How to Get to Mars: Q&A With NASA Deputy Administrator Dava Newman
As part of our ongoing live video interview series on PCMag’s Facebook page, we invited NASA deputy administrator Dr. Dava Newman to our office for a chat . The transcript below has been edited for readability.
If you watch the news, it’s very easy to become cynical, to think that mankind can only do bad things to each other and to the planet. But we also have the capability for doing great things — things like space exploration. Over the last few years, we’ve had some really big moments in space exploration.
Last year, New Horizons went to Pluto for a close-up. Who ever thought we’d see Pluto? The Dawn spacecraft went to the dwarf planet Ceres. The ESA, the European Space Agency, successfully landed a probe on a comet. Then just a few weeks ago SpaceX managed, after a few tries, to land a rocket upright on a barge in the middle of the ocean.
For most of my lifetime, NASA was at the center of space exploration. But that’s changed a little these days, because there’s a (mostly) collegial competition amongst other nations’ space agencies, but also there’s a burgeoning private space industry.
We spoke with Dr. Dava Newman, the deputy administrator for NASA, about the current state of space exploration.
PCMag: So, where does NASA fit in?
Dr. Dava Newman: NASA is well and alive. We are on our journey to Mars. All of those great examples you gave, we’re at the heart and center of them; we’re funding everything you just talked about.
First let’s back up: Why exploration? It is about the enduring questions, for us. Are there other habitable worlds out there, other habitable planets? Does life exist anywhere else in the universe? We’re going to Mars to look, searching for past life. We’ll have boots on Mars by 2030.
But you mentioned New Horizons, what a great year! Last year got us to Pluto, so we’ve now explored every planet. (I count dwarf planets still, great to get there). July 4th, where will you be?
PCMag: The Juno spacecraft will be arriving in Jupiter’s orbit.
DN: That’s it.
PCMag: We’re going to get to that, and some of the other big missions a little later on in the show. But let’s talk about Mars. What is the plan for NASA to get to Mars right now? You said boots on the ground by 2030, so what kind of timeline are we looking at?
DN: It’s three phases. We’ve almost completed the first phase: International Space Station. We’ve been in low Earth orbit for the last 16 years. We’ve had humans, NASA astronauts, Russian cosmonauts, the whole world — we’ve had 222 folks in space, in low Earth orbit.
We are bringing down the human health risks, which is really important; we want to keep our astronauts healthy and well. And we’ve been learning a lot. We’re doing six-month crews, except for the Scott Kelly mission, the one-year mission. In the six-month missions, we do about 250 scientific experiments each increment, and we’re doing technology demonstrations as well. That’s all about life in low-Earth orbit — Phase One.
Then we move on. Today, we’re designing, building, and constructing our Space Launch System (SLS). It’s huge, more powerful than Saturn-V. We haven’t taken on this type of undertaking in decades. We’re in the early development stages, but as an engineer, it’s really cool.
In 2018, very shortly, we’ll fly what we call EM-1: Exploration Mission-1, which will fly beyond the Earth-Lunar orbit. Early 2020s: We’ll launch EM-2 with astronauts on board to take them beyond lunar orbit. That’s all part of Phase Two, what we call the “Earth Reliant” phase.
Final phase is Martian orbit and then boots on Mars. When we get to Phase Three, that marks the beginning of us being Earth-independent. That’s a big deal.
So, Phase One is closer to Earth, here on Space Station; Phase Two gets us back out to Earth-Moon orbit and beyond. Then we get to Martian orbit and then we’re completely Earth-independent.
We’re well on our way to sending people to Mars. It’s pretty revolutionary. I have a great job. I get to think about this every day.
PCMag: There’s an independent Mars mission that’s not associated in any official capacity with NASA: Mars One. They want to send people to live on Mars forever, to never come back. I recently heard an interview with the CEO of that organization — I think it’s a bit of a controversial organization — but he says that the biggest engineering hurdle is the ability to leave Mars because of the rocket that would be needed. What do you think of that mission?
DN: They don’t have the funding, they don’t have the backing, they don’t have the technical team assembled. The vision’s great, though! Let’s get people excited, we want to take everyone with us. But NASA — and I think all of the world’s space agencies — plan on doing round trips.
PCMag: Do you believe that there is other life in the universe? And what is NASA doing to contact it?
DN: That is a great question, is there life in the universe? That’s the big enduring question. Could there be habitable planets? We are looking for the evidence of past life — even in our solar system, Earth and Mars are both 4.5 billion years old; they’re sister planets. That’s why we’re looking for life there on Mars. Probably past life, if it exists — like fossilized past life, maybe microbial. Then we look way out when we talk about habitable planets — exoplanets.
Twenty years ago, that wasn’t even a discipline. We didn’t have the tools to study these exoplanets 20 years ago. Now we have thousands. We just sent out a press release announcing that we just categorized 1,200 more. There’s thousands of these exoplanets out there.
We’re looking for Earth-size exoplanets. There’s a couple dozen that we’ve found, which are in the habitable zone; those look very interesting. They’re very, very far away, so we’re not getting to them any time soon, especially not with humans.
Again, what we’ve got our sights on is sending humans to Mars. But there’s also places in our solar system like Europa, a moon of Jupiter which has a huge ocean underneath all the ice. That’s a great place to go in the solar system to look for life.
PCMag: Will NASA go back to the surface of the moon? Does that figure into your future plans much?
DN: Our main goals are a journey to Mars. Mars is the horizon goal.
PCMag: Speaking about how we’re going to get the steps to get there, one of the big things that I mentioned earlier was the private space industry. A lot of Libertarians (you know who you are), would like to point to things like SpaceX, and say, “Isn’t it great that the private industry’s taking over?” It is great, but what people don’t seem to realize or mention as often, is that SpaceX did it with decades of publicly funded research that came before them. I don’t know if you want to get too political, but I’m just wondering if you have a general philosophy about what should be publicly funded, before it gets handed over to private industry?
DN: We work together. A little bit of cooperation is collaboration to us; public-private. We’re funding SpaceX, and Boeing, and everyone. We’re funding the aerospace industry — that’s what government should do. We’re counting on their success.
What’s new is that now we’re looking at them for services, so NASA’s not doing it all. Right now, a few companies, like SpaceX and Orbital ATK, are getting our cargo up to the Space Station. We’ve given them those contracts, but we’re buying those services, we’re just not buying their crafts.
We’re funding them now, and that’s what we think NASA should do, government should do. If they can commercialize low Earth orbit, that’s great, that’s what we’re hoping, we’re planting the seeds.
PCMag: We spoke a bit earlier about some of the big missions that are coming up in the next few years. You mentioned on July 4th, there’s going to be a big thing happening: The Juno spacecraft is going to arrive into orbit around Jupiter. We’ve been to Jupiter before, but what are we hoping to learn and to see in this mission?
DN: I’m really excited, actually. It’s our biggest effort in citizen science. July 4th will be the apogee, when Jupiter will enter its closest orbit around the sun. We’ll stay in orbit with some incredible scientific instruments on board. We have something called the Juno-cam, which will send take high-def images and the public will help decide what images to capture. As long as we’re in orbit, we’re going to say, “Okay,” to the public, “where do you want it? Help us explore.” We really want to take people with us to Jupiter, and I think that’s the best way to do it. It’s a huge experiment in citizen science, so you can tell us where you want to look on Jupiter and we’ll point the camera.
PCMag: What will deep space travel be like in terms of the actual technology behind it?
DN: The near-term space travel is, again, going on our Space Launch System. That’s what we are developing and designing to get us to deep space. We’ll be going to Earth-Moon orbit, and then deep space beyond that.
As an in-between spot, Lagrange points are incredible places to go. I don’t know if you know our Discovery mission, it’s incredible. It’s at L-1 — Lagrange point one. That’s a gravity-neutral point halfway between the sun and Earth. That mission, I call it the ‘solar system weather buoy.’ It’s taking all the solar radiation and the sun’s weather, if you will; the radiation. It predictably tells us all that’s moving towards Earth. That’s just an example of deep space, where we’re going, realistically right now.
PCMag: What’s going on with the James Webb Space Telescope? Is it fully funded now? There was some question of whether it was going to be.
DN: It’s on track. I’ve already seen it; it’s built and designed. It’s heading from out Goddard Space Flight Center to Houston for thermal vacuum chamber testing. Then it goes on to southern California, Grumman, the main contractors; gets on a barge, and heads down to French Guiana. We’re launching in 2018.
PCMag: As the successor to Hubble Telescope, what will that be able to do? What will that be able to see and tell us that Hubble can’t right now?
DN: Hubble has been up there for 26 years, and it’s revolutionized all of space science. James Webb is supposed to be 100 times more powerful. And they see in different frequencies. James Webb is infrared, Hubble’s optical. And you can put that all together with the rest of the telescopes out there.
Webb will be really focused on the beginnings of the universe. It’ll be looking at dark energy, dark matter, and really the beginning of it all. It’ll have the ability to look even further back, if you will, in time.
PCMag: New Horizons was at Pluto and now it’s going further into the Kuiper Belt. Does it have a destination? Is it going to visit an object?
DN: Not to land or anything; it’s not a lander. It’s just flying out in the trajectory and taking as much data as it can. It’s getting close to the end of its mission, since we went past Pluto. The proposal’s in for extended mission, but it has to get peer-reviewed and judged. Those decisions will come in the fall. The hope is to keep New Horizons going as long as we can.
PCMag: What are NASA’s plans to support the STEM initiative in the school system here in the U.S.?
DN: Thank you for asking the STEM question, because that’s one of my favorite things to talk about. But I call it ‘STEAMED,’ very intentionally. Let me explain.
The Arts are always in there for me. As an aerospace engineer, I’m the “E” part of that. But I need the story tellers, I need the artists. They are the visionaries. They bring humanity on our journey with us, they tell the stories. You can’t do it without the story tellers. We need the scientists, the technologists, the engineers, sure. But the artists are important. We build and design and fly things, so I put a “D” on the end now, so I call it STEAMED, and guess what? I think that’s a great little model here.
PCMag: Let’s talk about some independent space projects that not necessarily NASA-related. There are two in particular that I wanted to talk about: One is Planetary Resources; that’s Peter Diamandis’s company. This company wants to capture asteroids to mine them, because he wants to be the first trillionaire. That’s one big project.
The other is a Silicon Valley-based project, Starshot, which was just announced last month and wants to send a whole bunch of micro-satellites to Alpha Centauri. They said they’re going to launch them in 20 years, then it’ll take 20 years to get there, then another 4 or 5 years to get the images back. It’s a long-term bet. Is NASA working with either of those organizations? Do you have any thoughts on them?
DN: We talk to them. I’m in charge of all the NASA partnerships, 700 of them, with 120 different nations. We’re always talking to everyone. Got to give a shout out to Peter, we’re dear friends, full disclosure. We were grad school buddies together at MIT. Great visionary.
But NASA’s also going to asteroids. September 4th, we’re going to launch OSIRIS-REx, another one of our missions. O-Rex, as we call it, is going to an asteroid and is going to bring back a sample. What’s so great about the private folks: We all have the same dreams, but they can commercialize it. The government agency doesn’t commercialize it. But the private industry can make a business out of it and make money out of it. That’s great. We just want everyone to succeed. That’s a great dream.
Then, Alpha Centauri—that’s really far out, that’s great to just be bending our brains. Making us all think about how far can we really go and explore. I’m not sure if I’ll be alive to see that, but I love the vision.
PCMag: For the first man-missions to Mars, how long do you envision people actually staying on Mars?
DN: The mission, as you know, is just over a three-year mission. Think about two years round-trip, depending on orbital mechanics. Then we hope they’ll be there 500 or 600 days on the surface of Mars. We have a couple different options; it all depends on the orbit. One of the big jobs is going to search for the evidence of life.
We have a whole arsenal already on Mars today. People need to remember that we’ve been exploring Mars for 50 years. The MAVEN orbiter is up there now. The data from MAVEN has told us how Mars lost its atmosphere. We have Curiosity, Mars Science Lab roaming around giving us data back every day, the topology, all these incredible things. The first mission, probably about four people, over three years. They’ll have 500 to 600 days to live on the surface.
PCMag: Do you think we’ll step on a different planetary body, like an asteroid, or something other than the moon and Mars, in the next 20 to 30 years?
DN: I hope so. Absolutely.
PCMag: No concrete plans, though?
DN: Somebody asked before whether there will be people on the moon. For sure. I hope it’s a NASA astronaut; again, we’re not investing right now in a lunar lander; can’t do everything. But in the next couple of decades, there will be people on the moon and people on Mars — I’m sure we’ll reach our goals. Then we’ll start looking beyond that. Probably first with orbiters and landers. And then, in the distant future, we can start going to ocean worlds and other places in the solar system.
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This story originally appeared on PCMag.com.
