Former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino, known for his work on the Hubble Space Telescope and two shuttle missions, says there’s no evidence humans have been contacted by extraterrestrials — but life beyond Earth remains plausible. Massimino, who performed four spacewalks and spent more than 30 hours outside a spacecraft, points to the sheer scale of the cosmos as a reason to keep looking: billions of galaxies, each with billions of stars, and many stars hosting multiple planets. We’ve even detected some of the chemical building blocks of life, including within our own solar system, he noted. That makes life elsewhere possible even if we haven’t found it yet.
Massimino stressed that the real obstacle is physics, not imagination. The distances between potentially habitable stars are immense, and that makes travel and communication extraordinarily difficult. Even radio signals take a long time to travel between stars; at light speed, messages would still require decades, centuries or longer to reach distant systems. Responding to recent studies suggesting extraterrestrials might be listening to Earth, he said the long travel times and enormous separations make contact challenging — and would likely favor communication over physical visitation.
On lighter but commonly asked questions, Massimino was candid about life in orbit. Asked whether people can have sex in space, he said he sees no physical reason it couldn’t happen, though he’s seen no evidence it has. As humans start to send families and longer missions off Earth, these practical questions will arise.
Looking toward Mars, Massimino called a crewed landing within 20–25 years expensive and difficult but not impossible. Mars missions face narrow launch windows, long transit times and significant communication delays: while conversations aboard the International Space Station are effectively instant, a round-trip signal to the Moon is on the order of a few seconds and to Mars can be 20–30 minutes. Those constraints mean Mars crews would likely stay many months or about a year to wait for favorable return windows.
He dismissed popular Area 51 alien theories, calling the site a classified test range and saying there are no aliens there that he knows of. A large-scale cover-up, he argued, would be effectively impossible.
Still, Massimino remains optimistic that contact may someday occur — probably via signals rather than visits — and that any civilization able to bridge these gaps would have to be far more advanced than ours.
