Gwynne: “We’re working on the vehicles – some of the architectures for the vehicles right now – we should have some big engines on stands in a couple of years and hopefully we’ll land some folks in thirteen, fifteen years.”
We’re talking ordinary people?
Gwynne: “Explorers. But more ordinary than current astronauts, that’s for sure. Lot’s of engineers.”
Engineers with an interest in space but who maybe didn’t train to be an astronaut.
Gwynne: “Well you know once you land on Mars space isn’t that important – now you’ve got a planet, you’ve to make it livable, um, one of the funniest things I’ve ever heard Elon say was that Mars was a fixer upper planet. Um. There’s a lot of work to do, there’s no atmosphere, ah, you’re going to hafta mine the water. […] I’m a mechanical engineer I don’t know how to build atmospheres, but, ah, I’m willing to look into it. Um, so, we have to build atmosphere, we have to figure out how to protect humans from radiation. […] It seems really a shame that the human species – that humans – that we’re done. That Earth is it. And I’m not saying that there aren’t things to explore and learn here. I think we can learn much more about our physical selves, or mental selves. We can learn more about um, life in the oceans. But, seems like you gotta find a new boundary to go take over, and pass, pass through. So there’s that piece: humans are – kinda the philosophical, humans are – we’re differentiated because we want to explore and learn new things. Um, and the other thing that’s fundamental it’s risk management. Something will happen, on Earth, to cause, a calamity. Now is it in two years? Probably not. Is it in a hundred years? Maybe not. But certainly within the next millennium, ah, something will happen and I think it’s really important for humans to have an alternative. -Now that’s the crazy talk by the way – that’s when you lose people at the restaurant, they’re not paying attention, they’re like, ‘Ooo don’t give her another chardonnay. She’s done.'”