NASA LRC Chief Scientist on AI, Mars Colonization & Spaceflight
Toxic dust & cosmic radiation make the human exploration of Mars difficult, but our robotic children already call the planet home. We’re joined by Dennis Bushnell, Chief Scientist at the NASA Langley Research Center to discuss the challenges with the human exploration of Mars, and the advantages of machine exploration of the solar system.
Dennis, let’s start out by asking about the Vision for Space Exploration and how that relates to human expeditions to Mars. Taking into account all the political & economic uncertainty over the last few years, are human missions to Mars is still a definite yes for NASA?
Mars is a definite yes — it’s not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. We need to do Mars both safely and affordably, but with today’s technologies what’s safe is not affordable and what’s affordable is not safe.
What we’re trying to do right now is to invent new technologies to reduce the cost sufficiently so that we can afford the right safety, and then we can go. The estimates are that it will take 15 years to complete the research and another 15 years for development — that puts us about 30 years out from Mars.
