Approaching the Unknown

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Mars is

just a tiny dot in the sky.

Forty million miles away.

Nothing lives there.

Nothing has ever died there,

but I'm going

to bring it to life.

Fourteen hours and counting.

Captain.

Good luck, sir.

Skinny.

Hey, excited?

Of course, you?

You bet your ass I am.

Perform a.P.U. Start.

Six billion people on earth

cheering me on, but most of

them wondering why I'd do this.

Commencing launch sequence.

O.S.M. Permit to close.

O.S.M closed.

Why leave this life behind to

die on some barren planet?

- Vent one heater exit.

- Exit. S.S.C.

Because I know it

won't be barren for long.

- G.L.S. On.

- G.L.S. Is on.

Final poll.

Houston flight?

Houston flight is go.

- Fido?

- Fido is go.

- GPO?

- GPO is go.

- STM?

- STM is go.

- SPE?

- Go.

CDR?

Commander is go.

We are go for launch.

T-minus ten, nine, eight...

This is a one-way mission, but

I'm not going there to die.

I'm going to Mars to live.

This is captain William d. Stanaforth

here aboard the good ship Zephyr.

We are go for Mars.

Roger that, captain.

- Gravitational spin is on.

- Copy that.

Requesting permission to kick off

my shoes for the rest of the ride.

Roger, captain,

you have permission.

Lights, on.

Welcome to space, captain.

You hear that?

That's the crowd out in the

parking lot here in Houston.

We're all thrilled.

That said, we'd like to start

running diagnostics on some of the

life support systems we can't monitor.

Copy that Stanaforth?

Yeah.

Starting with the essentials, let's

run a test of the air circulation

and the water reactor.

Yeah, give me a minute, skinny.

Hello, little guys.

How life on

earth started is a mystery,

but sustaining it

is an engineering problem.

One meter of steel and insulation

separate me from nothingness.

I can feel the pull

of the ship's rotation.

My feet are heavy,

my head is light.

This massive machine,

so tiny in the void of space,

powerful but fragile.

It's unnerving, but I love it.

Hello, captain? It's time for your

first weekly student interface.

Are you ready for the uplink?

Kind of busy here.

Stanaforth, take a break.

P.R. Is important, too.

Plus a little human interaction

could do you good.

Good morning captain

Stanaforth, I'm Mrs. Wilson,

and I'm going to be monitoring

the student q and a

for the American youth

in science program.

Our first question comes

from Samantha Hopps.

Hi, my question is,

if you make it to Mars,

how will you be able

to survive the harsh climate?

When I get to Mars, we've already sent

up a lot of materials, fuel, food.

But one of the big challenges was water.

They just can't send up enough.

That's why I had been

working on this reactor.

Wow, you

made that? What does it do?

It's very similar to the

fuel cells on the ship.

Like an electric car,

the product is power,

and the byproduct

is drinking water.

Only mine runs on dirt.

Dirt?

I invented a process to extract the

hydrogen and the oxygen from the soil,

and recombine them,

which makes h20.

No one thought it would work,

so I went out to

the Atacama desert

alone, with no water,

and only one way to survive.

To make that reactor work.

Day one, I'm making little adjustments.

My throat is parched.

Day two, I'm still working, but without

water I'm getting light-headed.

I could have

radioed in for a rescue,

but I thought I could fix it.

By day three, I'm

doing a full reset.

And in that instant, I knew

that this could work on Mars.

With this step, I leave the earth

moving to a barren new planet.

Hmm.

With this step,

I leave the earth

moving to a pristine new planet.

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