocktail and irradiated beef tacos. A solar cell or a thruster nozzle is stable and undemanding. It does not excrete or panic or fall in love with the mission commander. It has no ego. Its structural elements don't start to break down without gravity, and it works just fine without sleep. To me, you are the best thing to happen to rocket science. The human being is the machine that makes the whole endeavor so endlessly intriguing.

I guess I should explain how Mars missions work, for any layman who may be reading this.

He went to the Palo Alto public library to read about rocket engineering and started calling experts, asking to borrow their old engine manuals. At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.

Stanford University suggests that a two-year mission to Mars would have about the same effect on one’s skeleton. Would an astronaut returning from Mars run the risk of stepping out of the capsule into Earth gravity and snapping a bone?

They have this idea that they can send astronauts up and the bone loss will level off in a few months, but the evidence that has come back doesn’t support that view. If you look at a two-year mission to Mars, it’s kind of a scary prospect.

All the Ares missions use Hermes to get to and from Mars. It's really big and cost a lot so NASA only built one.

When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.

A manned mission to Mars, called for by the first President Bush in a moment of passing giddiness, was quietly dropped when someone worked out that it would cost $450 billion and probably result in the deaths of all the crew (their DNA torn to tatters by high-energy solar particles from which they could not be shielded).

Mars will not be our new home; it will be our new hotel! Because for a new place to be our own home, we need to see the things we used to see: An autumn lake, a bird singing in the misty morning or even desert camels walking in the sunset!

Girl was not to be pressured into a quick and easy answer. She took her work very seriously, and became one of the most adept Diviners in the cult by the young age of sixteen. She was quite crushed when the outsiders broke through the ancient gates of the world's Husmannsplasses and gleefully proclaimed her kind freed from a cult of fairy tales.

I applied to be a subject in a simulated Mars mission. I made it past the first round of cuts and was told that someone from the European Space Agency would call me for a phone interview later in the month. The call came at 4:30 A.M., and I did not take care to hide my irritation. I realized later that it had probably been a test, and I had failed it.

Never assume malice where stupidity will suffice.

We have yet to establish a permanent Mars colony for this reason: Trying to colonize Mars with humans is a known suicide mission that no one is talking about.

Seriously hairy shit was going down on a regular basis.

I could fly a solo mission to Mars on the back of a winged Pegasus and not impress my mother,

The first people on the historic mission to Mars are probably alive today, perhaps learning about astronomy in high school.

I may have been too casual about explaining this before, but to say the mission would be ‘risky’ is sort of like saying this book is ‘poorly written’. It’s an accurate appraisal, but it doesn’t really capture the agony of enduring it.

Space is often compared to our oceans. Throw a stone at the water and the density smothers its propulsion. Skim the stone across the surface and the propulsion is mostly preserved with minimal drag. This kind of approach could work for NASA's mission to Mars.

we will look ahead to a time when we will be able to move beyond the solar system and explore the nearby stars. Again, this mission surpasses our current technology, but fifth wave technologies will make it possible: nanoships, laser sails, ramjet fusion machines, antimatter engines.

NASA’s years of slip-sliding away—and the fact that it allowed contractors to work on a cost-plus basis—created a huge hole for entrepreneurs to walk through. The 135 shuttle missions ended up costing an average of more than $1 billion each. Somebody ought to be able to do what NASA did better, faster, and cheaper.

For the record…I didn't die on Sol 6. Certainly the rest of the crew thought I did, and I can't blame them. Maybe there'll be a day of national mourning for me, and my Wikipedia page will say, "Mark Witney is the only human being to have died on Mars." Let's see…where do I begin? The Ares Program. Mankind reaching out to Mars to send people to another planet for the very first time and expand the horizons of humanity blah, blah, blah. The Ares 1 crew did their thing and came back heroes. They got parades and fame and love of the world. Ares 2 did the same thing , in a different location in Mars. They got a firm handshake and a hot cup of coffee when they got home. Ares 3. Well, that was my mission. Okey, not MINE per se. Commander Louis was in charge. I was just one of the crew. Actually, I was the very lowest ranked member of the crew. I would only be "in command" if I were the only remaining person. What do you know? I'm in command.

the Deep Space Gateway, which will act as a refueling and resupply station for missions to Mars and the asteroids. It will be the basis for a permanent human presence in space. Construction of this lunar space station will begin in 2023 and it will be operational by 2026. Four SLS missions will be required to build it.

The United States is literally a distillation of the human spirit of exploration,” he says. “This is a land of adventurers.” That spirit needed to be rekindled in America, he felt, and the best way to do that would be to embark on a mission to colonize Mars. “To have a base on Mars would be incredibly difficult, and people will probably die along the way, just as happened in the settling of the United States. But it will be incredibly inspiring, and we must have inspiring things in the world.” Life cannot be merely about solving problems, he felt. It also had to be about pursuing great dreams. “That’s what can get us up in the morning.

The truth is that it has been possible to reach Mars for at least thirty years. Within a decade or so of the Apollo 11 mission that landed the first humans on Earth’s moon, we could have landed humans on the Red Planet. Almost every technology required has long been available. We simply have not chosen to pursue the opportunity.

This is not to suggest that Christ isn’t the source of salvation of the human soul, but I am suggesting that the mission of Christ extends far beyond the narrow spectrum of private spirituality and afterlife expectations. Jesus actually intends to save the world! And by world, I mean God’s good creation and God’s original intent for human society.

Humans experience a physical existence but are not physical beings.  Not even while in the perceived physical flesh.  Under a microscope, what we call physical, the elements that make up flesh and blood, are not physical at all.  Everything we see, taste, touch, smell and hear is illusionary sensations, created by massless vibrations birthed by mass from the star.  The same mass that gives life to creations brought here from beings originating on other star systems, who are saddled with a propagation gene, and on a mission.               What humans perceive as reality is but a mysterious electrical element that behaves in a bizarre and humanly inexplicable manner, concerning known particle physics.

It would take them only five seconds to zip to the moon, about an hour and a half to get to Mars, and a few days to reach Pluto. Rather than waiting ten years for a mission to the outer planets, we could receive new information about them from nanoships in a matter of days, and in this way we could observe the developments in the solar system very nearly in real time.

In part 2, we will look ahead to a time when we will be able to move beyond the solar system and explore the nearby stars. Again, this mission surpasses our current technology, but fifth wave technologies will make it possible: nanoships, laser sails, ramjet fusion machines, antimatter engines. Already, NASA has funded studies on the physics necessary to make interstellar travel a reality.

Together the five orbiters Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour have flown a total of 133 successful missions, an unequaled accomplishment of engineering, management, and political savvy. But it's the two disasters that people remember, that most shape the shuttle's story. The lovely dream of spaceflight I grew up with is marred by the images of Challenger and Columbia breaking apart in the sky, the lost astronauts smiling on hopefully in their portraits, oblivious. Some people took the disasters to mean the entire space program had been a lie, that the dream itself was tainted with our fallibility. But even as a child, I knew it was more complex than that. If we want to see people take risks, we have to be prepared to sometimes see them fail. The story of American spaceflight is a story with many endings, a story of how we have weighed our achievements against our failures.

Given the complexity of the chore, “escapees,” as free-floating fecal material is known in astronautical circles, plagued the crews. Below is an excerpt from the Apollo 10 mission transcript, starring Mission Commander Thomas Stafford, Lunar Module Pilot Gene Cernan, and Command Module Pilot John Young, orbiting the moon 200,000-plus miles from the nearest bathroom. CERNAN:…You know once you get out of lunar orbit, you can do a lot of things. You can power down…And what’s happening is— STAFFORD: Oh—who did it? YOUNG: Who did what? CERNAN: What? STAFFORD: Who did it? [laughter] CERNAN: Where did that come from? STAFFORD: Give me a napkin quick. There’s a turd floating through the air. YOUNG: I didn’t do it. It ain’t one of mine. CERNAN: I don’t think it’s one of mine. STAFFORD: Mine was a little more sticky than that. Throw that away. YOUNG: God almighty. [And again eight minutes later, while discussing the timing of a waste-water dump.] YOUNG: Did they say we could do it anytime? CERNAN: They said on 135. They told us that—Here’s another goddam turd. What’s the matter with you guys? Here, give me a— YOUNG/STAFFORD: [laughter]… STAFFORD: It was just floating around? CERNAN: Yes. STAFFORD: [laughter] Mine was stickier than that. YOUNG: Mine was too. It hit that bag— CERNAN: [laughter] I don’t know whose that is. I can neither claim it nor disclaim it. [laughter] YOUNG: What the hell is going on here?

Nathaniel and I’d made the decision not to have children. They aren’t conducive to a life in space, you know? I mean there’s the radiation, and the weightlessness, but more it was that I was gone all the time. I couldn’t give up the stars… but I found myself wishing that we hadn’t made that decision. Part of it was wishing that I had some connection to the next generation. More of it was wanting someone to share the burden of decision with me. What happens after Nathaniel dies? What do I have left here? More specifically, how much will I regret not going on the Mission? And if I’m in space, how much will I regret abandoning my husband to die alone?

But it was while discussing SpaceX’s grandest missions that Shotwell really came into her own and seemed to inspire the interns. Some of them clearly dreamed of becoming astronauts, and Shotwell said that working at SpaceX was almost certainly their best chance to get to space now that NASA’s astronaut corps had dwindled. Musk had made designing cool-looking, “non–Stay Puft” spacesuits a personal priority. “They can’t be clunky and nasty,” Shotwell said. “You have to do better than that.” As for where the astronauts would go: well, there were the space habitats, the moon, and, of course, Mars as options. SpaceX has already started testing a giant rocket, called the Falcon Heavy, that will take it much farther into space than the Falcon 9, and it has another, even larger spaceship on the way. “Our Falcon Heavy rocket will not take a busload of people to Mars,” she said. “So, there’s something after Heavy. We’re working on it.” To make something like that vehicle happen, she said, the SpaceX employees needed to be effective and pushy. “Make sure your output is high,” Shotwell said. “If we’re throwing a bunch of shit in your way, you need to be mouthy about it. That’s not a quality that’s widely accepted elsewhere, but it is at SpaceX.” And, if that sounded harsh, so be it. As Shotwell saw it, the commercial space race was coming down to SpaceX and China and that’s it. And in the bigger picture, the race was on to ensure man’s survival. “If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.

It is true. I did fall asleep at the wheel. We nearly went right off a cliff down into a gorge. But there were extenuating circumstances.” Ian snickered. “Are you going to pull out the cry-baby card? He had a little bitty wound he forgot to tell us about, that’s how small it was. Ever since he fell asleep he’s been trying to make us believe that contributed.” “It wasn’t little. I have a scar. A knife fight.” Sam was righteous about it. “He barely nicked you,” Ian sneered. “A tiny little slice that looked like a paper cut.” Sam extended his arm to Azami so she could see the evidence of the two-inch line of white marring his darker skin. “I bled profusely. I was weak and we hadn’t slept in days.” “Profusely?” Ian echoed. “Ha! Two drops of blood is not profuse bleeding, Knight. We hadn’t slept in days, that much is true, but the rest . . .” He trailed off, shaking his head and rolling his eyes at Azami. Azami examined the barely there scar. The knife hadn’t inflicted much damage, and Sam knew she’d seen evidence of much worse wounds. “Had you been drinking?” she asked, her eyes wide with innocence. Those long lashes fanned her cheeks as she gaze at him until his heart tripped all over itself. Sam groaned. “Don’t listen to him. I wasn’t drinking, but once we were pretty much in the middle of a hurricane in the South Pacific on a rescue mission and Ian here decides he has to go into this bar . . .” “Oh, no.” Ian burst out laughing. “You’re not telling her that story.” “You did, man. He made us all go in there, with the dirtbag we’d rescued, by the way,” Sam told Azami. “We had to climb out the windows and get on the roof at one point when the place flooded. I swear ther was a crocodile as big as a house coming right at us. We were running for our lives, laughing and trying to keep that idiot Frenchman alive.” “You said to throw him to the crocs,” Ian reminded. “What was in the bar that you had to go in?” Azami asked, clearly puzzled. “Crocodiles,” Sam and Ian said simultaneously. They both burst out laughing. Azami shook her head. “You two could be crazy. Are you making these stories up?” “Ryland wishes we made them up,” Sam said. “Seriously, we’re sneaking past this bar right in the middle of an enemy-occupied village and there’s this sign on the bar that says swim with the crocs and if you survive, free drinks forever. The wind is howling and trees are bent almost double and we’re carrying the sack of shit . . . er . . . our prize because the dirtbag refuses to run even to save his own life—” “The man is seriously heavy,” Ian interrupted. “He was kidnapped and held for ransom for two years. I guess he decided to cook for his captors so they wouldn’t treat him bad. He tried to hide in the closet when we came for him. He didn’t want to go out in the rain.” “He was the biggest pain in the ass you could imagine,” Sam continued, laughing at the memory. “He squealed every time we slipped in the mud and went down.” “The river had flooded the village,” Sam added. “We were walking through a couple of feet of water. We’re all muddy and he’s wiggling and squeaking in a high-pitched voice and Ian spots this sign hanging on the bar.

Rich Purnell sipped coffee in the silent building. Only his cubicle illuminated the otherwise dark room. Continuing with his computations, he ran a final test on the software he'd written. It passed. With a relieved sigh, he sank back in his chair. Checking the clock on his computer, he shook his head. 3:42am. Being an astrodynamicist, Rich rarely had to work late. His job was the find the exact orbits and course corrections needed for any given mission. Usually, it was one of the first parts of a project; all the other steps being based on the orbit. But this time, things were reversed. Iris needed an orbital path, and nobody knew when it would launch. A non-Hoffman Mars-transfer isn't challenging, but it does require the exact locations of Earth and Mars. Planets move as time goes by. An orbit calculated for a specific launch date will work only for that date. Even a single day's difference would result in missing Mars entirely. So Rich had to calculate many orbits. He had a range of 25 days during which Iris might launch. He calculated one orbital path for each. He began an email to his boss. "Mike", he typed, "Attached are the orbital paths for Iris, in 1-day increments. We should start peer-review and vetting so they can be officially accepted. And you were right, I was here almost all night. It wasn't that bad. Nowhere near the pain of calculating orbits for Hermes. I know you get bored when I go in to the math, so I'll summarize: The small, constant thrust of Hermes's ion drives is much harder to deal with than the large point-thrusts of presupply probes. All 25 of the orbits take 349 days, and vary only slightly in thrust duration and angle. The fuel requirement is nearly identical for the orbits and is well within the capacity of EagleEye's booster. It's too bad. Earth and Mars are really badly positioned. Heck, it's almost easier to-" He stopped typing. Furrowing his brow, he stared in to the distance. "Hmm." he said. Grabbing his coffee cup, he went to the break room for a refill. ... "Rich", said Mike. Rich Purnell concentrated on his computer screen. His cubicle was a landfill of printouts, charts, and reference books. Empty coffee cups rested on every surface; take-out packaging littered the ground. "Rich", Mike said, more forcefully. Rich looked up. "Yeah?" "What the hell are you doing?" "Just a little side project. Something I wanted to check up on." "Well... that's fine, I guess", Mike said, "but you need to do your assigned work first. I asked for those satellite adjustments two weeks ago and you still haven't done them." "I need some supercomputer time." Rich said. "You need supercomputer time to calculate routine satellite adjustments?" "No, it's for this other thing I'm working on", Rich said. "Rich, seriously. You have to do your job." Rich thought for a moment. "Would now be a good time for a vacation?" He asked. Mike sighed. "You know what, Rich? I think now would be an ideal time for you to take a vacation." "Great!" Rich smiled. "I'll start right now." "Sure", Mike said. "Go on home. Get some rest." "Oh, I'm not going home", said Rich, returning to his calculations. Mike rubbed his eyes. "Ok, whatever. About those satellite orbits...?" "I'm on vacation", Rich said without looking up. Mike shrugged and walked away.

And that’s why you are a brilliant choice for pilot. Octogenarian Grandmother Paves Way for Humanity.” “You can’t pave the stars. I’m not a grandmother. And I’m sixty-three not eighty.” “It’s a figure of speech. The point is that you’re a PR goldmine.” I had known that they asked me to helm this mission because of my age—it would be a lot to ask of someone who had a full life ahead of them. Maybe I was naive to think that my experience in establishing the Mars colony was considered valuable. How can I explain the degree to which I resented being used for publicity? This wasn’t a new thing by a long shot. My entire career has been about exploitation for publicity. I had known it, and exploited it too, once I’d realized the power of having my uniform tailored to show my shape a little more clearly. You think they would have sent me to Mars if it weren’t intended to be a colony? I was there to show all the lady housewives that they could go to space too. Posing in my flight suit, with my lips painted red, I had smiled at more cameras than my colleagues. I stared Garrett Biggs and his fork. “For someone in PR, you are awfully blunt.

Shakespeare had Polonius truly say, "The apparel oft proclaims the man." (Hamlet, act 1, sc. 3). We are affected by our own outward appearances; we tend to fill roles. If we are in our Sunday best, we have little inclination for roughhousing; if we dress for work, we are drawn to work; if we dress immodestly, we are tempted to act immodestly; if we dress like the opposite sex, we tend to lose our sexual identity or some of the characteristics that distinguish the eternal mission of our sex. Now I hope not to be misunderstood: I am not saying that we should judge one another by appearance, for that would be folly and worse; I am saying that there is a relationship between how we dress and groom ourselves and how we are inclined to feel and act. By seriously urging full conformity with the standards, we must not drive a wedge between brothers and sisters, for there are some who have not heard or do not understand. They are not to be rejected or condemned as evil, but rather loved the more, that we may patiently bring them to understand the danger to themselves and the disservice to the ideals to which they owe loyalty, if they depart from their commitments. We hope that the disregard we sometimes see is mere thoughtlessness and not deliberate. [Ensign, Mar. 1980, 2, 4]

As I was completing this book, I saw news reports quoting NASA chief Charles Bolden announcing that from now on the primary mission of America’s space agency would be to improve relations with the Muslim world. Come again? Bolden said he got the word directly from the president. “He wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science and math and engineering.” Bolden added that the International Space Station was a kind of model for NASA’s future, since it was not just a U.S. operation but included the Russians and the Chinese. Bolden, who made these remarks in an interview with Al-Jazeera, timed them to coincide with the one-year anniversary of Obama’s own Cairo address to the Muslim world.3 Bolden’s remarks provoked consternation not only among conservatives but also among famous former astronauts Neil Armstrong and John Glenn and others involved in America’s space programs. No surprise: most people think of NASA’s job as one of landing on the moon and Mars and exploring other faraway destinations. Even some of Obama’s supporters expressed puzzlement. Sure, we are all for Islamic self-esteem, and seven or eight hundred years ago the Muslims did make a couple of important discoveries, but what on earth was Obama up to here?

In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets—the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster—plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.

The Sumerian pantheon was headed by an "Olympian Circle" of twelve, for each of these supreme gods had to have a celestial counterpart, one of the twelve members of the Solar System. Indeed, the names of the gods and their planets were one and the same (except when a variety of epithets were used to describe the planet or the god's attributes). Heading the pantheon was the ruler of Nibiru, ANU whose name was synonymous with "Heaven," for he resided on Nibiru. His spouse, also a member of the Twelve, was called ANTU. Included in this group were the two principal sons of ANU: E.A ("Whose House Is Water"), Anu's Firstborn but not by Antu; and EN.LIL ("Lord of the Command") who was the Heir Apparent because his mother was Antu, a half sister of Anu. Ea was also called in Sumerian texts EN.KI ("Lord Earth"), for he had led the first mission of the Anunnaki from Nibiru to Earth and established on Earth their first colonies in the E.DIN ("Home of the Righteous Ones")—the biblical Eden. His mission was to obtain gold, for which Earth was a unique source. Not for ornamentation or because of vanity, but as away to save the atmosphere of Nibiru by suspending gold dust in that planet's stratosphere. As recorded in the Sumerian texts (and related by us in The 12th Planet and subsequent books of The Earth Chronicles), Enlil was sent to Earth to take over the command when the initial extraction methods used by Enki proved unsatisfactory. This laid the groundwork for an ongoing feud between the two half brothers and their descendants, a feud that led to Wars of the Gods; it ended with a peace treaty worked out by their sister Ninti (thereafter renamed Ninharsag). The inhabited Earth was divided between the warring clans. The three sons of Enlil—Ninurta, Sin, Adad—together with Sin's twin children, Shamash (the Sun) and Ishtar (Venus), were given the lands of Shem and Japhet, the lands of the Semites and Indo-Europeans: Sin (the Moon) lowland Mesopotamia; Ninurta, ("Enlil's Warrior," Mars) the highlands of Elam and Assyria; Adad ("The Thunderer," Mercury) Asia Minor (the land of the Hittites) and Lebanon. Ishtar was granted dominion as the goddess of the Indus Valley civilization; Shamash was given command of the spaceport in the Sinai peninsula. This division, which did not go uncontested, gave Enki and his sons the lands of Ham—the brown/black people—of Africa: the civilization of the Nile Valley and the gold mines of southern and western Africa—a vital and cherished prize. A great scientist and metallurgist, Enki's Egyptian name was Ptah ("The Developer"; a title that translated into Hephaestus by the Greeks and Vulcan by the Romans). He shared the continent with his sons; among them was the firstborn MAR.DUK ("Son of the Bright Mound") whom the Egyptians called Ra, and NIN.GISH.ZI.DA ("Lord of the Tree of Life") whom the Egyptians called Thoth (Hermes to the Greeks)—a god of secret knowledge including astronomy, mathematics, and the building of pyramids. It was the knowledge imparted by this pantheon, the needs of the gods who had come to Earth, and the leadership of Thoth, that directed the African Olmecs and the bearded Near Easterners to the other side of the world. And having arrived in Mesoamerica on the Gulf coast—just as the Spaniards, aided by the same sea currents, did millennia later—they cut across the Mesoamerican isthmus at its narrowest neck and—just like the Spaniards due to the same geography—sailed down from the Pacific coast of Mesoamerica southward, to the lands of Central America and beyond. For that is where the gold was, in Spanish times and before.

How’d you get the job?” says Lynn. “You’re not that special.” “It was more because of where I was after the simulation attack. Smack-dab in a pack of Dauntless traitors. I decided to go with it,” he says. “Not sure about Tori, though.” “She transferred from Erudite,” I say. What I don’t say, because I’m sure she wouldn’t want everyone to know, is that Tori probably seemed explosive in Erudite headquarters because they murdered her brother for being Divergent. She told me once that she was waiting for an opportunity to get revenge. “Oh,” says Zeke. “How do you know that?” “Well, all the faction transfers have a secret club,” I say, leaning back in my chair. “We meet every third Thursday.” Zeke snorts. “Where’s Four?” says Uriah, checking his watch. “Should we start without him?” “We can’t,” says Zeke. “He’s getting The Info.” Uriah nods like that means something. Then he pauses and says, “What info, again?” “The info about Kang’s little peacemaking meeting with Jeanine,” says Zeke. “Obviously.” Across the room, I see Christina sitting at a table with her sister. They are both reading something. My entire body tenses. Cara, Will’s older sister, is walking across the room toward Christina’s table. I duck my head. “What?” Uriah says, looking over his shoulder. I want to punch him. “Stop it!” I say. “Could you be any more obvious?” I lean forward, holding my arms on the table. “Will’s sister is over there.” “Yeah, I talked to her about getting out of Erudite once, while I was there,” says Zeke. “Said she saw an Abnegation woman get killed while she was on a mission for Jeanine and couldn’t stomach it anymore.” “Are we sure she’s not just an Erudite spy?” Lynn says. “Lynn, she saved half our faction from this stuff,” says Marlene, tapping the bandage on her arm from where the Dauntless traitors shot her. “Well, half of half of our faction.” “In some circles they call that a quarter, Mar,” Lynn says.

Beginning in 2011, SpaceX won a series of contracts from NASA to develop rockets that could take humans to the International Space Station, a task made crucial by the retirement of the Space Shuttle. To fulfill that mission, it needed to add to its facilities at Cape Canaveral’s Pad 40, and Musk set his sights on leasing the most storied launch facility there, Pad 39A. Pad 39A had been center stage for America’s Space Age dreams, burned into the memories of a television generation that held its collective breath when the countdowns got to “Ten, nine, eight…” Neil Armstrong’s mission to the moon that Bezos watched as a kid blasted off from Pad 39A in 1969, as did the last manned moon mission, in 1972. So did the first Space Shuttle mission, in 1981, and the last, in 2011. But by 2013, with the Shuttle program grounded and America’s half-century of space aspirations ending with bangs and whimpers, Pad 39A was rusting away and vines were sprouting through its flame trench. NASA was eager to lease it. The obvious customer was Musk, whose Falcon 9 rockets had already launched on cargo missions from the nearby Pad 40, where Obama had visited. But when the lease was put out for bids, Jeff Bezos—for both sentimental and practical reasons—decided to compete for it. When NASA ended up awarding the lease to SpaceX, Bezos sued. Musk was furious, declaring that it was ridiculous for Blue Origin to contest the lease “when they haven’t even gotten so much as a toothpick to orbit.” He ridiculed Bezos’s rockets, pointing out that they were capable only of popping up to the edge of space and then falling back; they lacked the far greater thrust necessary to break the Earth’s gravity and go into orbit. “If they do somehow show up in the next five years with a vehicle qualified to NASA’s human rating standards that can dock with the Space Station, which is what Pad 39A is meant to do, we will gladly accommodate their needs,” Musk said. “Frankly, I think we are more likely to discover unicorns dancing in the flame duct.” The battle of the sci-fi barons had blasted off. One SpaceX employee bought dozens of inflatable toy unicorns and photographed them in the pad’s flame duct. Bezos was eventually able to lease a nearby launch complex at Cape Canaveral, Pad 36, which had been the origin of missions to Mars and Venus. So the competition of the boyish billionaires was set to continue. The transfer of these hallowed pads represented, both symbolically and in practice, John F. Kennedy’s torch of space exploration being passed from government to the private sector—from a once-glorious but now sclerotic NASA to a new breed of mission-driven pioneers.

With Juno's launch, Dawn's arrival at Vesta, MESSENGER's arrival at Mercury, the Stardust flyby of Tempel l, and the launches of the Mars Science Laboratory, Fobos-Grunt, and the insertion into lunar orbit of the GRAIL (Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory) for the Disocvery program, 2011 was another landmark year for solar system exploration. This was even more remarkable for the fact that, except for the loss of Fobos-Grunt, all of these missions were run by NASA, an agency which had been criticized as having "a great future behind it" as a result of the absence of a clear vision by politicians for manned spaceflight after the retirment of the Space Shuttle.

THE SHEER COMPLEXITY OF PLUTO The diversity of phenomena seen on Pluto was far beyond what anyone, even New Horizons team members, expected to find on such a small planet so cold and far from the Sun. Ground fogs, high-altitude hazes, possible clouds, canyons, towering mountains, faults, polar caps, apparent dune fields, suspected ice volcanoes, glaciers, evidence for flowing (and even standing) liquids in the past, and more. This little red planet perched 3 billion miles away in the Kuiper Belt packed more punch than any other known small world explored, and indeed more punch than many much larger worlds. The variety of terrains, its complex interactions between the surface and the atmosphere, and the wide range of surface ages even prompted the New Horizons team to adopt the slogan “Pluto is the new Mars.

Let me hypothesize a political scenario on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’ s landing on the moon, in 2019. The U.S. President, whoever that may be, takes the opportunity to direct the future of human space exploration, pioneered by Americans, by stating in a speech: “I believe that this nation should commit itself, within two decades, to establish permanence on the planet Mars.

Have you ever heard of a biodome?”  Cameron wanted to blink and ask the man to repeat himself.  “They kept trying them, before all this started,” Andreus continued. “In the years before the first Mars missions, they ramped up. There was one in Canada, another in Europe. Truly isolated environments. But do you know why they’re so difficult to pull off in the long term?”  The question was several paces ahead of Cameron. He knew nothing about biodomes beyond the concept: to wall off a piece of nature and see if it could sustain itself with no exchange beyond the bubble.  Cameron shook his head.  “It’s because nobody really understands the complex interactions of an ecosystem,” Nathan said, still glancing toward the window. “There’s the question of what eats what and what breathes what — biologist, ecologist stuff. But I think there’s a lot they’re forgetting, because it’s on a higher level. A thinking level perhaps. Like how a zoo animal will never truly behave like a wild one simply because it’s not free to wander.

Pour votre question concernant la vie du Prophète, la conception la plus orthodoxe est que l’impeccabilité appartient réellement à tous les prophètes, de sorte que, si même il se trouve dans leurs actions quelque chose qui peut sembler choquant, cela même doit s’expliquer par des raisons qui dépassent le point de vue de l’humanité ordinaire (à un degré moindre, cela s’applique aussi aux actions de tous ceux qui ont atteint un certain degré d’initiation). D’un autre côté, la mission d’un rasûl, par là même qu’elle s’adresse à tous les hommes indistinctement, implique une façon d’agir où n’apparaissent pas les réalisations d’ordre ésotérique (ce qui constitue d’ailleurs une sorte de sacrifice pour celui qui est revêtu de cette mission). C’est pourquoi certains disent aussi que ce qui serait le plus intéressant au point de vue initiatique, s’il était possible de le connaître exactement, c’est la période de la vie de Mohammed antérieure à la risâlah (et ceci s’applique également à la « vie cachée » du Christ par rapport à sa « vie publique » : ces deux expressions, en elles-mêmes, s’accordent du reste tout à fait avec ce que je viens de dire et l’indiquent presque explicitement). II est d’ailleurs bien entendu que les considérations historiques n’ont pas d’intérêt en elles-mêmes, mais seulement par ce qu’elles traduisent de certaines vérités doctrinales. Enfin, on ne peut pas négliger, dans une tradition qui forme nécessairement un tout, ce qui ne concerne pas directement la réalisation métaphysique (et il y a de tels éléments dans la tradition hindoue comme dans les autres, puisqu’elle implique aussi, par exemple, une législation) ; il faut plutôt s’efforcer de le comprendre par rapport à cette réalisation, ce qui revient en somme à en rechercher le « sens intérieur ». Lettre de René Guénon à Louis Caudron d’Amiens, Le Caire, 22 mars 1936.

Her work would inform mission control if the first American satellite would be a success or a crushing failure.

Spacecraft flying at distance from the Earth are particularly vulnerable as they are away from the protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere. A powerful solar flare in August 1972 occurred between the two last Apollo manned missions to the Moon. Had the flare struck during one of those missions, when the astronauts were outside the Earth’s protection, the radiation dose received on board could well have been fatal. Major solar flares are relatively rare events, but are a worrying risk for future manned space missions, especially to more distant destinations such as Mars where the extended journey time increases the likelihood of a catastrophic event en route. This is a useful reminder that planet Earth not only provides humans with an atmosphere which we can breathe but also a magnetic shield which protects us from deadly cosmic radiation.

Future destinations in our solar system neighborhood include potential probe missions to a few moons of Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune -- mainly by virtue of them being possible candidates for life, with their large oceans buried beneath icy crusts, plus intense volcanic activity. But getting humans to explore these possibly habitable worlds is a big issue in space travel. The record for the fastest-ever human spaceflight was set by the Apollo 10 crew as they gravita­tionally slingshotted around the Moon on their way back to Earth in May 1969. They hit a top speed of 39,897 kilo­meters per hour (24,791 miles per hour); at that speed you could make it from New York to Sydney and back in under one hour. Although that sounds fast, we've since recorded un-crewed space probes reaching much higher speeds, with the crown currently held by NASA's Juno probe, which, when it entered orbit around Jupiter, was traveling at 266,000 kilometers per hour (165,000 miles per hour). To put this into perspective, it took the Apollo 10 mission four days to reach the Moon; Opportunity took eight months to get to Mars; and Juno took five years to reach Jupiter. The distances in our solar system with our current spaceflight technology make planning for long-term crewed explora­tion missions extremely difficult." "So, will we ever explore beyond the edge of the solar system itself? The NASA Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft were launched back in 1977 with extended flyby missions to the outer gas giant planets of Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 2 even had flyby encounters with Uranus and Neptune -- it's the only probe ever to have visited these two planets. "The detailed images you see of Uranus and Neptune were all taken by Voyager 2. Its final flyby of Neptune was in October 1989, and since then, it has been traveling ever farther from the Sun, to the far reaches of the solar sys­tem, communicating the properties of the space around it with Earth the entire time. In February 2019, Voyager 2 reported a massive drop off in the number of solar wind particles it was detecting and a huge jump in cosmic ray particles from outer space. At that point, it had finally left the solar system, forty-one years and five months after being launched from Earth. "Voyager 1 was the first craft to leave the solar system in August 2012, and it is now the most distant synthetic object from Earth at roughly 21.5 billion kilometers (13.5 billion miles) away. Voyager 2 is ever so slightly closer to us at 18 billion kilometers (11 billion miles) away. Although we may ultimately lose contact with the Voyager probes, they will continue to move ever farther away from the Sun with nothing to slow them down or impede them. For this reason, both Voyager crafts carry a recording of sounds from Earth, including greetings in fifty-five differ­ent languages, music styles from around the world, and sounds from nature -- just in case intelligent life forms happen upon the probes in the far distant future when the future of humanity is unknown.

Dirk Visser was a compromise to Mars and his organization. Mars had no reason to believe that the Dutch banker who worked in Luxembourg knew his identity, but he was the private banker of his traitor high within the ranks of the CIA.

Space Exploration Ethics 101 If we can colonize Mars, we can heal the Earth. But that's not the point here. The point is, we gotta explore space just like we gotta explore anything unknown - but we must do so as humble scientists, not as steroid-pumped, illegitimate offspring of musky retards like Columbus. We gotta explore space just like we explore the Arctic. Humankind has several outposts in the Arctic, dedicated solely to research - our endeavors into other planets oughta be exactly like that. Otherwise, what starts out as space exploration will soon turn into space imperialism, and will do to other planets what white terrorists have been doing to the indegenous people on earth for ages. Therefore, focus on space exploration, not on space colonization. Let me put this into perspective. NASA, ISRO, CNSA, ESA, KARI, JAXA (and more) - these represent the real democratic aspirations of humankind's endeavors of curiosity into space, whereas SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic these are the new-age posterboys of space imperialism. All I say is this, O Brave Explorers of Space - your mission is to explore the universe to facilitate human welfare, not to be some retarded billionaire's backboneless underwear. Beware, I repeat - space exploration doesn't turn into space imperialism!

Missions to Mars are basically sandbox play to these life-forms. And wouldn’t you know, they came here with the express purpose of neutralizing a barbaric species before more harmful space exploration practices could be established. Pretty much the Space Age equivalent of “Hey kid, step away from the hot stove before you burn your mitts off!

Zero gravity is part of the reason NASA price tags seem so extravagant. For every new piece of equipment that goes up on a mission—every pump, fan, throttle, widget—a prototype must be flown on the C-9 to be sure it works in weightlessness.

In the Mission District of San Francisco, observant passersby can discover the heroic history behind a fire hydrant that sits on an otherwise ordinary sidewalk. In the wake of the 1906 earthquake that shook San Francisco, a great blaze swept through the city. Many of the water mains failed and other lines ran dry, but one hydrant continued to function. This bit of infrastructure is credited with saving the Mission District from total destruction. Today, the hydrant has been painted gold and its importance has been further memorialized with an adjacent plaque. The small marker tells a huge city-defining tale of tragedy and triumph and highlights a moment in time that reshaped a metropolis.

Getting to Mars would cost serious money. So Musk combined, as he often did, an aspirational mission with a practical business plan.

The more he thought about space, the more important its exploration seemed to him. He felt as if the public had lost some of its ambition and hope for the future. The average person might see space exploration as a waste of time and effort and rib him for talking about the subject, but Musk thought about interplanetary travel in a very earnest way. He wanted to inspire the masses and reinvigorate their passion for science, conquest, and the promise of technology. His fears that mankind had lost much of its will to push the boundaries were reinforced one day when Musk went to the NASA website. He’d expected to find a detailed plan for exploring Mars and instead found bupkis. “At first I thought, jeez, maybe I’m just looking in the wrong place,” Musk once told Wired. “Why was there no plan, no schedule? There was nothing. It seemed crazy.” Musk believed that the very idea of America was intertwined with humanity’s desire to explore. He found it sad that the American agency tasked with doing audacious things in space and exploring new frontiers as its mission seemed to have no serious interest in investigating Mars at all. The spirit of Manifest Destiny had been deflated or maybe even come to a depressing end, and hardly anyone seemed to care. Like

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LaMar S. Williams, an employee in the Missionary Department, who began to send pamphlets and overruns of the church magazines each month, sometimes several hundred pounds per shipment.94 A short time later, in 1960, church leaders requested that Glen G. Fisher, who had just been released as president of the South African Mission, visit Nigeria on his way home

If you hate people and think human extinction is okay, then fuck it,” Shotwell said. “Don’t go to space. If you think it is worth humans doing some risk management and finding a second place to go live, then you should be focused on this issue and willing to spend some money. I am pretty sure we will be selected by NASA to drop landers and rovers off on Mars. Then the first SpaceX mission will be to drop off a bunch of supplies, so that once people get there, there will be places to live and food to eat and stuff for them to do.

Even the most elite of engineers commits the most mundane and costly of errors. In late 1998, NASA launched the Mars Climate Orbiter on a daunting nine-month trip to Mars, a mission that fewer than half the world’s launched probes headed for that destination have completed successfully. This $327.6 million calamity crashed and burned indeed, due not to the flip of fate’s coin, but rather a simple snafu. The spacecraft came too close to Mars and disintegrated in its atmosphere. The source of the navigational bungle? One system expected to receive information in metric units (newton-seconds), but a computer programmer for another system had it speak in English imperial units (pound-seconds). Oops.

My father, Edwin Eugene Aldrin, was an engineer and an aviation pioneer—and a friend of Charles Lindbergh and Orville Wright.

Phobos is the innermost moon of Mars, only 16.7 miles (26.9 kilometers) in diameter but the larger of the two moons. Diminutive Deimos is a little over 7 miles (11 kilometers) in breadth. Scientifically, both Martian moons are oddballs. There is continual dispute as to where they came from. Just how did they get there? Conjecture about them being captured asteroids or cogenerated with Mars is debatable. These two objects are a cosmic detective story, and we need more clues to sort out their true nature. Years ago I stirred up a little more than Phobos dust by calling attention to a strange feature spotted on that moon. I termed this oddity a monolith, a very unusual structure. While there are those who view it as a large, rectangular boulder, visiting Phobos can categorize this curious creation, put there by the universe, or God if you prefer.

The Power of Facebook Facebook has 800 millions members. They have thepower to overthrow tyrannical governments, collectively find the cure for cancer, send a manned space mission to Mars or overcome starvation in all Third world countries by giving money. What do Facebook users do with such amazing power? Collect and clear brush in Farmville.

I have a message in a time bottle for the candidate who wins the 2016 election for the U.S. presidency. There’s opportunity to make a bold statement on the occasion of the July 2019 50th anniversary of the first humans to land on the moon: “I believe this nation should commit itself, within two decades, to commencing American permanence on the planet Mars.

The airless moon receives more than 13,000 terawatts of solar power. Harnessing just one percent of that sunlight could satisfy Earth’s power needs. Criswell

According to Professor Ryan Cragun, churches cost America about $71 billion per year in nonprofit property-tax exemptions alone. That’s enough for twenty-eight missions to Mars per year,10 or 1.5 million teachers11 or 1.4 million police officers12 per year.

Going Public Per my recent comments, I am increasingly concerned about SpaceX going public before the Mars transport system is in place. Creating the technology needed to establish life on Mars is and always has been the fundamental goal of SpaceX. If being a public company diminishes that likelihood, then we should not do so until Mars is secure. This is something that I am open to reconsidering, but, given my experiences with Tesla and SolarCity, I am hesitant to foist being public on SpaceX, especially given the long term nature of our mission. Some at SpaceX who have not been through a public company experience may think that being public is desirable. This is not so. Public company stocks, particularly if big step changes in technology are involved, go through extreme volatility, both for reasons of internal execution and for reasons that have nothing to do with anything except the economy. This causes people to be distracted by the manic-depressive nature of the stock instead of creating great products. For those who are under the impression that they are so clever that they can outsmart public market investors and would sell SpaceX stock at the “right time,” let me relieve you of any such notion. If you really are better than most hedge fund managers, then there is no need to worry about the value of your SpaceX stock, as you can just invest in other public company stocks and make billions of dollars in the market.

Water is doled out as if it were being squeezed from the atmosphere by robots; each person is allowed eight minutes of shower time a week. The six crew members keep in touch with mission control only by computer, with a twenty-minute lag in each direction to simulate communication from Mars, and they leave the dome only on E.V.A.—extra-vehicular activity—wearing Velcro-sealed approximations of spacesuits.

In Gujarat if you travel by autorickshaw the fair is ten rupees per kilometre, but friends, we have achieved Mission Mars at seven rupees per kilometre. That is less than the budget of a Hollywood film. And we have achieved this in our first attempt.’ This

At a gathering of PayPal alumni in Las Vegas, he sat in a cabana by the pool reading a tattered manual for a Russian rocket engine. When one of the alums, Mark Woolway, asked him what he planned to do next, Musk answered, “I’m going to colonize Mars. My mission in life is to make mankind a multiplanetary civilization.” Woolway’s reaction was unsurprising. “Dude, you’re bananas.

Lu Chan stepped into the galley. “We’ll be ready in ten for a preliminary mission brief.” “That gives me just enough time to show you how to use the espresso machine, Lu.” Paolio jumped and grabbed a little cup from a storage unit. “Paolio, show me later. I have to get ready for the brief.” “Nonsense, you have plenty of time.

Stone went through two more corrections, and five sharp braking maneuvers. Then, maybe half a mile from the booster, he took the Apollo on a short, angular inspection sweep. The reaction control systems bit sharply, rattling York against her restraint. York watched the cluster roll with silent grace past her window. The booster cluster was squat, pregnant with fuel. Its heart was a fat MS-II booster, a Saturn second stage, modified to serve as an orbital injector. Fixed to the front of the MS-II was an MS-IVB, a modified Saturn third stage, a narrower cylinder. To either side of the MS-II were fixed the two External Tanks, fat, silvery cylinders as long and as wide as the MS-II stage itself. The supplementary tanks carried more than two million pounds of liquid oxygen and hydrogen, propellant Ares would need to break clear of Earth orbit. The MS-II and its tanks looked like three fat sausages, side by side, with the slimmer pencil shape of the MS-IVB protruding from the center. The rest of the Ares stack—the Mission Module, MEM, and Apollo—would be docked onto the front of the MS-IVB to complete the assembly of the first Mars ship, a needle well over three hundred feet long.

Steve Squyres, who led the Mars Exploration Rover Mission, described perfectly the thrill of collaboration:

The first of those, the preliminary design review, or PDR, usually takes place about four years, sometimes more, before the scheduled launch. The team has to convince the review board that it has solid concepts for all major aspects of the mission.

Yes, our century is called the 21st century, but some countries are in the 16th century, some leaders in the 9th century, some people in the 4th century! It is an impossible mission to bring the whole world and all people to the same century! People or countries will always live in a different century! While some has left the religion issues behind, some others will still be the slaves of religion! While some is heading for Mars, some others will start building cars!

reading the text copy. “Where three protestors against the launch of the armed American space mission to investigate the landing of the Visitor starship on Mars set themselves on fire. The identities of the dead have not yet been determined, but nothing of the sort has been seen since the Vietnam War protests in the 1960s.” “Jesus,” Lee murmured. “The tumult and chaos outside the houses of power in the Capitol were mirrored by the violence within the halls of the House of Representatives.” “Warmongering terrorists from this administration are going to drag us into a war!” Morales recognized the congressman screaming the accusation. He was from California because of course he was, a slender dagger of a man dressed in a suit that cost more than Morales made in a month, though he styled himself as a champion of the poor. “Not just with the Russians, but with advanced aliens who could destroy this entire planet!” Spittle flecked from his mouth as he clutched the microphone against the grip of the sergeant-at-arms who tried to pull him away, and the Speaker of the House slammed her gavel. “You

Jim Lovell seemed to do most of his displacing on the Gemini VII nutritionist. “Note to Dr. Chance,” says Lovell to Mission Control at one point in the mission transcript. “It looks like we’re in a snow storm with crumbs from the beef sandwiches. At 300 dollars a meal! I think you can do better than this.” Seven hours later, he gets back on the mic: “Another memo to Dr. Chance: Chicken with vegetables, Serial Number FC680, neck is almost sealed shut. You can’t even squeeze it out…. Continuing same memo to Dr. Chance: Just opened the seals; chicken with vegetables all over window at this time.

Back in mid-1997, the candy company Mars noticed an unexpected uptick in sales of its Mars bar. ... What had happened? NASA had happened. Specifically, NASA's Pathfinder mission. ... Pathfinder's destination? Mars.

one: decline the mission.” Luke smiled. “I’m afraid you’re no longer my commanding officer. Your orders don’t carry a lot of weight these days. Sir.” Don’s eyes met Luke’s. He

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There was no need to burn our ships upon arrival, like the explorers of old, to ensure the crew's dedication to the mission. Instead, we'd burned our home.

Among American newspapers, the New York Times offered by far the best and most extensive coverage of the war in Angola, and it was the New York Times that first revealed the existence of a U.S. covert operation there. In a front-page article on September 25, Leslie Gelb wrote that “millions of dollars are being poured covertly into Portugal and Angola by East and West,” including the Soviet Union and the United States. (The Soviets, he hastened to say, were “far more” involved in both Portugal and Angola than the Americans.)60 The article provoked nothing but total silence. “It was, and still is, a mystery to me why the Gelb report had so little public impact in the United States when it was published,” Nathaniel Davis writes.61 The explanation is suggested by a stern editorial in the Washington Post that appeared two days after Gelb’s article. The editorial endorsed the covert operation in Portugal, but not that in Angola. “The operation there seems much closer to the questionable crudely anti-communist adventures that have so marred the CIA’s past,” it observed. But this was not the point. The point was that the secret had been betrayed: “The disclosures illuminate the strange new semi-public setting in which ‘secret’ operations must now be devised. . . . Some would consider this anticipation of exposure as a healthy deterrent or even as just retribution for past excesses. We find it deplorable. The United States still has, we believe, reason to conduct certain covert operations abroad—Portugal is an excellent example. It should not be necessary to point out that covert operations must be covert. ‘National security’ unquestionably has been overworked as a rationale for secrecy but it has not lost all validity.”62

By the way, while Neil was the first human to step onto the moon, I’m the first alien from another world to enter a spacecraft that was going to Earth.

Our space agencies won’t be able to push out farther into space, to a destination like Mars, until we can learn more about how to strengthen the weakest links in the chain that makes spaceflight possible: the human body and mind. People often ask me why I volunteered for this mission, knowing the risks—the risk of launch, the risk inherent in spacewalks, the risk of returning to Earth, the risk I would be exposed to every moment I lived in a metal container orbiting the Earth at 17,500 miles per hour. I have a few answers I give to this question, but none of them feels fully satisfying to me. None of them quite answers it.

If we humans are nothing else, we are an inquisitive and restless species, explorers at heart. For that reason, we’re also optimistic that even humans will one day travel to the Kuiper Belt to explore it in person, making footfall on Pluto and other Kuiper Belt worlds, as we have already done on the Moon and will soon do on Mars, and then no doubt on many other worlds.

launch, Macallester started feeling unwell. An examination by the ISA medical team quickly diagnosed a viral infection. Not life threatening, but she would not be fit for the mission. So, after much deliberation and hand wringing by the ISA directorate, Dr. Jann Malbec got the call. She was officially next in line and checked most of the boxes for most of the stakeholders but she was least experienced in terms of astronaut training.

looks like we’re about one klick from the HAB beacon.” The commander pointed to a flashing blip on the main screen. “ If our calculations are correct then the sandstorm should be about five kilometers west of us. Plenty of time to reach the Habitation Module.” They had been tracking the storm for some time while still on board the Odyssey. After much deliberation with ISA Mission Control it was decided to land now before the storm had chance to grow. If left too long it could engulf the entire area, making

I’m starting to understand why all those people want to go to Mars. The guest today on the show is explaining that many scientists are in a state of barely suppressed panic about the latest data coming in. Their previous models were much too conservative. Everything is happening much faster than expected. He signs off with a small borrowed witticism. “Many of us subscribe to the same sentiment as our colleague Sherwood Rowland. He remarked to his wife one night after coming home: “The work is going well, but it looks like it might be the end of the world.” … What scares you most about the mission? I won’t be afraid of anything if I’m chosen. What will you miss the most on Earth? I will miss swimming the most.

Until we see the monkeys do a round trip to Mars and return in a healthy state, talk of a manned mission to Mars is nothing more than corporate government propaganda.

We don’t have GPS on Mars,” says Tomas Martin-Mur, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has done navigation work for several Mars missions, including the Mars Science Laboratory, the ambitious mission that brought the rover Curiosity to the red planet in 2012. Nor is there any GPS for the solar system, he adds, which would be a useful way to correct for the effects of solar radiation—just one of the many things that can send a spacecraft off-course. The only GPS we have is on Earth, so we’ve harnessed it for space travel.

Socially,” continued Kelly, “the world has become ever more tolerant, with all races, religions, and sexual preferences not only accepted by most, but even celebrated. Yes, there is still bigotry and persecution in the world, but compared to the level seen in the time period we’re in now, it’s microscopic.” Boyd chimed in, describing such advances as supersonic jets, microwave ovens, and Moon and Mars missions, completed by rocket ships capable of returning from space and setting back down gently on a landing pad, like something out of an early science fiction novel. “Absolutely amazing,” said Otto in awe when they were done, having soaked it all in like a superintelligent sponge. “You

Privacy was something so essential to a person’s mental health that she would suggest rethinking permanent surveillance for the next mission.

Until a team of monkeys have made the round trip to Mars and returned in good health, there is no manned mission to Mars.

Change has brought new meaning to that old mission. We can never again stand aside, prideful in isolation. Terrific dangers and troubles that we once called "foreign" now constantly live among us. If American lives must end, and American treasure be spilled, in countries we barely know, that is the price that change has demanded of conviction and of our enduring covenant. Think of our world as it looks from the rocket that is heading toward Mars. It is like a child's globe, hanging in space, the continents stuck to its side like colored maps. We are all fellow passengers on a dot of earth. And each of us, in the span of time, has really only a moment among our companions. How incredible it is that in this fragile existence, we should hate and destroy one another. There are possibilities enough for all who will abandon mastery over others to pursue mastery over nature. There is world enough for all to seek their happiness in their own way. Our Nation's course is abundantly clear. We aspire to nothing that belongs to others. We seek no dominion over our fellow man. but man's dominion over tyranny and misery. But more is required. Men want to be a part of a common enterprise--a cause greater than themselves. Each of us must find a way to advance the purpose of the Nation, thus finding new purpose for ourselves. Without this, we shall become a nation of strangers.

Wouldn’t all this be extremely difficult, time-consuming, and controversial, thus harming his missions at Tesla and SpaceX? “I don’t think from a cognitive standpoint it’s nearly as hard as SpaceX or Tesla,” he said. “It’s not like getting to Mars. It’s not as hard as changing the entire industrial base of Earth to sustainable energy.

Their day will come when we put men on Mars or accomplish some other feat where the human factor makes it possible to achieve something that technology, no matter how brilliant and advanced, cannot. We have “slipped the surly bonds of Earth” and our destiny will ultimately lead us to the stars that glow in our deep black night sky, like diamonds scattered on a field of velvet.

In the late 1960s, visionaries like von Braun predicted that Apollo would promptly usher in reusable spacecrafts, lunar colonies, manned missions to Mars, and space-based industries. 205 Today, Apollo has become an icon of nostalgic futurism—an artifact of a past in which the future was expected to be radically different from the present. If we want to understand and recover the symbolic meaning of Apollo, and the Promethean ethos that underlies it, we shouldn’t focus on its minor material spillovers, like the popularization of Teflon, Tang, and Velcro.