By James Pethokoukis and Robert Zubrin

Since the days of Apollo, critics
of space exploration have argued that efforts to put men on the Moon or Mars
are wasteful endeavors while we have real problems here on the Earth. But the
Apollo program delivered real benefits that justified its costs, and now
private companies like SpaceX are taking steps toward greater expansion into
our solar system. When Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and SpaceX founder,
speaks publicly about his vision of colonizing Mars, his critics have little to
say that wasn’t said in the ’60s. In this episode, Robert Zubrin explores the
benefits of becoming a spacefaring, multi-planetary species.

Robert is President of Pioneer Astronautics and the founder and President of the Mars Society, an international organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars. An aerospace engineer and energy expert, Robert is the author of several books including “The Case for Mars” and “The Case for Space.”

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: We’ll start with a simple one: Why should humanity
try to become a multi-planetary, spacefaring species?

Zubrin: In order to have a bigger future.
In order to have an open future. In order to open the possibility to create new
branches of human civilization that will add their creative talents to the
human story.

I believe some people view it as a vanity project,
something almost like a luxury good that we’re going to buy because some people
think it’s cool. They don’t see the compelling case. And I’m sure that was true
in the 1960s and ’70s, and I’m pretty sure it’s true today. What aren’t they
seeing?

Well,
they’re not seeing the big picture. The game of life isn’t played for money; it’s
played for children. You might ask, why should a couple have children? It’s not
going to help them put food on the table — quite the opposite. But it’s going
to help them be part of the future. And the societies that move out and settle
space will be those that put their stamp on the future. I mean, look, why are
we speaking English in this interview? Neither your last name nor my last name
is Anglo-Saxon, but the British went forth and took their culture. Among the
cultures of Europe of the 16th century, 17th century, it was the most
individualistic, it had the most potential for opening the future. They
expanded from a rather small country of little significance into the dominant
global civilization, and you and I are part of it and have benefited from it.

I
only speak a little Russian. I don’t know, your name sounds Greek. But here we
are, contributing to a society that values individual liberty and dignity and democracy
and the literature of Shakespeare and all the rest. And the Earth is just one
planet. The human future is going to involve expansion into space. And do we
want to be part of it?

And
furthermore, humanity will benefit tremendously from the new creative societies
that are established in space, just as global civilization has benefited
tremendously from the creation of, well, America, actually. Not from the
exports of America, as impressive as they may have been in various periods,
whether it’s been cotton or steel or wheat. But for the past century, America
has been 4 percent of the world population and has been responsible for 50
percent of the inventions. And America didn’t just give the world tobacco. We
gave them steamboats and telegraphs and electric light bulbs and centrally
generated electrical power and recorded sound and motion pictures and airplanes
and nuclear power and computers and the internet. We have revolutionized human
existence.

Well,
Martian civilization is going to be forced to be as inventive as America has
been, because they’re going to be a frontier society, confronted with
challenges, but composed of technologically adept people who are going to have
to tackle those challenges and will undoubtedly create technological
breakthroughs that will benefit all of humanity in the process.

The United States has not, in a manned mission, been
beyond low-Earth orbit since the end of Apollo — despite our love of
technology, our exploration heritage, our individualism. Does that say
something about our culture’s willingness to support the kind of effort that
you’re talking about?

Well,
I have some problems with some of the ways our American culture has been going
in recent years, but I don’t really think this is a problem with the culture. I
think this is a product of the degeneration of the political class. The people
who got us to the Moon in a decade in the 1960s were the same people or the
younger brothers of the people that won us World War II. And they knew how to
run a government that got things done, whether it was winning World War II or
building the Interstate Highway System or creating Atoms for Peace or getting
you to the Moon. Now, there’s been an extraordinary degeneration of the
political class since that time, and this has shown itself in all sorts of
things that it has attempted to undertake. This defeat in Afghanistan was
farcical.

But
precisely because the political class has dropped the ball, a new force has
entered the arena, which is the entrepreneurial effort. In the 1960s, no one
would look or very few people would look for a private entrepreneur to save the
space program because the space program was doing great. And in the ’70s, we
thought, “Well, maybe we just hit a bump in the road and it’ll get started
again,” because we could all remember when it really was going great. But
as the ’80s and the ’90s went by, things just didn’t restart. Eventually in the
’90s you started to see people starting entrepreneurial space companies to say,
“Look, if someone is going to open space, it’s not going to be the US
government. I’m going to try to do it.”

And
by the early 2000s, one of those people or several of those people who were
recruited to that vision were people with the means to do it, such as Musk or
Bezos or others. And they’re doing it. So the government has dropped the ball,
but American culture and the surrounding Western culture still retains plenty
of people willing to do it. And where the government has failed, I believe that
private entrepreneurs will succeed.

Americans were excited about the Space Shuttle back
then, and it seems to me they’re pretty excited about the “billionaire
space race” today. Do we underestimate just how interested people are in
the prospects of going further and becoming a spacefaring civilization?

Look,
within NASA itself, you have a bifurcation between what I call purpose-driven
programs and vendor-driven programs. Purpose-driven programs spend money to do
things; vendor-driven programs do things in order to spend money. And while the
human space flight program was purpose driven during Apollo, the purpose wasn’t
scientific. It was to astonish the world at what free people could do, and we
did. The scientific programs were also purpose driven during Apollo. After
Apollo, since the manned space program hasn’t had a purpose, it has degenerated
into a vendor-driven program whose main source of support is the desire to
distribute funds to various companies and districts. However, the science
program, while imperfect, has remained primarily a purpose-driven program. We
didn’t build the Webb telescope to sell sunshades. There’s a sunshade on Webb
because it needs it.

And
whenever NASA does something that is purpose driven, the public response is
immediate; whether it’s the Mars rovers or repairing an upgrading Hubble, or
the Webb, you’ll see it every time. Whenever it’s actually doing something that
matters, the response is tremendous. And then people are looking at this rocket
team at SpaceX introducing reusable launch vehicles. And they’re going to
change the picture. The cost of space launch was astronomical at the time of
Sputnik. It declined to about $10,000 per kilogram by the time of the Moon
landing, ’69/’70. It stayed at $10,000 per kilogram till 2010 — 40 years. The
price of launch did not drop any further. It was like a law of nature: 10,000
per kilogram.

Since
2010, as a result of SpaceX introducing reusable rockets, it has fallen to
$2,000 per kilogram. It’s fallen by a factor of five in a decade. And if
they’re successful with the Starship, which both has a larger capacity and is a
fully reusable launch vehicle (unlike the Falcons, which are just mostly
reusable), they’ll bring the price down to $400 per kilogram and all sorts of
business plans that people have that don’t make sense at $10,000 per kilogram
are going to make a lot of sense at $400 per kilogram. And you’re going to see
a massive expansion of space activity as a result of this.

It sort of reminds me of a lot of the business plans with
the internet in the late ’90s where they just didn’t have the bandwidth to make
those work. There are other companies that had ideas for Uber, but people
didn’t have smartphones yet. We didn’t have the bandwidth. And all of a sudden
when people had phones and the internet was much faster and could carry much
more data, all those initial business plans from the ’90s started to make
sense. And I guess maybe that’s where we’re at: We had decades where people had
ideas, but we just did not have the technology to make it so. Now, all of a
sudden we have this huge drop in costs and we can do things we couldn’t do
before. What are some of those things going to be that we can do?

Well,
let’s take one example: orbital research labs. NASA identified this as a
possible application of the space station. Coupled with the space shuttle,
people could do research in zero gravity, taking advantage of zero gravity and the
hard vacuum that’s available in space. Well, the cost in schedule and
bureaucratic impediments involved in using the shuttle to put in an experiment
on the space station, and the fact that you have share the space station with
other people. . . I mean, I run a research lab. I wouldn’t want to have
strangers running around my lab while I’m trying to do research of a
business-competitive nature. Well, guess what? A Falcon 9 — forget about Starship,
that’s coming — but even where we are now, Falcon 9 can send 20 tons to orbit
for $65 million. 20 tons is the mass of a space station module.

We
could launch a space station for 65 million. And okay, maybe the space station
itself costs another $35 million. That’s $100 million to create an orbital
research lab. Now, that’s more change than I have, but that’s well within the
means of a Fortune 500 company. So we’re going to start to see the Pfizer
Orbital Space Station and the Toshiba Orbital Space Station and so forth. In
other words, you can have orbital research labs sponsored by major
corporations. It’ll be within their means to do it.

And
here’s another thing: space hotels. That’s a little further out, but it’ll come
next. In the ’90s, there was an entrepreneur named Bigelow who wanted to do
space hotels. And the business plan really didn’t make sense in the ’90s. There
was no inexpensive way to launch it or to get people up and down. But if
Starship comes along and now you’re talking about launching 100 tons to orbit
for $20 million . . . And 100 passengers to orbit: 100 passengers into 20
million is $20,000 per person. Okay. So people who are well heeled could afford
$20,000 for a vacation in space — and also intercontinental travel for that
kind of money. Once again, that’s a little more than I pay to fly, but that’s
the cost of a first-class, round-trip ticket from Los Angeles to Sydney right
now. And to be able to do that in an hour instead of 18 hours? People will pay
for that. And reusable space launch vehicles means there will also be a
secondary market in used space launch vehicles. So they will be available even
cheaper for people willing to pick up stuff that’s been used a bit. You know,
this is going to be a tremendous expansion of what’s possible in space.

As we look ahead to the coming space revolution, it’s difficult to know what advances will come of it — much like it was difficult to know what the internet would bring us. There seems to be an inherent inability to predict, so we just have to take a step forward into the unknown.

Well,
absolutely. John F. Kennedy, at the beginning of the space age, said in one of
his speeches, [paraphrasing] “This is an act of space and vision for we do
not know what benefits await us, but this is a new ocean and free men will sail
it. This is a mountain and free men will climb.” And that’s what this is.
And I mean, who would’ve thought when they first founded America or established
the first colonies in America or even declared the independence of the American
colonies, that it would grow into something like what we have here today — and
with all these incredible creations. And there are some immediate possibilities
that we can see: revolutions in research and even certain kinds of industrial
products, intercontinental transport . . . It’s certainly going to determine
the military predominance in the world — who has space assets and can replace
space assets and who can’t.

But
when you’re talking about creating, giving birth to new branches of human
civilization, it’s like Benjamin Franklin. He once gave one of his
demonstrations of electricity in front of an audience of French aristocrats
while he was over as ambassador to France during the revolution. And one of the
aristocrats came up to Franklin at the end of one of his demonstrations, which
were essentially kind of magic shows, and said, “Well, this is very
fascinating stuff, Dr. Franklin. But what possible use could electricity ever
have?” And Franklin answered, “Of what use is a baby?” Well,
this is some baby.

Though we were just talking about the space economy,
obviously the vision here is bigger. The vision here is the multi-planetary
civilization, permanent establishment on the Moon and Mars. When are we going
to see that happen?

Well,
I think we will probably see the first human landings on Mars by the end of
this decade. I think it’s likely to be a public-private partnership. Musk
always projects he’s going to do things sooner than he gets them done, but he
eventually gets them done. And I think Starships are going to be flying to
orbit by 2024. And somebody’s going to be elected president in 2024. And they
see 100 tons being delivered to orbit all the time by these reusable spaceships
and this guy wants to go to Mars. “Can this really be done?” Yeah.
There’s some other stuff that’s needed. The science, the Starships. We need
surface systems and all sorts of other stuff. We could develop that. We could
get together with him. And if we do that, we can make this happen. “Could
it be done by the end of my second term?” Absolutely. “Is it going to
cost a trillion dollars?” No, we could probably do it within NASA’s
existing budget because he’s got the transportation system. “Well then,
why aren’t we doing this?” So I think that’s how it it’s going to come
about.

And
I would say something: There’s another side to this. There’s the positive side,
and there’s also avoiding a tremendous negative. People talk about the grand
threats, the existential threat that humanity faces today. And some people will
very fashionably say, “It’s global warming.” Okay. And I believe
global warming is real, by the way. But one degree in 150 years is not an
existential threat. It’s an event. Somebody will say it’s resource exhaustion.
I do not think that. Real resources are created by technologies and with more
technology, we get more resources.

But
there’s another threat that is quite real, and that is bad ideas. It’s not
global warming or resource exhaustion that caused the catastrophes of the 20th
century. It was bad ideas. And one bad idea in particular in a variety of
forms, which is, “There isn’t enough for everyone.” Okay? “There
isn’t enough for everyone so we need to fight over what is here.” Now this is a
fiction. The world was not overpopulated in 1914 or 1939, and it’s not
overpopulated now. And it’s true that we don’t have to go into space to create
nuclear power so that we don’t need Middle Eastern oil. We could do that. But
the problem is not the shortage of the resource itself, but this fundamental
idea that the world is zero sum. And this is the fundamental driving force for
war, which is the existential threat to humanity today. And if people can see
that by working together, by using our creative powers, we can take planets
that are now wastelands and turn them into inhabited worlds, they’d understand
that if you can create planets, what’s the point of fighting over profits?

Of course, some of the opponents of doing more in space
make that exact argument, that there was a limited amount of resources and we
should not waste them on space when we should be applying them on Earth. That
was certainly the argument of people who opposed Apollo in the ’60s or early
’70s. And as we’re moving out into space again, you see those exact same
arguments. That belief remains persistent over the decades.

Well,
that belief is the existential threat facing humanity. That belief. We’re not
threatened by there being too many people; we’re threatened by people who think
there are too many people. Hitler said that this idea of perpetual plenty and
unlimited resources achieved through science was a Jewish plot to take away the
population’s belief in the necessity for war. Now, it’s not a Jewish plot, but it
does take away the population’s belief in the necessity for war.

And
that is why people whose ultimate design is to use necessity as the basis of justification
for tyranny and war propound the idea of limited resources. And it’s also, by the
way, why people who expound the theory of limited resources, whether it’s the
Club of Rome or Paul Ehrlich or any of these other people, will never lack for
sponsors. Because if you say resources are limited, then human aspirations must
be constrained and someone must be empowered to do the constraining. But this
idea that resources are limited is the existential threat facing humanity, and
it’s what we can obliterate by expanding to space and showing that the
resources available to us are as unlimited as our creativity.

How helpful would it be in making this vision reality for
us to figure out nuclear fusion? There’s probably been more news on fusion in
the past 18 months than maybe the past 18 years or more.

Yeah,
sure. But by the way, you should know that this entrepreneurial space
revolution is what has set off this entrepreneurial fusion revolution. People
looked at the success of SpaceX and they said, “Huh, maybe the problem
with fusion is the same as the problem with achieving space launch. Maybe the
fundamental problem isn’t technical; maybe it’s institutional” — that
instead of something being done by large government bureaucracies, this needs
to be done by teams of entrepreneurs. And I actually worked in the fusion program
a bit in the ’80s when I was at Los Alamos. And I can remember one group lunch
we had where the team leader, a man named Kokawski, actually said “You
know, when fusion power is finally developed, it’s not going to be at a place
like Los Alamos or Livermore. It’s going to be a couple of crackpots working in
a garage.” And everybody laughed because fusion machines are big and
expensive and beyond the realm of garage inventors.

But
if not crackpots in a garage, then a startup in a warehouse, yes. And so now
you have entrepreneurial fusion companies being funded: $500 million, $800
million, a billion dollars. They’re actually being funded at a higher level
than the official government fusion programs, and they’re moving much faster.
And these people are not talking about taking 50 years to build a machine like
ITER before you turn it on. They’re talking about taking three years to build a
machine and five years to get real results, because that’s what investors are
looking for. They’re not looking for a 50-year research program. And so this is
going to happen.

I
also think, however, that if fusion is not developed on Earth, or even if it
is, it will be taken much further by, for example, Martian civilization. Mars
doesn’t have fossils, and they don’t have waterfalls, and solar energy is
pretty weak, and nuclear power certainly can be used on Mars but it takes a big
industrial base to do all the isotope separation and mining and all this stuff.
But deuterium, which is the fuel for fusion reactors, is five times as common
on Mars as it is on Earth.

So
the Martian [colonists] will have a tremendous incentive to develop fusion
power. You know, the British developed the steam engine. But it was Americans
who developed the steam boat, because the only highways in early America were
rivers and sailboats have limited utility on rivers because of the strong
current. So they needed steamboats. So Robert Fulton, and then the steamboats
of the Mississippi. I mean, we developed the steamboat because our society
needed it. And then this greatly advanced steam technology; it made it more
compact and portable and efficient, and set the stage for a lot of other
things, including railroads.

Well,
nuclear power: It has been a mixed bag. It’s sometimes competitive for power
stations, but can also be replaced with fossil fuels. But the one place where
you can’t beat nuclear power is on a submarine. So just as the first efficient
steam engines were on steamboats, nuclear power came about because of its need
for submarine propulsion. And it remains unchallenged there today. Now, fusion
is a way to generate electricity. It’s also an incredible possible source of
space propulsion. With a fusion rocket, you can get exhaust velocities of up to
8 percent the speed of light, and a rocket properly designed could get up to
about twice its exhaust velocity. You’re talking about the introductory
capability for interstellar travel. That’s where this thing is going. The
Martian [colonists] will have a much stronger imperative than anyone on Earth
has for fusion power — both for industrial use, for power generation, but also
to enable travel farther out.

We’ve talked a lot about the private sector, about
entrepreneurs. What would you want government to do over the next decade to
turn this vision into reality?

Well,
first of all, the most important thing the government can do to help the
entrepreneurial space revolution is to be a smart customer. A free market
requires freedom to sell and freedom to buy. In other words, right now, for
example, you have various politicians attempting to compel the government to
use the SLS, a vastly more expensive space launch vehicle than Starship
promises to be, or even than the Falcons are already. So if the government is
not free to buy the best deal, that disincentivizes the provision of the best
deal. If the government is a smart shopper, if it rewards merit, then merit
will be promoted.

Once
again, if you talk about NASA, between purpose-driven and vendor-driven
programs, the science directorate is largely purpose driven. So for instance,
this TESS space telescope, which is a telescope in interplanetary space for
finding extra-solar planets, was launched on a Falcon 9. It cost them $65
million. Now they could have launched in on a $300 million Delta instead, but
since the science directorate wanted to save its money to devote to science
instead of launch costs, they bought the cheapest vehicle. But the human space
flight program’s imperatives are all distorted by the need to supply funds to
this district, this state, this manufacturer, and so forth. And so the funds of
the human space flight program are not being used effectively. I mean, they are
incidentally, but most of them are not being used effectively to promote
progress in space technology because they’re being politically directed instead
of purpose directed. So really, all the government needs to do is spend the
taxpayer’s money efficiently and they will promote the space launch revolution.

Where does your interest in space come from?

Well,
it goes a long way back. If I wanted to cite a particular event in my life, I
would have to say Sputnik. I was actually five when Sputnik flew, and I was an
early reader. I was reading science fiction. And while the adult world may have
been terrified of Sputnik because it meant the Russians could hit us, to me it
was exhilarating. It meant that all these stories I was reading about space
travel were going to be true. You’ve probably read Homer Hickam’s account of
his life. He was a teenager when Sputnik flew and that inspired him. Well, I
was five, but he inspired me, too. And my parents saw it and they promoted my
interest. My father got me a telescope, and I did drawings of the Moon through
the eyepiece and all this. And then I started launching rockets as well.

And
during the ’60s, we were moving ahead like you wouldn’t believe. Every month or
two, there’d be something new in space, whether by the Russians or by us: two
people in space, space walks, space rendezvous, orbiting the Moon, space probes
to Mars, and of course the Moon landing itself. And I was on board. You’re
going to be on the moon by 1970, Mars by 1980, Saturn by 1990, Alpha Centauri
by the year 2000; we were moving out, man. Now, of course, the only part of
that program that actually was realized was the Moon by 1970, in fact we made
it by 1969. But then Nixon shut the show down. And for a while, by then I was
in college, I accepted that as reality and I took my science education and went
and became a secondary school teacher in science.

But
at a certain point, I’m living in northern Manhattan, teaching in Brooklyn and
commuting on the A Train each way an hour and 15 minutes and reading novels by
Herman Melville about sailing the South Seas, and I started saying, “What
am I doing here? This isn’t what I signed up for.” And by then, I had
heard about this thing called graduate school, and I decided to go back to
graduate school, initially in nuclear fusion. And this was in the ’80s, but
even while that was happening, the fusion program was being slowed down by
budget cuts and then by this international collaboration, which took away the
dynamic of international competition which had driven it before.

But
I started hearing about the Mars Underground, which is a group of people about
my own age who were saying, “Look, we’ve got to get this space program
back on track. We should have been on Mars by now.” And I started going to
their conferences. By then I was an engineer and I got myself hired at Martin
Marietta, which is now Lockheed Martin, to do preliminary design of
interplanetary missions. And, well, here I am. And by the way, if people want
to know more about what I’ve got to say, I’ve got a couple of books: one is
called “The Case for Mars.” And you’ll notice that it’s got an
endorsement by Elon Musk on the cover. And the other is called “The Case
for Space,” which deals more with the entrepreneurial space revolution.

Robert, that was fantastic. Thanks so much for coming on
the podcast.

Thanks for having me here.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” Robert Zubrin is President of Pioneer Astronautics and the author of “The Case for Mars” and “The Case for Space.”

The post Should humanity become a multi-planetary species? My long-read Q&A with Robert Zubrin appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.