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SYFY WIRE Bad Astronomy

D.C. Event: To Mars and Back

By Phil Plait
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Hey BABloggees! On Thursday, April 9, 2015, I will be in Washington, D.C., to moderate a panel of experts talking about living and working in deep space: specifically what life will be like on a trip to Mars.

The panel is part of a series of discussions that are free and open to the public that day, all under the rubric of “Giant Leap: The Race to Mars and Back.” The event is sponsored by Future Tense, a collaboration between the New America Foundation, Arizona State University, and Slate, and underwritten by Lockheed Martin.

My panel—"A Day in Deep Space"—will be at noon, and includes Kate Greene, a sci-tech journalist and former crew writer for the NASA-funded HI-SEAS project; Josh Hopkins, a Lockheed-Martin space exploration architect; and Tara Ruttley, NASA associate ISS program scientist. We'll be discussing a typical (!) day on board a deep space vehicle headed for Mars. What's "routine" when you're on an interplanetary voyage?

Here’s info on the location and directions. Sign up to attend here.

I’m pretty excited about this. I love hearing experts talking about space travel, because it makes the 12-year-old sci-fi fan in me all giddy, and then my brain kicks in and tells me this stuff is real. There are humans whose job is to make plans for other humans to live in space.

The future: Welcome to it. Come to the event and greet it with me.

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