I'm John Bachelor. This is Hotel Mars Episode N, my colleague and co-host and co-pilot.

Dr. Space himself, David Livingston, of the Space Show,

and we're very pleased to be joined by our guide on Rocket Matters,

Eric Berger of Ars Technica, a magazine I hardly recommend,

because you've never heard of half the things that Ars Technica is covering.

However, we have heard of NASA,

we have heard of Mars, and there is a decision Eric brings us to right now for the new

administrator, Mr. Isaacman, and his decision-making team, how they spend the money. And that is

Mars, Mars communication. This is about the rovers. This is about staying in touch for future missions,

including Mr. Musk's ambition to die on Mars. Eric, a very good evening to you. I assume all of

those wonderful photographs from Rover come direct with the genius of the rover, but that's not true.

What do we have communicating to Mars right now?

What are we worried about? Good evening, too. Good evening, John. So most people are familiar

with the rovers, but the signals that you were talking about typically are beamed up to orbit,

where there's a relay spacecraft that then sends them through NASA's deep space network back to Earth.

And the orbiters we have are getting pretty old, pretty long in the tooth.

We have the Mars reconnaissance orbiter, which is now about 20 years old.

And for a spacecraft that's been flying around Mars, that's a long time.

And so we can't be sure how long that's going to last.

Concerningly, NASA's other orbiter called Maven recently was lost.

It was actually a little younger than the Mars reconnaissance orbiter.

So we're relying on 20-year-old technology, and then there's also a European spacecraft,

...