This is John Batchel, a conversation with my good colleague, Bob Zimmerman, Mars, Starship, SpaceX, Musk, Mars.

And yet, what about it? What about what we've discovered in the first Mars rovers?

And ingenuity, the little helicopter that was an experiment. Well, big helicopters are planned.

And Bob here explicates one of them, or one team of them, being prepared for starship in future.

Helicopters on Mars, planning. Here's Bob.

Well, you know, ingenuity successfully proved it could be done. And so there have been periodically images taken by Mars reconnaissance orbiter by scientists looking at potential, and this is what they label it, potential rotorcraft or helicopter landing sites.

And when these come up, I often post them behind the black because, you know, that's of interest.

Someone's thinking about doing a helicopter mission.

Well, I've done this once with a helicopter image within the Starship candidate landing zone.

And I said, well, that's interesting.

Someone's thinking of doing this, maybe flying on Starship.

When a second image showed up this week, I immediately decided I got to see if I can contact

the scientists who requested that image to find out the deal. And I did this. So I contacted

the guy. His name is Debraia. He's a scientist at the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. He says they don't

have any deals with Starship. In fact, they're not dealing with Starship at all. And they don't

have anybody from the ingenuity team yet on their team. But he and a bunch of others in their spare

time are, let me quote, performing what people do a decade before anything

else happens in our spare time in the interest of moving the idea forward.

They're asking for images, looking at areas.

And so the area where Starship wants to land is an area that interests him as well because it's got a gigantic amount of near surface ice, near surface war ice.

And so he's been taking these pictures with the idea to be a good place to send a helicopter.

Well, I got to tell you, his timing, he should start talking to SpaceX right now, because SpaceX intends to start launching starships to Mars, hopefully by 28, 29, but certainly by 3031.

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