What humanity will gain by going to Mars | Leland Melvin

[Music] So, for humans to live on Mars and not just making a lot of potatoes and live off the potatoes for a while, it's just the habitat, the systems itself for a robust life support system that's going to keep you alive for this, you know, long period of time.

I mean, we go to the Space Station that's been up there since 2000, and it's been working, but we have a, you know, agent, well, like a day and a half trip to get something to the Space Station if something fails. We need a spare part. Mars is just gonna take six to eight months to get something there.

So, trying to build systems that are, you know, super redundant but also have ways to fix things, like with, you know, 3D printing. I mean, that's another thing that we have on the space station, but we haven't had to utilize it for making things that are critical. They're in situ right there, so I think that's one of the things—a habitat that's, it's, you know, bulletproof.

The food aspects, you know, eating food that's not only, you know, tastes good, but it also has the nutritional value that you're going to get all the nutrients that you need to function, to live for this extended period of time. You know, the Martian environment is very harsh, you know, with the thin atmosphere, 3/8 gee, solar radiation—all these things.

Building suits that can handle that when you're doing these excursions and going out and cleaning the solar panels and doing these things, having robust systems will keep you alive. And then just, you know, water and food. You know, I think I heard it's gonna take 24,000 pounds of food for, I think, a colony of four or five to live up there.

So, the preposition—do you fly those in, preposition that there and hope that a dust storm or something doesn't wipe it out and know that it's still there? And then a shelf life of five years, whereas the shelf life for the food on the space station is 18 months. So, a five-year shelf life, and every time an item of food, you know, sits there for another month, another month, another month, it loses its nutritional value, it loses flavor, it loses texture.

So, making sure that we have something that people don't want to eat and will eat to stay healthy in this environment. We, as a race, the human race, are intrinsically curious, and we are wired in our DNA as it we're explorers. We look up at the night sky; we wonder what's up there, especially as children.

And so, this journey of exploring the things around us, whether they're close or far, that's what we do. That's what we do as humans, and I think, you know, all the things that we've done with exploration—whether it's walking on the moon or building an International Space Station— all these things help advance life back on Earth.

And so, exploration leads us to a better life. You know, heart pacemakers, smoke detectors— all these things that have come out of the space program. But it's also not just the technological things; it's the part that brings us together as a humanity.

I was in space on my first mission with, you know, African-American, Asian-American, French, German, Russian—the first female commander. People used to fight against her. Now, breaking bread at 17,500 miles per hour, going around the planet every 90 minutes, seeing a sunrise and a sunset every 45, while breaking bread, listening to Sade’s “Smooth Operator.”

Okay, that was surreal. That blew my mind, and it gave me this perspective shift when I look back at the planet, you know, like Ron Garren's book, "Orbital Perspective."

And so, as we do this space station thing, as we maybe move back to the moon and build a habitat, but eventually we're going to be going to another planet, and Mars is, you know, our closest neighbor that we can get to. There are potential resources there, you know, there's water at the poles, there's, you know, iron in the soil that we can turn into other things, that perchlorates.

And so I think, as a race of people, I think it's imperative that we continue to explore, but also that we visit this neighbor that might have been like our planet at one time before. So this can be a harbinger of maybe things to come, that we need to understand what happened there, and what's going to potentially happen here on Earth.

You know, no matter what that timeframe is, understanding that is very important. [Music]