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July 11, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
56:04
Edition 303 - Bas Lansdorp

Special Edition with the man in charge of the Mars One mission... Bas Lansdorp...

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Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes, and this is The Unexplained.
Well, the British summer rolls on as I record this.
We are in the midst of Wimbledon, the big tennis championship, always throwing up surprises.
And the weather has been pretty good for it, too.
We've had some real heat.
More heat.
Difficult to sleep for a few nights.
And as I record this, the rain is pounding down in London, giving us just a little bit of a respite.
But I know some of you don't like me talking about the British weather, so that'll be where I park that topic.
But that's how we're doing up here in the northern hemisphere right now.
I'm going to do a big load of shout-outs, probably two editions from now, because the next edition has a very, very special guest.
And we have a great guest on this one.
So two big-name guests on the Unexplained The Next Two Shows.
This one features Bass Lansdorp, the man behind the Mars One project.
They intend to colonize Mars by the year 2031.
They will start with automatic missions, and the automatic missions will build a settlement for people to go to eventually.
And Bass Lansdorp himself, who is the man driving the project, he wants to go and be on Mars himself towards the end of his life.
So he wants to do this himself.
You know, how many times do you see the person in front of a project actually want to be part of it?
Well, he is, and he says he will be.
So we've got him on this show.
He was on my radio show recently.
Then a special edition for this show, we have Michio Kaku, one of the most famous scientists in the world, answering questions on just about everything from quantum physics to aliens and UFOs and the nature of life itself.
So he is the next edition of The Unexplained, Bas Landstorp on this one.
If you want to connect with me, don't forget, even though I'm not doing shout-outs on this show or the next one, I'm seeing all of your emails and acting upon them.
If you want to make a suggestion for a guest, or if you want to tell me what you think of the show, how it can be improved, you can always do that.
Go to the website, theunexplained.tv, designed, created, and owned by Adam from Creative Hotspot.
Go there and you can send me an email, or if you'd like to make a donation for the show, you can do that on the website as well.
It's theunexplained.tv.
Right, let's get to the guest on this edition.
It is Bas Lansdorp, the man behind the Mars One project.
Bas Lansdorp, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained tonight.
It's a big pleasure, Howard.
Thanks for having me.
Do you know the one question I've wanted to ask you first, Bas, and I guess it is the right place to put this question, what is it within you that made you want to do this?
Well, I think it's the obvious.
I want to go to Mars.
And I came up with the idea of wanting to go to Mars about 20 years ago when I was still a student of mechanical engineering in Holland.
And I thought, well, I'm Dutch, I'm not American.
And back then, the only group that was planning to go to Mars was NASA.
So if I want to go to Mars, I'm going to have to do it myself.
So as a naïve mechanical engineering student, I started reading old mission designs, always immediately scrapping away anything that had to do with the return mission, which I think is a big waste of resources.
And I still want to go.
I won't be on one of the first missions.
We can talk about that later.
But I still hope to go to Mars one day.
We will talk about that later.
You know that this whole idea of the non-returnable mission, the idea that you go there and you stay there, is very, very controversial.
There are people that I've had on this show, they've said that will not work.
But you've been determined to do it that way from the start, haven't you?
Yeah, absolutely.
So Mars 1 started about six years ago, but even 20 years ago, I always assumed that it would be a permanent settlement mission for a number of reasons.
First of all, I think that it would literally be an enormous waste to send tourists or visitors to Mars if you actually need workers there.
You need to build a settlement, a new colony of mankind in a different place.
You need people who will work and build for the rest of their lives.
And you don't want to spend so much resources for people who are going to spend a couple of months or a year there.
But I actually believe that it's practically impossible from many points of view to have the first crew return.
I mean, just look at how difficult it is to launch something from Earth.
Thousands, sometimes hundreds, but sometimes thousands of engineers are checking all the systems at the last moment.
Everything is go, and then 5% of all rocket launches from Earth fail.
And they don't all explode.
That's the ones we see in the news.
But 5% have the payload, the satellite, end up in the wrong orbit.
Now, if that's from Earth, where we have the hundreds or thousands of engineers, and we have everything under control, how can we do it from Mars, where the return rocket will have been launched from Earth with all the vibrations, will have flown through space with the vacuum and the temperature differences, etc.
Then it will enter the Martian atmosphere.
Again, there's vibrations.
Then there's a big bang when it hits the surface.
We don't know exactly how big the bang will be.
Then the return vehicle is going to stand on the surface of Mars for at least a couple of years before the return crew is going.
Then there's three or four people, and they need to prepare that rocket that on Earth would be considered completely unusable.
Three or four people are going to make that rocket fly back to Earth.
It's impossible.
It's practically completely impossible.
And fortunately, right now there's a lot of people who do agree with us.
And for example, Buzz Ulrin, the second man on the moon, he has pleaded in the American Congress that NASA should be working on a one-way mission to Mars instead of return.
So it's catching on, but I don't think that the national space agencies are ever going to do something like that because they want their people back.
And that's why I think that it will not be the national space agencies that will land on Mars first.
So the people you're recruiting right now, Bess, to do this, those people have to realize that Once they say goodbye to people here on Earth, they may have some radio communication with them, but when they get there, they are not coming back.
That is the rest of their life.
And presumably, if you go there, that's going to include you in it.
That sounds really dramatic, doesn't it?
But we've been doing it for millennia.
That's how humans have conquered the planet.
Continent by continent, we've moved out away from our home in Africa, and we don't commute home to have dinner in Africa every evening.
And I guess if you think about it this way, Bas, the people who, and I'm only just starting to think about it now, having talked with you, the people who conquered the west coast of America, having conquered the East Coast, that was a massive achievement.
They had to build a railroad that went all the way through, blasting rock in the way.
Some people died making that thing.
It was a huge, huge venture.
They must have realized that many of them were not going back.
So it's the same pioneer spirit.
Yeah, actually, I think it's even a little bit less of a pioneer spirit than the people who before them were the native inhabitants of North America.
And so people have been doing this for 50,000 years, not just the last couple of hundred years that we consider modern history, but long before that.
But even 100 years ago, if you were migrating from England to Australia, then you were buying a one-way ticket on a boat.
And you could return, in theory, of course, you could return.
But if you wanted to communicate to your family or your friends back home, you had to send a letter.
Do you remember the old-fashioned letter?
And it would take a couple of months for your letter to go from Australia back to London.
And then your family would send a reply.
And it would take another couple of months before you could read it.
Now, you sound very, very comfortable with this.
And I'm sorry to interrupt.
I just want to get every minute to count of this conversation because it's taken a while to set up.
You're comfortable with this.
But what about those people?
And I think at a news conference about a year ago, you said you'd had something like 1,000 applications already.
Maybe I'm wrong about the number.
But, you know, how confident can you be that all of those people have accepted this fact?
Well, we received more than 200,000 registrations for the job vacancy of our first teams.
And we're now down to exactly 100 round three candidates that are still interested in going.
So, of course, in the 200,000 registrations, which was just people filling in their name, their email address, yes, I accept the terms and conditions on the website.
So, of course, in those 200,000, I'm sure there were people that didn't think it through completely.
But the 100 round three candidates, and even the 1,000 round two candidates that we had, I'm 100% convinced that these are people that at least think that they can deal with that.
Of course, that's the biggest challenge of MarsOne is not in the technology and it's not in the funding.
It's in finding a team that can actually be the first team, deal with being the first team to go to Mars and live there for two years before the second crew is joining them.
That's our biggest challenge, and that's definitely something that I do not want to underestimate here on the show.
So you've got 100 people.
You've got to thin those down.
How are you going to do that?
Actually, I would like to add one more thing about the distance of Mars and comparing it to the history of exploration.
So as I said, if you were migrating to Australia, you could go back in theory.
But if you wanted to communicate, there was the letter.
From Mars, you can send a WhatsApp message.
I mean, Curiosity Rover is actually sending photos all the time.
We are sending commands to the rover.
And Mars is never more than 20 minutes away.
So a return signal would take 40 minutes as compared to a couple of months if you were living in Australia.
So you will actually be much more in touch with your friends from Mars than people were 100 years ago from Australia.
But of course, there is no possibility.
There is no point in sending a message saying, dear folks, not really enjoying it here, want to come home because you can't.
That's it.
When you're there, you're there.
You've got to get on with everybody else.
And that's why it's so important for Mars One to do the astronaut selection extremely well.
So the most important thing is, of course, we're selecting people that are very healthy because there's no hospitals on Mars yet.
We need people that are very smart because we're going to teach them a lot of new skills, engineering skills to fix anything that breaks, medical skills, dental skills, botanical skills to grow their own food.
But the most important thing that we'll do during the training is testing them.
So we'll build a copy of the Mars outpost here on Earth and we'll lock up the teams that are training, that are training for 14, 15 years.
We'll lock them up under Martian conditions at least once per year and we'll test them for their ability to deal with the situation that they will find on Mars.
And this might take a couple of days or they might be in the outpost for half a year or for a whole year.
They won't know when they go in to make sure that they can't count down the days, just like on Mars.
And they will find out and we will find out if the teams are capable of dealing with such a situation.
This all assumes, of course, that human beings can survive on Mars.
There are some people who say actually they can't.
Bass Landsdorp is a dreamer.
You believe they can.
Well, I'm absolutely convinced that humans can't survive on Mars just like they can't survive in London and just like they can't survive here in the Netherlands without technology.
You need technology to survive here in Holland, at the other side of the North Sea in the UK, even more so in the north of Norway when the winter is even more cold and dark.
And you need technology to survive in the International Space Station, and you need technology to survive on Mars.
But Mars is actually a little bit easier than the International Space Station, where humans have already been alive for more than 16 years now.
Why is that so?
Mars has resources, which both of them are not available in the International Space Station.
So there is no doubt that humans can survive on Mars.
The only question is, can you make everything work?
Is your plan to terraform Mars, Bas?
For those who don't know what that means, that event, that essentially means trying to turn Mars into something in terms of a landscape you can grow stuff on and have a reasonable atmosphere.
That means the aim is to change it.
Is that your plan?
No, it is not.
So as you said in the beginning, in the introduction, a human mission to Mars is a huge, huge endeavor.
It's extremely complex, but I believe that something like terraforming Mars would be a thousand times, literally a thousand times more complex.
And look at this Earth.
We're trying to pollute it.
I'm making quote marks in the air now.
We're trying to pollute it with 7 billion people with exhaust gases and all kinds of other things that we're doing to changing the atmosphere.
But the effect still took a couple of decades to really prove.
And now imagine 4 or 8 or 20 or 100 people living on Mars trying to change the environment there.
It's such a momentous task.
I believe that if we ever start doing that, it's going to be an enormous task.
And I think it might actually be easier to find a more habitable planet orbiting another star than to try to turfle Mars.
But who knows, right?
I mean, if you were talking to someone 200 years ago and you would tell them that you can fly to New York one day and back the other, they would think you're completely insane and yet we're doing it every day.
So at this moment, I would say it's almost impossible, but I think that I should definitely be one to not talk about impossible because I'm trying to do one other thing that many people consider impossible, going to Mars.
All right.
Let's hold that thought right there because I want to get into the technology, the financing, and the timeline next.
So, Bas, we talked about some of the issues that will face the people who will be doing this because it will be a one-way trip for those pioneers going to Mars.
Let's talk about, first of all, the financing of this.
I read on your website that at the moment your company has a valuation of 389 million US dollars.
I think that's correct.
That follows a recent issue of shares.
There are people who are telling me that even with that kind of money, you are not going to be able to afford to do this.
That's absolutely right.
We estimate the cost of our mission to be about 6 billion US dollars.
But, of course, the valuation of the company has nothing to do with what we can afford when in time.
So, right now, we don't need hundreds of millions.
We need a few tens of millions to take our project from basically a startup that we are right now to the next level.
So, what we're aiming to do in the next year is hiring some really good team members.
So, for example, ex-NASA, people who have actually participated in the organizing of Mars missions.
Unmanned, but still something much more relevant than the experience that we have in the team right now.
Or ex-Lockheed Martin, so people who have, for NASA, built the systems that have actually landed on Mars.
We need to hire an excellent CEO for MarsOne Ventures, the stock exchange-listed company.
And we need someone there who has experience in monetizing stories.
So, for example, someone from Disney or from the marketing bureau of the Olympics or from the World Cup.
So, excellent team members is the first thing that we need to do.
So, are you hoping to raise most of this money, and that's a huge amount of money, $6 billion you were saying, from the media rights?
Are you hoping to make a lot of money from the media rights?
Is that what you're saying to me?
No, the business case of Mars One is monetizing the story of the human mission to Mars.
So that means indeed the value of the exposure, but with that also comes merchandise, application fees from people who apply to Mars, ads on video content.
Later on, when we're actually sending things to Mars, we will have revenue directly from broadcasting rights.
But it's a whole range of sources of revenue.
And don't forget that Disney has a story that you probably know.
It's called Star Wars.
And they make about $2 billion per year from the story.
And that's fiction.
This will be real.
Star Wars brand is $2 billion per year.
So you're thinking you can multiply that because their product is fiction, and this is going to be the real deal.
Exactly.
And there's a number of other business cases around MarsOne that we will also be able to use that they don't have.
For example, technology spin-off.
If we develop the systems to grow food on Mars with less water and less energy than we need there on Earth, these kinds of systems will definitely have value here on Earth.
Or business cases that become possible when humans or private companies are actually even just sending systems to Mars.
We've been approached by a company that provides the service to people where they can send a small fraction of the ashes of a beloved or of themselves after they die to Earth orbit.
And they approached us and they asked, can we use some space on your systems to cover our customers to land a small portion of their ashes, about a gram of their ashes on Mars?
And what are you thinking of charging for that?
How much will that be?
Well, I can't really disclose that, but what I'm trying to say is if we start doing something as exciting as actual exploration of Mars, then these kinds of business cases will pop up.
Don't forget that Columbus, Columbus was pitching a business case to the Queen.
He was pitching a shortcut to India.
Now he failed miserably.
He has never found a shortcut to India, but he found America.
And if you do something that's different and exciting and on the edge, then there will be rewards.
And sometimes you don't know in advance what that will be.
In this case, we know a number of the things, but I'm sure that there will also be benefits that we can't even think about yet, like the example that I just mentioned.
All right.
You talked about application fees from the people who've applied to be astronauts and go with you.
How much do the people who do that pay?
They pay a relatively small application fee of about 30 US dollars.
We scaled that to the GDP per capita.
So, for example, someone from Qatar, the richest country per capita, they paid $75.
And someone from Congo, which was the poorest country when we did our application, they paid $5.
So we wanted it to be enough to think about, but not so much that people would not be able to fund it if they really wanted to be part of our program.
So how much did you make from that?
If you had 200,000 people get in touch through the website initially, how much money did you make from those initial applications?
I'm just interested in how you're going to fund this.
So the first step was to register on the website.
That's what 200,000 people did.
And about 10,000 people actually paid the application fee.
So it was somewhere around 300,000 US dollars.
This was in 2013 when this was an amount that really mattered to us.
And I believe that if we repeat the selection process this year or next year, we don't know yet when the next round of applications will be, of course, we'll have a lot more brand awareness.
A lot of people didn't know MarsOne back in 2013.
A lot more people know us now.
So I wouldn't be surprised if there will be a lot more applications, so much more than the 200,000, but also a lot more people that actually finish their application and therefore also pay the application fee simply because they've seen MarsOne take a few more steps than they had seen in 2013.
Presumably, I saw on your website you're looking for donations.
The kind of donations you're looking for are not the kind of $10 that I could send you.
You're looking for a big commercial or philanthropist to get in touch with you and say, we're really fired up and enthused by this.
We think it's got a lot of mileage literally in it.
Here's a couple of million dollars.
That's what you want, isn't it?
Well, actually, I think both are important.
So just to clarify for the people listening, MarsOne is a for-profit entity, MarsOne Ventures, which is monetizing the mission, raising the initial funds to get some of the things going.
But the most important part of MarsOne is actually the MarsOne Foundation, which is a not-for-profit foundation that will organize the mission and that will train the crews.
Well, we've been taking donations since, well, we didn't actually take donations when we started, but people started emailing us, can we please donate?
So we quickly fixed that.
And we get donations from more than 100 different countries.
And we see that with every step that we take, the average amount goes up and the number of people that contribute goes up.
And with those small amounts, because the smallest donation is basically a dollar, you can donate whatever you like.
Some of our biggest donors donate $200 per month.
And that does really add up because of the number of people that are donating.
And, you know, of course, it's great to have that source of revenue for the MarsOne Foundation, but it's also building a community of people who think that this is important.
And they talk to their friends and they say, this is important.
I'm supporting it.
They buy a t-shirt and they tell the story of Mars One to their friends.
And that's actually really important because I think the biggest value that Mars One can bring to the world, that Mars exploration can bring to the world, is actually the story.
The inspiration of humans taking the next steps and going to the next frontier.
The inspiration that that can bring to our kids that will want to be scientists and engineers and astronauts if they can actually see humans going to Mars.
And I think also, I think the most important thing that Mars exploration will bring to the world is the realization of how special our own planet is.
There is no plan B. There is no plan B for keeping 7 billion people alive.
We have to take care of this planet.
And if we can show the world through Mars exploration that the second best place in the solar system, which is Mars, that's a dry desert planet and it can never support 7 billion people.
I think that that is one of the most important values that Mars exploration can bring.
And so the whole community building that Mars One is doing, and that includes asking donations and actually receiving them, I think that's extremely important for the storytelling and for the value that Mars One can bring to the world.
If I've got your timeline right, your first major test financially, technically, and in every way is in 2022, just five years from now, when you plan an unmanned demonstration mission to Mars.
Talk to me about that.
Yes, I think that that's our most important mission because right now, as I already said when I was talking about funding, Mars One is really still a startup.
And we need to show to the world that in five years' time, we will have grown from a startup to a company that can do the same that NASA does, which is landing an unmanned spacecraft onto the surface of Mars.
Of course, the great thing is that we have the experience of NASA already doing it.
So we'll hire some of the people that have contributed to that.
We will work with Lockheed Martin for that.
And we've already had our first contract with them to investigate if the platform of the Phoenix, NASA Phoenix mission, if that can be reused to send our mission to Mars in 2022.
And are they happy to give you this technology to share it with you?
Well, the platform is designed by Lockheed Martin, so we will simply hire Lockheed Martin as a contractor and ask them to build a similar platform for us.
But it's Lockheed Martin intellectual property.
The design of the platform does not belong to NASA.
Okay, how much money do you need to get to be able to buy this, to be able to do it all in 2022?
The NASA mission costs about 400 million US dollars.
Now we've assumed that out of conservacy reasons, we've assumed that the cost for us will be the same.
Although I believe that by being an easier client, the NASA is a pretty tough client with lots of checks and balances.
We believe that Lockheed Martin is such a great supplier that we would ask them to build this mission for us.
And of course, if you don't make it, if something goes wrong, then we won't pay your final payment, which is actually your profit.
But they know how to do this.
So they should build and fly the mission for us, and they'll get paid to do it.
Okay, you said one thing that I've just got to ask you about, though, which piqued my interest, that you said that NASA was a more difficult client because they have so many checks and balances in there.
Does that mean, and I'm sure it doesn't, but you tell me, that there will be some corners that you will cut?
No, there won't be corners.
Well, there will be corners that we will cut, but there won't be corners that Lockheed Martin will cut.
And their prestige will be on the line when they fly this mission.
And I believe that when you ask a contractor that has the experience, that has already done it successfully, if you're going to ask them to do the same again for you, why not trust them and take a huge cut in the check that you need to pay them by not checking every step too thoroughly, then I think that that's a risk worth taking.
Of course, you do take a small risk, but I believe that if you do this in the right way, of course, there won't be no checks, but you should think very carefully about what you check with a group like Lockheed Martin and where you're going to trust them.
All right, and that's why you're hiring people who have that kind of expertise.
There then follows, if this is successful in the following, how many years am I looking at here, the following decade or more, actually 15 years, 20 years, very nearly, a whole series of automated missions that will essentially build the place where the people will go.
Is that so?
Correct.
So in 2022, there's this demonstration mission that we just talked about.
Besides proving Mars 1, it will also demonstrate extraction of water from the Martian surface and thin-film solar panels on the surface of Mars.
Two years later, we sent a communication satellite.
2026, again two years later, we're sending a rover to Mars that will determine the right location for the outpost.
Again, two years later, 26 years later, it's 2029.
We're sending all the hardware for the manned missions, but not the humans.
The systems will be moved to the right location by the rovers, will be activated, so water, breathable air will be produced in the outpost before the first crew is even departing.
And then in 2031, in our current schedule, the first crew will be sent to low Earth orbit, and from there will depart to Mars.
Okay, so 2031, we have the first four people on the surface of Mars, if all this goes to plan.
How do you build up a colony from there?
And when do you go?
So 2031 is departure.
It takes seven months to fly to Mars, so they will land in 2032.
And then a few weeks after the first crew lands, the hardware for the second crew will land because we always send the hardware ahead of the crews.
And every two years, we send additional crews and additional hardware for the crew arriving two years later.
So when will I go to Mars?
It's a good question.
So six years ago, I started Mars 1, a bit over six years ago, and I would have given anything to fly to Mars the next day.
Right now, I have two kids.
The oldest one is almost four.
My youngest son is one and a half.
And right now, I wouldn't go.
So if the doorbell rang now and NASA stood at my doorstep and they said, come on, bus, let's go.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think this don't assume that I'm good enough.
But if this would happen, I would say no, because I wouldn't want to leave my family right now.
But maybe when they're, I don't know, 14 or 20 or 25, maybe I will want to take that step again.
Or maybe, you know, I'm the CEO of Mars1.
Maybe I can bring my family when my kids are adult.
But I do still have a lot of convincing to do before my wife will join.
I'm sure you do.
But if the boss can't take his family, I don't know who else can.
But is there any upper age limit, though?
Because, you know, none of us is getting any younger.
There has to be a point at which you won't be able to make that trip.
Absolutely.
Especially for the first cruise, there will be not so much an upper age limit, but a lower health limit.
So, for example, you cannot be dependent on medicine because obviously it's too difficult on Mars.
But, you know, there's 35-year-olds that can hardly get out of their chair, and there's 70-year-olds that run a couple of marathons per year.
So it's difficult to say this is the upper age limit.
But people are getting more and more healthy.
I do think that there is a lower age limit.
I think it's very difficult for someone under 30 to really make the decision for the rest of their life to go to Mars and Network.
I'm sure there will be a few, a very small percentage of the people who apply who are so dedicated and so motivated that they could make that choice when they're twenty-six, twenty-eight.
But I think m most people need more time before they can make a decision that's so profound.
So I think there's a more clear lower age limit than there is an upper age limit.
Do you consider yourself to be in a race with NASA?
Because they're doing this already.
Well, I've explained to you why I believe that the return mission is just too difficult to achieve.
And a lot of people ask, but hey, the moon, NASA did the moon.
Why wouldn't they be able to do Mars?
They returned from the moon.
But there's two major differences.
There's the scale.
The moon is only three days away.
You fly your people there on the system.
They fly back on the same system.
So you don't have a system that's standing there for a long period of time.
But I think even more importantly, there's the change in the willingness to take risks.
The moon landings were a huge risk, but NASA was willing to take that risk.
And right now, there's huge, huge risk averseness in the space agency.
So I've explained to you when I was explaining how difficult it is to send things from Earth, so let alone from Mars.
I've explained to you what such a mission might look like.
But I actually believe that NASA would want to do a full test of the entire system with an unmanned rocket departing from Mars and showing that it can return a cargo to Earth safely.
But how are you going to do all the steps that we've talked about?
So preparing the rocket for launch if there's no humans on the surface?
I'm convinced that NASA wouldn't launch an untested rocket from Mars like they did with the Moon.
Des Aldrin and Neil Armstrong landed in a system that had never been on the moon and they launched in a system that had never taken off from the moon.
I think for Mars, with the current risk averseness of the space agencies, that's impossible and that makes it even more difficult to do the return mission.
So I think that in 20 years, the space agencies will still be going to Mars in 20 years, just like in 1996, we were going to Mars in 2016.
And in 1969, we were going to Mars in 1989.
Just to finish up some loose ends here with Vass Landsdorp, the boss of Mars One, what an exciting project this is.
It is going to be a money spinner.
Now, Vass, you're talking about $6 billion that you need at today's prices.
Inflation is becoming an issue here in the UK.
I'm sure it is in Holland as well.
We've had zero inflation for a long time.
Now it's coming back.
Chances are within 20 years you're going to need $10 billion.
But you sound very confident that whatever it takes, the money will come.
Well, of course, if there's inflation, then all the revenues will also be inflated by the same amount.
So I actually think I would welcome inflation because in our business case, our revenues are larger than our expenses.
So it would actually be good for our business case if there's a little bit of inflation.
Right.
Okay.
I never thought of it that way.
I guess you have to think about these things all the time.
Your company, your business, as you've said already, has got to have two very large and very distinct segments.
Number one, there is the marketing side, because that's going to generate the money.
You've got to get that traffic coming in, otherwise the money's not going to be there.
Number two, there will be an enormous technical effort that you'll have to put in.
Keeping those things going is more than a task for one man, I would think.
Presumably, you have people you delegate important things to, even now?
Absolutely.
We're about 10 people in Mars 1, but I really have to stress how important it is that we find additional team members in the next couple of years.
So we need people with actual experience in organizing the unmanned missions to Mars that NASA has been performing, with building the systems that private space agencies have built for NASA.
So for example, people from Lockheed Martin.
And don't forget that Mars One is not going to build the systems.
We're going to purchase the systems from suppliers like Lockheed Martin and other aerospace companies.
It's actually our goal to not build a single component of the Mars mission in Mars One, because if you wanted to do that, then our timeline would be much too ambitious.
You can't develop the systems in the time that we are planning to do our mission.
You have a competitor in NASA, but their mission plan and their mission statement is very different from yours, as we've already discussed.
You are not the only one, though, privately looking to do this.
What do you know of your competitors?
Do you have contact with them?
Well, as far as we know, there's not really a competition.
So a lot of people think that SpaceX is a competitor of Mars One, but SpaceX is a transportation company.
And Elon Musk gave a really interesting presentation in Mexico last summer, where he explained his ambitious plans of the Mars transportation system.
But he made it very clear that they are a transportation company.
So he compared it to the railroads in the U.S. He said, we are building the rails, we are building the trains, but we need private entities or government entities to purchase our systems for their goals.
So that's really a supplier.
And as far as we know, there's not really any competition.
But of course, there could be.
I mean, anyone who has six billion or more in their bank account, and that sounds really scary, but that's more than 250 people on the planet.
In principle, they could do it if they wanted to.
And they could, especially in the next couple of years, two, three years, they could beat us because they have the money in the bank already.
Well, there is nothing to stop any of those other space players, and that includes, I guess, the likes of virgin.
Elon Musk has got deep pockets.
He's got arguably money that you don't have.
There is nothing to stop any of those people coming in and saying, actually, we want to do it.
Yes, that's absolutely right.
Except at some point in time, they will not have the possibility to catch up because you need to take a number of steps.
I'm absolutely convinced that the hardware, the outpost needs to go to Mars before the humans go.
Before you send the outpost, you have to send a rover as a beacon for your cargo missions, but also to make sure that you're landing in a location where there's enough water in the soil and where it's nice and flat for construction.
Before that, I'm convinced you need to do one more mission to test your landing system.
So there are simply a number of steps that you have to take before you can send humans.
So at some point in time, it will be difficult to overtake Mars 1.
When you have established the colony on Mars, so after 2031 you have the first four astronauts there, then you'll send progressively more people there.
What will that colony be doing?
Will it be producing perhaps materials that can be sent back to Earth?
Will it be doing something useful for us here?
I think that the use of a colony on Mars is not on Mars, it's directly on Earth.
I think the inspiration that it will bring is extremely important.
I think the realization of how special our planet is is extremely important.
And I think that for a very long time, until transportation from Mars to Earth becomes affordable, until that time, I think the most important export product or products will be, first of all, the story.
So the monetization of the story of humans exploring Mars and intellectual property.
So we know that humans make the greatest inventions when they're under pressure.
That happens during war and during exploration.
Well, I'm not a big fan of war and a huge fan of exploration.
So I'm convinced that when you have people on Mars and their life will be tough, I'm convinced that they will come up with extremely intelligent solutions for all kinds of problems, some of which we don't even know we have on Earth.
But there will be systems, and some of them will be completely useless for Earth because they're very Mars specific.
But some of them will be great solutions that we can also use here on Earth.
So I think for a very long time, those two, the story and intellectual property, will be the only export products from Mars back to Earth.
When you have people there, is it your plan that those people will reproduce on Mars?
Will they have babies?
That's actually the second most frequently asked question to our mailbox.
Mars babies.
So the first one is, can I go?
The second one is, will there be children on Mars?
Well, first of all, we don't know if babies that are conceived in lower gravity and that are growing in the womb in lower gravity, we don't know exactly how they will come out.
So this needs to be investigated.
How can you investigate that?
If there is a possibility and there will be a possibility of mutation, which is not a good thing, I would guess.
How do you investigate that?
Well, I think you need to do on-Mars animal tests to make sure that that works on animals before any human should try it.
But I think actually even more importantly, when there's four people or eight people on Mars, it's really an outpost.
It's not a village, it's an outpost, and you don't want a toddler running around there.
I mean, it's an extremely dangerous environment.
Anything could go wrong at any moment.
And with the very low air pressure outside and all kinds of other risks, it's simply too risky to even think about having children.
So it needs to be investigated with animal tests.
And the outpost needs to become a village.
And then maybe they can start thinking about creating some actual Martians.
And even above and beyond all of these enormous technical challenges, there are massive psychological ones to deal with.
The first one, of course, we've talked about, the idea that you're going there, you're not coming back.
How will you stop people, prevent people becoming bored on the surface of Mars?
Because, you know, for a long time, there'll be nothing to look at apart from the red terrain.
There'll be a lot of work to do, that's for sure.
But we have a saying here, I'm sure you have it there, that all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
You know, there have got to be other parts of your life.
Absolutely.
But don't forget that they can do anything that we can do on Earth indoors.
So how much time do people actually spend outside?
Some people, a lot, but a lot of people, they walk to their car, they drive to the office, in the evening they walk to their car and back home and from their car to their actual door.
And that's all the time they spend outside.
But all these things that they do inside of the house, so watching a football game on the television, playing a game, chatting with your friends online, all these things they can also do on Mars.
So I think the difference will actually be a lot smaller for many people than you might assume.
Of course, if you're the type that every weekend you go into the outdoors, that goes sailing, that goes to the beach, those kinds of people that value that a lot in their life, they shouldn't go to Mars.
But for many people, the outdoors is really not that important.
And indoor, there's plenty that you can do on Mars.
One of my listeners asked me to ask you this question, and I will because I think it's a fascinating question, and you must have thought of this.
Have you worked out a protocol?
Will you be working out a protocol, Bass, for the possibility, and it now seems more of a possibility than it might have seemed 10 years ago, the possibility that either on the way to Mars or while you're there, you discover one of two things: aliens or proof that there's been a previous civilization, perhaps us, living on Mars.
In that situation, have you worked out what you will do, who you will tell, if you will tell anybody, and how you will do that?
I think if something like that would pop up, I think that would be the most exciting event in the history of mankind.
If we know that we're not alone, even if that means that space, that our life has been transported from Mars to Earth or from Earth to Mars, or if it's independent life, I mean, both of those scenarios would change our idea about life in the universe completely.
Because right now, of course, we have only one proof of life in the universe, which is us, all the life on this planet.
But if on the neighboring planet there is also life, then we have to assume that life is everywhere in the universe, even if it's the same life being transported through the solar system and therefore also through the universe.
So, of course, this is something that we will share immediately on all the channels, because I think that these kinds of discoveries are exactly the reason why humans are exploring, why humans need to go to Mars.
We need to understand our own history better.
We want to do that.
And making such discoveries is what makes life worthwhile.
Now, I agree with you about that, and I think it's very important.
But then I would say that, wouldn't I, being a journalist, that the information should get out there as soon as you know it.
But I'm sure that governments, the American government, the Russians, us, all of us here in Europe, may have a different view of how that information should be divulged to the public.
You know, there have been very clear thoughts on how we should do that.
You can't just blurt it out to people.
It's got to be released in a particular way.
You are saying that if your team made a discovery there, you would let people know immediately.
You wouldn't go through a third party.
You wouldn't ask Washington if that was okay.
You would just do it.
Well, don't forget that I'm 100% convinced that if we find life and whether that's still alive or proof of historic life on Mars, I'm convinced that it will be microbial life.
I think that if what you're talking about is finding alien intelligent life, that's a different story.
I think if you because if you find alien intelligent life, then they're most likely a lot smarter than we are because they're coming from somewhere where we don't have the capability of traveling yet.
And that's a different story.
But if there is microbial, if there's proof of microbial life on Mars, then I'm convinced that this is not something that will cause panic on the world.
I think it will be an exciting scientific discovery that a lot of people will have big philosophical impact, but it's not a threat to our existence.
And what happens if your team find, and some people are saying that the evidence is there now, that things that look less than random on the surface of Mars are in fact proof that there's been a civilization, maybe our civilization on that planet before.
If you find evidence of that, equally, what would you do?
I'm not at all of the opinion that we have found such proof.
There have been pictures, but it's all...
And sometimes it happens.
Sometimes it does look like a face.
Sometimes it does look like a...
So I'm convinced that there has not been a civilization on Mars, an intelligent civilization on Mars.
And other people are, of course, entitled to their opinions about that, but I'm absolutely not convinced.
And Bas, when we've conquered Mars, which is, you know, it's a possibility that we may be in that situation by 2050, 2060, we may have the place completely sussed out.
Where else should we be looking, if anywhere?
Well, I think it's a very difficult question.
If you go back 100 years in the past and you would tell people that it might be possible to go to the moon, they would probably think you're crazy.
And now we're talking about going to Mars, but what's next?
There's a number of possibilities.
There's some moons where we might go to.
Some people are talking about a floating civilization in the atmosphere of Venus.
There's the moon.
There's many possibilities, and it's very difficult to predict where mankind will go next.
But I'm convinced that Mars is the first destination because of its resources.
And there's water, there's carbon for your carbon cycle, there's nitrogen for the inner part of the atmosphere.
There's an atmosphere that protects you against micrometeoroids and radiation.
So I'm convinced that Mars is the next place to go.
But maybe after that, we determine that it's time to build a starship and to travel to an exoplanet.
Then maybe in 10 years we will have found an exoplanet and we will have measured an exoplanet with an atmosphere that looks a lot like the Earth's atmosphere.
So if something like that would occur, then I think the appeal of going to a moon of Jupiter becomes a lot less because there's this second Earth a couple of light years away.
Going to Mars, I think, is the first step of mankind's journey into the, well, first the solar system and then the galaxy.
And who knows where we're going next?
The only thing that I'm 100% Convinced of is that Earth is not our final destination and neither is Mars.
I want it all to work for you.
I really do, because I've been interested in these things since I was a kid, and so have you been, Bus.
But I've got to put this to you, just finally, the first big hurdle for you, apart from the crew selection and all the rest of it, which is going to be years of work that you've got right now, 2022, this unmanned demonstration mission.
If, and we know that there is a failure rate in space missions, even the beautifully engineered shuttle occasionally had disasters.
If that first mission were to fail, would that blow the bottom out of your entire project?
What would you do?
Yeah, that's a really good question.
So the current NASA landed missions have a success rate of almost 90%.
So that's pretty good.
Now, we would be, if we fly our first unmanned mission and it will be a reflight of the NASA Phoenix mission, it would be the first mission that has a track record.
So the first time that a system is going to Mars for the second time.
So we should assume that we have a higher success rate than that.
But there will always be a few percent chance that something could go wrong.
And it will depend completely on where we stand at that point in time.
If we can afford a reflight of that mission, then I think that Mars One has a good chance of surviving.
If we can't, then I think it will be very difficult for Mars One to raise the funds to refly that mission.
So it's very difficult to predict.
So that's exactly why we're making the chance of mission success for especially that mission as high as possible by reusing a system, using the same supplier that NASA used, really everything to keep the risk of that mission as low as possible.
So I think as the parcel company UPS used to say in their ads in the 80s, when it absolutely positively has to be there, this is a mission that absolutely positively has to get there.
And I wish you very well with it, Bass Landstop.
I hope it all works out.
I hope we talk again about this along the way.
One very last question, and thank you for all of this time tonight.
If I was listening to this now, fired up with enthusiasm by what you've been saying, and if I wanted to donate, but wasn't quite sure whether I should, what would you say to me to make me donate?
I would say anything helps.
And Mars One is really a community program that is made possible by people from all over the world.
So if you want, donate $2 per month, less than the cost of a beer, and make our mission one step closer to reality.
And then, you know, don't just donate the money, but follow us.
Keep up to date of what we're doing.
Tell your friends.
Make sure that more and more people get excited about Mars One.
Because I think it was Dire Straits that's saying if enough people dream the same dream, then it will come true.
And I think Mars One is a good case of that.
Buzz Landsdop, the head of Mars One, thank you for giving me the time.
Thank you, Howard.
$6 billion is an awful lot of money.
But Bas Landstorp is confident he will get it and he is going to Mars.
Tell me what you thought about this show.
If you want to make a guest suggestion or make a donation, go to my website, theunexplained.tv.
You can do both of those things from there.
The guest on the next edition of this show is Michiu Kaku.
Very much looking forward to speaking with him from his base in New York.
So looking forward to that.
Definitely am.
And there will be more great guests in the pipeline here, too.
So in the middle of British summertime, until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
I am in London.
And please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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