The Mars Czar’s Guitar: Scott Hubbard’s “Launch Fever

Before he was NASA’s first Mars Program Director, Scott Hubbard was just a kid in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, pointing a two-inch telescope at the night sky with his dad. Sputnik had just gone up. Hubbard was nine. He wanted to know if there was life out there.

He also wanted to play guitar.

A few years after that telescope showed up, so did a baritone ukulele, courtesy of his father. Hubbard worked through the included pamphlet, graduated to a bloody-fingered “Truetone” Spanish guitar, then a Silvertone, and by high school he was playing sock hops.

At Vanderbilt, double majoring in physics and astronomy, he was also gigging around Nashville with the Nashville Blues Group, and at one point backing a reading by Allen Ginsberg. After graduation, he stuck around Music City a few more years, playing full-time with a band called Pale Fire and doing session work, wrestling with the question every musician eventually asks: should I pursue a career in music or a real job?

Space called, so he went with rocket science. Mostly.

What followed is one of the more unusual careers in American space exploration: staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, a stint founding a semiconductor startup, then NASA’s Ames Research Center, where he dreamed up the concept that became Mars Pathfinder and helped found the field of astrobiology, thirty years after a Vanderbilt biology department told him nobody studies life on other planets.

When Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander both vanished in 1999, NASA administrator Dan Goldin called Hubbard in California and told him, essentially, your country needs you. Hubbard went to Washington to rebuild the Mars program. A reporter for Space News dubbed him the Mars Czar, and it stuck. He’d go on to serve on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, direct Ames Research Center, teach at Stanford, chair SpaceX’s Safety Advisory Panel, and write the book Exploring Mars, with a foreword by Bill Nye.

But the guitar in the corner never went away. Fifteen years ago, Hubbard pulled together a group of working professional musicians he’d crossed paths with and called them The Space Rangers. This month, the 2026 version of the Rangers released Launch Fever, a live-tracked mix of jazz, blues, and rock, including standards, deep cuts, and two Hubbard originals that reach back decades. I sat down with Hubbard to talk about the album, the band, and — because you can’t have a conversation with the Mars Czar without at least a little space talk — where things stand on getting humans to the Red Planet. (His guess: somewhere around 2039, if we’re lucky.)

CultureSonar: What was the attraction to Mars — or space in general — in the first place?

Hubbard: It really goes back to being a kid in Kentucky right after Sputnik went up. I built a radio and strung a thirty-meter antenna outside my bedroom window, and I’d listen at night for anything I could pick up — no aliens, just a lot of radio stations from around the world, but I kept listening. I also started mixing my own rocket fuel in the basement. One batch blew up and filled the house with smoke, and my mother banished me to the backyard — and eventually the backyard rockets annoyed the neighbors enough that I had to move my experiments out to a rock quarry. Underneath all of it was the same question: is there life somewhere else in the universe? When I got to Vanderbilt and told the biology department I wanted to study that, they told me nobody did that kind of work. I was about thirty years ahead of my time — it eventually became the field of astrobiology, and I got to help found it.

CultureSonar: Are you still involved with Mars exploration today?

Hubbard: Very much so, mostly as a consultant now. The one piece of my old reconstruction job I never got to finish was Mars sample return — there are these incredible samples just sitting on the surface of Mars right now, from architecture work I did more than twenty years ago. I’m working with the Mars program office, first at headquarters and now at JPL, trying to find a less expensive way to actually bring them home. The other thing I’ve gotten deeply engaged in is what it would actually take to send humans to Mars. I think human exploration is the next logical step after the Moon, and I’ve been writing opinion pieces poking NASA to not lose sight of Mars while everyone’s focused on lunar plans.

CultureSonar: Do you think we’ll see a crewed mission to Mars anytime soon?

Hubbard: I’m hoping closer to ten years than fifty, honestly — partly so I might get to see it myself. The U.S. has an official target of getting humans back to the Moon by 2028, but there’s no way that happens; something closer to 2030 is more realistic, and even that’s aggressive given the risk involved. After that, it becomes more a question of political will than technology. I don’t think any single country, or Elon Musk on his own, is going to pull off a Mars landing solo — it’ll take an international consortium. My gut says roughly ten years beyond a Moon landing, so somewhere around 2039 feels like a reasonable target.

CultureSonar: What’s the connection between your science work and your music?

Hubbard: For years, honestly, I thought there wasn’t one — or that admitting there was one would be a liability. I assumed my space colleagues wouldn’t take the music seriously, and that my music friends would think the space career was a strange thing to bring up on a bandstand. Turns out I was wrong on both counts. I met a very senior scientist who also played in a string quartet. Musician friends of mine turned out to be fascinated by space exploration. At Starmus, an event that pairs science with live music, I met Brian May — the lead guitarist for Queen, who also happens to have a PhD in astrophysics. It probably doesn’t hurt that music runs in my family, too — my father was a serious harmonica player who was on the radio at ten years old, and my grandmother sang in her church choir for seventy-five years. I’m content now that there’s no real conflict between studying whether there’s life in the universe and playing guitar in a jazz band. They’re really the same impulse, just pointed in two directions.

CultureSonar: Let’s move from Mars to music. For the Launch Fever album, what guitars are you playing?

Hubbard: I’m playing three different guitars, all electric. The one on the album cover is an ES-330 — a true hollow body, with that big, fat, round jazz tone so many jazz players love. Then I played a Les Paul for the things that needed a little more bite and crunch, a bluesier sound. And I have a Stratocaster with a short-scale neck that I used for some of the tunes at the end. I also use a few effect pedals.

CultureSonar: Who are your guitar heroes?

Hubbard: It has to start with Hendrix. If you listen carefully, his playing was derived from all those years on the Chitlin’ Circuit, playing blues and country-fied blues and R&B. But he put it together with the Marshall amps and everything else to create that tone that was really his own. If you did an A/B — same tune, Clapton versus Hendrix — Clapton is very precise. He never misses a turnaround or a chord change. He’s linear. Hendrix was non-linear. He’d have these swoops of sound, ideas that started here and went straight to his guitar. And B.B. King — he never played more than about five notes in a solo, but the way he phrased it, it was a conversation.

On the jazz side: Wes Montgomery, Grant Green, Kenny Burrell. Fabulous technique and tone. But for my album, part of what I wanted to do with the jazzier stuff was get out of the tone category that typically defines jazz guitar — that pure, clean, almost-like-a-piano sound those three guys have. I wanted to sound more like a saxophone, with bending notes and glissandos. That’s on purpose. I started in folk, played rock, migrated to jazz — I wanted this record to carry all of that.

CultureSonar: Tell me about The Space Rangers and how the band came together.

Hubbard: They’re all fabulous players, working professionals that I met in Northern California. About fifteen years ago when I first dreamed up The Space Rangers, I recruited Matt Small on bass. He’s a star, classically trained at Oberlin. His solos and fills on this record are jaw-dropping.

Then Vince Littleton on drums, also a trained professional. He can play any style, and he’s a representative for the cymbal manufacturer Paiste. For example, when we got to “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” I told him to channel his inner Gene Krupa, and he nailed it.

Mike Hatfield, trained at Berklee, plays keys and did a lot of the arranging — really innovative guy. And Rob Zuckerman, a classically trained player who’s played with literally everybody, handles the horn parts and solos. We also brought in Rob Dehlinger on trumpet for one track, channeling his inner Miles Davis. We already had the track down, and he came in and nailed it in two takes.

CultureSonar: Where did you record, and how live is “live”?

Hubbard: Laughing Tiger Studios in San Rafael. It was all live, fully digitized, 24-bit through Pro Tools, with one big exception: the trumpet overdub on “In a Silent Way.” Everything was isolated, though — guitar in its own space, bass in its own space — so our engineer, Erin Tadenia, could clean up a stray note here or there without it being a total studio construction. He did a fabulous job. On “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy,” for instance, the original tune ran about eight minutes, and I went into this project wanting everything accessible at five minutes or less — not everyone’s up for 23 minutes of “In a Silent Way.” Tadenia trimmed it down, and it’s a pretty seamless edit.

CultureSonar: Let’s get into some of the tracks. The album opens with “A la Wes” — an original, right?

Hubbard: Right, an homage to Wes Montgomery. I wrote it about three years ago. It’s a bit of a show-off piece. The head has all these sixteenth notes in it, and you’d better be ready to play that fast, especially at my age. But the idea was to do something that nodded directly to Wes as an influence.

CultureSonar: “Half and Half” has a much longer history.

Hubbard: That one goes back to 1973. I’d co-founded a band — our trombone player was a classical-lit student who suggested we name it Pale Fire, after the Nabokov novel. We played dance sets at the graduate student pub but also wrote originals. I came in with this riff I loved. I was deep into modal stuff at the time, because Miles was doing In a Silent Way and then Bitches Brew. The other guitar player was a bebop fanatic and loved this 13th chord, so I hooked my riff up to his chord. Half bebop, half modal — hence the title.

During COVID, I found tapes of a three-night radio broadcast Pale Fire had done from Nashville’s Exit/In back in the day. I got them digitized, and when we started this album, I brought the tape to Mike Hatfield and said, “I never wrote down a chart for this — can you help me transcribe it?” He did, and it made the record fifty years later.

CultureSonar: Mike Hatfield also brought something special to “In a Silent Way.”

Hubbard: He did. Something I first experimented with fifty years ago was when Miles started moving into jazz-rock fusion with In a Silent Way. Hatfield is happy behind a B3 organ with all kinds of effects. So I told him, “Michael, we’re going to play ‘In a Silent Way'” — or our version of it, anyhow.

CultureSonar: “Coming Home Baby” is an older tune too.

Hubbard: It’s one I really love playing, and it’s got a great flute part from Zuckerman. There’s a spot where, if you just play what’s written on the page, the phrase just stops. I put my compressor up on sustain so I could really let that note ring instead. Zuckerman loved it, and we just decided on the fly to alter the arrangement.

CultureSonar: You’ve got two Sonny Rollins covers — “St. Thomas” and “Tenor Madness.”

Hubbard: I wanted something that would make your foot tap, get people wanting to stand up and dance. For the guitar tone, there’s a trick I learned in 19681963 from a guy who owned a music store in Nashville. If you catch the pickup switch on a Stratocaster between two of its three positions, you get this hollow, out-of-phase, funky tone. That’s how a lot of R&B guys out of Detroit were getting their sound. Fender eventually built it into the instrument. That’s why a Strat now has a five-position switch instead of three. I’m sitting in one of those in-between positions on “St. Thomas,” doubling the saxophone line. I wanted a tone that sounded nothing like what you’d expect from that bebop era.

For “Tenor Madness,” Hatfield had the idea to treat it like a Mardi Gras second line, and we just took off with it.

CultureSonar: Any plans to bring this music to a stage?

Hubbard: I’d love to. I’m hoping to do a concert that opens with some Mars exploration footage before we play — part lecture, part concert!

CultureSonar: Is a third Space Rangers album in the cards?

Hubbard: Could be. Getting this one from concept to reality, especially producing it myself, was a heavy lift. If I do another one, I’d like to spend more time on the production side, so when I’m in the room playing, I’m not also thinking about what the engineer should be doing. But playing stimulates the creative side of my brain. Once this album was mixed, mastered, and in the can, that’s when the fun started — just listening to it.

Scott Hubbard spent a career convincing NASA to spend a decade and several billion dollars chasing evidence on a planet 140 million miles away. Launch Fever took a fraction of the budget and a fraction of the travel time, and it’s arguably just as hard to pull off: getting five working musicians, one modified Stratocaster, and fifty years of unfinished tunes into the same room and calling it done. Mars sample return is still years out. Hubbard’s own samples — “Half and Half,” “A la Wes,” a saxophone-chasing “St. Thomas” — already made it home. Turns out the guy who spent decades getting things off the ground had no trouble bringing this one in for a landing.

Learn more about Scott here.

-Scott Freiman

Photo: Courtesy of Scott Hubbard