Translator: Hugo Wagner Reviewer: Els De Keyser
Good evening.
I'll start with a question.
While you are peacefully seated in your comfy theatre seats,
do you know how many people are in space right now?
Are there people in space right now?
Well yes, there are. There have been, uninterruptedly since 2001.
Right now,
there are three of them
who rotate at 17,400 mph over our heads.
17,400 mph, what does it mean?
It means that...
in 12 minutes, which is the time we will be spending together,
or the time it takes you to travel 8 stops on the metro,
they will travel 3,700 miles,
the distance between Paris and New York,
in a space station.
So think about it, it's really science fiction.
Tonight I will try to convince you that when it comes to space exploration,
you need to believe in science fiction.
I have believed in it since I was young.
It has helped me outdo myself.
It has allowed me to achieve things that seemed impossible
like becoming an astronaut.
Remember when you were young,
when you were reading Tintin.
Didn't you read Tintin?
"Destination Moon" came out in 1954.
At that time, the technology to enable flights to the Moon didn't exist.
Yet, 15 years later,
the Apollo missions landed on the Moon successfully, as we know
with an incredible number of similarities to Hergé's comics.
Without going all the way back to Jules Verne, who in 1865
rightly imagined a journey from the Earth to the Moon,
I would like to show you this.
It looks like a still from a bad B movie from the 1980s.
Right?
Yet...
It is happening right now in space
where this humanoid robot was sent by NASA
to assist the astronauts in their daily repetitive or dangerous tasks.
We need to believe in science fiction and in technical progress in space exploration.
What are our three astronauts doing in space right now?
They are crew members of the ISS, the International Space Station.
Let's say it right away:
it's the most complex object mankind has ever created.
It is as big as a soccer field: 378 by 243 feet, 98 feet tall.
It has the same interior volume as a Boeing 747.
It has 27,000 square foot of solar panels.
It is made of 10 or 15 modules, depending on how you count them,
representing 10 or 20 tons assembled in the most hostile environment we can imagine.
An absolute vacuum, without oxygen,
with extreme surface temperatures ranging from -148° to +302° F,
exposure to solar radiations unprotected by the atmosphere,
you name it.
Compared to his, the Sahara, the North Pole or the Mariana Trench are a piece of cake.
So this technical prowess is very nice, but what is it for?
The ISS is basically a high tech scientific laboratory,
where we use the weightlessness properties to conduct research
in life sciences, in fluid physics,
in materials science, in biology, etc...
Time is too short to list all the results of the research done on the ISS,
but in medicine for example,
Salmonella vaccines are being clinically tested right now,
that were isolated by the astronauts, on board.
Do any of you have the new iPhone 5?
In a TEDx audience, there must be a few.
The material of the case is based on research on alloys carried out on the ISS.
The ISS astronauts also pave the way for the future of human space flight.
What's next?
Flying farther and farther away.
Since the Apollo missions in the 1960s,
we've barely come close to the nearby suburbs of Earth.
And yet, they crossed that limit half a dozen of times to go the Moon,
250,000 miles away -- it's not that far.
A mission to Mars would send us 250 to 300 million miles away,
depending on the orbital configuration.
So, to get an idea of what we're talking about,
imagine that after the conference, you go to Dieppe for the weekend, in Normandy,
which I recommend because it's my hometown.
There is a very beautiful pebble beach,
water is at 55°F during summertime, it's perfect for swimming.
If the distance between the Olympia Theatre and the Place du Puits Salé at Dieppe
were the distance from Earth to Mars, a distance of 119 miles,
could you guess how far the low Earth orbit is,
where we have been confined for the last 40 years,
compared to the distance between the Olympia theatre and Dieppe?
Hard to say, right?
It's 8 inches away from the doorstep of the Olympia.
So it really is a small step for man, no pun intended.
And there remains much to be explored in space.
Which is a good thing because we plan on exploring it.
This slide, don't worry,
is not my personal attempt to show the most incomprehensible
and ugliest slide in TED history,
but it's an actual roadmap for the international space agencies
whose logos you can see the in the top right corner.
What does it represent?
It's really simple.
Can you see the timeline, the band at the top?
It means that we'll continue to do long duration missions on the ISS until 2020.
We will prepare the technologies of the future.
You can see this in the top left side of the slide.
Which means that around the year 2025 -- the square in the middle --
we should have the first manned mission to an asteroid.
Asteroids have great scientific relevance,
but they could also become dangerous for the Earth.
Unfortunately, that is not science fiction either.
Then, finally, in the second half of the 2030s,
that's the far right side of the slide, the orange planet you may have recognized,
we should see the first manned mission to Mars.
Mars is the ultimate goal of space conquest,
of space exploration, I should say.
But why exactly?
Among all the places we've visited, all the objects we've observed in the cosmos,
it's the only one that has harbored, at one point of the planet's history,
the favorable conditions to sustain life as we know it.
We know this for a fact.
It's a planet relatively close to Earth,
with reasonable gravity and temperatures.
The temperatures range from -112° to +50°F.
Today, it might still harbor life
as bacteria or microorganisms
living underground, near the surface.
So, one needs to understand that looking for, or studying life on Mars
can allow us to answer fundamental questions, like:
Where does our species come from? What's next for us in the future?
How does life appear? Most importantly, why does it disappear?
Is human life possible somewhere else than Earth and under which conditions?
So, of course we need to send rovers to Mars,
automatic probes and small robots on wheels, as pathfinders.
But exploration is above all a human adventure.
We cannot today, given our current technology,
substitute human decision-making and adaptability in a space mission.
Apollo 17's astronauts, in 1972,
explored 23 miles of lunar surface in 3 days.
They brought back 242 pounds of rock samples
that were selected onsite for their scientific relevance
by an astronaut who was also a geologist.
The Curiosity mission, you no doubt heard about,
is a technical and scientific prowess, we all agree.
Yet, it only has 164 feet of autonomy per day,
can only cover 3 to 12 miles of ground in 2 years,
and can analyze about 70 rock samples during the entire mission.
We also need to send humans to space because they bring civilization with them.
Correct me if I'm wrong,
but it doesn't really feel the same to see a human walk on the Moon
instead of an automatic probe.
Especially since the human will come back and will tell his story
and you will all feel as if you had been on the same journey.
So, what are the challenges?
What issues will our 3 astronauts face
when they decide to set course to Mars?
First, it's a very long journey.
We're currently talking of a 910-day round-trip mission to Mars.
And it is problematic for our health.
It is problematic for the muscular system,
the skeleton system, and the cardiovascular system.
Most importantly, it is problematic for our psyche.
We have never lost sight of Earth and pushed that far in the darkness of space.
We have never done it.
We don't know what will happen in these people's minds
when the only landscape they will see from their window seat for hundreds of days
will be a sort of absolutely motionless vacuum.
We don't know yet how to quantify it.
We'll also be subject to important radiation doses.
We can protect ourselves from radiation by shielding the spacecraft.
But shielding represents more mass, which means 2 problems:
first, we need to launch it from Earth, at a high energy cost.
That's why we have heavy launchers, big rockets.
Then, we need to land it on Mars.
And that's complicated too.
So, let's imagine that we are all on a journey to Mars.
We've been together for a year, and we're about to land on Mars.
We fasten our seat belt and here we go.
We descend at approximately 13,700 mph.
At that speed, we start scraping the atmosphere of Mars.It's not very dense, but still.
Our thermal shield heats up to about 3,000°F.
Which slows us down.
Which slows us down to 930 mph.
So it's better, it's really better,
but it's still too fast for us to land on the surface.
So we have no other choice but to deploy the parachute.
The parachute's speed is faster-than-sound, it's going to produce a 9G shock,
which is approximately what a trained fighter pilot can put up with in its jet.
It slows us down to 220 mph.
That's good but it's still too fast.
There's only one option: we land with the rocket engines.
We descend like that to the ground.
Not completely to the ground, unfortunately, because it would raise too much dust,
landing would be hazardous, so we have to winch up the mass,
the payload that we want to land on Mars.
Remember that this scenario is occurring millions of miles away from Earth.
It looks like science fiction, we all agree,
and yet you all witnessed it, even on television, maybe,
on the 6th of August,
when the Curiosity rover landed on the Martian surface.
Except that a manned mission wouldn't weigh the same.
To sustain life there and bring back the astronauts,
we need to land about 80 tons on Mars,
whereas the Curiosity rover was 2000 pounds.
So we don't know how to go to Mars?
Well, no, for now we don't.
But we're almost there.
Because we can feel that all the technology is converging.
Especially propulsion.
If we can fly ever more rapidly,
we can halve the duration of the mission.
We are still subject to radiation
but for a smaller amount of time, so we don't need shielding.
We also need less supplies for the astronauts.
Not only is their health -- our health -- preserved,
it also solves the problem of launching and landing.
So we can feel that everything is converging right now.
Of course, my dream would be to go to Mars one day,
I am among the few candidates to make the trip.
But even if I could not be part of the crew,
I am going to promise you
that most of you,
well, not counting the 85 people who won't see 2030,
(Laughter) (Applause)
you'll see a manned mission to Mars in your lifetime.
But what will happen if all the professional astronauts desert the low Earth orbit
and adventure themselves farther and farther away in the cosmos?
Who will keep rotating around Earth?
You will. All of you.
Is that science fiction?
Not even close.
There have never been as many spacecrafts projects.
Would it be for suborbital flight,
or to serve the International Space Station.
We even see inflatable space hotels projects in low Earth orbit.
Do no laugh. The technology exists.
It was tested by NASA last year,
and it works.
So, in 2030, instead of going to Dieppe,
you could spend the weekend in low Earth orbit
in a relatively low comfort room,
but with a view on Earth.
What we need to understand, is that space exploration
is actually the continuation of terrestrial exploration.
It's the same thing we've always done.
We first send slightly crazy discoverers,
then explorers, settlers,
and finally the public.
It has always been like that.
It's the natural continuation of terrestrial exploration,
but in a rougher environment, that's why it takes time.
We named the European ISS laboratory after Christopher Columbus for good reasons.
All fair and well, but I hear people muttering that space is expensive,
that we cannot afford it in times of crisis, etc.
Is space really expensive?
Even if some of you came here with their bike,
or have a metro pass,
there must be some of you
who buy a single metro ticket from time to time.
Think about this, next time you buy one,
you will spend the equivalent of your annual contribution
to the European manned space flight program.
Everything allowing the European astronauts to prepare the future for you on the ISS.
If you buy 10 metro tickets,
it's the entire European Space Agency,
with the launchers, the Ariane launcher,
the navigation satellites, the weather satellites,
the telecommunication satellites that you use every day,
that you will subsidize for one year.
Remember that the Apollo program,
in 10 years, cost 154 billion dollars,
with their well-known technological and societal benefits.
The war in Irak and in Afghanistan, unfortunately,
has already cost, in the same period,
1,200 billion dollars to American taxpayers.
Besides, it's ironic to notice that
an activity stemming from the cold war, like space exploration,
today unites different countries.
Countries as different as Russia, the United States, Japan, Europe,
and tomorrow, China,
in a cooperation so strong that it removes any antagonism.
Since the time has come to say goodbye,
and since we're talking about all those space nationalities...
It's 7:16 pm.
Our 3 astronauts have traveled 3,700 miles since the beginning of this talk.
They flew over Paris this morning,
It's time to introduce them more properly.
The ISS commander is Sunita Williams, an American-Indian astronaut.
Along with Aki Hoshide, a Japanese astronaut,
and Yuri Malenchenko, a Russian cosmonaut.
They were kind enough to take 5 minutes of their time this morning to send me a photo
to salute you from the ISS. (Applause)
I join them in thanking you for your attention.
I hope one day to be able to do a TEDx Talk from the ISS.
It's quite feasible and I would be delighted.
Above all, I hope that I convinced you to believe in space exploration.
That it is in our interest, that it allows us to surpass ourselves
and to dream beyond our own individual scale. Mankind really needs it.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)