when somebody wants to put a really heavy satellite into orbit they can have certain confidence that the falcon heavy configuration has demonstrated that it it can work successfully and hopefully that means that he'll be able to launch heavy payloads both for private companies and for the government because this is important for nasa nasa is a lot of heavy payloads and if you can launch it for a third of the price of what you would have to pay on the delta heavy you can get a lot more science done now dr hoffman just a few moments ago you mentioned this new vision that mosque and other space not as you called them have missed a mosque in particular is talking about space faring civilization and and multiply military species i suspect this is actually very similar to what year harry didn't imagine when you were growing up as a boy in new york drawing all those rockets and that it was more than sixty years

later and yet we ask humanity i still there do you think mr musk will see his vision very bold vision i have to say realized in his lifetime well when he talks about millions of people living on the surface of mars i think probably not that's that's a very expansive vision whether or not that will occur in the lifetime of anybody who's alive now i i honestly don't know. but the falcon heavy now has the capability of taking payloads to mars rather significant payloads and. you know one of the exciting things that happened is that nasa as a space agency. originally kind of was reluctant to get involved with the private sector bug. but. that was i think one of the successes of the

obama administration's space policy was that they basically directed nasa to work with the private sector for lower thor bit launches and for taking crew up to the international space station and so this idea of a public private partnership. i really look at as being the key to success for the future. we're not going to have another apollo program whether for the moon or mars i mean apollo was a very special time we had a cold war going on between the u.s. and the soviet union space had been identified as one of the areas in which you could demonstrate the superiority of your culture and you know the the russians were launching things first and then the americans and finally we got to the moon first. but at a tremendous cost i mean at the height of the apollo program over four hundred

thousand people were working on apollo it was for about two years nasa was getting almost four percent of the u.s. government's budget that's not going to happen again so nasa if they're going to be successful in space exploration has to learn to do it not apollo style but affordably and i think therefore there's a lot to be learned from the public sector and by working with the public sector and using these developments particularly the rockets and the spacecraft developed at a much lower cost than nasa has previously been paying for launches that might make it possible on a much more limited budget that we then we had during apollo to get started with real space exploration again that's what i hope will happen dr hofman we have to take a short break but to be will be back in just a few seconds stay chant. honestly i i.

i . it's a very rough terrain you sorts of climates and you have to fight to be able to the offense. it was gunshots on top of them and ready for it they would have been going in there and i've been. telling. you no i don't want to see it but a body in this room is ready to participate in the good. old to lead good to lead and if. you don't think about these things if the soldiers on you just like you know another patients.

welcome back to worlds apart chafee hofmann an american astronaut and now a professor in mit's department of aeronautics and astronautics now dr hoffman just before the break you mentioned that space x. already has the capability of transporting cargo and perhaps humans to mars i wonder if figuring out the transfer of capability is enough to command these very icy and dangerous voyage to the raft planet or absolutely no i mean there's a whole slew of things i mean. radiation how we're

going to deal with the radiation exposure. to something simple like keeping food viable for three years i mean there's all sorts of things that nasa is looking at that problems that need to be solved to say nothing of. the. you know the psychology how are we going to keep people healthy physically. i really think it's important that we first go back to the moon it's been almost fifty years since we've had human beings on the surface of another planetary body and mars is very hard which isn't to say that the moon is easy but it's a lot closer it's easier to get to you can come back relatively quickly if something goes wrong. and many of the things not all but many of the things that we have to accomplish on mars we could test out on the moon i think the moon would be

an excellent test bed and with the exception of the united states up until the recent change in policy every other space faring nation in the world russia included is wants to go to the moon. and i. hope that we could actually put together an international lunar exploration initiative much like we have the international space station consortium and together the countries of the world cooperating with the private sector. could afford to get back into real space exploration and i think that would that would create a real a lot of excitement it's interesting you say that because i'm sure you know that back in two thousand and seventeen nasa and the russian space agency are off course in a signed an agreement to look into building the first lunar space station and that's at the height of well very poor relationship that we currently have been

ours your country why do you think the space exploration was somehow on the fact that by all of these political matters that divides our countries i think it's actually cause for at least some optimism not not just talking about what we would like to do someday in the future with the moon but the current activities in the international space station where the two biggest players are the united states and russia. as you say we have our problems on the ground but i think it's very. you know it's a cause for optimism that still in space we were each keeping up our parts of the bargain and we seem to be getting along quite well if there is some hope that maybe get off the surface of the earth and we're not arguing about little pieces of ground in the middle east or wherever in the world. that we can actually behave

more like members of the whole human race and work together you complained of the shortage of budgets that go into space programs and i think that's even more the case for russia then for the united states but i wonder if those financial constraints actually provide for these called breaking experience because the russians need money and the americans need the the russian equipment or technology for the time being do you think that's a good range meant that does it provide any synergy apart from. each of the sides getting what they want. it provides a certain level of safety again looking at the space station we have to oxygen generating systems we have to water production systems and they're different. and if one somehow has a design for fault and breaks down. you have a certain level of safety by having different types of engineered systems and this

would be particularly the farther away from earth you go the more important the reliability becomes on the space station if we have a failure of a piece of equipment we can send up into something else to replace it or if the worst comes to worst it's pretty easy to come back to earth in a hurry you go to the moon and you're much farther away from help and if you're going to mars forget it there's no no way if something breaks they they can't send you a spare parts so to have two differently type engineered systems. really provides a lot of extra safety now a few minutes ago you're sounded very excited about this infusion of private money into space exploration and i think many x. parents believe that somehow private money can come to almost stops to cheat national budgets as far as space program is concerned our space programs are

concerned do you believe that's realistic to expect that you can continue exploring space. by the use of private money rather than relying on state budgets nasa has budget is is a little over nine to around nineteen billion dollars a year that's a lot more than even you know jeff bezos puts about he said he puts about one billion dollars a year into his blue origin company he sells a billion dollars worth of amazon. stock and he's got plenty of amazon stock to sell the real question is what's going to motivate them. the you know you're not going to make a profit by exploring mars and the government does it not to make a profit but because traditionally the governments have sponsored scientific missions but if you look at the history of exploration. you know earlier on in

previous centuries there was a lot of private sponsorship of exploration again what i hope will happen is that we'll have a mixture of public private investment in this. how much the private sector wants to put into it depends on what they will do you know do they need to make a profit from it i mean jeff bezos has said you know he he runs the amazon business because that provides enough money for his space company he's he's motivated by his work in space is not really to make a profit but when you look at what's happened over the last few years it has truly been revolutionary we have seen a tremendous amount of innovation just the idea of being able to reuse parts of the rockets nasa tried to do that with the shuttle economically it was not

a complete success but. you know nasa was never on its own probably was never going to develop the ability to reuse parts of the rocket or even to substantially bring down the cost up until space x. came into the game and nasa is launches were all with the united space alliance which was a monopoly created by boeing and lockheed. and they had no real motivation to reduce the cost of flights because they were getting their contract basically they had no competition and they were getting a cost plus contracts so. the more the launch costs the more profit they've got now we have real competition and rocket companies all over the world not just not just boeing and lockheed but ari on space for us cause most of the japanese the indians the chinese everybody is concerned can we compete with space x.

so it's really been revolutionary and it's led to a tremendous amount of innovation which i do not think we would have had if it had just been the government involved now i heard you seen one of the interviews that private companies such as basics of blue origin are willing and able to take more risks than nasa or any other government agency do you think government should play any role in determining the perimeter yourself though the risk just as a matter of public safety because i think you would agree that launching a vehicle into space maybe represents hadn't basics moon or no they do in order for space exploration any any or boeing or lockheed i mean any any private company needs to get government approval before they launch and of course the government approval is mainly to make sure that they don't hurt anybody on the ground we don't want rockets falling on the land near big cities or anything and they need to get

the it right now it's the federal aviation administration that has authority to approve commercial launches when it comes to launching people the first people who are going to get launched in the space x. and boeing is also making its its own private capsule space capsule there or they're going to be launching nasa astronauts and there of course nasa will determine the safety. conditions that have to be met and i think for as far as the fine the general public if nasa decides that these vehicles are safe enough to fly nasa astronauts then probably the federal aviation administration which frankly doesn't have a lot of expertise in human spaceflight.