For centuries, humans have looked to the night sky searching for answers about the universe—and their place within it. For star astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, that instinct to explore remains one of the defining traits of our species, and continues to shape how humanity approaches space.
“When people look up, they dream more,” Tyson told Newsweek in a recent interview with Politics and Culture reporter Mandy Taheri.
Tyson’s own penchant for exploration recently landed him in the orbit of William Shatner, with whom he teamed up for a nearly five-hour unscripted audio conversation. Dubbed Cosmos Confidential: Bill & Neil’s Excellent Bromance, the wide-ranging discussion explores science, space exploration and the ideas that have shaped both men’s backgrounds and careers. Tyson described the Star Trek icon to Newsweek as “a national treasure.”
But while science-fiction has long inspired visions of space travel, the reality looks very different—and different still from the earliest Apollo era. Robotic missions now carry out much of the scientific work once envisioned for human explorers, dramatically expanding the reach of research without the risks and costs of sending astronauts.
Look no further than Mars. NASA already has sophisticated robotic explorers operating on the planet’s surface, gathering detailed scientific data.
...“We have an SUV-sized rover on Mars right now,” Tyson said. “That brought a helicopter with it. If the human is going to do science, they’re going to bring some apparatus to make the measurement. So just send the apparatus, leave the human back.”
The bigger challenge, he argued, isn’t technological capability: It’s motivation. Sending people to Mars would require enormous resources, and history suggests that ventures of that scale tend to happen only under specific circumstances.
“There have only ever been three motivations to match an expense of that magnitude,” Tyson said. “The promise of economic return. The mandates of your king or the royalty or deity. But the biggest driver of all is the ‘I don’t want to die’ drive.”
So while curiosity may drive humanity’s interest in exploration, history shows that large-scale missions usually require stronger incentives.
“If China says we’re going to put military bases on Mars, we’re there in 10 months,” Tyson said.
Private companies are also playing a growing role in spaceflight. Suborbital flights from companies like Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic have drawn criticism from some observers who see them as expensive novelty trips for celebrities and billionaires.
Tyson takes a longer historical view. In the early days of aviation, he noted to Newsweek, wealthy thrill-seekers and public figures were often among the first passengers.
“At the dawn of aviation, most of the people who went up were celebrities and rich people,” he said. “That triggered interest in the press, which stimulated investments that became the birth of the aviation industry.”
Even so, Tyson said that the brief suborbital flights currently offered by commercial space companies hold little personal appeal. (“I’m a little bit of a snob," he admitted. "I’m an astrophysics snob.”) For him, space travel only becomes meaningful when it involves traveling to an actual destination rather than a brief suborbital flight.
“I do not want to boldly go where hundreds have gone before,” he said. “Send me to a destination—moon, Mars and beyond—then I’ll go into space.”
Future lunar missions are expected to focus on a very different region than the Apollo landings. Scientists and space agencies are increasingly targeting the moon’s south pole, where permanently shadowed craters may contain water ice preserved for billions of years.
“If you’re going to pitch tent on the moon, you want to do it where you have free water,” Tyson said.
Even as space exploration expands outward, Tyson noted that humanity still has significant gaps in its understanding much closer to home.
“We know more about the surfaces of the moon and Mars than we know about the ocean bottom,” he said. “We have mapped the moon and Mars to higher precision than the bottom of the ocean.”
The long-term value of space exploration, Tyson noted, often lies in discoveries that cannot be predicted in advance. He pointed to nuclear magnetic resonance, a fundamental physics discovery that eventually made MRI scanners possible—now one of the most widely used diagnostic tools in modern medicine.
For Tyson, the broader lesson is that curiosity-driven research can produce genuine breakthroughs decades after the original discovery.
“I’m proud to be a member of a species where a subset of us will knowingly put their lives at risk just to make a discovery,” he said. “To go where no one has gone before. To step where no one has stepped. To think as no one has thought before. I'm glad I'm human.”
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