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NASA head: Matt Damon’s potato farm on Mars isn’t ‘too far off’

Updated Oct 25, 2024, 12:05pm EDT
Actor Matt Damon, who stars as NASA Astronaut Mark Watney in the film “The Martian,” participates in media interviews, Tuesday, Aug. 18, 2015, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Bill Ingalls/NASA/Wikimedia Commons
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Elon Musk isn’t the only one with Mars dreams. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson predicted that humans will travel to the planet for the first time in the 2040s.

“We are getting everything we need to know about how to sustain human life in that very hostile atmosphere,” Nelson said during Semafor’s World Economy Summit in Washington, DC on Friday, adding that while it takes humans less than a week to travel to the moon, it would take months to travel to Mars.

“Matt Damon showed us that we can raise potatoes on Mars,” he joked, referencing the actor’s hit 2015 film The Martian. “That’s not too far off, by the way. I have actually seen plants growing in lunar soil that we brought back a half a century ago.”

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Nelson’s estimation of when humans will be on Mars is slightly further away than Musk’s more urgent ambitions, which are to land on Mars within the next four years and have a self-sustaining city by 2040. Musk’s SpaceX has been testing the launch and return of its Starship rockets in recent months with the intention to send an unmanned ship to the planet in 2026.

A Florida native, Nelson previously served as a US senator for the Democratic party from 2001 to 2019. Before that, he served in the House of Representatives from 1979 to 1991, where he became the second sitting member of Congress to fly to space, following Utah Senator Jake Garn.

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