Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center,

episode 156, Deep Space Transport.

I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers,

astronauts all to let you know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight.

Our Mars monthly series continues. Last month we sat down with Patrick Chai, who described the

challenges of rendezvousing with Mars, a little bit about trajectory, timing,

and propulsion. On this episode we'll be talking about what's needed for the vehicle that will be doing the rendezvooing and transporting the Martian crew the deep space transport.

See the journey to Mars will be a long one so the vehicle will need to be designed to support a crew on the nine month

ride to the Martian surface. That vehicle will need to remain in orbit around Mars

while the crew explores the surface and be ready to go back for the nine month journey.

So here to go into detail about what we need to design a place to live on the way to and

from Mars, or a Mars transit habitat, is Paul Kessler.

He's an aerospace engineer at Langley Research Center in Virginia.

He's working on vehicle design and mission analysis in the Space Mission Analysis branch

for the Mars Integration Group.

Paul describes the challenges that come with designing such a vehicle

and some of the considerations for how to tackle these challenges.

So here we go.

The Journey to Mars and back on the Deep Space Transport with Paul Kessler.

Enjoy. T-minus

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