No, no, no.

Hang on, though.

Hang on.

You can't do what you do and not have an opinion.

Is there intelligent life elsewhere?

Just a yes or no question.

Okay

I'm Mick Ebeling founder and CEO of Not Impossible Labs for the past 15

years, we've been on a mission to change the world through technology and story

by addressing societal problems to improve the lives of everyone with a

crew of engineers, hackers, entrepreneurs, technologists, storytellers, and artists.

We've tackled and solved some of the world's most incredible challenges,

but here's the thing.

We're just a small team in Venice beach.

The world is full of people making the impossible possible.

My goal now with this podcast is to find these people, share their stories,

and hopefully together we can keep pushing the limits of what's possible.

On today's episode, we talked to Dr.

Michael Hecht, who's figured out how to make oxygen out of thin air on Mars.

It may advance the time when we actually send my grandchildren to Mars.

I can't believe we're alone in the universe.

There is plenty of water on Mars.

How long until we plant humans?

Dan Goldin was the head of NASA and he said it could be as soon as 15 years.

All right.

Well, I want to say welcome to the podcast.

The Not Impossible Podcast,

it's talking about things in your brainiac, crazy scientists, super

accomplished way, but talking to people in a way that they can understand.

And also this is really a celebration of humanity.

We live in a world right now where you look at a newsfeed and the

crap that's going on in the world, the wars and the, and the

conversations and the politics, it becomes overwhelming.

And this is a celebration of the fact that every single day, every single

month, every single year, we are making steps forward in health,

in science, in so many other aspects.

And as a species, we are advancing regardless of what you read,

regardless of what you experience.

Well, I would ask you then to, to ask all those people who are making those wars

and all that tra a in the world to just take all that money and put it into the

space program and we'll all be a lot happier.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And we should start,

I mean, let's just start with the most obvious, but probably the

easiest to kind of just skirt by.

We're talking about Mars and we're not talking about Mars

like, "oh, let's go look at the red planet through a telescope."

We're talking about what colonization looks like, how long it's going

to take for us to place a human there?

What we're going to need to do to actually create a

situation where it can sustain human life.

Like those are the conversations we're having.

That's Buck Rogers material.

That's material that is not even comprehensible.

If we go back, I don't know, 15 years, 20 years, maybe even 10 years.

And now it's real conversations that we're having and there is

a chance and you're the expert.

But there's a chance that sometime in our lifetime, we are going to at

least start sending people out there.

That's that's incredibly exciting.

And Mick you're so right.

I mean, every once in a while, all of us, certainly me have to stop and

step back and say, "do you realize what we're doing?"

I mean, I built stuff, you know, I've touched, put my hands on it and it's

on Mars now and it's operating.

It's really easy to forget.

It's really easy to just, "this is my job.

I go to Mars.

Okay.

I'm going to Mars tomorrow."

And thank you for the reminder that it's Buck Rogers.

You're absolutely right.

And I think as humans, it's the beautiful thing about us.

And it's maybe not the most beautiful thing about us is that we advance so

quickly, but we also forget so quickly as well.

So we're like, oh, we put, you know, we did this amazing accomplishment.

, now let's move it on to the next one.

You don't, we don't celebrate it long enough.

So, let's celebrate Mars today.

Today is officially, today is Not Impossible Mars day.

All right.

So electrolysis, I've got all this hair that I want to get rid of,

and that's what this is really about, right?

Are we talking to the right guy?

Is that the right, more or less?

Yeah.

I mean, I've done.

I've sent two electrolysis, things to Mars and they

couldn't be more different.

So it covers, , electrolysis is a big wide subject that I'm not really

qualified to speak about cause I'm not a chemist, but I do it anyway.

Electrolysis, a chemical process that uses an electric current to

drive a reaction, breaking down compounds into their elements.

I came into electrolysis as a tool that would let me do things on Mars

I wanted to do, both for Mars science and also to advance

the cause of UN exploration.

So I'm probably the last person you should ask about the history of the

field, but I can talk to you about the applications and particularly

the ones we're pursuing. When we send the first crew of people of humans

to Mars, they will need an awful lot of oxygen.

So you can bring 30 tons of oxygen with you, which it's the single

biggest thing you would have to take with a crew of humans is that tank of

oxygen, or we can say it's already there,

it's all around us in the air on Mars,

we just have to do a little work to tease it out of the carbon dioxide.

And so that's what MOXIE is about.

MOXIE, a machine invented by NASA scientists that turns

the air on Mars into oxygen.

It may advance the time when we actually send, you know, my

grandchildren to Mars by a decade, if we can

solve that problem, and that's what we're trying to do.

But that's a great encapsulation.

By the way, I love the, the visual of boarding on your

spaceship and you've got a massive, massive payload of oxygen versus you

just get on the spaceship and you show up and it's being made there.

Talk about some of the pre MOXIE developments.

Talk about ISRU research.

Am I saying that?

Or is it, do you say ISRU or do you say ISRU?

Well, I say ISRU.

What makes me, if I was walking around JPL right now or Caltech and I said

it the right way that they might think that I know what I was talking about.

Most people say ISRU.

When I hear someone saying ISRU, I'm less likely to think they know

what they're talking about.

Let's break down these acronyms.

Initially it was called ISPP, which stood for in-situ propellant production.

However, as the practice expanded to include not just propellant, but

also natural resources on Mars, the name was changed to ISRU,

in-situ resource utilization.

Basically it means using the local resources at mission destinations.

Could just as easily be called living off the land.

, and everyone would understand it, but the acronym LOL has already been

taken, so they had to come up with something more NASA like, so it's ISRU.

I've always been fascinated because this is remote control to a degree of how

many, how far is Mars from the earth?

I should start by saying it's one I can't answer because think about the planets.

Okay.

Here's earth going around the sun, right?

And here's Mars farther out going around the sun.

So when earth is here and Mars is here, they're pretty close.

And you know what?

If you look up at the sky in the middle of the night, you'll see this bright orange

dot, you know, right overhead when they're close and that's called weirdly,

that's called opposition.

The reason it's called opposition is because here's earth, here's Mars on one

side of the earth, and here's the sun on the opposite side of the earth, right?

So that's been called opposition forever.

Or you can have Mars way on the other side of the sun when in fact, we can't even

talk to it because the sun's in the way and that's called conjunction.

So the answer can be, you know, a few tens of millions of miles, or it can be

a hundred and, you know, tens of millions of miles.

We always talk at Not Impossible about the moment in time when something

transitions from impossible to not impossible.

April 20th, 2021 was that moment for you when all of a sudden that data came

back and you went, Eureka, it did actually, well, look, mom, it worked.

I know I was faking it, but I guess it was a good,

it was a good guess, this thing actually worked.

Describe that moment, described how the information came back.

And, even if you're lying to me, describe that scene and write stuff

where everybody in Cape Canaveral starts jumping up and down, you know,

just paint the picture for us.

You know, this is not an instr ent you see anything move.

You don't see clouds of oxygen coming out.

You get this data back and you chunk the data and there's this little

plot that says oxygen and a zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.

And at a certain time it starts climbing up.

That's all it was that little hockey stick.

And yeah, I mean, we went nuts.

We went absolutely bloody nuts.

The creation of MOXIE is truly remarkable.

For perspective, it would need to run for nearly six days to produce enough

oxygen to sustain one person for a single day.

To visualize it, 5.4 grams of oxygen, what MOXIE generates in an hour, is

about one third the volume of a party balloon.

That means you'd need 50 party balloons of oxygen to meet one person's daily needs.

Talk about what you did and then talk and start to nod to the scale and

what this looks like at scale.

When we send your grandkids to Mars, whenever we do this, they're going to

have to bring a lot of stuff with them.

You mentioned that earlier.

I also talked briefly about conjunction and opposition and how the planets go

around the sun and every, turns out 26 months, they line up.

What that all means when you do all the fancy orbital mechanics and the math is

that every 26 months we get a chance to go to Mars.

So the general thinking usually is send all the critical

stuff 26 months earlier.

That's the key.

So send the habitat, send the power plant, send the rovers, send food

supplies, whatever, 26 months early.

And it's going to take six or seven months to get there.

And you still got another, you know, 20 months, 19 months before the human

crew even has to launch just to make sure everything's working.

All right.

So you get a lot of time.

And what MOXIE is all about is what do we do in those 18 months?

You got a 25 or so kilowatt power plant

there doing nothing, just sitting there at idle because the crew is

going to need it when they arrive.

And you also know that the single biggest thing that you need to bring,

you know, for crazy reasons, the single biggest thing is a tank of oxygen.

Maybe 25 or more likely 30 tons of oxygen just for a crew of four to six people.

Let's take a moment to understand how much oxygen that is.

It's approximately 2 million party balloons, which to put that into

perspective, it's not only one entire hot air balloons worth of air, it's

25 full hot air balloons.

Now what that's for, remember I mentioned propellant production.

It's only one or two tons of that is for people to breathe,

the rest of it is to get them home.

So you're not just making the thing that's going to keep them alive.

You're making the thing that's going to get them home.

That's going to get Mark Watney home.

That's right.

So to give you an idea of - Sorry... Mark Watney?

The Martian.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

I was like, wait a second.

I'm geeking.

I'll stop.

That's okay.

Matty D, Matty Damon.

That's who.

Matty D, Matty Damon.

That's right.

I didn't have to explain what MOXIE did to anybody.

Right.

The Martian had just come out and I say, Oh, I'm making the oxygenator.

Remember the oxygenator on the -?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Oxygenator.

That's it.

Explained the whole thing.

But you know, if you burn, and I'm going to use a weird unit, a kilogram of

gas or a pound of gas, right,

in your car.

Okay.

You don't buy it by the compound, but if you did, if you burned a pound of gas, you

would burn about four pounds of oxygen to make your car go to use up that pound of

gas.

Right.

Right.

Because most of what you're burning is oxygen,

we just don't think about it on earth because it's free.

If you want to run a rocket and you want to burn a pound of rocket fuel, you

need four pounds of oxygen or five pounds of oxygen to do it.

So that's why that tank is so, you know, enormous, 30 tons.

So now you've got, you're landing on a planet with a thin carbon dioxide

atmosphere.

I say thin, it's like less than 1% as thick as earth air.

There's not much of it, but nonetheless, what's there is all carbon dioxide, 95%.

So if we can take that thin air and turn it into oxygen and fill that tank in 18

months, we just saved you a big chunk of your payload.

And you're pulling that out of CO2.

We're pulling it out of CO2 because you know, the O2 and CO2 is oxygen.

And that's where electrolysis comes back in.

So that's, that's the whole story of why we want to go to Mars, take 18 months to

use that unused power plant, probably a nuclear reactor.

There's just sitting there waiting for the crew, you know, doing nothing.

We're going to use all that power to make oxygen out of thin air and have

an oxygen tank completely ready to go.

When someone at NASA, you know, counts 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 launch for the human crew.

How far are we from sustainable exploration of Mars?

How, how long until we plant humans on Mars?

You know, that is that, that question has been asked since I

started in this business.

And I remember back in 96, when I really started getting involved in missions,

around that time, Dan Goldin was the head of NASA and he spoke to us about this

because we were starting to do the preparation and he said, it could be as

soon as 15 years by 2011, we can have Americans on Mars.

When I started doing MOXIE, they were saying, you know, in, in as soon as 15

years, and that was back in 2013, we could have humans on Mars.

It's actually receded.

It's gotten farther away.

The reason is that several years ago, you know, there were two directions we were

going.

One was toward the moon, one was toward Mars.

And the decision was made, let's go to the moon first.

NASA calls it the moon to Mars program, which basically means all the resources

for human exploration have been, , you know, pivoted toward Artemis and toward

going back to the moon.

The Artemis program, NASA's moon exploration program.

The answer is it's not a technology question at all.

Technology, it's been 15 years, you know, for as long as I can remember.

So right now, if we wanted to, if we wanted to put someone there and have them be

able to like, go stop, wait for the, all the orbits to align and then come back.

You said that that's six to seven out, 18 months

there, and six to seven back, right?

Yep.

Yep.

Okay.

We could do that.

So you're two years.

We could do that.

That's not a problem right now.

Well I wouldn't say it's not a problem.

Yeah.

But it's not like, it's not science fiction.

The capabilities are there.

Are there going to be problems?

Yes.

But you know, we have the capabilities.

It's not farfetched to say it's just a question right now of budget and passion.

That's right.

It's a John F.

Kennedy saying, you know, we do these things, not because they're easy, but because

they're hard and we're going to do it by, you know, by the end of the decade.

That moment has not happened with Mars.

I think what might precipitate that moment is the fact that NASA is not the

only organization capable of doing that at this point.

I can think of, you know, SpaceX is hoping to do it.

I have no idea what their timeline might be in practice.

I think the Chinese are shooting to do that as well.

Maybe there'll be another space race, you know,

the screenwriters for "For All Mankind" have as much insight

into this, I think, as any of us do.

God, I love this conversation.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's an honor to be able to talk to you.

What didn't we talk about?

Boy, you know, Mars is a great big planet.

And that's what we're always learning that we think we're

going to go to Mars and study this, you know, and it's like saying, we're

going to go to earth and study this, you know, you don't do that.

There's things we still obviously don't understand about earth,

like the weather and the climate.

We've learned so much and we know so little is the feeling.

And if the human presence can help us understand more, understand the big

"questions, are we alone in the universe?"

You know, that's- Sure.

Sure.

not far below the surface.

Right.

Those are the big questions.

And what do you, what's your opinion on that?

Are we alone in the universe?

I can't believe we're alone in the universe.

No, I mean alone, in the sense of life, intelligent life, I think I will

not speculate on, even on this planet, but no, no, no, hang on though.

Hang on.

You can't do what you do and not have an opinion.

Is there intelligent life elsewhere?

Just a yes or no question.

Okay.

I will answer it.

I'd say I would bet on it.

And I would also bet we will never have any way of knowing.

So it's a safe bet.

It's a safe bet.

I would buy that.

I find it to be incredibly narcissistic, which by the way, humans are wonderful

at doing, it's incredibly narcissistic to think that we are the only ones in the

in this, this thing we call the universe.

Like, come on, like, really?

Like we are the single soul living beings.

That's- there's just no way.

I'm totally with you on that.

If you look at the whole history of development of science, you know,

from, Galileo up to DNA.

I mean, it's all about learning that we're not as special and unique and different

Yeah.

as we thought we are. Even about language, that,

"we're the only creatures on earth that can use language" eh, not true.

I mean

we're constantly learning things like this, that we're not as unique as we

thought.

Well, I cannot tell you how much we have enjoyed this conversation today, Dr.

Hecht.

This was fantastic.

Thanks so much for taking the time to spend some of that rare and valuable time

with us.

Anytime.

You know, I guess what I should add is,

this is why we do this,

and I'm very grateful to you.

You're doing a lot of our job, which, you know, Moxie by itself doesn't

help anybody unless people know about it.

So thank you.

Absolutely.

Have a great day.

And that wraps up another episode of the podcast, where we talk to some of the

most fascinating people, transforming the impossible into the possible, a big

thank you to Dr.

Hecht for sharing his insights on Mars, the magic of Moxie, and the potential for

human life on other planets.

It's conversations like these that remind us of the incredible strides we're

making in space exploration every day.

Don't forget to follow us on your favorite podcast platform for more

discussions that make you realize, the world doesn't suck.

I'm Mick Ebeling and I'll see you on the next episode.