@PopularMechanics _ April 2019 71when you get there—for food, for water,
for fuel.
EM: Once you get there, that stuff is rela-
tively straightforward.
RD: Food. What’s the plan?
EM: I mean, the easy way to do the food
would be just to do hydroponics. You essen-
tially have solar power—unfurl solar
panels on the ground, feed that to under-
ground hydroponics, either underground
or shielded by wires, dirt. So then you
can be sure that you don’t have to worry
about excessive ultraviolet radiation or a
solar storm or something like that. Really
pretty straightforward. You could just use
Earth hydroponics. Earth hydroponics
will work fine.
For having an outdoorsy, fun atmo-
sphere, you’d probably want to have some
faceted glass dome, with a park, so you can
walk around without a suit. Eventually if
you terraform the planet, then you can walk
around without a suit. But for, say, the next
100-plus years, you’ll have to have a giant
pressurized glass dome.
RD: You seem unimpressed by the people
who say you can’t terraform Mars.
EM: Of course you can terraform Mars.
Why would they think you can’t? You
totally can.
RD: And making fuel once you’re on Mars,
you don’t see as a problem?
EM: Well, it’s a tricky engineering problem,
especially in terms of the energy required—
you need a lot of solar panels or you need a
nuclear power plant. Then, if you have a
methane-oxygen system—which is what
we’re talking about, since the atmosphere
of Mars is primarily CO2, and there’s a
massive amount of water ice, so you’ve got
CO2 and H2O, from which you can make
CH4 and O2—it’s a simple Lego. You’ve got
three types of blocks. That’s it. C, H, and O.
Technical challenges: power genera-
tion, and a good way of getting ice. There’s
ice in the soil, but it’s dirty. And it’s not
necessarily all in, like, ice form. Some-
times it’s like permafrost or something.
If you can land somewhere near a glacier,
where there’s only a small amount of dirt
with the ice, that would be quite helpful.
So you’ve got to mine some ice, basically.
You’ve got an ice-mining engineering chal-
lenge, and you’ve got an energy-generating
engineering challenge. Those are your
problems. On Mars.The logical thing to do is basically outfit
one of the ships as a propellant plant itself,
and just land it on the planet as a working
propellant plant. And then you just need
little miner droids to go dig up ice and bring
it back and unfurl the solar panels.
RD: What are you hoping to learn from the
InSight lander? Do you have people here
who monitor what NASA’s finding?
[Long pause.]
EM: Certainly we pay attention to any
new discoveries with respect to Mars.
Yeah. But I mean Mars is fairly well
understood. You know, it would be helpful
to have finer details about, where are the
high concentrations of water ice? The
more you can find high concentrations of
water ice, the less work your miner droids
need to do and the less work you need to do
to basically heat the soil and evaporate the
water and get rid of whatever isn’t water. So
having high-purit y ice? Ver y helpful. Less
energy to heat it.
Still, one of the toughest things that’s
really hard to explain to people is orbit ver-
sus space. Getting to space is easy. Getting
into orbit is hard. It’s 100 times harder to
get to orbit than to get to what you’d call, in
quotes, “space.” Which is, say, the Kármán
line at 100 kilometers, which is an arbitrary
point at which the atmosphere is fairly thin.
This is typically called space. It’s arbitrary.
Obviously it would be quite a coincidence if
space started at 100 kilometers. I think it
was randomly [named that] so X-15 pilots
could get astronaut wings back in the ’50s
or something. You can’t orbit a satellite at
100 kilometers because the atmosphere is
still too thick.
RD: Is that one of the things you most
want to communicate to people? Orbit
versus space.
EM: Yeah. Giant, giant, giant difference.
And if you want to go to orbit and come
back from orbit, now this is way harder
than going to 100 kilometers and just
falling back. Not that it’s easy to get to
100 kilometers and fall, but if you go
to 100 kilometers and just fall back down,
you don’t even scorch the paint. But if you
are coming in from orbit, unless you have
a heat shield, you will get vaporized. Okay?
There’s meteors coming in all the time, but
they generally get pretty much vaporized
or pulverized into tiny pieces before they
touch the ground, which is good. You don’t
want to be the meteor.
You need something that allows you to
reach the ground intact.Note: An extended version of this interview
appears on PopularMechanics.com.