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

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, and from Silicon Valley billionaires, we 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. Costs have dropped since the 1960s. For example, take a look at India; developing nations like India and China are already dreaming about Mars. In fact, it has already sent a probe to Mars just a few years ago. And it shows you that the economics have changed.

And now, with the introduction of reusable rockets, 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 $1,000 a pound.

In 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, is 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, his goal 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. 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 heavy industries in outer space. Now, I once talked to Carl Sagan, and he said that because the Earth is in the middle of a shooting gallery of asteroids, comets, and meteors, it’s inevitable that we will be hit with a planet buster, something like what hit the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. We need an “insurance policy.”

Now, he was clear to say that we’re not talking about moving the population of the Earth into outer space; that costs too much money and we have problems of our own on the Earth, like global warming. We have to deal with those problems on the Earth, not fleeing into outer space. But as an insurance policy, we have to make sure that humans become a two-planet species. These are the words of Carl Sagan.

And now, of course, Elon Musk has revived this vision by talking about a multi-planet species. He wants to put up to a million colonists on the planet Mars, sent to Mars by his rockets financed by a combination of public and private funding. And remember, he has the vision, the energy, and the checkbook to make many of these ideas into a reality.