In a 4-hour special, Buzz Aldrin, Richard C. Hoagland, Howard Bloom, and Robert Zubrin discussed the future of the space program, and how branching out to space is more important now than ever. "A nation that looks up, goes up; a nation that looks down goes down. A nation without a sense of a new frontier begins to cave in upon itself...nations make their own resources by opening up radical new frontiers," said multi-disciplinary scientist Bloom, who argued for America staying in the forefront with their space program. One asteroid has up to 17 trillion dollars of resources, with minerals like platinum and lithium that are used for electric vehicles, he noted.
Bloom said he supports private efforts such as Elon Musk's Space X rocket, as well as Aldrin's Unified Space Vision. Joining him in the first half of the show, Apollo astronaut and rocket scientist Buzz Aldrin outlined a plan in which NASA could land on the Martian moon Phobos in 2022 and set up a base, with eventual landings on Mars itself by 2031. Aldrin also said that he supports an international effort to develop the moon with partners such as China and India.
In the second half of the program, founder of the Mars Society, Robert Zubrin and C2C Science Advisor Richard C. Hoagland discussed and sometimes debated space issues. Zubrin stated he was not in favor of the Obama space plan, and that instead "our goal should be to send humans to Mars by the end of the decade." Hoagland believes Obama has taken bad advice (from John Holdren in particular) in formulating NASA's mission plan. He also talked about the artificiality of NASA's moon Phobos. Zubrin disagreed that Phobos was artificial and argued that we shouldn't bother building a base on it, when the real discoveries (and settlements) were to be made on Mars.