Will Elon Musk or NASA get humans to Mars first? | Michio Kaku | Big Think

Will Elon Musk or NASA get humans to Mars first? | Michio Kaku

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

It costs about $10,000 per pound, to put a person into orbit and $1,000,000 per pound to send a person to Mars. That's a lot of money, especially in these current times of economic austerity. So how are we going to explore space and build an insurance policy, so to speak, to save Earth from global warming? The acclaimed theoretical physicist Michio Kaku says that help could come not from NASA alone but with help from the private sector. Specifically, he posits that inventor, free-thinker, and all-around Silicon Valley disruptor Elon Musk "has the vision, the energy, and the checkbook" to turn these seemingly far-out ideas into a reality. Michio's latest book is The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MICHIO KAKU:

Dr. Michio Kaku is the co-founder of string field theory, and is one of the most widely recognized scientists in the world today. He has written 4 New York Times Best Sellers, is the science correspondent for CBS This Morning and has hosted numerous science specials for BBC-TV, the Discovery/Science Channel. His radio show broadcasts to 100 radio stations every week. Dr. Kaku holds the Henry Semat Chair and Professorship in theoretical physics at the City College of New York (CUNY), where he has taught for over 25 years. He has also been a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, as well as New York University (NYU).

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Michio Kaku: We are entering what I call the next golden era of space exploration. The first golden era was back in the 1960s, but it was unsustainable. In 1966 the NASA budget consumed five percent of the entire federal budget! It was impossible to sustain that level of spending; now it’s about .5 percent.

However, now with the injection of new ideas, fresh enthusiasm from the private sector, from Silicon Valley billionaires, have a whole new different landscape. Just recently we had that sensational launch of the Falcon Heavy rocket financed by zero, zero amount of taxpayer’s dollars.

And it shows you that the economics have changed.

And now with the introduction of reusable rocket we’re now talking about opening up the heavens to perhaps a whole new economic landscape that is ten percent the cost of the past. To put me in orbit around the earth costs about $10,000 a pound; that’s my weight in gold. Think of my body made out of solid gold, that’s what it takes me just to go around the earth in near orbit. To go to the moon would cost about $100,000 a pound. To put me on Mars would cost at least a million dollars a pound. That is unsustainable and that’s where the reusable rockets come in because we’re now talking about dropping the cost by a factor of ten.

Instead of $10,000 a pound, SpaceX wants to bring it down to $1000 a pound. December of 2019 NASA will send the LSL booster rocket and the Orion Module around the moon on a robotic unmanned mission; just a few years after that the first astronauts will go back to the moon after a 50-year gap.

Late in the next decade we hope to have a lunar orbiter, a lunar orbiter that gives us a permanent presence in outer space. Not just the space station, but a lunar orbiter. And from that we want to go all the way to Mars.

And so NASA has already now looked at the blueprints, made by Boeing aircraft, concerning what it would take to send probes to Mars. In fact, we may even have a traffic accident around Mars because of the fact that SpaceX, not to be outdone, they’re proposing their big rocket to take us not just to the moon with the Dragon space capsule and the Falcon Heavy rocket, but a new rocket, the BFR rocket, to take us all the way to Mars—even bypassing the lunar orbiter. So we’re talking about a whole new political and technological landscape that, by the 2030s, sometime in the 2030s we will be on Mars.

We have not just new energy and new financing and money coming from Silicon Valley, we also have a new vision emerging. For Elon Musk of SpaceX is to create a multi planet species. However, for Jeff Bezos of Amazon, he wants to make earth into a park so that all the heavy industries, all the pollution goes into outer space and Jeff Bezos wants to set an Amazon type delivery system connecting the earth to the moon. And so he wants to lift all the heavy industries off the planet earth to make earth a paradise and to put all the he...

For the full transcript, check out