Think of it as Yoga for the brain, we are going to stretch a bit.
Why Elon Musk—or Anyone You Know—Probably Won’t Make It to Mars in Our Lifetime
“Mars won’t be reached by bravado or billionaires; it will be reached by the quiet tyranny of engineering—rotation, redundancy, and a ship built to keep our fragile lives alive when Earth is nothing but a pale dot behind them.” --YNOT!
We have developed a charming new superstition.
If you say “Mars” with enough confidence, people nod like you just said “next airport expansion.” NASA has plans. SpaceX has plans. China has plans. Everyone has plans. Plans are cheap and gravity is not.
The phrase “humans on Mars” has become the technological version of “I’m starting my diet Monday.” It sounds responsible. It signals ambition. And it requires precisely nothing in the present tense.
But if you actually work through what’s involved—distance, mass, time, radiation, autonomy, life support, landing, and return—you run into an inconvenient truth:
Mars is not a rocket problem. Mars is a civilization-grade systems problem.
And we are not close.
Not close in the way that matters: not “we need a bigger budget,” but “we need entire classes of systems that can run flawlessly for years in a hostile environment without rescue.”
I wish it wasn’t so – but no—Elon Musk is almost certainly not going to Mars in our lifetime. And neither is anybody you know, unless your friends list includes a future corpse with excellent PR.
Let’s talk about why.
The Big Lie: People Talk About Mars Like It’s the Moon With Better Branding
If the Moon is a three-day drive. Mars is a seven-month ocean crossing—one way—with no coast guard, no ports, and no “turn around and come home” if things get weird.
Moon missions were hard, but they had an escape hatch: home was close.
Mars removes the escape hatch and replaces it with a calendar that doesn’t care about your funding cycle. Miss your launch window and you don’t slip by a week—you slip by 26 months. Hardware ages. teams disperse. politics changes. your “momentum” turns into archaeology.
That alone has killed more Mars dreams than physics ever will.
Distance Turns Every Small Problem Into a Fatal One
At Mars, communication delays aren’t a minor inconvenience; they are a structural feature of reality.
Best case, a message takes minutes. Worst case, it takes tens of minutes. And sometimes the Sun itself blocks you entirely. That means:
No real-time guidance in emergencies
No Apollo 13-style collaboration with mission control
No “We’ll talk you through it” heroics
A Mars crew must be a self-contained repair shop, a medical unit, a psychological resilience experiment, and a high-stakes improvisation team for years.
That isn’t astronaut training. That’s asking 24 people to become a portable civilization.
The Real Wall: Reliability at a Time Scale We Don’t Know How to Engineer
People love to talk about rockets because rockets are visible. They explode on camera and inspire speeches.
But Mars doesn’t primarily demand thrust. It demands systems that do not fail:
air recycling
water recycling
food storage and processing
thermal management
medical capability
radiation sheltering
power generation and storage
spare parts strategy
autonomous diagnostics and repair
On the ISS, when something breaks, you can ship parts. You can ship people. You can ship solutions.
On Mars, if something breaks and you didn’t bring the part, you don’t “adapt.” You ration. Then you suffocate on schedule.
We have never demonstrated closed-loop life support at the level of years-long, no-resupply, no-evacuation reliability required for a Mars mission. We have prototypes. We have partial systems. We do not have proof.
And in engineering, “not proven” is just a polite way of saying “not real yet.”
Radiation: The Invisible Tax Collector That Never Misses a Payment
Outside Earth’s magnetic protection, your body becomes a long-duration detector for radiation physics you didn’t order.
You get two problems:
unpredictable solar events that can spike dose
constant galactic cosmic rays that you can’t “wait out”
Shielding helps, but it has nasty edge cases (secondary particle showers) and a brutal cost: shielding is mass, and mass is fuel, and fuel is exponential punishment.
So what do we do? We talk about “materials,” “storm shelters,” and “maybe magnetic shielding someday.” That last word—someday—is doing heroic labor.
If your mission requires “someday,” it is not a mission; it is a wish with diagrams.
Microgravity: The Slow-Motion Sabotage of the Human Body
Even if you solve the rocket, the human body is still an inconvenient legacy system.
Months in microgravity cause:
muscle loss, even with intense exercise
bone loss that may not fully recover
cardiovascular deconditioning
vision changes we still don’t fully understand
immune weirdness that is manageable only because Earth is nearby
Artificial gravity would help. It is also an engineering problem we have not operationalized for deep space crews. We have concepts. We do not have a flight-proven, human-rated, long-duration rotating habitat system.
Again: “concept” is not “capability.”
Landing: Mars Has an Atmosphere That’s Perfectly Designed to Humiliate You
Mars’ atmosphere is thick enough to cook you and thin enough to let you die anyway.
We’ve landed rovers around one ton. A human mission needs to land tens of tons—habitats, power, vehicles, supplies, and likely a propellant plant.
Scaling entry, descent, and landing is not a linear problem. You don’t just “make the parachute bigger.” At a certain point, the parachute becomes a nautical project.
Supersonic retropropulsion is promising, but “promising” is not “operational,” and “operational” is what you need when human lives are inside the vehicle.
Mars landing at human scale is still a high-consequence research project, not a solved transport service.
The Return Trip: The Part Everyone Mentally Skips
Here is the part that quietly murders most realistic Mars timelines:
Coming home.
Returning from Mars with chemical propulsion requires an obscene amount of propellant. Which means you either:
bring it from Earth (mass spiral; basically unworkable), or
make it on Mars (ISRU), which means your crew’s return depends on industrial chemistry operating autonomously on another planet for months or years.
We have proof-of-concept oxygen production (MOXIE). That is not a fuel refinery. Scaling from grams to tens of tons is not “engineering detail.” It is the difference between a science fair volcano and an oil refinery.
If your return plan depends on a Mars propellant factory that has never run at scale on Mars, then your plan is not a plan. It’s gambling with human beings as the chips.
“But SpaceX Iterates Fast”
Yes. And iteration is valuable.
But iteration does not repeal the fundamental reality that Mars requires multiple independent breakthroughs to mature at the same time, and then to work together, perfectly, for years, with no rescue.
Starship can be spectacular and still not deliver “humans on Mars and back” in our lifetime, because Mars is the integration test from hell. The rocket is only the delivery truck. The real product is survival.
We are not failing because we lack ambition.
We are failing because the gap between “can launch big things” and “can keep humans alive for years without a lifeline” is wider than marketing language.
The Verdict
Mars talk is the modern equivalent of buying a gym membership.
We swipe the card, we feel virtuous, we tell our friends, and then we go home and eat pie.
The truth is that Mars will not be conquered by confidence. It will be conquered by boring, relentless, unglamorous reliability—systems engineering so mature that failure becomes abnormal.
We are not there.
Not close enough to put human lives on the line with a straight face.
So will Elon Musk go to Mars in our lifetime?
No. Not unless “lifetime” means “the lifetime of the concept,” which is how long it takes the public to forget the last promise and get excited about the next one.
Mars is possible in physics.
Mars is not yet plausible in engineering.
And until it is, Mars remains what it has always been: a beautiful red reminder that the universe doesn’t care what we announce at press conferences.
We might see robots there, Tesla or otherwise, in about 10 years – may be.
DESIGNING IT
So what would be involved – let us design some of it.
Below is an updated design sized for a 24-person crew on a conjunction-class Mars mission (long surface stay; shortest total risk profile we can plausibly defend). I’ll do two things:
Ship architecture for 24 people needed and changes everything: volume, redundancy, power, radiation sheltering, medical, social dynamics).
Provide explicit oxygen/food/water budgets for outbound + surface stay + return, with margins, and show where those supplies live (in-ship vs pre-deployed on Mars).
Baseline mission duration (for sizing)
If sized to a realistic round-trip where you actually come home:
Outbound transit: 180 days
Surface stay: 540 days
Return transit: 180 days
Total:900 days (~2.46 years)
Different duration, the consumables scale linearly.
Part 1 — HERMES-AG-24: ship design adjusted for 24 crew
1) Larger crew concept for redundancy
With 24 crew, you do not want a single monolithic habitat. You want:
Multiple pressure zones (fire, leak, contamination containment)
Operational redundancy by “crew islands” (a failure shouldn’t force all 24 into one crippled space)
A real clinic (not a “med kit”)
Real psychological habitability (privacy, conflict management, noise zoning)
2) Core architecture (high-level)
HERMES-AG-24 is a modular interplanetary transport assembled in Earth orbit:
A. Rotating habitat ring (artificial gravity)
A rotating ring (preferred over a tether at this scale) providing ~0.38 g (Mars gravity) during cruise.
Practical numbers:
Ring radius ≈ 75 m
Target spin ≈ 2.1 rpm (comfortable regime for most humans with training)
Ring contains most crew living volume, galley, hygiene, exercise, medical, and work areas.
Used for docking/assembly, engine burns, and as the structural backbone.
C. Propulsion stage (mission-dependent)
You can keep the earlier “fast-transit” assumption (e.g., nuclear thermal) or go chemical.
Crew-24 pushes you harder toward shorter transits because radiation and microgravity risks scale with time.
D. Power and thermal
24 crew + closed-loop life support + big thermal radiators is a power/heat problem.
Practically: hundreds of kWe class power system (fission-electric or hybrid) plus batteries, with large radiators.
E. Earth re-entry capsule
A dedicated Earth Return Capsule (ERC) docked for the trip, used only at Earth return.
For 24 crew, this is usually multiple capsules (e.g., 2×12 or 3×8) for redundancy and recovery logistics.
F. Mars interface elements (separate vehicles)
Crew lander + cargo landers + surface habitat + surface power + ISRU + Mars Ascent Vehicle (MAV).
The transport’s job is: keep 24 alive in deep space and deliver them to Mars orbit reliably.
3) Hab layout and redundancy (recommended)
Split the ring into 4 habitat sectors, each supporting 6 crew as a semi-independent “lifeboat zone”:
Each sector has:
sleeping quarters
a hygiene module
local air handling loop
emergency O₂ and water
fire suppression and isolation bulkheads
Shared ring facilities:
galley + mess
exercise gym (large, because 24 people need scheduling)
medical clinic
workshop + spares
command/mission ops bay
storm shelter (see radiation below)
This is how you prevent one bad day (fire/leak/toxic event) from becoming a mass-casualty event.
Part 2 — Explicit oxygen, food, and water budgets (24 crew, 900 days)
Assumptions (conservative, human-rated planning)
These are planning numbers, not marketing numbers.
Oxygen (metabolic requirement):
Use 1.0 kg O₂ / person / day (this includes margin for operational losses and variability).
Total O₂ over mission if you carried it all as stored oxygen:
24 × 900 × 1.0 = 21,600 kg O₂ (21.6 metric tons)
Food (packaged, shelf-stable):
Use 1.8 kg / person / day (includes packaging and prep waste; conservative for deep-space provisioning).
Total food:
24 × 900 × 1.8 = 38,880 kg
Add 15% mission margin:
38,880 × 1.15 = 44,712 kg (44.7 metric tons)
Water (total use) with recycling:
People underestimate water because they only count drinking. On a spacecraft, water touches everything.
Use 11 kg water / person / day total demand (drinking + food rehydration + hygiene + oxygen generation feedstock + housekeeping).
Assume 93% water recovery (ISS-class performance; deep-space system must be at least this good).
Gross water use (open loop) would be:
24 × 900 × 11 = 237,600 kg (this is why recycling is non-negotiable)
“Makeup” water needed with 93% recovery:
237,600 × 0.07 = 16,632 kg
Add 25% margin for losses/leaks/off-nominal:
16,632 × 1.25 = 20,790 kg (20.8 metric tons)
Summary totals (with margins)
For a 24-person, 900-day mission:
Food: ~44.7 t (must be physically present somewhere: in ship stores and/or pre-deployed depots)
Makeup water (with 93% recycling): ~20.8 t
O₂: not necessarily stored as O₂, but the mission must support 21.6 t equivalent metabolic consumption
How the ship “has enough oxygen” in practice (not by carrying 21.6 t of O₂)
A serious Mars ship does not plan to fly with 22 tons of stored oxygen unless it has to. Instead:
Primary O₂ strategy: regenerate oxygen onboard
Generate O₂ via electrolysis of water.
Remove CO₂ via regenerative scrubbers; optionally reduce some CO₂ back to water (improves closure).
This shifts “oxygen supply” into a water + power + hardware reliability problem (which is the correct framing).
Required onboard oxygen storage (contingency, not primary)
You still carry stored oxygen for emergencies and EVA losses.
A robust contingency posture for 24 crew is:
60 days emergency oxygen as stored LOX or high-pressure O₂
24 × 60 × 1.0 = 1,440 kg O₂
Add margin and operational losses → plan ~2.0–2.5 t stored O₂ equivalent distributed across habitat sectors.
This is the difference between:
“Our O₂ generator failed; we die,” and
“Our O₂ generator failed; we have two months to repair it.”
Where all this food/water actually goes (ship vs Mars depots)
You asked to “make sure there’s enough oxygen, food, and water for trip + stay + return.” With 24 crew, the only credible plan is distributed stockpiles:
A. What must be on the transport at departure (minimum credible)
Add “contingency extension” buffer (e.g., +90 days food in case of delays):
24 × 90 × 1.8 = 3,888 kg → +15% ≈ 4.5 t
Transport food load recommendation:~22–24 t
Transit makeup water + buffer
Transit makeup water (360 days):
24 × 360 × 11 × 0.07 = 6,653 kg
Add 25% margin:
~8.3 t
Add contingency buffer:
round to ~10–12 t total onboard makeup water capability (distributed tanks)
Stored emergency oxygen
~2.0–2.5 t O₂ equivalent
This makes the transport self-sufficient for both transits and gives you repair time if a core system degrades.
B. What should be pre-deployed on Mars (because hauling all surface supplies on the transport is inefficient)
Surface stay is 540 days, which dominates food mass:
Surface food (540 days):
24 × 540 × 1.8 = 23,328 kg
Add 15% margin:
~26.8 t
Mars surface depot recommendation: at least ~27–30 t food pre-deployed and verified before crew departure from Earth.
For water and oxygen on the surface:
If you have reliable water extraction, you can supply:
drinking/hygiene water,
electrolysis oxygen,
and even feedstock for propellant production (if your architecture requires it).
For 24 crew, daily total water demand at 11 kg/p/day is:
24 × 11 = 264 kg/day (~0.26 t/day)
A surface water system that can reliably produce 1–2 t/day gives robust margin (crew + O₂ + losses + contingency).
Updated ship inventory plan (the “enough supplies” answer)
Here is a concrete provisioning plan that satisfies your requirement:
Total mission provisioning requirement (900 days, 24 crew)
Food total (with margin):~44.7 t
Makeup water total (with margin, 93% recovery):~20.8 t
Emergency stored oxygen:~2.0–2.5 t O₂ equivalent (plus onboard generation)
Recommended distribution
On the transport at departure (Earth orbit):
Food:~24 t (covers both transits + 90-day buffer)
Makeup water:~12 t (covers both transits + buffer)
Stored O₂:~2.5 t O₂ equivalent
Plus: ECLSS spares, filters, seals, pumps, and repair tooling scaled for 24 crew
Pre-deployed on Mars (verified before crew launches):
Food:~30 t (covers full surface stay with margin, plus extra contingency)
Water/oxygen: produced locally from water extraction + electrolysis (with stored reserves)
(If return propellant depends on ISRU, that system must be running and stockpiling before crew departure.)
This is how you “make sure” without pretending a single vehicle can practically carry everything and still be sane.
ECLSS reliability must now support 24 people for years; failure consequences scale up.
Power and thermal rejection become major drivers.
Radiation sheltering must protect 24 simultaneously (and shelter volume grows).
Medical capability becomes a real onboard hospital problem.
Crew dynamics become a mission-critical system, not a footnote.
So yes: a 24-person design is more plausible socially and operationally, but it amplifies the reality that this is still a systems-engineering mountain.
Below is a conceptual, order-of-magnitude spec sheet for HERMES-AG-24 (24-person Mars transport). Where I give ranges, it is because the value depends strongly on propulsion choice, shielding philosophy, and how much is pre-deployed on Mars. This sheet is sized to the 900-day conjunction-class mission profile we just used.
HERMES-AG-24 — Mars Transport Stack (Spec Sheet)
1) Mission profile (sizing basis)
Crew: 24 (4 habitat sectors × 6 crew)
Mission class: Conjunction (long surface stay)
Outbound transit: 180 days (design goal: 120–180 days if fast propulsion is available)
Surface stay: 540 days (supplied primarily by pre-deployed surface depot)
Return transit: 180 days
Total mission duration: 900 days (2.46 years)
Launch cadence constraint: 26-month windows; crew launch occurs only after surface power + depot + return-propellant readiness is verified.
2) Vehicle architecture (modules)
A. Rotating Habitat Ring (AG ring)
4 sealed, isolatable sectors (Sector A–D), each supports 6 crew in degraded mode
Integrated storm shelter volumes (one per sector + central shelter)
JFK’s Rice University “Nation’s Space Effort” speech (September 12, 1962),
Despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this Nation’s own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension.
No man can fully grasp how far and how fast we have come, but condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of but a half a century. Stated in these terms, we know very little about the first 40 years, except at the end of them advanced man had learned to use the skins of animals to cover them. Then about 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago man learned to write and use a cart with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. The printing press came this year, and then less than two months ago, during this whole 50-year span of human history, the steam engine provided a new source of power.
Newton explored the meaning of gravity. Last month electric lights and telephones and automobiles and airplanes became available. Only last week did we develop penicillin and television and nuclear power, and now if America’s new spacecraft succeeds in reaching Venus, we will have literally reached the stars before midnight tonight.
This is a breathtaking pace, and such a pace cannot help but create new ills as it dispels old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high reward.
So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer to rest, to wait. But this city of Houston, this State of Texas, this country of the United States was not built by those who waited and rested and wished to look behind them. This country was conquered by those who moved forward–and so will space.
William Bradford, speaking in 1630 of the founding of the Plymouth Bay Colony, said that all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.
If this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space.
Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it–we mean to lead it. For the eyes of the world now look into space, to the Moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding.
Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say the we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.
In the last 24 hours we have seen facilities now being created for the greatest and most complex exploration in man’s history. We have felt the ground shake and the air shattered by the testing of a Saturn C-1 booster rocket, many times as powerful as the Atlas which launched John Glenn, generating power equivalent to 10,000 automobiles with their accelerators on the floor. We have seen the site where five F-1 rocket engines, each one as powerful as all eight engines of the Saturn combined, will be clustered together to make the advanced Saturn missile, assembled in a new building to be built at Cape Canaveral as tall as a 48 story structure, as wide as a city block, and as long as two lengths of this field.
Within these last 19 months at least 45 satellites have circled the earth. Some 40 of them were “made in the United States of America” and they were far more sophisticated and supplied far more knowledge to the people of the world than those of the Soviet Union.
The Mariner spacecraft now on its way to Venus is the most intricate instrument in the history of space science. The accuracy of that shot is comparable to firing a missile from Cape Canaveral and dropping it in this stadium between the 40-yard lines.
Transit satellites are helping our ships at sea to steer a safer course. Tiros satellites have given us unprecedented warnings of hurricanes and storms, and will do the same for forest fires and icebergs.
We have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them. And they may be less public.
To be sure, we are behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight. But we do not intend to stay behind, and in this decade, we shall make up and move ahead.
The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school. Technical institutions, such as Rice, will reap the harvest of these gains.
And finally, the space effort itself, while still in its infancy, has already created a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs. Space and related industries are generating new demands in investment and skilled personnel, and this city and this State, and this region, will share greatly in this growth. What was once the furthest outpost on the old frontier of the West will be the furthest outpost on the new frontier of science and space. Houston, your City of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community. During the next 5 years the National Aeronautics and Space Administration expects to double the number of scientists and engineers in this area, to increase its outlays for salaries and expenses to $60 million a year; to invest some $200 million in plant and laboratory facilities; and to direct or contract for new space efforts over $1 billion from this Center in this City.
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year–a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year. Space expenditures will soon rise some more, from 40 cents per person per week to more than 50 cents a week for every man, woman and child in the United States, for we have given this program a high national priority–even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the Moon, 240,000 miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25,000 miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun–almost as hot as it is here today–and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out–then we must be bold.
I’m the one who is doing all the work, so we just want you to stay cool for a minute. [laughter]
However, I think we’re going to do it, and I think that we must pay what needs to be paid. I don’t think we ought to waste any money, but I think we ought to do the job. And this will be done in the decade of the sixties. It may be done while some of you are still here at school at this college and university. It will be done during the term of office of some of the people who sit here on this platform. But it will be done. And it will be done before the end of this decade.
I am delighted that this university is playing a part in putting a man on the Moon as part of a great national effort of the United States of America.
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, “Because it is there.”
Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it, and the Moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God’s blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
