Space Stories from the Sifu

Sofea Ghani
Sep 7, 2018 · 2 min read

Space Travel: The biggest problem is going to the toilet. When someone says, The shit hit the fan! — it’s real.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending a sharing session by Malaysia’s very first astrophysicist, Datuk Dr Mazlan Othman.

“I want to become an astronaut… still”, whispered 12-year-old me who would skip lunch breaks back then at school to hide in the library and write notes on space travel.

Courage for such an adventure? Fast forward 12 years — not anymore, but the session truly rekindled my passion for the universe and everything in between. Datuk Dr Mazlan shared:

If at least one person lands on Mars, the human race will be known as an interplanetary species.

And that just blew me away. The target is to have a million people on Mars, representative of the entire human race. Living in a community and starting a whole new life there.

We want to send people to space not because it is easy, but because it is hard — former US President John F Kennedy, May 25 1961 to Congress

If you haven’t been following the developments, here are a few interesting tangents I compiled from the talk to kickstart your readings:

Space investors

  • Elon Musk — wants to take the human race to Mars by 2025. NASA is 10 years behind on the same mission, 2035.
  • Richard Branson — to fly humans to the edge of space by next year for USD200k per person. This would qualify these space tourists as astronauts (and fulfill all childhood dreams!)
  • Jeff Bezos — invests heavily on technology developments to enable private human access to space via his company, Jeff Bezos Space.
  • Robert Bigelow — wants to build inflatable hotels in space. He is the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.
  • China — is going to have their very own space station by 2020.
  • We now have approved regulations to mine the moon. To mine asteroids. Like Avatar! The technology is already there. Now is only a matter of cost.

Mars

  • Datuk Dr Mazlan believes that there is a moral obligation for people who first step on Mars to be multiracial.
  • We have discovered liquid water.
  • There is a volcano, Olympus Mons, big enough to cover Thailand to Singapore and with a height of 25km (that’s 2.5 times higher than Mt Everest!)
  • There is a “Grand Canyon” big enough to cover the east coast to west coast of the US.

Draggies and floaties

She talked about aliens too (of course!) and how unimaginative we humans are in describing how they look like. Imagine a planet where there is too much water, or the gravity pull is too high, or there is little or no gravity at all?

Really though, would we see them walking around comfortably on two legs?

Written by

The girl on the train with a book. I pen my experiences and everyday observations.

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