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

Episode 273, Deep Space Transport. I'm Gary Jordan, and I'll be your host today.

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

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

We're continuing with a reboot of our series that outlines a human mission to and from the Red Planet.

The fourth episode is all about what needs to be considered for spacecraft that will carry

humans between Earth and Mars. This episode was recorded on June 23rd, 2020. Let's get started.

On this episode, we'll be talking about what's needed for the vehicle that will be doing the

rendezvous, 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.

Paul Kessler, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. Thank you for having me.

Well, this is certainly an interesting thing to be working on is I always like to really

Mars missions to what you see in the movies. You always see when humans are traveling between star

systems and they're going hyperspace or whatever. They're in these big, gigantic vehicles.

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