For years, the possibility of a manned mission to Mars has filled our newsfeeds and imaginations, but what actually needs to be done to make that dream a reality? In this episode of The Curious Cosmos, Derrick Pitts is joined by science writer Mary Roach discuss her book, Packing for Mars, and all the important (and often off-kilter) work being done to prepare for that mission here on Earth!

• Check out Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Mary's other books
• Explore the Antarctic Search for Meteorites further
• Check out the Mars500 project from the European Space Agency, where participants simulated a tip to Mars in Moscow.
• Learn more about Peggy Whitson, the American record holder for most time in space!
• Learn more about the failed Mars One project, which promised to colonize Mars via a reality TV show

I'm Derrick Pitts, and welcome to The Curious Cosmos.

In the not so distant future, we'll be leaving Earth, heading off for

the Moon, and eventually Mars.

Sound great?

Well, for some, maybe, but there's a lot of stuff that needs to be fixed

up before any of that can happen.

Thankfully, we're here.

There's already people on that case, including my guest today,

who's approaching this from a decidedly non NASA point of view.

Mary Roach.

Mary is the author of six New York Times bestsellers, including Stiff:

The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary

Canal, and Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void.

Mary's books have been published in 21 languages.

Mary has written for National Geographic, she's written for WIRED,

the Journal of Clinical Anatomy, among lots of other publications.

Mary and I met over a decade ago at the Franklin Institute to talk

about her book, Packing for Mars.

But now that space exploration is taking bigger steps towards human exploration

of the solar system, I wanted to ask Mary about the adaptability of humans in space

and the challenges we might be facing.

Thanks for joining us, Mary.

It's great to have you with us.

Oh, thanks, Derrick.

Great to be here.

So, I guess my first question for you, Mary, refers to some

of the other titles of, uh, what you've written as well, but in relation to

this, you've written on a series of topics that really, I would say, have

somewhat escaped lots of other authors, like Stiff, The Curious Lives of Human

Cadavers, uh, Gulp, Spook, Grunt, Bonk.

And this one.

What encouraged you to explore what the challenges would be to human exploration?

How did you get on to that topic?

Okay, here's how I got on to that topic.

Years ago, I was writing a piece for Vogue Magazine about bone loss,

osteoporosis, and I was kind of bored with the topic, and I thought, how can

I make this a little more interesting?

I called an astronaut who's also an MD, and I, we got to talking about

bone loss and how this is an issue when you don't, you know, use your

bones, you start to lose them, but the conversation strayed because I

have kind of a short attention span.

And in the course of that conversation - we're going way back before I wrote

books - he mentioned this toilet at Johnson Space Center that had a video

camera that was pointing up, with a closed circuit screen right next to you.

It was basically a training camera for astronauts to help them learn

how to dock with a space toilet.

And I was like, I can't work this into an osteoporosis story, but one

day I will write about the Johnson Space Center potty cam, as it's known!

And it stuck in the back of my head.

And years later, I was in Antarctica for a series of stories.

And I met somebody who later went on to run the bed rest facility

near Johnson Space Center.

It's in Galveston, Texas, where they have volunteers basically stay in

bed for three months to mimic the kinds of changes that will happen to

your body when you go up into space.

When you don't have gravity, uh, you know, your body starts going, you know what?

We don't need all these muscles.

We don't need these bones.

Let's just dismantle them!

Anyway, those two things made me really start to think about number one, the

challenges of trying to deal with life without gravity, like nothing works.

And the other side to that was, I realized there are all these very interesting

research facilities and things going on at NASA and places related to NASA.

And that for me, as sort of a science geek, that would be a fun

playground for a couple of years.

So kind of those two events that made me very curious about it.

And, um, It just seemed like there was a lot there.

Yeah, most of the books about space exploration are very

focused on actually being there!

But a lot of stuff on the ground, to me, was as interesting

as what goes on in orbit.

Yeah, right.

How are you going to sort of simulate an environment so you can figure out

what the effects are going to be?

You have to do it here on Earth.

Exactly!

So we have to try to mitigate all those things that

are Earth related, so we can try to be space oriented somehow.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just amazing that everything that you as a human do or build or sit on or

whatever is going to have to be rethought.

So, I think you sort of pointed at it already, but in the work

that you did with this, what did you identify as maybe the most difficult

challenge that needs to be overcome or dealt with in exploring space for humans?

Yeah, um, I'm going through them all in my head, you

know, and I was tempted to say the psychology of isolation and confinement?

Because you talk about going to Mars, you know, that's a -that's a long

time in a small can with people that you maybe didn't choose to be around!

Um, and strange things happen in that scenario.

You know, there's wonderful examples from Antarctic or Arctic expeditions

where you know, you read journals, and even though that's a vast expanse of

the environment you are stuck in your tent in your camp with your people.

You can't just, you know, go for a jog, or take a day trip, or go to the mall.

You really are stuck with those people and you start to get irrational

antagonism I think maybe it was called, where you're just like every

single thing about that person just really bugs the crap out of you.

You know, you're just like, uh, anybody who's, you know, been stuck on a,

an RV trip with family for too long.

It's that kind of thing.

But this is hugely magnified in space

travel because there really is

- Mary Roach: Yes!

No, just go outside, take a walk and blow it off.

I mean, conceivably in Antarctica, you could bundle up enough and wait

for the weather to subside to the point where you could actually go

outside and get a breath of fresh air.

But in space, there is no recourse.

You have no opportunity for that at all.

You know, you're in the spacecraft.

You can't get outside.

You can't open the window.

None of that kind of stuff is going to happen.

And so this...

Uh, what was it you, you said again, antagonisms?

Yeah, I think it's irrational antagonism.

Irrational antagonism.

Yeah, and you would see it in the documentation of every space

mission - Mercury, Gemini, Apollo - the transcripts of the conversations between

the astronauts and mission control.

And you'd see that pop up.

What happens is you don't want to take it out on your crewmates

because you depend on them for your survival in a very serious way.

So you don't want to alienate the people that you're up there with.

This is something that was told to me by astronauts, and you tend

to take it out on mission control.

So the poor guy down there on the microphone in there.

In the case of I think it was Gemini 7, Jim Lovell, you could see where

at one point he goes, he gets the science guy the guy who's in charge

of the food, his name was Dr.

Chance, and he gets him on the microphone.

He's like "Yeah, okay.

Chicken a la king, serial number 2674, all over the window at this time.

I think you could, you know, for 300 a meal, I think you could

make this a little better."

You know, it's just this, you could tell he's just having a really bad day.

And poor, uh, Dr.

Chance had to take the brunt of it.

The reason why space meals are so expensive is because it takes a

lot of effort to do the proper research to figure out how to package something

to be completely germ free, be able to be shelf stable for months at a time, taste

good, and be in a small, compact package.

There's really a whole team of people whose job it is to figure out How to

package food appropriately for space.

You want to take what you might normally eat and get rid of all the extraneous

calories and just go for the nutritional value in a package that looks as

good as it can look for something that's packaged for a trip to space.

So, it's not like we can take a item from Burger King, stick it in

a plastic bag, and just suck all the air out to make it smaller.

There's a lot more that has to go into materials that go into space, even food.

Yeah, displacement where you displace your anger.

Yes, right, right These were the gemini missions where

the missions in which there were two astronauts in a space capsule

They were uh, really doing the test flights for longer duration missions.

And so often these missions were, you know, five days, seven days, eight

days, ten days, you know, essentially in a sardine can with your co pilot,

your partner there, and you had to do everything in that little space.

Everything.

Literally everything.

There's no bathroom.

You're using a little, very scientifically designed plastic bag.

And it's the size of, you know, the front seat of a sports car.

I mean, it really was a tiny space.

You know, they're trying to keep it small and lightweight.

You know, the astronauts were tiny.

Everything was tiny!

You are smooshed in there, right?

And some of those early astronauts, they were, they were big ego guys.

They were chosen for their bravery, their machismo, their, you know,

they were test pilots and heroes.

And so these aren't the kind of guys you want to cram in a

small space together, you know.

Right, right.

And in later years, astronauts were chosen differently.

Obviously you wanted technical expertise, there's a whole

variety of things that you wanted.

But in terms of personality, you wanted a team player, somebody who had a sense

of humor, who was easygoing, forgiving.

Well now, you know, this brings me to, uh, one of the

directions I wanted to try to pursue.

When we talk about the length of missions like this, it's easily years.

You know, there's no question that a Mars expedition is gonna be two

and a half to three years minimum to make the trip worthwhile and all

that kind of stuff, especially with the technology we have right now.

And so it made me think about the kind of psychological screening that probably has

to happen to find the right mix of people.

And I've always wondered what, what it might be like, and is there any

possibility that one of the astronaut candidates has managed to sneak something

under the psychological radar and you end up with an axe murderer on board as

part of your crew, when you didn't really expect to have that kind of thing emerge

as part of the personality of someone?

And for me, it begs the question of, in long duration space flight, what

do you do in a situation like that?

NASA goes to great lengths to try to get around it.

There's a guy in Antarctica who works with the Antarctic Search for Meteorites.

Well, the reason why there's a hunt for meteorites in

Antarctica is because Antarctica is essentially just a big snow field.

And when meteorites fall on the surface, because they're so dark, they can easily

stand out against the background of snow.

But, they also get covered with snow because there's so much snowfall.

Well, that means they get buried.

Well, the compaction of the snow in the center of the continent actually pushes

buried meteorites in a curved sort of path up to the surface of the snow, and

scientists can literally go along and just pick up meteorites along this circle.

He's involved with NASA and astronaut selection because

they're out in tents in the middle of nowhere in Antarctica, so he sort

of has first hand experience with the kind of cabin fever scenarios.

Anyway, he knew one of the candidates, and at one point, he got a call, and

NASA said, you know, well, one of the things that we have these astronauts

do, they gotta learn how to fly an F 14, like a fighter plane, and we

need to just check out his stuff.

We're gonna take him up, and how comfortable would you feel going up

with him and it was like - you know, there was something that you couldn't

plan on, you know, he had to kind of really tell the truth about that person.

I had an experience where I had applied for a simulated Mars mission

called Mars 500, that's 500 days.

And I made the first round of cuts, partly because not very many women

had applied to be in a simulator outside Moscow for 500 days.

And they said, "okay, well, we'll be back in touch with you" and fast forward a

few weeks in the middle of the night 3 a.

m.

I get a phone call and I pick up the phone and they're like, "yes, hi, this is the

European Space Agency, calling about the Mars 500 interview" and I said "It's 3 a.

m.!

I don't know if you know that I where I live..."

and they're like "Okay.

Thank you.

That's the end of the interview.

Okay.

We know enough about you.

Thank you very much for your time!"

That was it.

Right.

Okay.

So, sure.

Testing just to see what your reaction is going to be in these situations.

Yeah, just to see how do you behave when you're woken up from a

deep sleep and asked to do something?

You know, what kind of personality are we dealing with here?

One thing about training for a longer mission.

It's likely to be a long training period.

So you're going to have these people working together for

well over a year, I would say.

So any personality clashes, I think, would surface before the mission.

The other thing about, you know, a long mission, the communication

time, the lag, from when you say, "Hello, Mission Control," you

know, "Houston, we have a problem."

That's going to take 20 minutes to get there!

So the way a radio signal gets to Mars is the same way

a radio signal gets from a radio station to the radio in your car.

It's just a radio signal.

Although, the farther away you are, the longer it takes to get there.

So to deal with an emergency situation, you're on your own.

You really are going to need a bunch of jack of all trades.

You're going to need people with, you know, medical skills

and also engineering skills.

And as many as you can cram into those three or four people,

however many are on your crew.

So how do you think humans are adapting to space?

I mean, we've seen the missions have been getting longer on board

International Space Station.

Peggy Whitson is an American.

She's now a retired NASA astronaut who has joined another company after

a number of years working for NASA.

She actually spent 666 days in space, uh, cumulatively.

And so she holds the record for an American astronaut for

the amount of time in space.

And she seems to have adapted very, very well to the space environment.

Yeah, Peggy, Jeff here.

I'm standing in line and I just wanted to take a moment to congratulate you on,

uh, on the new record among Americans.

Thank you, Jeff.

That's sweet of you to come in to say that.

I appreciate it.

You bet.

Well, it couldn't be more deserved, uh, than it is for you.

I remember 20 years ago you and I talking and all I wanted to do was

do a little construction on station and all you wanted to do was get

up there and stay and do science.

Yep.

It's been a great ride.

Well, again, congratulations and enjoy the rest of your,

uh, several months to go here.

Are there particular things that we have to look at about

that adaptation for a trip to Mars?

Do all the basic functions of the human body still work?

You know, as they are supposed to, you know, over these long trips in space?

That was a question in the beginning.

There really, it was a big question mark.

Can you swallow without gravity?

Can you initiate urination without gravity?

There were little test flights in which, they would be like, given a pitcher full

of water to drink, sent up on a, you know, zero gravity simulating, you know, with

the parabolic arcs, the, where you have like 20 seconds of weightlessness at a

time, they're like, "Okay, go, try to pee!

Okay, drink some water!"

They sent up eye charts on the Mercury flights, you

know, like, can you still see?

Is your eyeball changing shape or doing something strange?

Astronauts on the ISS spend like an hour and a half a day exercising.

I mean, you're really, and that, that in itself, how do you get weight-bearing

exercise when you have no weight?

You have to kind of bungee the person to the treadmill.

I mean, that was another challenge to, to come up with weight-bearing

exercise equipment for the International Space Station.

Uh, you're gonna lose muscle and bone mass.

Um, you come back down and you gain it, but there were studies showing

that you don't gain it in the same.

way and in the same bones.

There's an adaptation period just getting used to so much more of the body's fluid

being in the upper part of the body.

It's not all falling down toward your legs.

So your body has to figure that out.

And for a while, your head, it feels like you have a cold all the time.

Your sinuses are congested.

Your face is kind of puffy.

I mean, you feel kind of crappy the first few days /weeks is my understanding.

Um, but the body is adaptable.

It'll figure that out.

But the atrophy is definitely a concern.

Also, you get out into space without the Earth's atmosphere,

you're, you're talking about solar flare radiation, cosmic radiation.

So Mary talks about two types of radiation here.

One is solar flare radiation and the other is cosmic radiation.

Cosmic radiation is just the general space background radiation.

Whereas solar flare radiation is really specific.

Those are eruptions of electromagnetic particles that come off of our

sun and blast out into space.

Doesn't happen all the time.

Happens kind of episodically.

But it can cause a lot of problems for astronauts in space.

That's a big question mark.

At the time I was writing the book anyway, it was a lot of debate about, is

this a big concern or is it no big deal?

I know that NASA was talking about for a mission to Mars, you know,

where you're exposed for that much time and that much more radiation.

They're talking about sending older astronauts, you know, say you're exposed,

you get a mutation somewhere in your genetic material, and that's going to show

up in 15, 20 years while you're at the end of your lifespan anyway, so that was

considered more of a trade off, you know.

You're going to die anyway soon, so!

Yeah, radiation.

I don't think anyone at that time really knew exactly what

that risk is for a Mars mission.

How much are we increasing the likelihood of cancers?

It's definitely a concern.

I was going to posit that - so here you've got a multi month journey

out to Mars, then you get there, you know, after having been trapped, quote unquote,

"inside the RV" for lo these many months.

You get there, you have to be in a spacesuit to be out on the

surface, out of the spacecraft.

So you finally get down on the surface, and then, now you go into

your habitat, and you're gonna be here, inside this habitat now for...

X number of months before the planets realign themselves to make the shorter

trip back to Earth and things like that.

What kind of people can possibly manage to survive that kind of existence

for such a long mission like this?

Well, you're going to have also those rovers that you can leave

the suit, you know, you kind of like back up to it in your suit and then

you connect to the rover and then you get out of your suit and you're

in your shirt sleeves in the rover.

So you're kind of, you have the - now you're back in the RV!

So you've got the RV experience going on.

But I compare it to, I like to go backpacking.

My husband and I pack up whatever we need for three or four days

and we go up into the Sierras.

There's no one around and it's, for me it's, it's a beautiful place.

People go, "well, uh, backpacking, you can't get any good coffee.

The freeze dried food is terrible!

You're sleeping on the ground.

It's cold at night.

Why would you do that?"

And I say, "yeah, but look where you are.

No one else is there.

It's this unbelievable landscape and you're just removed from everything else."

And it's just almost a spiritual experience.

And I think for the kind of person who wants to explore

space, it's that times a thousand.

Yeah, the unknown.

To go out into the unknown, I think, it's a strong pull and

plenty of people will do it.

One of the goals of SpaceX is to establish a colony

on Mars within a hundred years.

You know, when you look at the work that SpaceX is doing

in developing their latest...

launch capability of the Starship.

The idea there is that they can send dozens of people at one time to visit

space or to go to some place, and this may be one of the tools that

allows them to actually colonize Mars.

Do you think there are enough people on our planet that would be willing to make

a journey like that, that we could start to shuttle a bunch of people up to Mars?

Oh, absolutely.

Absolutely.

I remember when Mars One, what's that guy's name?

Oh, yes.

Lars...

Boz?

He wanted to start a Mars mission that would be funded by, essentially,

entertainment rights globally.

Well, his name was actually Bas Lansdorp.

And he had this really interesting idea to start a permanent human colony on Mars,

where funding would come from broadcast revenues from a reality show they

would produce about the whole process.

From astronaut selection to actually being on Mars.

The project officially shut down in 2021, having been unsuccessful in

their goal of establishing that colony by 2023, but you'd be amazed at how

many people actually signed up to go!

And he put out a call for people, like, who's interested,

and hundreds, uh, he was overwhelmed with people who said they'd go.

This is a one way trip.

You'd think of it more as emigration, that you're moving to Mars permanently.

Not It's a suicide mission, but no, I'm going to live on Mars the rest of my life.

I think thousands of people would sign up possibly completely unaware of all the

things you and I've been talking about!

But I think easy to find well trained astronauts from various

international Space Agencies who would absolutely sign on, yeah.

And if we were going to do that sort of colonization kind of thing

of, you know, dozens of people or hundreds of people or something like that, what

do you think would need to be brought or set up for a settlement on Mars?

Well, I think that things like iPads are tremendous

technology for that, for bringing as many photographs and books and music.

I mean, that's assuming that it'll work on Mars.

I'm sure it will.

It'll work.

The cloud, can you hook up to the cloud when you're on Mars?

Yeah, I think the wire is going to be really long for that!

Where is that cloud located?

How far is that cloud?

Yeah.

So when I wrote Packing for Mars, there was a very strict limit on personal

belongings, weight wise, because the heavier the spacecraft, the more

expensive it is to get it off the ground.

Astronauts have carried all sorts of interesting

and odd personal items to space.

So there was the instance in which Gemini astronauts carried rolls of

coins because they wanted to give them away as souvenirs of individual

coins that had been to space.

There's an instance where an astronaut actually smuggled a

corned beef sandwich into space.

Yeah, from their nearby corner delicatessen!

And it's also fairly well known that Buzz Aldrin, when he landed on

the moon, had with him a very small set of communion items so that he

could take communion on the moon.

In fact, the Franklin Institute has actually sent things into space.

We have a really cool item on display, an artifact of a four inch wide

steel star that was flown on the very last space shuttle mission, and then

subsequently went to visit International Space Station on a different mission.

If you want to know more about the steel star, check out our Curious

Cosmos episode with Chris Ferguson.

That's episode number one.

People sometimes ask me, what would you bring?

You know what I would miss?

Color.

Probably bring one of those, you know, those paint things with all

the different colors, the paint chip.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, the paint chip book.

Sure.

The interiors of these spacecraft are busy and metal and drab.

Very utilitarian.

Well, I want to go back to something you said earlier, Mary, and

I'll sort of put it together like this.

We know going out to the moon is like a weekend trip, you know, two and a

half days will get you to the moon without any problem, you can spend

whatever time you want there and two and a half days back or a day and a

half back or something, and that's kind of easy to do, uh, we know that.

And going out to Mars is a bit more challenging because it's gonna take, you

know, at least nine months to get there, you'll spend a year and a half or so on

the surface of Mars because you're going to wait for the two planets to realign

again so you have the shortest distance for a return trip, and that return trip

might be six months So already we have nearly three years invested in a trip,

but it's still kind of conceivable that that could work You know when we think

about how long people have been living on board space station and things like

that But for this truly romantic idea of really long trips, you mentioned that

at one point it was considered to send senior citizens into space because of

the possibility of radiation damage to the genetics wouldn't really matter so

much because these people are aged out of birth and things like that anyway.

So maybe that's a consideration.

But if we think about that new dimension of space exploration, where we're

considering these really long trips, like going out to Alpha Centauri, for example.

Now we're talking about something that's hundreds of years, and this is now

more like a generational space mission.

That is a completely different animal altogether now, because this is

a case where the original crew...

is not coming back.

Right, and one of the things that was surprising to me in researching

Packing for Mars is that there had been very little work done looking at the

physiology of conception, gestation.

Can conception even happen?

What happens to the fetus and what happens to the embryo?

Do things attach properly?

Do things mechanically even work?

Well, what happens for birth?

The changes in the bone mean that everybody has to

give birth through cesarean?

I mean, none of that's, none of that is known!

Nobody has studied that.

And I said, why?

You know, I remember saying, "you know, if the goal here, the end

point is to live off planet, to set up life on another planet in case I

guess we completely trashed this one.

If that is the goal, don't we need to know that we can reproduce?

Isn't that a basic thing to know?"

That was kind of, and they're like, "well, we're not there yet.

It's still pretty low on the priority list.

We need to understand things like the effects of radiation."

And plus, you know, just the massive challenges of the technology.

But that does seem to me something you want to, you want

to figure out at some point.

Can you actually populate a colony?

Does everything work without gravity?

Lots of experimentation still to do.

Yeah.

Let's finally have some astronauts having sex in space!

All the journalists want to know!

I was going to ask, have there been any studies

yet that the government is willing to release about this?

Are they also being stored down in Area 51 along with the alien corpses?

A fake document online, you know, it's like "Space Shuttle, STS,"

they had the mission number and they had the whole thing written up as though

it was a document testing the best positions for zero gravity intercourse.

Definitely a fake document.

One of the conclusions was it's helpful to have a third party

pushing at helping you stay together!

That is something I want to see on the application

form of "other duties as required if you accept this job."

I don't think so.

But in all seriousness, this is still part and parcel of what the human experience

has to be for long distance space travel.

And the difference between what the romanticized idea is and

what the reality is, these things are still very, very far apart.

Yeah, I mean, I, I would love to go to the moon in my lifetime.

I'm in my 60s now, it's probably not gonna happen, but that's incredibly

cool that at some point that sort of thing might be possible.

Taking it out to the extreme of colonizing another planet,

it to me is still very sci-fi.

Well, it's interesting because that was going

to be my last question to you.

Would you go?

It sounds like you'd go to the moon.

Would you go to, uh, would you go to an orbiting space hotel?

Um, no, because you know what, what really attracted me about

it was to experience weightlessness.

And you can do that right now.

Zero Gravity Corporation has flights out of Las Vegas where you can

go and you've got,what do we do, like 25 parabolas on my flight?

So you probably have more chunks of time, you know, because you've got 20

seconds at a time, then the plane pulls up and then you've got double gravity.

And that was exhilarating.

That was the most fun I've, I think I've ever had, to just be floating!

But you could do that right now for, I don't know what they charge at

zero gravity corp, I pestered NASA till I got onto one of their flights.

But, um, so that was to me, that's what's appealing.

Now, your experience on zero gravity, is that something

you think most of us, all humans, ought to give that a shot, just to

see what that experience is like?

I mean, yes!

Do it!

Okay.

Yes!

Do it!

Alright.

Have you done it?

I have not done it yet.

It's so cool.

I mean, you are a soap bubble.

I mean, you have no weight!

Which is a really strange, I mean, you're floating, but it's

different than floating in water.

It's even more pleasant.

because...

There's no resistance.

In water you feel that resistance.

Also, your organs now have no weight.

So everything inside you, it's like this sort of subtle physical euphoria.

You have no weight!

It's the most awesome thing.

Yeah!

I think I'll try to do that.

Well, Mary, this has been big fun, and I'm so glad you were willing to do this.

Thank you very much for joining us to talk about what it's like to be out

there in space and give us a little bit of a look at what might be coming in

the future in terms of, uh, how we have to try to get the romantic part and the

reality part a little bit closer together.

And hopefully, in our lifetime, we'll see more of this, and maybe we

will get a chance to go to the moon.

Who knows?

We'll keep our fingers crossed.

See you on the moon, Derrick.

That sounds great.

That sounds great.

Mary, thanks again.

I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much.

I really enjoyed it.

Good luck with all your future writings.

I look forward to them.

They're all really exciting and interesting, and those topics

you choose are just great.

So, thanks for introducing us to all those things.

You're so welcome.

My pleasure.

Thanks so much, Mary, for sitting down with me

to chat about traveling to Mars.

Now, I know this may sound like science fiction fantasy, but

believe it or not, the first person to walk on Mars is already here,

walking among us on Earth now.

Let's just think back about what it was like when we

thought about going to the Moon.

That was fantasy for a long time, but that actually came to reality.

And, we're going back to the Moon in the very near future.

But let's think about Mars for a second.

How many of you out there listening would go to Mars?

Maybe?

How about the moon?

Does that sound more reasonable, like something you might do?

Well, the next time you're outside looking up at the night sky, imagine what it

would be like for you to be on the moon.

Then imagine what it would be like to go all the way to

Mars, and what you might pack.

Thanks for listening.

We'll see you next time on Curious Cosmos.

This podcast is made in partnership with RADIOKISMET, Philadelphia's

premier podcast production studio.

This podcast is produced by Amy Carson.

The Franklin Institute's Director of Digital Editorial is Joy Montefusco,

and Erin Armstrong runs Marketing, Communications and Digital Media.

Head of Operations is Christopher Platt, our Mix Engineer is Justin

Berger, and I'm Derrick Pitts, Chief Astronomer and Director of the Fels

Planetarium at the Franklin Institute, and your host for this podcast.

Thanks so much for listening.