Mars is a television first. It's a half-scripted original sci-fi mini-series about a team of scientists who are attempting to build the first small colony on Mars in 2033 and it's a half-documentary with behind the scenes footage of researchers working at Elon Musk's Space X featuring illuminating interviews with Musk, Neil Degrasse Tyson and experts from NASA, JPL and many more. The global event series was produced by Ron Howard and Brian Grazer for National Geographic and begins airing on Monday.

The segues between 2016 and 2033, fact and fiction, are done rather seamlessly—although it helps that the music comes from Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, whose tones glide us from current optimism and grief to a crew that's struggling to survive with maximum ease. The fictional crew is made up of Ben Cotton, Jihae, Anamaria Marinca, Clementine Poidatz, Sammi Rotibi and Cosima Shaw and their fictional Musk-type tech wiz—who's moved on to funding international space exploration projects—is played by Olivier Martinez (Unfaithful). The entire series is directed by Everardo Gout (Banshee) and the first episode simultaneously follows their landing and a launch of a new Space X rocket with up close and personal reactions of both scientific elation and grief.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

We had the chance to travel to Budapest, Hungary to visit the fictional set—which featured a series of pods that were based on current models for colonization plans—and speak with the author and a co-producer of the series, Stephen Petranek. Petranek is a technological forecaster who was a long time editor of Discover magazine and The Washington Post's magazine. Petranek recently wrote the book How We'll Live on Mars, a well-researched extension of a famous talk that Petranek did on settling Mars and on which the series uses as a structural template (his TED talks were some of the earliest to receive more than a million views).

Petranek filled our brains with reasons why space exploration will come from the private sector, updated us on many aspects about Musk's Space X project (as a journalist, Petranek has profiled the Tesla Motors and Space X CEO for years) and how films like Gravity, Interstellar and The Martian have all contributed to making space the place again for big time dreamers. Including how the popularity of The Martian changed many statements of intent by NASA.

Question: First of all, would you call yourself a dreamer or a realist?

STEPHEN PETRANEK: Realist. Absolutely a realist. There is no technology that has to be invented to go to Mars and live on Mars and that’s been true for fifty years. In the early 1970s Werhner Von Braun went to President Richard Nixon and to Congress and to NASA and said the Apollo program is coming to an end, what are we going to do with NASA and he said I want to go to Mars. And he laid out a very intelligent plan to land people on Mars in 1985. So we’ve had everything we need to do this for a long, long time so it’s not unrealistic to say we can go to Mars and we can build a civilization there. That’s completely realistic. Whether or not it’s a good idea or it’s something we want to do or it’s something we want to spend money on is different, that becomes a political choice. But from a technical standpoint this is all very, very real. Not easy but real and also it’s fraught with a certain amount of danger. I mean people are gonna die when we do this. We lost what 16 people on the space shuttle or 15 people on two different space shuttles. That’s gonna look like kindergarten compared to going to Mars. There are gonna be big problems.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

I could easily imagine if Elon Musk’s scenario comes true and he’s sending a Mars colonizer rocket with 80 to 100 people aboard every rocket. Some of those rockets are not gonna get there. There are gonna be problems. I’m old enough to remember when flying in an airplane was actually kind of a scary proposition and now it’s not. And eventually going to Mars will be the same way but right now it’s a pretty scary proposition. So realistically we can do all of this. There’s no fantasy involved in this. Whether or not we wanna do it and should do it, that’s a different story.

How much of Elon Musk and Space X will we get to see in Mars?

PETRANEK: Well I can tell you there were very journalistic situations that we were allowed to participate in. For example last December you may remember how easily we forget, we now take it for granted that Elon Musk can send a rocket booster into space and bring it back down again and even land it on a raft. But last December was the first time they were successful in actually recovering a booster, all the others had crashed when they came down and so we had cameras at Cape Canaveral last December shooting the entire situation of that launch of that rocket and bringing it down and landing it successfully for the first time and recovering it. And we have footage of Elon at the last second leaving his spot at the control center and going out the door which is marked with one of those things that says an alarm will go off if you go through this exit, running out that door and actually watching it come down himself.

So what we have that is very unusual is access and none of this is staged. They don’t say “oh, the National Geographic guys are coming today so everyone wear nice clothes and we’re gonna build part of a rocket.” Space X is just like “you guys can come next week but leave us alone as much as possible.” So it’s all very realistic, all very journalistic. We just have amazing accessibility because none of this would have happened, this entire project would not have happened if he had not agreed to give us access. Because all of us felt that without entry to Space X you just didn’t have enough of the building blocks to do this with great credibility.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

For this book you are saying that it’s a reality, we can go to Mars. This planet is full of religious people. Do you think that it in this future, religion has a future?

PETRANEK: Hmm. I’m not a religious person, organized religion person. But I do believe in a certain level of spirituality. I don’t think going to Mars is any threat to religion. I think if we find life on Mars that may be a threat to religious thinking, that may require some...

Rewriting, right?

PETRANEK: Some rewriting, yes. I think it’s very unlikely that life only exists on Earth. And I think it’s only a matter of time before religion needs to confront that dichotomy so I don’t think there are many religious considerations involved in whether or not we explore, whether or not we are exploring Antarctica or we’re exploring Mars. I mean we found life at the bottom of Lake Vostok which is a frozen lake in Antarctica. It’s almost impossible to imagine that life existed at the bottom of this lake but it does. So it’s unreasonable to think that life doesn’t exist throughout the universe, we just haven’t discovered it. You have to remember that only twenty years ago in 1995 there were only 9 planets in the universe, the ones in our solar system. We had not discovered a single other planet and then all of a sudden in 1995 we found two other planets and now there are 8,000 that we know of and we think there are billions. So we seem to be able to accommodate and adapt to these earth-shaking, so to speak, discoveries. So I don’t think it will necessarily be a problem for religion.

I wanna go back to Space X because I know Elon Musk’s Falcon Heavy is four years behind when he said that it would be ready to go.

PETRANEK: He’s very optimistic.

Yeah, so how do you take something like the Falcon Heavy, which is behind, and carry that to the Mars Colonization rocket, which he’s just announced?

PETRANEK: First of all it’s the early stages of rocket development that are the most expensive and the most complex so they are still flying a version of the Falcon rocket that they invented 10 years ago but in almost no way is it the same rocket. It’s been constantly developed. It can lift at least twice as much as it could ten years ago and the Falcon Heavy is still a Falcon Nine with two Falcon Nine boosters strapped on to it. So the Falcon Nine s 9 engines, 9 Merlin engines and then they take two boosters that have 9 engines and strap it on. Now you have a rocket with 27 engines that can lift 4 times what the Falcon Nine can lift and that isn’t big enough to go to Mars with. So the interesting part of your question is whether or not they have to reinvent the wheel to do the Mars Colonizer rocket or whether they simply have to upgrade existing technology and I think what you’ll find is that it’s an upgrade of existing technology. It’s actually pretty easy to just make things bigger when you’re developing rocketry. It’s not that complicated. Once you have the mechanics and the engineering of the systems involved and that those work, making those larger, scaling them up is not that much of a problem.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

The whole Mars colonizer idea is both revolutionary and not revolutionary. It’s not revolutionary because the concept from this came from Werhner von Braun in 1948 and when he wrote the book Das Marsprojeckt and he said we’ll have these small rockets that go up to Earth orbit and they will bring supplies up to Earth orbit and we will build our Mars rocket in Earth orbit and then go from there. Musk is building a two stage rocket, the Mars colonizer which the booster will be recoverable and will land again on Earth will bring it almost to Earth orbit and then a second stage that is also part of the spacecraft, so that’s one unit instead of a three or four stage rocket that we have now. It’s just gonna be two stages. The second stage will get to Earth orbit and this will be a huge rocket carrying 80 to 100 people but it will be out of fuel so he will also fire rockets into orbit that will carry fuel and they will transfer that fuel to the Mars colonizer rocket and they will take on from there. Those rockets will never return to Earth. They’ll go to Mars, they’ll get refueled on Mars and then come back to Earth, they’ll go to Mars, come back to Earth, but they’ll never land on Earth again because it just takes too much fuel just to get up high enough to get going so I don’t think the technology of the Mars colonizer rocket is more complex, I think it’s just bigger.

How has Musk and Space X changed since it began?

PETRANEK: I think, this is my own personal conjecture but I think that and I’ve been covering him for more than a decade but I think Elon learned a very important lesson when he started Space X and the first three rockets didn’t fly and his house was mortgaged for the fourth rocket, which did fly fortunately, because he is a private company and not a government, failure is a very expensive option. You learn a lot from failing and I think because they had one of their rockets that was resupplying the space station a little more than a year ago blow up, I think that was the best thing that ever happened because it taught them to not get ahead of themselves.

He’s very optimistic and he says “hey we got all these systems in place, everyone says everything works, let’s go.” And I think now the philosophy is let’s make really sure this works before we do it. And one of the problems with the Falcon Heavy is that this is going to launch satellites that don’t cost 300 billion dollars. This is going to launch satellites that cost a billion dollars. And even though they’re insured and all of that, they want to make sure that the first time they fire that rocket and they send something into geosynchronous orbit that cost a billion dollars like a telecommunications satellite that it doesn’t fail. I think there are different forces at work in Space X and some of those forces say we cannot afford a failure and we should not move ahead too quickly on this. And you actually see this in Tesla automobiles so the Model X was very late in coming out and that was because the doors on it didn’t work right. And Elon wanted everything to be perfect and to make sure everything worked perfectly when he launched that vehicle, the same as with the Tesla S, he did not want any failures because he was asking people to invest in an entirely new technology and invest a lot of money in it and he could not afford bad publicity or a bad image. You cannot afford the image of unreliability in this business.

I think the Falcon Heavy had been delayed for two reasons. One is they don’t really need it. Because they upgraded the Falcon Nine they’ve been able to launch heavier and heavier loads. They don’t necessarily make more money by having a bigger rocket that can launch heavier loads, the economics of it don’t scale up necessarily the same way. He only needs it for one reason which is it’s the precursor to the Mars colonizer system so he needs to develop the Falcon Heavy to get more experience with lifting heavier loads so that they can build the Mars colonizer. Otherwise you might not see them develop the Falcon Heavy for another 10 years because they have a very successful business right now.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

There was a proposal that NASA and Space X had been working on called Red Dragon for 2018 to land a Red Dragon capsule on Mars and that would probably have used the Falcon Heavy although you actually can get it there without the Falcon Heavy. You have to put another stage on the Falcon Nine but you can actually do it. And for reasons that are mysterious to me and are not released by Space X and I cannot force out of NASA, that project fell apart.

No, they just made a formal announcement about it like a month ago.

PETRANEK: A formal announcement about what?

About Space X and the Red Dragon landing on Mars in 2018.

PETRANEK: That’s different. There was an original 2018 project called Red Dragon that was a collaboration between NASA and Space X. About a year ago that was nixed and thrown apart. Now, Space X says, Space X made the announcement, not NASA that they are considering sending a Red Dragon rocket to Mars in 2018 because in 2018 the planets will be closer than they have been in about 50 years. So that’s not a guarantee. I think they want to do that. Jim Green who’s head of planetary sciences at NASA said the reason he thinks it’s a really good idea is that he said it will probably crash and he said they will learn more from that crash than they could from anything else so I think the idea is, this is kind of a quick and dirty experiment to see if they can land something intact on the surface of Mars without having put something in door of it and having a lander, the way we did it with Apollo. And whether or not they can use arrow breaking successfully in the atmosphere of Mars to land something that big.

So it’s kind of a big quick and dirty experiment but it should not be confused with the original Red Dragon project that was a partnership with NASA. Now the thing that makes incredible sense is for NASA to partner with Space X and to say you guys build the rockets and get us there and we’ll worry about keeping people alive once you get there and building the city there. Because that’s what NASA is good at. They’ve already figured out how to do that. Space X hasn’t spent any money figuring out how to do that. They’re a rocket company but because the way the system works is they have to put this out for bid and because Boeing and Lockheed have tied up the space business in the United States ever since there has been a space business, it’s very difficult for NASA to make that kind of decision and do that under public funding rules. It’s a tragedy that they can’t do that.

What I think is going on behind the scenes is that NASA is going to give them all the help they possibly can to make that 2018 landing successful but all the press releases, everything that gets said is gonna come out of Space X. You’re not gonna hear a peep from NASA.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

You mentioned that there are going to be lots of more accidents with this type of exploration. So how is this program going to survive these perhaps many fatal accidents?

PETRANEK: Because it’s not a public project. They’re not responsible to Congress. Elon Musk can send anything he wants up into space and do anything he wants with it. And remember no one is going to die on those early cargo ships but it’s very conceivable that their first attempts to land humans on Mars will not succeed and that people will die but their is only one guy who is responsible and he owns the company. It’s not a public company, there are no stockholders and that’s why he’s kept it that way so there are not outside influences that can change his mission based on failure.

Do you think Elon Musk can play God in this case?

PETRANEK: I don’t think he’s playing God. I think he’s proving that these technologies and these abilities have existed for a long time and that the American space program has been in a very bad place for a long time. Look, 50 years ago we could put humans in space. We can’t do that now. We’ve gone backwards, not even sideways, we’ve gone backwards. It’s really kind of incredible how we have not progressed in decades.

Because the Cold War has stopped?

PETRANEK: Possibly. That’s a reasonably good explanation. I actually think that the Cold War was actually won by landing people on the moon. You know this is a really interesting thing and it only came out a couple of years ago. There was a proposal at the time that Kennedy announced the Apollo program, within the Soviet Union to land people on Mars and eclipse what the United States was doing on the moon. It would have made what we were doing on the moon look like kindergarten. And I can’t remember who the premier of the Soviet Union was at the time but his space scientists said we can land humans on Mars and he said no, i want more rockets that can deliver warheads and they chose to put their money into that instead of challenging the Americans on going to the moon or going to Mars. And if they had chosen to challenge them the other way around we might be looking at a completely different scenario now.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

This might be too far ahead, but I’m just curious—we know we will be sending people to Mars, but what is the time table as far as populating a new generation that is born on Mars?

PETRANEK: I think that Elon Musk would be the one to answer that. I’m just recording this, I’m not – although I should probably add that I think that it’s realistic even though it doesn’t sound realistic. This fall, SpaceX is going to announce the architecture of something called the Mars Colonizer Rocket. The next large rocket space that’s going to build – which is called the Falcon Heavy which is gonna be the largest rocket on Earth for getting stuff to base, but it’s only a fourth the size of the rocket they’re contemplating. And this is gonna be a rocket that’s two stages, so there’ll be a booster that gets it almost all the way to orbit and then there’s the second stage that’s attached to the spacecraft, and that will go into orbit around Earth, and it will never return to Earth. It will be used as a shuttle to go to Mars and come back and be completely reusable, and it will hold 80 to 100 people, and Musk says that starting on or around 2032 or 2033, I should mention that you can only go to Mars in 25 or 26 months ‘cause the planets have to be aligned so the distance is short.

But about every two years, he will send a group of the spacecraft to Mars to populate Mars. As he says, if you want to build a society on Mars, you’re talking millions of people, not hundreds of people. So he says that SpaceX will build about a thousand of these rockets between 2030 and 2032, and by 2050, he imagines that a thousand of these rockets will leave every two years with 80 to 100 people in each one. So carrying 80,000 to 100,000 people per trip to Mars every two years. And then he certainly imagines 50,000 people on Mars by 2050. As difficult as that is to take in, that is not unrealistic.

Do you see any interest at the governmental level to maintain space research or is it all going to be private methods?

PETRANEK: I think the government’s being pushed very strongly by private interests, but I also think it’s being pushed very strongly by public interests. I think Gravity, the movie Gravity was the beginning of a rekindled interest in space traveling and I think that was followed by Interstellar. People were interested in space travel and that was a huge success in showing the fragility of Earth. The scenario in Interstellar where there’s only one or two crops that grow on Earth – we’re like three years ahead in hybridizing crops of the diseases that ravage those crops. Every year, we have to come up with new plant species in rice and wheat and corn to keep three years ahead of disease. It’s not an unrealistic scenario, Interstellar. And I think that rekindled a lot of interest in space.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

But The Martian did an amazing thing. The talk that’s up on TED right now about going to Mars that was actually done a year ago, and was not put up on the TED website because the reaction of the audience that TED – at least 50 percent of the people in the room said this is ridiculous, going to Mars by 2030 is never gonna happen. What’s he talking about? The movie The Martian came out, and all of a sudden, public opinion was completely the opposite. It was like, yeah, I guess we’re going to Mars, I guess this is realistic. And then NASA which had said on its own website, we have no programs and no plans to have any man missions to Mars suddenly appoints a head of a Mars project. And now, a year later, we’ve got NASA saying that it’s gonna work on getting people to Mars by 2030. So, I think public opinion – I think there’s a tremendous increase in public interest.

I think the reason we lost interest in space travel was primarily the shuttle program, because it had nothing to do with – no place to go. I mean, literally, the International Space Station kind of built a place to have the shuttle to go to, and to have a reason to do stuff that we had two extraordinary tragedies with the shuttle and the public is very unforgiving of tragedies in space travel. So, one of the reasons a private company is more likely to get to Mars before NASA is because Charlie Bolden said as the head of NASA, “We can’t afford to take risks like private companies can. Private companies can kill people on the voyage to Mars and NASA can’t.” So, I think the dangers of going to Mars and the difficulties of going to Mars are actually going to become a compelling part of the public discourse and they’re gonna create a tension about going to Mars, which is going to increase public interest.

 

Mars debuts Monday, November 14 on the National Geographic Channel. The first episode (plus the short film, 'Before Mars') is already available online. Click here.

There are also many additional interviews with scientists, such as Neil Degrasse Tyson (and how to make babies on Mars) on the official website.

Image via National Geographic
Image via National Geographic

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