The next stage of our push into space should be setting up home on the moon, says astronaut Chris Hadfield , who warns a rush to Mars would be deadly

“We have not yet figured out how to live permanently off-planet” NASA

Why do you think we should try to live on the moon before aiming for Mars?

For tens of thousands of years humans have followed a pattern on Earth: imagination, to technology-enabled exploration, to settlement. It’s how the first humans got to Australia 50,000 or 60,000 years ago, and how we went from Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard orbiting Earth to the first people putting footprints on the moon, to people living in orbit.

There are six people living on the International Space Station, and we have had people there continuously for nearly 17 years. But the reality is we have not yet figured out how to live permanently off-planet.

So I think if we follow the historically driven pattern then the moon would be first. Not just to reaffirm that we can get there, but to show that we can also live there.


US vice-president Mike Pence recently said his country will put American boots on Mars. How long do you think that will take?

It’s easy for the vice-president of the US to say that, but it’s not going to be while he’s vice-president. I think ultimately we’ll be living on the moon for a generation before we get to Mars. If the world and the moon were threatened and the only way to preserve our species was to launch from Earth, we could go to Mars with yesterday’s technology, but we would probably kill just about everybody on the way.

It’s as if you and I were in Paris, paddling around in the Seine in little canoes saying, “We’ve got boats, we’ve got paddles, let’s go to Australia!” Australia? We can barely cross the English Channel. We’re sort of in that boat in space exploration right now. A journey to Mars is conceivable but it’s still a lot further away than most people think.

Why do you think lots of people die on the way to Mars?

With long-haul space exploration there is a whole smorgasbord of unknowns. We know some of the threats: the unreliability of the equipment, how to provide enough food for that length of time. But there are countless others: What are the impacts of cosmic rays on the human body? What sort of spacecraft do you need to build? What are the psychological effects of having nothing in the window for months and months? And going to a place that no one has ever been before, that can’t be discounted.

Humans have a history of moving to one place, trashing it and moving to the next. Is there a risk that we could trash space as well as Earth?

I’ve orbited Earth 2600 times, and I wouldn’t say it is trashed. The asteroid that hit at the end of the age of the dinosaurs trashed the planet.

We do need to do a better job of being stewards of this planet, but to say we show up somewhere and trash it is a negative oversimplification.

Could we ever move to Mars? Find out more in our expert talk at New Scientist Live

One of the beauties of having seen the entire world from space is that you suddenly get a vague understanding of what 4.5 billion years – the lifetime of our planet – means. Earth is immensely tough and regenerative. It has put up with far, far worse than us. I think part of the reason we make a big deal of the destruction that we cause is because it makes us feel powerful and significant, like, hey, we matter.

Did orbiting Earth ever lead you to an existential crisis?

It’s the opposite. I think it puts everything in its proper perspective – gives you a sense of serenity and peace and understanding. If all you ever did was watch CNN, I think you would go mad: what a bizarre frame of reference to try to base your decision-making around. But if you understand what 4.5 billion years means, and what the distance between here and Mars actually is, then you get a sense of, OK, how important is The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer TV show today? It’s just noise. And who cares what a particular person in power has typed out in 140 characters on Twitter today? That’s just gossip with a tie on.

Chris Hadfield is a retired Canadian astronaut who flew two space shuttle missions and commanded the International Space Station. He is currently on a speaking tour of Australia

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