Yeah, dreaming of a thriving community in space is all fine and dandy. But have we really thought this through? Dr. Kelly Weinersmith is a biologist and popular science writer. She co-authored the book A City on Mars: Can We Settle Space, Should We Settle Space, and Have We Really Thought This Through? with her husband Zach Weinersmith. In this conversation with host Sean Mobley, she brings a critical eye to the concept of space settlements, and wonders if we’re putting the cart before the horse when it comes to long-term habitation on another planet.
Check out Kelly’s podcast Extraordinary Universe: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-daniel-and-kellys-extraord-29862087/
Learn more about A City on Mars: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/639449/a-city-on-mars-by-kelly-and-zach-weinersmith/
Donate to The Museum of Flight: https://pages.museumofflight.org/flight-deck-donate
Transcript after the player.
SEAN MOBLEY: The Flight Deck is made possible by listeners like you. Thank you to the donors who sustain the Museum of Flight. To support this podcast and the museum’s other educational initiatives, visit museumofflight.org/podcast. [Music] Hello, and welcome to The Flight Deck, the podcast of the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington. I’m your host, Sean Mobley.
Now, this season is all about space stations. And today’s episode is a conversation with someone who kind of questions the whole premise. Not in a bad way, but in a have we really thought about this sort of way. Doctor Kelly Weinersmith is a scientist, podcaster, and coauthor of several popular science books including A City on Mars: Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through? In this conversation, she asks thought-provoking questions about the ramifications of settlements like space stations, and about the reality of living in space beyond the dreaming. [Music] Kelly, welcome to The Flight Deck. Thank you so much for joining me.
KELLY WEINERSMITH: Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
00:01:21
SM: Yeah. Now, I’m really curious, you wrote the book, City on Mars with your husband. What does the actual city on Mars? Like, what does this idea of a city on Mars represent to you? What does it mean to you?
KW: Well, so my husband and I are both, kind of, sci-fi geeks. And when we set out to write this book, we were excited about the idea that maybe you could have a city on Mars. And for a city, we were imagining that you would have families. You know, people would be having kids. Those kids would grow up to have their own kids. People would have jobs. You know, it would be like picking up a city on Earth and, you know, finding something similar on Mars. And we had just finished researching this book, Soonish, where we had two chapters related to space. One of them was about how the cost of sending mass to space is going down rapidly. So, that was mostly about SpaceX. And another about mining resources from space. And the folks in that community kept emphasizing that we’re going to be able to do this soon. And you can use those resources to build settlements in space. And so, we, you know, we think this is a cool idea. And we thought maybe it was going to happen soon. So, we set out to write a book about how this is going to be happening really soon, and it’s super exciting. And then, that’s not the book that we wrote.
00:02:28
SM: Yeah. Turns out it’s a bit more soon-ish.
KW: Yeah. That’s right. That’s right. Lots of work with that ish.
SM: Popular joke, I’m sure.
KW: [Chuckles]
SM: Now, the idea of this itself, right, for you in, like, a cultural space. What does an actual, like, physical city on Mars represent to you?
KW: Oh. That’s an interesting question. So, there’s a lot of different reasons why folks want to have cities on Mars. A lot of, sort of, dreams that get, sort of, amplified out into space. I mean, for me, to be honest, I just think it’s kind of awesome. I don’t have a lot of big lofty – like, you know, I know there’s a community of people who think that being above Earth and looking down on Earth sort of changes your perspective in a way that makes people get along more. That’s a nice idea.
I’m not really sure how, like, well founded that is in, like, facts. But, like, my husband and I decided to write the book ‘cause we just thought it sounded awesome. And in our hypothesis was that, like, well, if it sounds awesome, who has a right to tell you you can’t do something awesome? And that was, sort of, the premise that we started writing the book around. And we ended up deciding that, well, you know, if you’re doing something awesome and it doesn’t hurt anyone else, then they don’t have a right to tell you not to do it.
00:03:38
So, our example in the book was, well, if we wanted to have a hot tub in our backyard, even though we might not look good being in the hot tub, no one’s getting hurt by that, and no one has a right to tell us we can’t do it. ‘Cause we think it’s awesome. So, our question was, is a space settlement more like a hot tub, or more like having a nuclear weapon in your garage which we would all agree could hurt other people. And so, we ended up deciding that space was not exactly like a hot tub because the act of going out and settling space could do things like increase geopolitical conflict between China and the United States, and that could have implications for everybody who’s living on Earth. And the ability to move mass around in the gravity well above the Earth could also have some negative implications if someone gets clumsy or something for example. So, we ended up deciding that it was reasonable to put some constraints on this, and that we need to think through it. And you don’t get to do it just ‘cause it’s awesome because it impacts other people.
SM: You mentioned China and the United States. We’re just going in hot here, aren’t we? [Chuckles] But…
KW: [Chuckles] Sorry.
00:04:36
SM: No, it’s okay. I’m really interested ‘cause this is, you know, one of the things that I don’t see addressed very often in conversations about space. It could be very likely that it’s happening and I just don’t see it. But, you know, I’ve been to a couple conferences about space, and building communities in space. And it always seems this piece gets left out when we talk about the excitement and the unity piece of going to space. And we look at the Apollo era too, right? The Apollo–Soyuz program, this time where the United States and the Soviet Union who were mortal enemies, right, still managed to find common ground with the space program. But then we flash forward to today, and, you know, we talk about, again, how exciting it is we can go to Mars, or go elsewhere. And, you know, it’ll be this unifying opportunity for people regardless of where they’re from. And yet, today, when ostensibly the Cold War is over, we have, now the United States and China. And as far as I understand, the United States is essentially forbidden from working with China when it comes to space programs. Legally forbidden. So that’s why China, like, built their own space station. They wanted to be part of the ISS. But the United States, and others presumably, but, I mean, the U.S. is forbidden from working with China. So, that’s just not going to happen. And it seems that here we are today, and we’re talking about all this unity and excitement, but we’re not able to overcome this obstacle that they were able to overcome 30 years ago. Where do you see this going?
00:06:16
KW: Yeah. So, I mean, space has always, sort of, been tied up in questions related to prestige. And it’s, sort of, a way that nations compete with one another without, you know, actually getting violent. And so, you know, the Soviet Union and the United States, it was a race to who could get to the moon first at a time when a bunch of decolonization was happening. So, a bunch of empires were breaking apart, a bunch of states were coming into existence. And the United States and the Soviet Union were trying to show all of these new states what the best political system was. And the way to show it was, you know, to show who had the best, like, technology and creativity and ingenuity, and who could get to the moon first. And the United States won. And then, after the Soviet Union broke up and they became a little bit less of a threat, the United States and Russia started collaborating. And now we, you know, work together on the International Space Station.
And that’s great. And we did work together during the Apollo–Soyuz test project. So, we worked together, but that was during a time when the Cold War was sort of, like, cooling down. We were getting along a little bit better. We were able to collaborate for a little bit. Okay. So, now, flash forward to now, and China is not supposed to work with NASA on space projects because of something called The Wolf Amendment. The idea here was that if China is working with us, they’re likely to try to steal our technology, steal our secrets. We decided that for a variety of reasons, we couldn’t trust them, so we didn’t want them to be a part of the program. I believe if there’s, like, a unanimous vote from the senate, we’re allowed to do something with them. But, you know, nobody has bothered to try to do that. So, China is essentially cut out of collaborating with us. Depending on who you talk to, there are people who argue that a new space race has already started. And folks like Namrata Goswami, I think her collaborative’s name is Pete Garretson. They wrote a book called Scramble for the Skies. And they’re essentially arguing that there’s this new race for resources and for land in space. And that it’s already started. There’s already a new space race.
00:08:04
And the reason that this differs from our previous space race is that before, we were just trying to get to the moon. And whoever got there first, won. But now, it’s whoever gets to the moon. And then, you also want to set up research stations or extract resources. And so, it’s more of a land grab now. So, if this is a new space race, the stakes could be higher because, you know, whereas before, if the U.S. landed, that didn’t stop the Soviet Union from subsequently landing. But if, you know, the U.S. sets up a research base on one of the poles of the moon which are the best places to be on the moon, then, you know, China, presumably, couldn’t also set up a research base in that same place. So, it does seem like things are heating up a little bit. It depends on who you talk to. But, you’re right. At this point, we’re not really collaborating with the Chinese on space-related projects.
SM: So, shifting to, back to this cultural idea of space, one of the things you spend a lot of time talking about in the book is that this idea that the frontier of space today is, kind of, compared, or draws on a lot of ideas about settling of the American West in this wild west frontier time. Can you just talk a little bit more about that, and how you see this iconography showing up in a lot of how we talk about settlements in space today?
KW: So, while we were researching this city on Mars, we pretty regularly came across folks who were arguing that space is a new frontier. And it was often American authors who were making this comparison to the American frontier. And what they were arguing was that the American frontier fostered democracy and gave people a chance to, sort of, lift themselves up by their boot straps and become innovative and increase their earning potential.
00:09:43
And that it had all of these great benefits, not just for the people who were out there, but that those benefits, sort of, flooded back over into the people on the east living in the cities. And a couple things; so, one, I mean, quite clearly, that doesn’t take into account the indigenous people who were dispossessed, murdered, and whose lands were stolen. Additionally, it tends to focus almost exclusively on the white guys. It doesn’t take into account the fact that there were a lot of, for example, Asian immigrants who were very mistreated to produce the railroads that were needed to bring resources out to the American West. Also, there have been a lot of historians who have since looked back on the American West and they’re not quite so sure that those benefits that are often touted actually were realized. So, for example, democracy didn’t necessarily come from people out on the frontier. There’s just as good arguments to say that it arose from cities in the east.
Macroeconomists have looked at folks who live in frontier areas and they, sort of, compare traits of these people to people who live in, like, sort of, less frontier environments. And you do get some benefits to being in a frontier, but you also get things like people were less willing to wear masks at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. In some parts of the world, areas that are, sort of, in frontier areas are more likely to have high childhood mortality.
00:10:58
And so, it’s not clear that everything that you get from a frontier environment is good, or are things that, you know, for example, people from both political parties would agree are good. And so, we argue that this metaphor of a frontier is a bit outdated because it doesn’t match with what, how historians today understand the frontier. And additionally, you know, one of the reasons the frontier was so great was because, was so great for the white guys was because it was a lot of really, like, fertile great land. And that’s where people move to. And a big part of the definition of a frontier is that you have a very small density of people on a big plot of fertile land. But when you go to Mars, you’re going to have a very high density and a very small pressurized chamber in an area where you can’t easily even do something like farming. There’s not resources that you can make a living off of easily there. So, it doesn’t even seem to us that the frontier environment is analogist to the American West in ways that would be important even if this popular view of the American West were to even, you know, be true. And so… So, anyway, we argue that maybe this frontier metaphor is not very useful for thinking about space. And that has made us some enemies.
SM: [Chuckles] Well, it’s interesting because, as a historian, you know, when I look at the story of the American West, you know, it’s easy to just see that it was a constructed mythology. That in the era before television, for entertainment people would go to the Buffalo Bill show and, which played into people’s expectations of what the Wild West was. And so, like, this idea of the, you know, to use an older term, you know, cowboys and Indians type of wild west really is fiction. It’s marketing.
KW: Yes.
SM: It never truly existed in that way.
00:12:47
KW: And some people will recognize that. Like, you know, Ronald Reagan was, sort of, referring to the American West. You know, he was an actor before he was president. And in one of his speeches, he essentially said, like, look, we know the American West wasn’t, like, the way that you see it in movies. But, like, that’s the way we kind of want to believe, you know, that it was. And, like, so some people will admit that, but others… Others less so.
SM: Do you think part of the reason why this, kind of, wild west methos is tied with space exploration is because the space race was happening when it did, which was a time when, like, westerns were really popular in pop culture. You know, the, again, the cowboy and Indian show. Like, those, they were huge on television. And, I mean, it’s not even hard to think about – or – and I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to think of, like, Star Trek seminal space race science fiction.
It's not hard to see Kirk as, like, a space cowboy going out there and doing frontier justice.
KW: You might be right that the cowboys and Indians movies around the Apollo era is part of why this idea got big initially. But there are still people today who hold to this idea pretty closely. In my encounters with some of them, they seem to argue that the historians have all been, sort of, liberalized and they’re, sort of, washing away the awesomeness with their new left-leaning viewpoints. I feel like it’s not fair to go after historians for their political leanings if you’re not also following it up with, and here is the evidence that they’re wrong.
00:14:20
Like, just because you are right or left leaning doesn’t make you wrong. And so, they don’t seem to have good, like, data-driven arguments against what the historians are arguing. But I think, I don’t know, it’s just a really beautiful idea that kind of stuck with some people.
SM: The historical anecdotes in your book are what stood out to me as a historian. And one of the points that you drew on too was the history of company towns when you talk about private space communities. And with a lot of, you know, these big space companies, talking about creating private space stations, private settlements and things like that, what are the dangers? Maybe you can share a little bit about, you know, company town history for people who might not know, and what dangers do you see there? Is it a reasonable thing to think about?
KW: Sure. So, the reason we ended up writing a chapter on company towns is because when we would go to conferences with space element folks, we would ask them, like, well, what will early settlements be like? How will they be, sort of, managed? And the two main answers we got were that they’ll be managed like communes, or that they’ll be managed like company towns. And so, there was originally a chapter in the book about lessons you can learn from communes on Earth.
And then, we ended up publishing that in space policy when we cut it out of the book. But the company towns chapter, you know, is based on the idea that on Earth, when you want to bring people out to extract a resource, and that resource is a way from already populated areas, then in order to attract people to work for your company, you need to offer them all of the stuff that they get in a normal town. So, you need to offer their kids education.
00:15:56
You need to provide a shopping mart, or a grocery store. You need to provide medical care. You need to provide places of worship. And, you need to provide housing. Otherwise, people aren’t going to move out to the middle of nowhere if you’re not offering them any of those things. And during our research, we found that there was a lot of evidence that people who run company towns didn’t necessarily want to control all of those aspects. But it just, they really, kind of, had no choice. So, if they brought a company, a separate company out to make the housing, for example, then that company would have a monopoly. They’d be the only ones selling houses out there so they could jack the prices of the houses up. And the only way people could pay for it would be to demand higher wages from the resource holder who has the company who hired them. And so, there are economic reasons why the people who are running the company also want to run, you know, the houses and the sanitation and stuff like that. And so, there are lots of cases where company towns actually didn’t seem so bad. There are stories where people seem to have enjoyed it. There are some company towns that transitioned into normal towns. But there were also a lot of instances where things would go wrong, people would be out in the middle of nowhere. The company would be treating the employees in some bad way. And the employees didn’t have a lot of leverage to get out of there. So, it would be hard for them to find new jobs elsewhere.
00:17:13
And so, they were just, kind of, stuck there. But one of the main ways that they have power over the situation is, you know, for example, if you’re in a coal town in West Virginia, if you could hop on the train and get to the next town, then you could, sort of, move between jobs and try to find a better situation for you and your family. But if you start a company town on Mars, now in addition to needing to provide, you know, like, sanitation and education facilities and medical facilities, you also need to provide, like, the oxygen that everybody is breathing, the pressurized habitat that they walk around in. And if somebody doesn’t want to work there anymore, if conditions are getting bad, their main leverage which was leaving is gone. So, you know, Mars, it takes, like, six to nine months to get there with current propulsion technologies. And then, because Earth and Mars travel around the sun at, like, not exactly the same, you know, pace, sometimes Mars is ahead, sometimes Earth is ahead. And you have to wait until they, sort of, line up in a nice way where you can shorten the distanced between those two planets. So, you can only leave, like, every two years. So, if a year in, you’re being horribly mistreated by your boss, you don’t really have any way to leave. And they control everything including the oxygen that you breathe. And so, there’s a lot more power for the company owner if you’re having a company town in Mars than you would have here on Earth. Now, on the other hand, they also can’t get new employees half way through that, like, two-to-three-year window.
00:18:39
And so, hopefully, that will make the owners of company towns more willing to try to make their employees happy. But it’s, you know, a very weird set of conditions that are not really experienced anywhere here on Earth. It’s like setting all of the conditions of company towns to, like, absolute extreme levels and hoping it goes well.
SM: Well, with the added piece that there are plenty of volunteers who say that they’d happily go to settle in these towns, so.
KW: Yeah.
SM: When it comes to questions of, like, power and balances, you have a lot of willing people who are willing to give everything up on Earth to go over to that space. Which is an inter-, so, in your mind, you know, who makes an ideal astronaut? Who makes an ideal person to live in one of these cities?
KW: Oh. That’s interesting. So, first I’ll say that I agree with you. There’s loads of people who want to join a Martian company town. I’ve encountered loads of people when I tell them, you know, what life will be like, and how it’ll be dangerous. And they’re like, look. I don’t care about any of the things you’re saying. If I die on Mars, that’s fine. I don’t care. It was awesome that I got to go to Mars. So, there’s loads of people who want to get there. The kinds of people who are best for a Martian settlement. So, the sort of environments on Earth that are most Mars-like are things like submarines that, sort of, like, go dark and don’t communicate with anyone else for, like, months at a time, or people who work at polar research stations and stay with a small number of people in a confined and dangerous environment for, like, an entire season, sometimes an entire year.
00:20:15
So, I think you want to find people who are good at entertaining themselves, good at getting along with other people, good at being in confined spaces and doing monotonous tasks, especially when an environment is dangerous. So, the kind of people who end up on, you know, on submarines. I think you want to do screening to make sure that you’ve got people who are, you know, not likely to get cancer, for example, partway through a mission. But these are all criteria for picking people for the initial mission. Like, if you are going to have a settlement on Mars, then you are going to have the children of those people, and the children of those highly selected people will probably, sort of, revert to more of a mean. So, people more like me who, like, start the day with their anxiety medication, and probably, like, should exercise more, but don’t. And, like, have problems that the rest of us have. And so, you know, I think you can start by selecting the perfect people for this environment. But eventually, you need to figure out supports that will work for the rest of us. So, you know, you’re going to want to train people in, like, psychological support because you can’t call psychologists and psychiatrists Earthside because there’s a minimum three-minute delay because Mars is so far away. And there’s a maximum delay of up to 22 minutes. And so, any psychological support needs to come either from, like, AI, that you send out, you know, that people can communicate with. But I think there’s a subset of people who will maybe never be comfortable with an AI therapist. And so, you’re probably going to want people out there also. You’re going to want medication and medical facilities. And so, you know, I think it’s an interesting exercise to think about who the best people are. But eventually, you need to be able to prepare for anyone being there ‘cause, otherwise, you’re not really going to have a settlement.
00:21:56
SM: It’s interesting to think about the future generations, and, kind of, this relatively closed system. Right? Like, let’s say, you know, new people can only arrive in a city on Mars every so often. And so, like, there are jobs that need to be done. And if you have a limited supply of people… Like, just think of how on Earth we talk about, you know, pursue your dreams, do what you want, sort of thing. And I wonder if that ethos fits with a world where at the end of the day someone’s got to be, you know, doing a job, maybe, that they don’t want to do. Because, otherwise, you’re not going to have what you need to survive.
KW: Yeah. So, this is where I think we get into some of the more ethically complicated aspects of space settlements. We were reading a bunch of different papers. We were trying to get a handle on how the community was dealing with problems like this. And, you know, some of it is just like, hey, look, especially for the first generation, as we’ve both noted, there are people who would be happy to have any job in a space settlement. They don’t care what it is. It’s just awesome that they’re on Mars. So, first generation is probably going to be okay. But, you know, it’s going to be a lot of hard work to, for example, just feed people on Mars. So, if you look at other experiments where the facility has been completely closed and people are trying to manage their atmosphere and grow their own food and stuff like that. Like, Biosphere II for example, that was… I think it was eight to 10 hours of work five and a half days a week. And so, that was a lot of work.
00:23:31
And those people lost between 10 and 16 percent of their body weight. They weren’t even able to grow all the food that they needed to eat as much as they would like to eat. And so, some of the papers that we were looking at were saying, you know, hey, not only is everyone going to have to do whatever job is needed… And there probably will be variability. You know, like, you’ll need a plumber. You’ll need an agricultural person. You’ll need engineers. Like, there’s a lot of options. But they were arguing that everybody needed to be, like, able-bodied and participating in some way. And so, to be honest, that’s the part that makes me the most nervous. So like, one of the papers said that we’re going to have to change what we think of as our threshold for valuable life because the habitat, or the space settlement would just not be able to support people who couldn’t contribute. And as, you know, the mother of a son who probably can’t work in the garden or clean the solar panels, like, this is absolutely appalling to me that we would go out into space and, like, lose the progress that we’ve made on human rights. And start to decide, like, you know, people with disabilities are not worth having around at all. Like, that’s just absolutely appalling to me.
And so, I think we need to do a lot of planning ahead for what these early stages will be like so that we can support each other. Like, if somebody, you know, falls off of the equipment and breaks their back. Like, that we have enough people around where we can take care of each other and still, like, value each other. And, you know, what we’re able to add to the community even if it’s not gardening. Zach and I argue in the book that maybe one thing we could do is we wait until we can, sort of, go big all at once. So that we can plan on having enough people, so that you can have people whose main job is caretaking. And that might require figuring out a lot more of the details about how we might garden in space ahead of time. But just, sort of, you know, figure out, how do we get enough resources and people out there so that people do have choices about what they do.
And we can all, you know, continue caring about each other the way we do here on earth. Where even there, we can make some progress.
00:25:26
SM: [Chuckles] You bring up the interesting question of, like, ability, and what makes an able- bodied person. And, you know, it’s a tricky conversation to have. I’m certainly not trying to take anything away from John McFall who people may or may not know is a para-athlete and will be one of the first, probably the first, like, openly disabled person, person with a disability to go to space. I’ve seen some headlines calling him the first. And that’s not true. There are people with disabilities going back to the Mercury program who went to space. They just hid them. Invisible disabilities. But the criticism that I’ve heard – and again, not minimizing the prospect of him going to space, I think it’s cool and important. A criticism that I have seen though is that in the choice of this person that’s being put up as, you know, the first, or among the first people with, like, visible disabilities going to space. They picked a person who is, like, a gold medal winning para-athlete.
You know, a person who, among any human, is somewhat superhuman as opposed to a number of other disabilities that exist. And so, the criticism that I’ve seen isn’t so much of him. He’s just doing, you know, following his dream. It’s the idea that people can go to space even if they’re disabled, but only if they’re, like, amazing.
00:26:49
KW: Yeah. Right. No. And I agree with you. And I feel like the problem will only become more pronounced when we’re talking about settlements.
SM: It’s tricky ‘cause the question is, like, you know, where is the space for people who are blind? Where are the space for people in wheelchairs who aren’t, you know, able? Like, are they considered able or not when it comes to this kind of space thing. And how is that really a problematic way to categorize people.
KW: Yeah. And, you know, another thing that kind of annoys me is that when I talk to people about this, maybe it frustrates me is maybe a better word. But, like, I’ll say, like, how do we make space for blind people in space? And people will say, well, you know, maybe because they’re blind, like, their sense of smell and their hearing is better. And so, they’d be better able to, like, detect a fire before it starts. And I’m like, I like where you’re going with that, but on the other hand, I don’t think we need to find a reason to argue that they’ll be better than someone else at some skill. The point is, like, we want all human beings up there. Like, we want all of them up there. And so, how do we make that happen? And, you know, especially in a space settlement, it’s going to be tough. And I think it’s going to take a lot of planning ahead of time.
00:27:57
SM: Well, and to your point too about future generations, you could plan a quote-unquote- perfect, you know, group of fully able-bodied people who are perfectly mentally and physically sound. And then, all their offspring, because they’re living in a different environment than Earth have just different ways of interacting with the world. And maybe they do have disabilities. And if they’re not ready to accommodate those right then and there, then have we done our job to prepare for a space settlement?
KW: Amen. Yeah. There’s plenty of reasons to think that when we start having children in space, there will be an even higher rate of disabilities than we see here on Earth. There’s a lot about the space environment that we don’t understand. How is, you know, partial gravity. So, Mars has 40 percent of the gravity we feel here on Earth. Having that lower gravity could impact development in some way and result in more disabilities. Additionally, there’s some evidence that radiation can impact cognition and result in cognitive decline. And so, there’s plenty of reasons to think that even those, like, superhuman people that you send out there first are going to have problems the longer that they’re out there. And so I, you know, I think we just need to be planning right from the beginning, how do we take care of people who are, you know, very likely to need support? How do we make sure that support is there when they need it?
SM: You also get into in this idea of, like, who makes an ideal astronaut, you know, as you kind of surveyed who is currently in the core, or not in the core, necessarily, people are going to space, you do talk about this question of, you know, what people hide in order to pursue this amazing prestigious thing.
00:29:38
In the most recent season of the podcast, we interviewed Wendy Lawrence who… So, this is just a few months ago. And as far as I know, this is the first time that any astronaut, living astronaut, has spoken directly on record about holding an LGBT identity. And that interview happened in 2023. And so, again, going back to, like, what people feel that they need to put aside in order to reach space. It’s a fascinating conversation to have about what people expect out of an astronaut as this, like, ideal human.
KW: Yeah. I mean, they’re expected to be perfect. And when we read the biographies, we came across story after story of both men and women saying that they lied to the medical doctors and the mental health professionals because if anything is wrong with you, then you don’t get to go to space. Or, if you’re in space and you admit, like, you know, I miss my family and I’m depressed, and I’m anxious, and I’m starting to worry, you know, that maybe the air locks are going to open, or something, then, like, you don’t get to go to space again. And so, you know, there’s people who have worked their whole lives to achieve this. And are they actually going to honestly say, I’m not feeling well. And so, we found stories about somebody who thought maybe they had bone cancer. Another person, and maybe this was the same guy, who thought maybe he was having a heart attack before he was supposed to go up. I think this was Cunningham, maybe.
00:31:04
We found Eileen Collins said that she, you know, wouldn’t have told the mental health professional the truth if they had asked a question where, like, it was clear that she had a mental health problem. Because, who’s going to admit to that? Mike Mullane pulled a page out of his medical records back in the day where there were paper medical records so that the medical professionals wouldn’t, you know, find out about I think it was an injury that he had or something. There’s just incredible incentive to say that you’re fine even when you’re not which suggests that we don’t really have a good handle on the medical and mental health problems that people experience in space because there’s just so much incentive to say that you’re fine. But, you know, there’s other places where we can look for those data, like submarines and stuff. But they also have similar problems. You’re incentivized to say that you’re fine. So, it’s kind of hard to know how people actually do when they get out into space and you get past the point where you can just lie.
SM: What do you see as some of the most important misconceptions about building a community in space or on another planet that should be addressed?
KW: When I started researching a city on Mars, I imagined that you were going to have these beautiful glass geodesic domes that you’d live under. And there – you’d be able to walk through, like, something that looks like the recreation of a forest on earth. But while we were doing the research, over and over again, we saw the actual proposal saying like, of course, we’re not going to have glass because glass lets the space radiation through.
00:32:26
And you’ve got to worry about, you know, the pressure differential between the habitat inside and the, like, one percent atmosphere that you find on the surface of Mars. And that would be incredible strain on the glass. And there’s always space junk falling onto the surface of Mars. And glass, you know, would be very prone to cracking and then, you know, letting in the low-pressure environment outside of the habitat. And so, most of the proposals involved taking regolith which is like the dirt that you find on the surface of mars and the moon. It’s very jagged. And on Mars, it also has a bunch of chemicals in it that are bad for human health. But the proposals for habitats involved burying yourself in a couple meters of this. And that would, one, protect you from radiation. Two, it would protect you from temperature swings. Three, it would be a bit of a shield from, like, junk falling into your habitat and, you know, depressurizing your habitat. So, for a lot of reasons, it makes sense to put your habitat underground. And I feel like that takes a lot of the excite-, maybe not the excitement. Like, it’s still an exciting adventure. But it’s not how I imagined it. You know, I imagined, like, everybody would have a big, you know, glass window in their bedroom. And they’d wake up to see, like, the sunrise on a foreign planet. And that would be amazing. But that’s not what it’s going to be like. And instead, we need to think about, you know, what kind of mental health problems might people have if they’re living underground.
00:33:37
And, you know, is a… You know, having a really nice screen that, sort of, projects what it looks like outside, is that going to be as good as actually having a glass, you know, window to look through? And I think to me, that’s probably the biggest misconception about what life in space will be like is just, it’s not going to look like most of the depictions that you’ve seen, most of the artist renderings that you’ve seen.
SM: Kind of the flip to that question is is what do you think is the most pressing, like, real issue, real obstacle between us and creating some sort of settlement elsewhere in universe that needs to be addressed?
KM: Babies.
SM: Babies.
KM: Yeah. I think the answer is babies. I think we just really don’t know enough to ethically send people out there and have them start trying to have babies. So, you know, we hit on this a little bit earlier. We don’t know how 40 percent gravity is going to impact development. We don’t know that we can get the, sort of, medical equipment that we need out there to support, you know, women and babies in this harsh environment. And I do often get people who say to me, like, look, women have babies all over the world without access to medical care. And then they’ll say something like, well, so, you know, what’s the problem if you send people to space? But I don’t feel like it’s good that women don’t have access to medical care everywhere. Like, I don’t think that’s something we should be bringing with us to space. I think we need to think through these sorts of problems and figure out how to support people in space.
00:34:59
So, for example, a main way that women die in childbirth is that they bleed out afterwards. They hemorrhage. So, we use this drug called Oxytocin. And Oxytocin causes contractions and those contractions clamp off the blood vessels and make women stop bleeding. But Oxytocin needs to be refrigerated at a very stable temperature. And if you refrigerate it at that stable temperature, it stays good. So, you could send it to Mars. It would probably be good until the next resupply ship if your fridges never break and it never warms up. But I haven’t seen discussions about, like, which star ship is going to contain all of the refrigerators with all of the Oxytocin, and the back-up systems to make sure that, you know, women have the support so we’re not bleeding out on Mars. And I guess, like, where we are right now is we don’t even know if you can conceive and have babies on Mars. So, for example, there’s this step called decidualization. And this is essentially the uterus gets ready for implantation. And there has been some studies that suggest that that requires gravity. And it’s not clear if 40 percent gravity is going to be enough. So, we might even have difficulty conceiving in space. There’s all of these medical problems that the 50 years of data that we have from space stations orbiting the earth haven’t really addressed because there’s zero gravity essentially when you’re in freefall around earth. You’re experiencing something like zero gravity. And we know that that’s bad for muscles and bones. It might explain why a lot of astronauts have vision loss. But we don’t know if 40 percent gravity is going to make those problems go away.
And we’re protected – astronauts are largely protected from space radiation by the magnetosphere. And when you get out to Mars, Mars doesn’t have a similar magnetosphere. So, you’re going to be exposed to more space radiation. And we don’t know how that’s going to impact reproduction.
There’s just lots of reasons to be worried, and lots of reasons to want to see more research.
00:36:44
For example, you know, maybe setting up a research station on the moon where we see if, like, multiple generations of rodents can give birth with no problem. And there, the gravity is even lower than you’d find on Mars, and you’re exposed to space radiation. So, we could maybe feel like we had started to get a handle on some of those problems. But then, Mars has even more problems. Like, we mentioned that that regolith has chemicals in it. One of those chemicals if perchlorate which is picked up by plants. So, if you grow plants in dirt that has perchlorates and you don’t get all those perchlorates out, it gets picked up in that food, and it messes with fetal system development, and with metabolism in moms. So, you know, there’s all sorts of problems that Mars, sort of, piles on top of the problems that we already have with space. I’d like to see a lot more research done before we send women out there to have babies. And, you know, I don’t think it’s going to happen anytime soon. But Musk’s timelines, you know, he wants to have a million people on Mars in the next 20 to 30 years. That doesn’t sound like enough time to me to get the data that we need because biology is, sort of, like, a notoriously slow field because it can only work at the speed of, like, you know, generations for rodents, for example. And so, anyway, I’d like to see a lot more research on babies and moms.
SM: What role do you see pessimism having in forging a positive future?
00:38:07
KW: Yeah. Right. So, I accept that I am a pessimist. But I didn’t want to write the pessimist book. And so, I would like to think of myself, perhaps unrealistically, as a realist. I’m not, you know, trying to stomp on people’s space dreams. I’m just trying to make sure that people understand that there’s a bunch of steps we should go through before we start going out to space. And so, yes, it’s a bummer that we’re not ready to do it right now. But I do feel like all of the work that we have left to do between now and when we settle space is really exciting. It is really cool.
Like, if I could be the biologist running the rodent colony, doing the reproduction research on the moon, that would be really awesome. And there’s a bunch of cool space law work that needs to get done. And if you’re one of the people who, like, sets up the, you know, international space law, then you’re governing human activity in this, like, environment that’s way bigger than earth. And your impact could be felt for, like, hundreds, maybe thousands of years. Like, there’s so much cool work that’s left to be done that that’s… That’s not really pessimistic or depressing to me. It’s like, here’s the cool stuff we need to do. We need to do it. And it’s, you know, a bummer that, maybe, we’re not ready to settle Mars yet, even though we’ve been talking about doing it for, like, you know, many decades now. But the work that still needs to get done is cool. And so, you know, I still feel like I’m trying to focus on enthusiasm. But I understand why people read it as pessimism because, you know, I have gone through a long list of negatives. But there’s some cool work that we still need to work on.
00:39:42
SM: Why don’t we end on an up note then, an enthusiastic note? Let’s say you are running that lab on the moon, or just going to space in general. Astronauts get to take a personal preference kit, things that they would just take with them. What would you take up with you in your personal preference kit?
KW: Oh, man. Oh, that’s a great question. So, do I get to take my family? ‘Cause I – so, first, I’d like to go with my family. But I realize they don’t fit in a kit. So… So, I’d probably bring some of the jewelry that my daughter has made for me, or some of the, like, handprint art that my son has made. And then, also, I’m really into, like, insects and bugs. And I live in the middle of nowhere in Virginia. And I have a barn. And whenever a cool animal wanders into the barn and dies, I’m weird. And so, I dry it out and I put it in shadow boxes. And so, I would probably bring some of my, like, Eastern Hercules beetles and some of my, like, iridescent beetles, or beautiful moths up with me so that I can enjoy doing the research in space while also appreciating how amazing earth is.
SM: Well, if a xenomorph crawls into the space station and dies, you know, we know who to send to check it out. [Chuckles]
KW: That’s right. Yes. That would be – I hope that it doesn’t infect me. But that would be fascinating.
00:40:57
SM: Oh, Kelly, thank you so much for bringing your voice to The Flight Deck. Thank you for your time today.
KW: Thanks for having me, Sean. This was great.
SM: Thank you for tuning into this episode of The Flight Deck, the podcast of The Museum Of Flight in Seattle, Washington. You can find links to Dr. Weinersmith’s books and podcast in our show notes at Museumofflight.org.podcast. The Flight Deck is made possible by the Museum Of Flight’s donors. Everyday people who are excited about these sorts of stories. So, special thanks to all of you for your support. If you like what you heard, please subscribe to the podcast on Apple podcasts or wherever you downloaded us from. And please rate and review the podcast. It really helps get the word out. Until next time, this is your host, Sean Mobley saying we’ll see you out there, folks.
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