Houston, we have a podcast.

Welcome to the first episode of the second year of the official

podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center.

This is episode 53.

Mars is hard. Here's why. I'm Pat Ryan, your

introducer this week. Gary Jordan comes up in just a moment. This is where we

bring NASA scientists, engineers, astronauts, and other experts to talk about the stuff you want

to know about human spaceflight.

This week's guest covers a few of those boxes.

Dr. Stan Love, bachelor's degree in physics, masters and PhD in astronomy, was selected as a

NASA astronaut in 1998 and flew to the International Space Station in 2008 on the Space Shuttle Mission that delivered

and installed the European Space Agency's Columbus Laboratory module. Stan spent more than

15 hours outside the station on two spacewalks on that mission.

He also operated the robotic arms on the station and the Shuttle Atlantis.

Since then, he's worked in a number of flight analog programs on land and underwater

programs that are figuring out the nuts and bolts of how to make deep space missions

work as planned.

So we understand better than most

why sending human people to Mars

will be really hard to pull off, but not impossible.

And he talked with Gary about the details of that

earlier this year.

...