Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Alan Stern's Golden Spike Sets Sights on the Moon

Episode Date: March 4, 2013

Alan Stern is back to tell us about Golden Spike, his new company that plans to put human clients on the surface of the moon by the end of this decade. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Building a Railroad to the Moon, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. Alan Stern is back. This time, the busiest man in space exploration has a new company that wants to take people to the surface of the moon. He'll tell us about Golden Spike. Sequestration. It's a word and an action that has begun indiscriminately slashing budgets in Washington,

and one of those budgets is NASA's. Bill Nye will comment. Later, I'll be panning for astronomical gold with Bruce Betts, and you might win Bill Nye's voice on your answering machine. We begin with Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, I hope we can talk about a March 1st entry that you put in the blog, and it's another of these old images that you found from the Galileo mission. What's this one? This one is of Gaspra, which is pretty cool because it's the very first asteroid that was flown past close enough for us to take really good pictures of it. And it turns out to be kind of this angular, lumpy shape and probably not what people were expecting when they thought about pictures of

an asteroid. I'm one of those. I watched an old episode of Star Trek last night, and here were these nice, craggy, sharp-edged asteroids. I mean, what happened? They're not shaping up the way we thought they would be. Well, there's a couple of reasons why asteroids have these rounded shapes. One of them is because the asteroid belt is full of asteroids, and they tend to hit each other a lot. And so you have what's called, well, one of the things that happens in space weathering is that you have little micrometeoroids. They strike and hit other asteroids and they just, they rub off those edges. It's the same reason that the moon actually, when the Apollo astronauts on it looked pretty kind of smooth, those craters were not sharp edge. They had very smooth edges.

It's the same process. The other thing is that, so they have the surface that's made up of all this broken up material from other impacts. And every time an impact happens somewhere else, you have like a little asteroid quake that goes through the asteroid. Imagine just jiggling a box full of dirt. It kind of smooths everything out. And so you wind up with these more rounded kinds of smooth areas than you might expect. And I don't want to be too insulting to asteroids because they still look very cool, and you've created a beyond cool animation of Gaspra. Yeah, it's pretty neat to see the asteroid

just spinning, tumbling end over end as Galileo approached. Emily, that'll do it for this week. Thanks very much. Talk to you later, Matt. She is the Senior Editor for the Planetary Society and our Planetary Evangelist. You can hear her every other week on our Google Plus Hangout. That's on Thursdays. Check it out on the website. She's also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye.

Bill, I would say happy sequestration day, but we've already missed that, just like all those folks in Washington missed the deadline for getting something done. And now I guess we're beginning to see the dire consequences. Yeah, so they're going to cut everything across the board, including NASA. And along with that, we in the planetary community are very concerned that planetary science will be among the first things to go as they start arbitrarily cutting back. And this is bad because we claim space brings out the best in us and planetary science is the best that NASA does. So this is serious business. We're hoping now everybody in the community, the planetary community,

members of the Planetary Society, our supporters, to petition Congress, senators and representatives, about the Omnibus Bill. And the Omnibus Bill is sponsored by Barbara Mikulski, who's a senator from the state of Maryland, where the Applied Physics Lab is, where they do the James Webb Space Telescope. And if we can get the Omnibus Bill passed, that will restore funding for NASA and, along with it, funding for planetary science. We're at another turning point in space history with this foot dragging in Washington, D.C.

Been there before, and here we are again. Now, of course, we've heard about other parts of the NASA budget that may suffer, and one of those is commercial crew, that funding of people like SpaceX to get people up into low-Earth orbit. Just last week, I was interviewed by CBS News about the Dragon Capsules thruster pods. And you got to have two of them working, but they only had one of them working out of four. And so there was this few minutes or a few hours,

these dire things where this commercial program was going to fail. And we told you all along, we shouldn't invest in commercial group. But sure enough, by the end of the day, they had it working. And they docked with the International Space Station after all. And the whole idea of this commercial crew effort, not only with SpaceX, but with the other companies involved, is to lower the cost to Earth orbit. We're trying to save money. But if you slash the program in the middle here, you're

going to lose money. It's a serious thing. We've got to get the U.S. Congress and the administration, everybody's got to be working together. And space is a terrible thing to waste. No, I'm not kidding. No, I just like that phrase. It just slipped out. I can't help it. So we're just trying to change the world here, Matt. And all the money spent in space is really spent on Earth. And if you can't get your budget act together, you can't explore space. And you're going to hold humankind back. Thanks for listening, Matt.

I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. He'll join us again next week when I will be in Chile, but I'll have a show ready to go for you. And up next is a conversation with somebody else who'd like to commercialize space, Alan Stern, the busiest man in space exploration, who now wants to take people to the surface of the moon. I know a lot of people whose days and nights are devoted to the development or exploration of space, but none who are as busy or who are juggling as many projects as Alan Stern. You may know him best as the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission to Pluto, or as a former NASA associate administrator.

He's got a presence on many other planned and current robotic missions, and we've also heard from him about Uingu, the crowdsourced project that is raising funds for space researchers. Now, Alan and several distinguished colleagues have announced their creation of Golden Spike. The company plans to put humans back on the moon, to do this by the end of the decade and to do it for less than it costs to put the Curiosity rover on Mars. I couldn't wait to get Alan on the phone to tell us about this audacious goal. Alan, what's the idea here? You building a railroad to the moon? That's right, Golden Spike. This company is building the first commercial human lunar transportation system

to mount expeditions back to the moon. People have got to take a look at the website for this brand-new venture because there are just the cool images there. I mean, there are at least a couple of these hypothetical lunar landers. That's pretty cool in itself. But you've got to tell us about the team you've put together for this. There are too many people to mention all of them, but it's really an awesome collection. On the company side, our chairman of the board is Jerry Griffin.

And for many of your listeners, you'll know Jerry's name as a legend of Apollo. Jerry was a flight director for three landed Apollo missions, including Apollo 17. He was an executive in NASA for many years, was director of the Johnson Space Center, worked at NASA headquarters, as I did, became president of the Houston Chamber of Commerce. But others on the team include Esther Dyson, very, very well-known venture capitalist in the space field and the Internet field, Jim French, a real legend in rocket propulsion. Max Vazov, who's formerly with SpaceX, who's a project manager of Dragon,

and then Dragon Lab, and then went on to do business development with SpaceX and is doing the same for us, and many more of that caliber. We also have just a stellar board of advisors, people from all walks of life, ranging from Michael Bostic, who's the CEO of Walden Media, made films like Chronicles of Narnia, to guys like Homer Hickam and Mike Akuta, that many of your listeners will know,

Bill Richardson, former UN ambassador. We could go right on down the list. Wayne Hale, who ran the shuttle program for NASA. Jeff Ashby, who flew on the shuttle and in fact was commander on two flights. Many more. I encourage people to go to that website and take a look at this team. State the mission for us. I mean, you want to get people to the moon. It's not going to be cheap, but it wasn't cheap when Apollo did it. I think we've got a price breakthrough. We have figured out, using a strategy we call a maximally pragmatic strategy, how to do human lunar expeditions with the same capabilities, essentially, that the early Apollo missions to the surface of the moon had.

Not the more advanced ones towards the end, but the early ones like Apollo's 11, 12, and 14. We can do that for about the cost of a robotic flagship mission less than mars curiosity by a lot for a billion and a half dollars now these aren't for tourists somebody may come along who's got that kind of money and wants to walk the moon but for foreign space agencies and foreign uh science agencies to be able to do human lunar expeditions, whether they're for Korea or South Africa or Israel or Saudi Arabia or European countries, South America, Asia, India, wherever, to be able to do that scale of planetary exploration and to do it for prices like what they spend on their biggest ticket robotic scientific missions. So we think it's a breakthrough.

And that is a breakthrough. I mean, that's really remarkable. I mean, I think I've seen these figures on the website. And really, when you look back to Apollo, and you're talking well over $100 billion over the course of the program, of course, what's the secret? What are the technologies that are going to enable Golden Spike to achieve this price price? Well, the secret is primarily what I call trailing edge technology.

We're not inventing anything we don't have to. We're using existing launch vehicles. And we haven't made our procurements yet, but the Atlas is a good option for us. Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, very good options for us. From SpaceX, of course. That's right. We'll be taking bids for the launch vehicles. We'll be taking bids for the launch vehicles. We'll be taking bids for the capsules.

We'll use existing crew transports that fly to low Earth orbit. Really, wherever we can purchase something that already exists and use it in the architecture, we will. We have a technical paper that's coming out in the Journal of Spacecraft and Rockets showing how you put all this together, and that's how you lower the cost. So you're not reinventing the wheel. We're building a very basic but very impressive capability. And the bottom line is that this has been looked at by experts, it's been peer-reviewed, and the cost model does work.

And we can make a profit at it for our investors. That's Alan Stern. He has more to tell us about Golden Spike's plan to put people back on the moon. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most

exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Among other things, Alan Stern is president and CEO of Golden Spike,

the newly announced company that hopes to turn a profit by taking people back to the moon. He believes this opportunity will attract interest from nations with no capability of their own to reach such destinations in space. At the moment, that includes every nation on Earth. So I'm the prime minister of an ambitious nation, and you as president and CEO of Golden Spike are making your presentation. What's in it for me? Why do I want to put my countrymen or countrywomen on the moon using your vehicle? Well, there are a couple of good reasons you would want to, and one of them is your scientific community. If we're coming to talk to you, your scientific community has probably got a lunar community

and a planetary science community, and they'll be pushing for that capability to return samples, to put experiments on the moon, to do geological field traverses. In fact, we hope that many customers will buy sets of missions, not just a one-off as a stunt or a demonstration they can do it, but real scientific exploration at two or three or four different sites. Secondly, from the standpoint of your country, really catapulting it onto the world stage into the 21st century, joining that club where so far only Neil Armstrong and his light have gone, we think is going to be very attractive for middle-sized countries

that don't have the capability to do human spaceflight, to fly on American flight systems that are proven and proven to be safe, and to join that club of planetary exploration, to come home with dirty boots and heroes and the scientific goods that come with the samples and the data from the experiments. We think it's going to be an unbeatable combination for a lot of countries. And you know, in the 80s and 90s, the Russians did almost the same thing, of countries. And you know, in the 80s and 90s, the Russians did almost the same thing, selling tickets to fly to Salyut and Mir space stations, and 30 separate expeditions took place by countries all around the world. Japan, France, England, Malaysia, Cuba, Vietnam,

East Germany, Romania, I could go down the list. Some of those countries bought as many as half a dozen trips up to those space stations. They all wanted to join the club. Didn't really care if they were second or 17th. They wanted to show they were in the big leagues. And we're going to do the same with lunar exploration. And think of the science when we've had 20 expeditions to the moon with golden spike spacecraft and 20 sets of sample returns. I think it's science when we've had 20 expeditions to the moon with Golden Spike spacecraft and 20 sets of sample returns. I think it's going to be mind-blowing. So is it too soon

to talk about a timeline? When might we see the first passengers on Golden Spike hitch a ride? Well, we're aiming for the end of the decade, for 2019 to complete our test flight series and 2020 to open the doors to commercial operations. All right. Not everybody, obviously, is going to be able to save up enough for the trip. Are there ways for people to get involved right now? Well, there are ways for people to get involved today. And the primary way that people can get involved is a crowdsourcing campaign that we're conducting on a platform called Indiegogo. You can simply go to Indiegogo's website, type in Golden Spike, and find our campaign. After we launched our company publicly in December, we had, and I'm not exaggerating, Matt, thousands of emails that came in, people saying, how can I help this happen?

I want it to happen for my children or my grandchildren. I want to see this happen. Can I volunteer? Can I send money? What can we do? We decided to start a public participation effort and to let people actually feel like they're vested in it. So we're conducting this campaign to raise $240,000.

That's a dollar for every mile on the way to the moon. And you get perks. If you put in $10, you get a thank you note on our stationery. If you put in $50, you can actually suggest role models for astronauts to fly to the moon. There are other levels at which you get to get involved in landing site selection or get trips to, for example, the LADEE launch by NASA to fly the next lunar mission from our space agency this year in September, and there are a whole slew of others.

So people can get involved right away, and we hope they will. Alan, speaking of Indiegogo, the last time we talked, it was about that other effort that you have underway, well, one of many, Uingu. And since we're speaking on February 27, that's a pretty significant day for Uingu. Well, it is. Today is the day that we launched our commercial website, www.uingu.com, and opened the doors to exoplanet naming to the people of the Earth. You can not only nominate names for astronomers to use in the future.

You know that we now know there are over 100 billion, actually over 160 billion exoplanets. So we need a lot of people to get involved in naming them. The astronomical community that I'm a part of could never pull this off ourselves. We're just overwhelmed by those numbers. And the greatest part, for me at least, is that the proceeds are going, after we pay the light bills and so forth at Owingu, they're going to fund the Owingu Fund,

which is providing grants to space researchers and space educators and small startup companies from the money that people spend nominating extrasolar planet names and voting them to the top. And we just think it's a great model, a 21st century model, for how to fund science and education in the space field going forward and a lot of fun, a way for the public to connect through putting their names in the hat for the planets of our galaxy.

I've got to check in. It's been a while since I've checked on my two nominations that are in. I think Pandora and Coyote. We're almost out of time, but I really can't let you go without getting at least one update on the health, the status of New Horizons. My favorite current flight mission is New Horizons, and it's doing very well. We are just now about six and a half astronomical units to Pluto and bearing down on an encounter two years from now with a healthy spacecraft that's on course

and a team that's busy as beavers putting the encounter plans together and getting ready for a spacecraft wake-up, in which we'll do a complete rehearsal on board the bird, way out there beyond the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, of the main encounter sequence. A full dress rehearsal, every command, exactly as it will be in 2015, this summer. Good luck with that. Alan, few things are as invigorating as a conversation with you,

so I hope we can do it again sometime soon. Anytime, Matt. Thank you so much. Alan Stern is, well, he is so many things that if we had gone through all of them, we wouldn't have had time to talk to him about anything else. But let's start with the principal investigator for the New Horizons mission and then go to associate VP for research and development at the Southwest Research Institute in the Space Science and Engineering Division. He's got a piece of so many missions out there.

He's leaving to go talk about the European mission Rosetta next week, and we talked about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in the past. Uwingu has come up before. He's the CEO for that effort, and now president and CEO for Golden Spike, and we will have links to lots of these at planetary.org slash radio. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up. That's just a few moments away. Just back from our favorite hot dog place in Southern California, at least in Pasadena,

it's time for What's Up with Bruce Batts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. As I told you earlier, I feel like I've been to the county fair. I had too much. Well done, my friend. Yeah, I know you were impressed. I earlier, I feel like I've been to the county fair. I had too much. Well done, my friend. Yeah, I know you were impressed. I was. I was. Usually I'm disappointed by your focus on moderation and rational behavior when it concerns eating.

But you kind of lost it today. Okay, we've got to get to the night sky because there's a comet, Matt. There's a comet, but it's not super, super, super bright. But it's the brightest comet in years, probably, in the next couple weeks. Which one is this? This is crudely referred to as Comet Pan-STARRS, but it is more formally Comet Pan-STARRS C2011L4, which is a little significant because Pan-STARRS, a survey telescope looking mostly for near-Earth asteroids, will probably find multiple comets. But this is the one of interest now.

So comet Pan-STARRS is already, as we record this, visible in the southern hemisphere, but still not too bright. It's still approaching the sun at the moment, but we'll have closest approach to Earth on March 5th and closest approach to the sun on March 9th. But probably the easiest viewing, particularly for northern hemisphere, will be mid-March, so even a few days after that. Now, we're talking first or second magnitude, probably, in astronomy, which sounds awesome because it's equivalent to a bright star, but that's all the brightness of the comet spread over a big area. It's a smear. It's a smear. You probably can pick it up naked eye, certainly can if you pull out binoculars,

and the challenge will be is it's low in the west after sunset because, you know, it just flew by the sun, and then it'll get too low to see. But look low in the west. It gets a little higher as the days go on in mid-March. Pretty close to due west. It moves across the sky very slowly from night to night. It's going to be groovy. Well worth looking for.

Also up there in the west, while you're looking, look up higher and you'll see Jupiter. And you can even see the moon hanging out near the comet on March 12th in particular. It's just below where the comet should be. And then it'll be significantly above on March 13th. Photo op. Comet activity. Yeah, definitely. At least with the right camera and patience.

Not clouds. So yes, photo op. Okay, we move on to this week in space history. In 1979, this week, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, starting a revolution in knowledge of Jupiter and its moons, and ring, and stuff. Random space fact! Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Pan Stars has left the building. Gold. Gold. Gold is very reflective in the infrared. I used to use it in the lab doing infrared stuff as a brightness standard. I think I know where you're going with this. Where, Matt? Go ahead.

Go there. All right. Get thee. Matt and I are going gold mining this weekend. No, that's not what we're doing and not where I'm going. How much? You're going to stake my claim, stranger. Well, if you staked your claim for the gold that would be used to coat the six and a half meter diameter mirror, which is actually made of 18 segments of the James Webb Space Telescope,

then you would use about 48.25 grams of gold, equivalent to the weight of a golf ball. So a golf ball's worth of gold spread very thinly over 18 mirror segments, 6.5 diameter mirror. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. What is the largest optical refracting, meaning using lenses, not mirrors, telescope ever used for scientific research? How'd we do, Matt? Our winner. And he's a past winner, but it's been over a year, well over a year, since Randy Bonham got picked by random.org. Randy in Brighton, Ontario, came back with the Yerkes Observatory in Chicago.

Didn't mention the specific telescope, but a number of other listeners did. In fact, lots of listeners did. One of those being Ilya Schwartz. But I want to mention Ilya mostly because he also pointed out that research is still being done at Yerkes with this instrument. And they also do research utilizing Yerkes' collection of over 150,000 archival photographic plates that date back to the 1890s. Now, it's interesting, the observatories that have those plates, depending on how sensitive they were, Now, it's interesting, the observatories that have those plates, depending on how sensitive they were, you may be able to backtrack when new objects out in the trans-Neptunian objects are discovered, although it may be tricky with your keys. It is not in Chicago.

It is run by the University of Chicago, but it is actually in Wisconsin. Randy, it's still good enough. We're going to send you that Re t-shirt from Saturday morning breakfast cereal, the comic strip of science and many other things. And we hope you will enjoy that. And we're going to give away one more of those next week, as I believe you know. I also want to mention this response from Torsten Zimmer, who really enjoyed the conversation with Chris Lewicki, chief asteroid miner for Planetary Resources.

But he did say this, listening to the news first and to Chris Lewicki's ambitious plans, I'm starting to wonder now if the asteroids have decided not to wait any longer and launched a preemptive strike. Beginning with Chelyabinsk. Chelyabinsk. Yes, I'm not sure if we mentioned there at Yerkes Observatory, the telescope has a 40-inch main objective lens. That's a big lens. So 102 centimeters. All right, we move on.

You kill a lot of ants with that lens. Yes, yes, yes, you could, adolescent boy, Matt. We move back to the James Webb Space Telescope. Those 18 primary mirror segments are made of beryllium coated in gold. Beryllium being light, strong, has good thermal properties. For the James Webb Space Telescope, what country and state or province did the beryllium they used come from? Where was it mined from for the James Webb Space Telescope? The beryllium, yeah.

Right. Well, you have until the 11th of March, 2013. You want to get it in? Go ahead. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. We're going to give away Bill Nye's voice on your answering machine. So there's a really cool prize. And you have until Monday, March 11, at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. I will be in Chile, either at 10,000 feet or 16,500 feet above sea level.

But hopefully we'll be back in time to announce the winner. Back in time and not in the hospital. And we look forward to more of your fabulous online blogs. Yeah. And audio blogs. Thank you of your fabulous online blogs. Yeah. And audio blogs. Thank you. It's groovy. My Autocomma Diary, which is available with the other blogs, including yours, at planetary.org.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think of all the things you can make using just aluminum foil. Thank you, and good night. You were admiring my hat, weren't you? I am. It's fabulous. Are you getting any signals? No, it's to prevent them, not to attract them.

Oh, right. That's why my brain is so fuzzy. I'm not wearing one. You would not make it as a psychotic person. Let me see. Anyway, he's Bruce Gutz. Some would disagree with that. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society.

He joins us this week and every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society. He joins us this week and every week for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the Moonwatching members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.