Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space

Center, episode 270, preparing for Mars. I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

On this podcast, we bring in the experts, scientists, engineers, and astronauts, ultimately

know what's going on in the world of human spaceflight. About two and a half years ago,

we kicked off a series that laid out the considerations of a human mission to and from the Red Planet.

We released a new episode once a month for about a year. You may have missed it or even

forgot about it. So we figured it's probably a good time to bring it back up and make it

a convenient find for you, the listener. For the next few months, we're going to bring

back this collection of episodes in sequential order. The first episode features Michelle

Rucker, who was central in helping us to secure all of these guests and even develop the

outline for the episode by episode journey to this series. Before we take a deep dive

into each intricate aspect of a Mars mission, this episode sets the tone and lays out the

big picture. This conversation was recorded on January 8th, 2020. Let's get started.

We have nearly 20 years of continuous human presence on the International Space Station.

That's nearly 20 years of studying the human body, understanding systems, and fine-tuning

operations for how to conduct human spaceflight missions, not to mention the decades of human

spaceflight missions and experience before that. A lot has changed over time based on what

we've learned, and a lot of questions have come up that are important to understanding

how things will change when traveling to Mars. You might think that's a lot of experience

already, so why don't we just go to Mars? It's hard to imagine just how hard Mars is.

It requires near absolute perfection, and any deviation may be a risk to the safety

of the humans on board or the success of the mission. So the question is, are we ready?

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