Franklin Diaz at COMVEC 2019.
Franklin Chang Díaz is the chairmen and CEO of Ad Astra (the rocket company, not the new movie) and has been to space seven times. He’s also in the NASA Astronaut Hall of Fame. But for all of his visits to the heavens, he spends a lot of time thinking about how to make things better here on earth. For example, Ad Astra is working with the government of Costa Rica on a project involving hydrogen vehicles, including buses and the first four Toyota Mirai sedans in Central America. Diaz calls Ad Astra “a rocket company that also deals with electric propulsion on earth.” I spoke with him at the SAE COMVEC event earlier this month.
Q: Tell me about your mission, which involves everything from cleaner mass transit to rocket ships.
A: We’ve come to realize that the planet is finite and there is limit to the growth to humanity that the planet can sustain. We are making changes to our behavior to try and go a little further, to make the planet help us be sustainable, but it’s really, no matter what, eventually will not be sustainable because there are too many of us. I think we are already seeing the effects of that heavy load put on the planetary environment. That’s why people migrate. I think all of the migrations that we’re seeing are manifestations of the fact that people are going to go wherever life is better. You’re not going to stop that. … We also need to look deep into the future as to what is going to happen to humanity 50-100 years from now when, no matter how efficient we are, and how clean everything is, we’re not going to be able to sustain it. So we need to become a spacefaring species.
Q: Did your time in space change how you view the way humans impact the planet?
A: When I flew in space, it completely transformed me as a human being. I had the fortune to fly in space over a very long period of time. I flew from 1986, which was my first flight, until 2002, which was my last flight. In that span of many years, I actually saw changes in the planet. The planet became very familiar to me, because I was in orbit every couple years and I was able to observe the Amazon basin, the African continent and the Indian subcontinent and all of the changes in the population, even in the United States, one thing that was very evident to me was the migration of humans in the United States west from the Eastern seaboard. You could see a great deal more light at night than you could see in the early flights. It just seemed to me that we really messing up the place, and that had a big impact on me.
Q: How do the hydrogen vehicle projects you’re working on play a role in that?
A: We need to decarbonize, move away from petroleum-based and carbon-based fuels and realize that those are gradually going to be phased out, just like coal.
Q: I heard you say earlier that there can be a number of side benefits to a hydrogen economy. This is something not many people are talking about today.
A: People always point out that it’s inefficient and expensive to make hydrogen from water, but they always ignore the fact that you’re producing a lot of oxygen in the process and that oxygen has a value. Then there’s the fact that you make clean water when you use the hydrogen. We should pay attention to that as well.
Q: It seems like you are an optimistic person. What do you see as the end game for our species?
A: In my mind, looking deep into the future, the Earth really will become humanity’s national park, a place where humans of all kinds will come back to visit. Most of humanity will be elsewhere. Humans gradually will leave our cradle and we will forget that we are U.S. citizens or Costa Rican citizens or Italians whatever, only in the sense that we have some cultural roots that we want to conserve. Other than that, we will just be humans. There’s still a ways to go. hopefully we do not annihilate each other before we get to that point. But I do see a bright future for humanity.
This conversation has been edited for clarity.
