“Just recognizing that you can’t build a spacecraft and plug people in later — you have to integrate your thinking, which would also help us here on Earth.”
I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Mark Shelhamer, a scientist who has spent decades studying what happens to the human body in space and who has remarkably little patience for the idea of colonizing Mars. Even under the worst imaginable conditions on Earth, he argues, living here would be vastly easier than surviving on the Red Planet. “You’ve got to be crazy. Really, it’s untenable,” he says. Yet Shelhamer believes humans absolutely should go to Mars. He just wants us to understand what we’re getting ourselves into.
For Shelhamer, the greatest danger in a mission to Mars may come from something less spectacular than a rocket failure or a radiation storm: our habit of treating the human body as a collection of separate parts. A former Chief Scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program and a professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, he has spent much of his career investigating how the brain and body adapt to spaceflight. His latest work, explored in his book Are We Ready for Mars?, challenges a fundamental assumption underlying modern medicine and engineering: that understanding every component of a complicated system individually means we understand how the entire system functions as an integrated whole.
His fascination with complicated systems began long before NASA entered the picture. Shelhamer grew up in a household where education was an expectation, despite neither parent having completed college. His mother was a nurse, his father worked as a clerk in a steel mill, and the family home was filled with books. An uncle who had surveyed coal mines and performed codebreaking for the government during World War II became another important intellectual influence. By age ten, Shelhamer was captivated by the Apollo moon landing, but he was equally fascinated by shortwave radio and the invisible signals traveling through the air. He became an amateur radio operator, an interest he maintains to this day.
Electrical engineering seemed the natural career. Then, during his freshman year of college, his father received a pacemaker. With his mother and two aunts working as nurses, Shelhamer had already been exposed to medicine, but the intersection of electronics and human physiology now became particularly compelling. He began gravitating toward biomedical engineering, while his interest in space exploration resurfaced with the emergence of the Space Shuttle program.
In 1982, while searching for graduate programs, he discovered MIT’s Man Vehicle Laboratory. Researchers there studied how the brain interprets sensory information, particularly the signals responsible for balance and spatial orientation, and how those processes change in weightlessness. For Shelhamer, it was an extraordinary convergence. He could pursue, as he puts it, “my vocation and my avocation at the same place.”
He supported experiments aboard two Space Shuttle missions, earned his doctorate in 1990, and moved to Johns Hopkins, where he worked with researchers David Zee and David Robinson to deepen his understanding of the neurological mechanisms governing eye movements and balance. For years, his research combined fundamental neuroscience with occasional spaceflight projects.
Then, in 2013, he took a three-year leave of absence to become Chief Scientist of NASA’s Human Research Program at Johnson Space Center. The assignment transformed his perspective.
Suddenly, his responsibilities extended far beyond the balance system. He was overseeing research involving cardiovascular function, muscles, bones, immunity, psychology, and the many other ways prolonged spaceflight can affect human beings. He began noticing that these systems, although intimately connected inside the body, were often investigated independently. Each field had its specialists, its measurements, and its proposed solutions. But what happened when several systems changed simultaneously?
Shelhamer became convinced that this compartmentalized approach could have deadly consequences. In a mission where medical resources are severely limited and rescue may be impossible, he warns, failing to understand the interactions among physiological systems could end up “killing somebody.”
His concern extends beyond astronauts. Modern medicine frequently sends patients from one specialist to another, with each physician concentrating on a particular organ or condition. Shelhamer wonders whether a more integrated approach could identify problems earlier by examining how physical health interacts with psychological stress, relationships, working conditions, and the surrounding environment.
The ambition is considerable, and he acknowledges the scientific difficulties. His emerging field of multi-system resilience attempts to model those relationships using principles from engineering and complexity science. Much of this research remains developmental. The goal is to recognize when an interconnected system is beginning to deteriorate before an obvious crisis occurs.
One of Shelhamer’s favorite illustrations of resilience comes from the film The Martian. What impresses him is the constant procession of unexpected problems, which he summarizes as “just one damn thing after another.” He is less convinced by the ease with which the fictional astronauts agree to extend an already exhausting mission by years. Spaceflight, he points out, has psychological costs that heroic narratives can underestimate.
That skepticism gives his work a distinctive character. He admires astronauts and the engineers who make their missions possible, but he resists the temptation to treat extraordinary people as immune to ordinary human limitations. If he could advise Elon Musk, one of his central messages would be simple: “you can’t build a spacecraft and plug people in later.”
There is a certain irony in the direction Shelhamer’s career has taken. The boy fascinated by signals and electrical systems has become a scientist arguing that our most sophisticated systems are still inadequate unless they account for the unpredictable complexity of human life. He wants the same interdisciplinary thinking applied to medicine on Earth, where the consequences may be less dramatic than a failed Mars mission but are no less personal.
When asked about his influence, Shelhamer responds with characteristic modesty: “I wish I had more influence than I do.” What he hopes to change is the way researchers approach complicated problems, beginning with his own students. His challenge to them, and ultimately to the people planning humanity’s next great expedition, is to look beyond the individual pieces and understand how everything works together.
Getting humans to Mars will require extraordinary rockets. Keeping them healthy, capable, and resilient once they arrive may require an equally extraordinary change in how we think about ourselves.
Yitzi Weiner: Dr. Shelhamer, it is such an honor to meet you. Before we dive in and talk about your amazing work, our readers would love to learn about Dr. Shelhamer’s personal origin story. Give us context. Can you share with us a story of your childhood, how you grew up, and particularly the seeds of all the amazing ingenuity and leadership that have come since then?
Mark Shelhamer: Oh, you humble me with that question, but okay, if you insist. This is actually in the introduction or prologue to the book. We have some material in there, and I’ll give you a version of it.
I was a typical young, nerdy kid interested in doing well in math and science in school, things like that. So that sets the background for this. I had parents who were extremely encouraging about that, though they did not go to college themselves, or at least did not finish. My mother was a nurse, and my father was a clerk in a steel mill. So they were not highly educated in intellectual pursuits, but they made it very clear that me and my three brothers would go to college. The house was full of books and very encouraging. I also had an uncle who I talk about in the book. He was a surveyor in coal mines for a while and a very intelligent guy. He never went to college and never drove a car, but I got to know him very well. He was a very big influence on my life, and he did codebreaking for the government during World War II.
Like a lot of kids interested in that sort of thing, I was fascinated by the space program. I was 10 years old when we first landed on the moon, so that dates me in 1969. I was interested in that, and then didn’t really pay that much attention to it after that. I moved on to other things, did math and science in school, and went to college for electrical engineering. In the meantime, also around that time when I was about 10 years old, I started to get fascinated with what we call signals and systems — how systems manipulate signals of various kinds, and radio communication. I became an amateur radio operator. Shortwave radio and all that stuff just fascinates me to this day.
So I figured I would be doing something like that professionally. Then I got interested in the biomedical engineering aspects of electrical engineering. My mother and two of my aunts were nurses, so that was an influence. My father had a pacemaker implanted when I was a freshman in college, so I started to get more interested in that. At the same time, just coincidentally, the Space Shuttle program was starting up in the early 1980s. I got interested in that once again and really learned a lot about the history of the early American space program. I just became fascinated by that — the heroics and the audacity of it. Still, I always thought that would be a hobby and that I would go on and do my electrical and biomedical engineering work.
Then I was looking for places to go to graduate school in 1982 and found written material, back when it was all on published books and pamphlets, about a laboratory at MIT called, at the time, the Man Vehicle Laboratory — since then called the Human Systems Laboratory. They studied how the brain processes signals from the sensory systems, including the vestibular system, the balance system, which I didn’t know anything about at the time, and how that processing is altered when you send people into space. This was like a miracle to me because I could now do both. I could do my vocation and my avocation at the same place.
This laboratory had experiments that were going up with astronauts on the Space Shuttle. I got involved with that and supported two of those missions. It was incredible, just an amazing experience. MIT is an amazing place, as you can imagine, especially for people with an engineering orientation. I finished my doctoral degree in 1990 and came to Johns Hopkins as a postdoctoral fellow. For all of the really rigorous quality of my education at MIT, which was fantastic, I felt that there was a lot of basic neurobiology that I was missing because we were doing a lot of applied research. So I came to Johns Hopkins and worked with some real world authorities, David Zee and David Robinson, on eye movements driven by the vestibular system and balance coordination. I didn’t do any spaceflight work for several years, and then started to get back into it. I was doing about half basic fundamental research — what we call NIH and NSF type research, because those are the groups that supported it — and a little bit of spaceflight research.
Thirteen years ago, in 2013, I took a leave of absence for three years to serve as the Chief Scientist of the NASA Human Research Program at Johnson Space Center in Houston. That had a significant impact, as you might imagine, in changing the course of my career — not completely, but changing it in a really significant direction. It was my job to oversee the entire portfolio of all the research that they do to maintain health and performance in long-duration spaceflight: psychological, bone, muscle, cardiovascular, immune system, things that I didn’t know anything about.
I really came to recognize the complexity of the situation and the fact that these systems are all changing together, yet they’re being addressed research-wise independently and separately. There are some legitimate reasons for that, but this is going to end up killing somebody — literally — by not looking at the combinations and the interactions of body systems. This is a problem for everything. This is a problem in medicine on Earth. What do you do? You see a series of specialists if you have a problem. If you’re really lucky, you have a primary care doctor who pulls it all together and sees the big picture. Otherwise, it’s just a series of one person and one thing after another, and it’s not integrated. We can’t afford to do that on a Mars mission. It’s too risky. The medical care is not there, and it’s a very challenging situation for the body.
So this now has become one of my lines of research: figuring out what to do about that. Hence the book. About half of my research endeavor now is what we call multi-system resilience, or a form of integrative physiology in medicine. From my point of view with an engineering background, we’re trying to figure out how we quantify this, how we model it, and how we systematize these interactions — including the interactions with other people and with the environment. When is the last time your doctor asked you about that? Are you getting along with the people in your life? Do you have a reason to live? Are things going well at work? Is your work style, your house, and your office arranged in a manner that is conducive to you living a good, healthy lifestyle or not?
It takes a pretty forward-thinking doctor to get into all this stuff. My colleague Bill Queale, who is mentioned in the book, does do this. We’re collaborating right now on trying to take those lessons that we’re trying to implement in the spaceflight domain — we’re not there yet — and also implement them in medical practice on Earth, starting with his practice. So there you go. I think that’s the whirlwind version of how I got to be where I am right now.
Yitzi Weiner: You’re an amazing storyteller, Dr. Shelhamer. So let’s talk about the main pieces of your work. Have you seen the movie The Martian?
Mark Shelhamer: Of course, I’ve seen the movie The Martian and read the book.
Yitzi Weiner: I think our readers may be familiar with the concept that the author in the movie tries to provide solutions for people to live on Mars. Off the top of your head — and I’m sure there’s a lot — what part of the book did he get right, and what part did he not get right?
Mark Shelhamer: Yep, I saw that one coming. Now, I can’t speak to the agriculture part of it. I don’t know potatoes, and potatoes played a big role in that movie. What I can say resonated with me is the main theme of that movie, which is — pardon my language — it’s just one damn thing after another. You thought you had something solved, and then it’s something else, and then it’s something else.
Sometimes the solutions involve struggling with the way the equipment was designed, because it was designed to do something else and was designed to prevent you from doing something that you really need to do now to solve an unforeseen problem. So it’s inhibiting the resilience that’s necessary to address the issues. Resilience plays a large role in my thinking. I think that’s one thing it got right: it’s going to be crazy time in space. Maybe not that extreme, but there are going to be unexpected things happening. We can count on that.
As a little side note, we know that definitely in terms of the human body, we are regularly taken by surprise by new medical things, just on the medical side, not to mention the technology. For example, there was a first-ever medical evacuation from the International Space Station earlier this year. Deep vein thrombosis was seen for the first time ever in space three or four years ago. Like, wow, what’s going on here? This isn’t fair. We thought we’d seen it all. We thought we mitigated the major problems, and that for the problems we haven’t mitigated, at least we know what they are and we’re working on them. And then something completely new happens. We don’t know how to deal with that, and that’s what we’re going to have to deal with.
Now let me tell you one thing that I thought was maybe not so realistic in that movie. That is when the rest of the crew that had left Mars and left Mark Watney behind are told, “Guess what, your crewmate is still alive there.” They have just finished undertaking this very demanding, very long, very dangerous mission and are about to come home, and NASA says, “Well, would you mind extending your mission for another several years?” “Sure, no problem, we’re on board.” That strikes me as unrealistic. Not that they would not do it. Astronauts are amazing people. Absolutely, they’re mission-driven and they do amazing things. There was the crew on the Boeing Starliner ship that went up a couple years ago. They thought they would be up there for three weeks, and they ended up staying for six or eight months — whatever the numbers are, that’s what astronauts do. So they would say yes.
But in the movie and the book, it was just no question at all: “Of course we will do it.” This is an aspect that I got to learn much more about during my time at NASA, especially the psychological aspect. One of the things that we do know is a common feature to stressful situations is something called the third-quarter effect. It’s the idea that if you’re in some stressful situation — it could be a one-hour lecture, a three-month mission to the space station, a three-year mission to Mars, or six months in Antarctica — around the third quarter, if people know how long it’s going to be, is when the problems start to set in. The novelty has worn off, and the end is not yet in sight. This is when mood, motivation, and depression start to take their toll.
It just goes to show you that there are psychological cycles that people go through. They’re natural, well-studied, and well-characterized. So the idea that a crew would have gone through that and be so close to coming home, and then you say, “You’ve got to turn around, it’s time to do it all over again” — astronauts are extraordinary, but that’s asking a lot. Otherwise, I thought the movie was great.
Yitzi Weiner: That’s really interesting. You thought all the other solutions were realistic?
Mark Shelhamer: Well, I think so. Andy Weir really did his homework. He was a trajectory analyst or computer programmer before he wrote or while he was writing the book, so he knew people that he could call on to get the information. It seems to me that none of those solutions — except maybe the potatoes, I don’t know if you could live on potatoes that long — violated the laws of physics. There’s nothing that I looked at and said, “That’s physically impossible.”
That includes things that are very relevant to what crews on Mars are going to have to face, like the issue of autonomy. You’re on your own when you’re this far away from Earth. Communication is even a problem because of the time delay. They captured that in the movie very well, where he had this complicated system of pointing to letters and things like that, and he couldn’t get the answer until much later. Those kinds of things are realistic. It captured the existential difficulty of: Earth is out there, they want to help me, but they just can’t help me. They can’t do anything; they can only provide moral support.
Yitzi Weiner: When I was in high school — and I’m sure it came out earlier — there was a trilogy called the Mars trilogy. Are you familiar? For our readers, it’s a trilogy where the first one is called Red Mars, then Green Mars about how they’re able to change the ecology of Mars, and then Blue Mars where they are able to make water and atmosphere. Those are obviously much broader thinking than The Martian. Are those notions realistic, to change the ecology like that?
Mark Shelhamer: Well, now I’ve got to come clean: I haven’t read them. They’re downstairs in the space section of my home library, and I’m going to go downstairs and pull them out again. You’re well-read, because not too many people have mentioned them to me, and it’s a natural connection, so I need to read them.
Strangely enough, I’m not a big science fiction fan, but The Martian and the Mars series that you just described are exceptions because those are authors who really did their homework. They allow you to explore conceptually what might actually happen when you’re on Mars, which I think is a really valuable experience for people who are trying to make the actual plans. Because we haven’t done it yet, you need to think outside the box.
Yitzi Weiner: Amazing. Someone might ask: why are we putting all this energy into going to Mars and colonizing Mars? First of all, we have places on Earth that are uninhabited, and also, how about the moon? Why are the moon or other celestial bodies not the primary considerations?
Mark Shelhamer: Well, we have to define the scope of your question. It depends. We are going back to the moon, obviously. Artemis II went around the moon, and future Artemis missions are planned to land on the moon in a couple years, so people are seriously considering going to the moon.
I am not promoting — and the book does not promote — settling on Mars or living on Mars. I think in any reasonable timeframe, that’s really far-fetched. If you don’t believe me, there’s another book that I recommend called A City on Mars, which points out how daunting that prospect would be. Among other things, even under the worst-case scenarios you could imagine happening to Earth that would make it challenging to live here, it’s still a thousand times better than trying to live on Mars. You’ve got to be crazy. Really, it’s untenable.
However, I definitely think we should go there, explore, and spend more and more time there. Doing it on the moon first depends on if you’re a glass-half-full or half-empty type person. When I was at NASA 10 to 13 years ago, Mars was the next priority; that was where the design reference missions were driving us. Since then, we’ve changed it so the priority is the moon first. Still, NASA has an office called the Moon to Mars Program Office to look at how what you’re going to do at the moon can give you the information you need to go to Mars, explore, and do all those operations. Mars is orders of magnitude harder, more challenging, more dangerous, and more expensive.
I want to make the point that it’s not one or the other. Saying we should go to Mars, explore Mars, and consider how we might live on Mars for a year at a time doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be doing it on the moon. We should be doing it on the moon. It’s going to be extremely challenging, dangerous, and expensive to do it on the moon — make no mistake — but it’s relatively easy to do it on the moon because it’s so much closer.
Why would we do it anywhere, for example on Mars? Certainly there are issues of national will and national policy. Sometimes those are for the better, and sometimes those are for the worse. The Apollo program was a battle in the Cold War, no question about that. Kennedy was upfront about that; he wanted to beat the Soviets, and that is why it was done. NASA built a wonderful engineering and science infrastructure based on that, much to their credit. That’s wonderful, and hopefully we will continue to do that kind of thing.
There are also good scientific reasons for sending people to other places, especially Mars, because of the things that you would find there. I’m not a planetary geologist or an astrobiologist, but my understanding is you could potentially learn some very interesting things about the evolution and development of the solar system, how planets evolve, and whether or not there is life outside of the Earth — very primitive life or at least precursors to life.
If you accept that there are other reasons to go to Mars like those, I’m also saying that we shouldn’t send people to Mars as an experiment in itself. That’s not ethical: “We’re just going to send you to Mars to study sending people to Mars.” No, that doesn’t make any sense. But if we’re going to do that for other reasons, we should make it an experiment, and we should recognize that this is going to be really challenging. There’s a lot more we need to know before we design the mission, train the crews, and build the spacecraft.
Once they’re doing that mission, we should treat it as an experiment. We should be extensively monitoring physiology, medical conditions, psychology, crew interactions, and their performance along with their interactions with the spacecraft. Not to be Big Brother, not to impose, “We’re watching you constantly, don’t you dare screw up.” Quite the contrary. It’s to provide the crew, using the proper onboard intelligence, with the information that they would need to understand when something is about to go off the rails. “Let’s see what the computer says about this. Yes, the computer detects an anomaly, some change in the configuration of this network of all these interacting systems. Maybe the computer has never seen this before, but it’s telling us that something is weird. Guys, let’s all get together as a crew and see what is happening here. Is there something we can do about this?”
And by the way, that kind of thing could be really useful for us here on Earth. You wake up in the morning, open up your laptop, and check your personal dashboard. It says, “You’ve been a little down lately, or you’ve been sluggish, and we notice your social network — your calls, emails, and texts — is starting to decay a little bit.” Which one came first? Are you feeling bad and therefore you’re not making phone calls, or are you feeling bad because people aren’t contacting you? Whatever it might be, that’s just a small subset. It’s something that just says, “Here is the status of your life. Act accordingly, or do nothing.”
It could also say things like, “We’ve got four years of information on you, and we factor this into our aging models for what people with your particular demographics look like. There are some things we know to expect. For example, around this time every year you get a little sluggish — maybe seasonal affective disorder, or maybe it’s the stress of going back to a school environment. Whatever it is, we factor that in. You’re good to go, but it’s an increasing stress level. Maybe you want to reduce the stress in some other parts of your life to help you get through this.”
It’s not a popular idea, but I’m saying we can’t afford not to do something like that on a Mars mission because it’s so complicated and pushing the limits for the crew so much. Why don’t we give them all the support we possibly can? And I think that could also be a spin-off for human health and performance on Earth. I don’t even remember your original question, but I hope I got it!
Yitzi Weiner: Next question: if you were able to sit in front of Elon Musk and say, “These are the top three things in order that you have to focus on if you really want to achieve your vision,” what would you say?
Mark Shelhamer: Wow. The scene itself boggles my mind. Limiting it to spaceflight conversations, it would be variations on a theme.
First: please do not repeat what I believe has occurred in most early space programs, which is putting so much emphasis on the rockets, the technology, and the spacecraft that you just treat people as an engineering component that you can plug in later. “I know how much food they need, how much water, how much oxygen. I know how much excrement they produce. I know how much room they need physically to live. That’s fine, I’ll take it from here. I’ll engineer that into my system, plug them in at the end, and they will be fine.” Astronauts are special people, and so far they’ve been fine with that mentality. That should be changed. The astronauts, the doctors, the engineers, and the mission planners should be talking to each other a lot more.
By the way, I’ll put in a plug for an organization here — you can include this in the interview or not — called OSMED, the Organization for Space Medicine, Engineering, and Design. My good friend and colleague Erik Antonsen started this just a couple years ago, and it strives to start breaking down those barriers, starting with the younger people who are still in training. Let’s have the doctors talk to the researchers, talk to the designers, talk to the planners. That doesn’t happen systematically enough.
Second, along those same lines: you’ve got all the money in the world, almost literally in his case. Why don’t you invest some of it in the research that would help us understand humans in a complex setting as part of a complex system? In the sense of complexity theory — like the Santa Fe Institute — there are mathematical tools that you could be looking at, though they are not sufficiently developed to address this problem yet. You’ve got enough money to build rockets; no question that’s an expensive and risky undertaking. Why not spend some percentage of that to make sure that the humans are capable of taking full advantage of the technical capabilities that you’re going to give them? By the way, that will also make them resilient enough so that they can help maintain the performance of the technological side of things. It’s about recognizing that it’s a human and technical endeavor at the same time.
And if there was a third thing: start encouraging these conversations. That’s what he does. He makes it possible for people like us to sit here and talk seriously about sending people to Mars without being figuratively laughed off the stage. That’s significant progress in my domain. So if he could do the same for the human side of things, that would help us. Just recognizing that you can’t build a spacecraft and plug people in later — you have to integrate your thinking, which would also help us here on Earth.
Yitzi Weiner: Now, this is our final aspirational question. Dr. Shelhamer, because of your amazing work and the platform that you’ve built, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re a person of great influence. If you could spread an idea or inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Mark Shelhamer: Ah, well, I will grudgingly accept your compliment. I appreciate it. I wish I had more influence than I do, but I would say it’s what I was just talking about. I think people should recognize that modern problems — the things that we’re facing now and are going to face in the future — are going to require new ways of thinking about things, which means new ways of dealing with complexity.
I’m not the first person to say this, but I mean specifically in the domain of the complexity of someone’s daily life. I’m not talking about the complexity of medical care in the standard sense, where you go into a hospital for “complex care” because a person has a lot of coexisting conditions. That’s fine, but that’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about how your life is complicated, my life is complicated — our lives are complicated. Let’s help people deal with the complications of their lives, which will keep them healthier by, among other things, getting them to medical care early rather than waiting until something goes wrong, and by detecting stresses in their lives that they might be able to deflect.
So if I’m going to have any influence, it would be to encourage this kind of thinking. I try to promote this with my students in my lab. If they come in and say, “We want to do an experiment on this system,” I say, “Okay, that’s fine, but you’re also going to include a psychological component and a physiological component as well, because these things are connected.” I get it — there’s a limit to what you can do before the complexity becomes intractable. There’s a reason why science is reductionist, to remove confounds. But we have to start reversing that trend and being more broad-minded.
Yitzi Weiner: Dr. Shelhamer, how can our readers purchase your book, and how can they support your work in any possible way?
Mark Shelhamer: They can find the book at their favorite bookseller, or Amazon, of course. They can also go to the publisher, which is the Johns Hopkins University Press; it’s in the Wavelengths series. There is a discount code: HSHEL26. I don’t know where that came from, but clearly my name is in there, the year, and an H in front of it. That’s the discount code for that, and it’s widely available.
I also have a website at the Johns Hopkins University Human Spaceflight Laboratory, which is www.jhuhsl.space—for Johns Hopkins University Human Spaceflight Lab. Not .edu, not .org, it’s .space. There they will find some idea of the kinds of things that we’re doing, the papers that we publish, and the work that we do.
And if you really love what we do and want to make a philanthropic donation to our research, which Johns Hopkins will gratefully accept, contact me on that — seriously, because for research funds for this kind of forward-thinking work, the community is not quite there yet. Anything we can get to help us support this research would be appreciated, though it will continue nonetheless.
Yitzi Weiner: We’ll try our absolute best to get Elon Musk’s attention to read this interview.
Mark Shelhamer: Yeah, I’m not sure I want his attention, but we could use it in this case!
Yitzi Weiner: Very good. It’s been a true honor to meet you. I’m really grateful for your time, and I wish you continued success, good health, and blessings. I’d love to do this again in the future.
Mark Shelhamer: You know where to find me. I’m always happy to talk about this. I really enjoyed this. Thank you — you gave me a lot of room to talk, and the questions were great.
Yitzi Weiner: Really appreciate it. It means a lot. Thank you so much. See you soon.
Mark Shelhamer: Thank you.
NASA Scientist Mark Shelhamer: Why You Can’t ‘Plug People In Later’ for Mars was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.