Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Andy Weir’s New Novel Puts a City on the Moon

Episode Date: November 8, 2017

The author of #1 bestseller "The Martian" is back with "Artemis," a superbly-researched, rollicking adventure in the first city on the Moon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Andy Weir of The Martian is back with his new book, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of a human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Andy's brand new book is called Artemis. That's also the name of the city he has created on the moon as the setting for this entertaining tale about a young woman named Jazz who gets herself and her lunar village in a heap of trouble. Later today, Bruce Betts and I will give you a chance to win a hardcover copy of Artemis. It's just one of the prizes in the new space trivia contest. Emily is back, not only on Planetary Radio, but from the DPS conference,

one of your annual favorites, isn't it? That's right. DPS stands for Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, which tells you why they usually abbreviate it to DPS. It happens every October in a different location, and it's the more astronomy-focused of the two big meetings that I

attend every year. The other one being the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference, which is more geology. Did you have your usual challenge not knowing which of the many concurrent sessions to attend? It's always a problem. But this year, I found that it helps if I pick a theme. And this year, I was looking more at incremental developments in science and seeing how people were making those little bits of progress. And sort of process over actual science results, although there certainly were good results. progress. They present what they're doing on a given problem, but the problems are definitely not solved yet. And they're really at the conferences in part to have the opportunity to talk with the other scientists about ways that they can solve some of the trickier things in their work. Well, there are three pieces you'll find at planetary.org. The one that I want to

focus on just for lack of time is one that you posted on October 24th about this guy, is one that you posted on October 24th about this guy, James Tuttle Keene, who you mentioned is becoming famous among planetary scientists. Why? Because James Tuttle Keene is also a really good and fast artist with pen and ink. And then later on, he goes back into his notes and colors them with beautiful colored pencil. And he provides these kind of encapsulated talks in note and drawing form. And he's done that even and especially for his own work. So he gave a talk about impacts on the moon and illustrated everything with his own beautiful drawings.

You and I and Andre Bermanis talked about the intersection of art and science. And that seems to surface again here. Yes, it does. I think that I often emphasize that science is a very creative process, especially planetary science, because we have to imagine the things that happened in the past in order to be able to go query our physics to understand whether those things are actually possible. For instance, craters on the moon were originally thought to be volcanic because that was the only way we could imagine a circular feature forming. And it wasn't until people imagined what would happen if a giant rock impacted that they came up with this alternative explanation.

And so imagination is actually a really important step in developing any new scientific idea. And you have lots of evidence of his documentation using tremendous creativity of the DPS meeting, because you've included a whole bunch of his Twitter posts, which I suspect is going to get him a whole bunch more Twitter followers. But let's talk for a moment, an extra minute or two here, about his own research having to do with impacts, including impacts on our own moon. That's right. The point of his research was to show that ways in which gigantic impacts of the moon actually reoriented, changed the spin axis of the moon. And this changing of the moon spin axis is not a new idea. What's new about James's work is that he's looking at how that spin axis would have evolved over time as the gravity field of the moon changed in response to the changing shape of the crater itself over time. It wouldn't have moved in a simple way just from here to there. It actually spiraled around a lot. And that has implications for where other impacts would have struck the moon, where ice reservoirs may have been, and a whole lot of other stuff in ancient lunar history. So it's interesting work, but it really is just a step

from here to there. And that's the kind of thing that you see at a science meeting. So as so often happens, not just in planetary science, but in all of science, the answer, the truth, the reality always seems to be so much more complex than was originally theorized. Oh, of course, because you got to start simple and then complicate it from there. Now, let's close with your description. I wish we could show it to people of this wonderful, really entrancing animation of an impact. It's not just an impact. It's a gigantic impact. It's the one that formed the Oriental Basin on the moon, the latest and one of the

bigger ones of the lunar impact basins. And it's this multi-ring impact basin. And you see the impactor strike the surface, cause a shockwave that goes into the subsurface and then rebounds with this gigantic spike of what would have been solid rock at the surface, erupting out of the center and splashing back down. It looks kind of like a raindrop, but you think about it, think really hard and imagine how it's all solid rock, some of it molten. And it's just a cataclysm that's absolutely, you know, speaking of imagination, it's really beyond my ability to imagine what that would have been like. It is beautiful to watch. There are little fractal things going on below the surface. And also, anybody who looks at it, look deep below the surface. There are these great

subtleties in the changes of density, well below where the real evidence of the obvious evidence of the impact is. Visualization is such a powerful tool. It's tremendous. You're seeing the deep fracturing of the lunar crust, which makes the crust more porous than we used to realize. Emily, thank you so much for sharing this and your other coverage of DPS 17 with us. And I look forward to talking again. Me too, Matt. That's our senior editor at the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla. Her three posts, as we said, are at planetary.org, including this one about, well, it's called Wobbling the Moon and Art by James Tuttle Keene. The setting for Andy Weir's new novel about our possible future in the solar system shifts

from Mars to our own moon. We'll soon know if Andy is able to match or surpass the well-deserved success of The Martian with Artemis. As you're about to hear, he put the same painstaking research into creating this story as he did with his previous book, which has become one of the most successful science fiction novels of all time. One of the greatest science fiction films, too. There are similarities, but also big differences, science fiction novels of all time. One of the greatest science fiction films, too.

There are similarities, but also big differences, including the resourceful, offbeat woman at the center of Artemis. It is a pleasure, it is a joy, to welcome you back to Planetary Radio. Thanks, it's great to be back. I was really worried. I have to thank you, because I thought, you know, here I raved about the Martian,

and now I think of you as a friend, and I thought, what if Artemis sucks? I'm already set up to interview the guy. What am I going to say? I only like to talk to authors whose books I enjoy. Thank God and thank Andy Weir.

I really enjoyed this. This book is really fun. Oh, well, thankir. I really enjoyed this. This book is really fun. Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate that. What a relief. You know, I said this to you about The Martian, you know, that other book that one or two people read. And I hear it's going to be a movie sometime soon. Yeah, The Martian, yeah.

It's very – I got started in science fiction because I found this guy named Robert Heinlein. And like The Martian, this is a very Heinlein-esque book. And that is a high compliment for me. Yes. No, and for me too. I mean, Heinlein is one of my holy trinity of influences. Heinlein, Asimov, and Clark. Those are the guys I grew up reading, even though I'm a Gen Xer and those are baby boomer sci-fi, but it's because I read my

dad's sci-fi collection. Anyway, Heinlein is a huge influence on me. And so somebody saying that my book is reminiscent of Heinlein is just a huge compliment for me. There's no question about it, the whole attitude of the characters, but also your typical attention to the details of the story and building this plausible future and city on the moon. Tell us about Artemis. Well, Artemis is the first city on the moon. It's the first city anywhere outside of Earth. It was built about 20 years before the events of the story, and it's been growing. So it started small and grew bigger and bigger. The conceit, it takes place about 60 or 70 years in the future. And the kind of the given, the conceit is that commercial space travel or the commercial space industry has driven

the price to low Earth orbit low enough that middle class people can afford to go to space, like as a vacation kind of thing. And once that becomes the case, then a lunar colony, a lunar vacation resort becomes a real economic viability. And that's what Artemis is based on. I did all the math. I did this huge, complicated economic analysis of, and, you know, amateur because I'm not a real economist, but this whole economic analysis of the current state of commercial space travel and compared it to the airline industry and said, like, where would it go if it ended up being as efficient as the airline industry is? So just presume infinite demand and people competing with each other and lots of money going into research. And I came up with some numbers. And that's what Artemis's whole economy is based on.

It's tourism. It's about 40 kilometers from the Apollo 11 site because they didn't want their construction of their city to screw up that national, you know, not national, but whatever, that landmark. And then there's a little train you can take that goes to a visitor's center next to the site where you can look at the site through windows. You don't need to get into an EVA suit. But you can for an additional charge. Which I would definitely do. I'm only sorry that this is 60 or 70 years in the future because I want to go.

Are you talking about that? You're set. I don't know. You're about, what, 85 right now? Yeah, roughly. Thank you. That's generous. I'm't know. You're about, what, 85 right now? Yeah, roughly. Thank you. That's generous. I'm just judging by your looks.

I mean. Nice guy. You know, it's not too late for me to say bad things about the book. It's true. Never too late. Now the economy of Artemis is about tourism, but it didn't start that way. It started with smelting aluminum, which actually turns out to be a very key part of the story, very much a key part of the story. Yeah, well, actually,

the economy of Artemis was started for tourism. Smelting aluminum was a necessary step along the way. A lot of companies got together, well, a large group of investors, companies, whatever, got together to make the Kenya Space Corporation. There's a story behind that, too. But they built and own Artemis. And their economic model is we're going to build habitable space on the moon in these big spheres that they call bubbles. And then we're just going to rent out the lots. We're never going to sell property. We're just going to rent it. And that's how we're going to make our money. And then individual businesses can put whatever they want in those lots as they rent them from us.

The biggest issue there is, although it's much cheaper in this setting than it is now to transport stuff to the moon, it's still pretty expensive. And so they wanted to minimize how much mass they had to take to the moon. And to build this huge city, they needed a lot of metal, especially for the pressure vessels, the outer hull of the city. And it turns out that the moon, if you go to the lunar highlands, which is the not smooth parts of the moon, the vastly predominant mineral available is called anorthite. If you pick up any rock off of the surface of the moon in the highlands,

there's about an 85% chance you've just picked up a piece of anorthite. And anorthite is made of aluminum, calcium, silicon, and oxygen. I mean, it's a rock, it's a mineral. But if you use smelting to pull apart those elements, then you have aluminum to build your moon base with and oxygen to fill it up with. So the moon is really made out of moon bases, just some assembly required. Now, smelting aluminum takes an enormous, or smelting anorthite, rather, takes a huge amount of energy, so much more energy than you could ever hope to get from a solar farm or anything like that. So they have reactors.

Yeah, and they put them behind a berm because, you know, something could go wrong. What is it that they eat for the most part, at least the people who can't afford something better? They call it gunk. That's their nickname. What it is is chlorella algae, which is a great way to grow food in a confined space because algae grows by doubling its population every time unit. You're really limited by your growing area, not by time. They grow it in vats. I mean, that's just one of the companies on Artemis.

Artemis is not a planned community. It's just KSC, which is the company that owns it, said, there we go, that we have all these lots for rent. And then people just came in, and the economy developed on its own. There are chlorella farms and they sell it. That's what you eat if you're poor or even middle class, because it's really expensive to ship food up to Artemis. And of course, you don't have cropland or cows or anything. Our hero, Jazz, she eats gunk most of the time. And I'm glad it was time. And it's flavored.

They have flavor extracts that you can import a little bottle of extract from Earth and that'll flavor it so that it doesn't taste terrible and merely taste bad. Yeah. Although Jazz seems to think that some of the stuff, some of the flavorings are actually worse than just eating the stuff raw. I'm glad you brought up Jazz. She is very much the central character in this book. Talk about a menace from earth for people who get the Heinlein reference. Yeah, she's got a mouth on her. She does. She does have a mouth on her. It's another first person smart ass novel like The Martian because it's kind of how I write.

I don't know. I think she would make Mark Watney blush. I don't know. Actually, I think Mark swore more than she does. But yeah, she can be really crude. I didn't really like her much at first, because I don't think we're giving too much away, because the word is pretty much out. She's kind of a criminal. Yeah, she's definitely a criminal. And she's also, well, what I tried to do, it'll be up to the readers to decide if I succeeded. But what I wanted to do was I wanted to have a character with more depth than Mark Watney.

The Martian is just a human versus nature story, problem, solution, problem, solution. No one would accuse it of being literature. No one would say, oh, that Mark Watney is such a deep and nuanced character. He's not right. And so I wanted to try for a little bit more depth. And jazz is much more complicated. She is not perfect. In fact, she's very far from it. She makes bad decisions. She's made morally wrong decisions in her past. She has regrets. She's got personality flaws, and she's a very flawed person. And yet, she's brilliant. I mean, she comes up with solutions and executes them amazingly well in most cases. Well, things don't always go the way she wants. No, of course. You know, that makes for a better book, doesn't it? But there's no denying she's a genius, and everybody around her recognizes this, apparently except for her.

Well, she kind of knows it, but she doesn't like to dwell on it. She really hates people telling her that she could be doing more with her life. It's like she's so sick of hearing people say, like, oh, you had the potential to do so much, and you kind of pissed it away, which is true, but she doesn't like hearing it. At least for public consumption consumption she's a porter she uh helps tourists out uh getting from well not just tourists if you want anything moved from one place to another she's your gal she's uh delivering everything from mail packages to furniture to whatever she's one of many porters and you make the point that uh I mean, this is going to be a tourist destination, and some of the people coming are going to be very wealthy, not above

the middle class folks who, you know, might save up for nearly a lifetime to be able to make this trip. The rich are not going to want to clean their lunar toilets. And so there are multiple strata of society in this little town of 2,000. One of the things that's most important to me in science fiction, especially when you have a fictional society, is how does that economy work? And it always sticks in my craw when I'm like, how would that economy even work? And a lot of the explanations for why people are colonizing the moon or Ganymede or whatever is always like, oh, they're mining. And I'm like, what? Well, send robots. Why would you do that?

It's like, oh, well, Earth was overpopulated. I'm like, then colonize Antarctica or the ocean or the Sahara. I mean, all of these things are easier than colonizing the freaking moon. So the economics is really important to me. I need to know that the economics works out. And a little aside, one thing I've always appreciated about Mad Max, the world of Mad Max, is that it actually has a viable, sustainable economy. It's this post-apocalyptic world. The Citadel mines water and food. Gastown creates energy.

They're on top of an oil well. There's the bullet farm. And then there's barter town, where they grow pigs and everybody does trade. And I'm like, holy crap, the wasteland, as it's called in Mad Max, has a well thought out functional economy. For Artemis, I based it off of with the understanding that it's really a tourist destination. I based it off of tourist towns, places like in the Caribbean. Well, resort town is really the key. A town that exists for no reason other than tourism. There's nothing else

there. There's no reason to be there other than people like to go there because it's pretty. I looked at those towns and what you see are big hotels, opulent place for tourists and stuff to stay and like the whole touristy area right up on the beach. And then behind it are, well, I won't say slums, but far less accommodating. It's where the people who live there and work there. Yeah. And it's nowhere near as nice. I'm not making any sort of statement about these things.

I'm just there's no political slant here. I'm just saying this is how those economies always work out. And Artemis is no exception. I got the same impression. I mean, this is just how human society works. You mentioned the wasteland in the Mad Max stories, and there is no wasteland like the moon. I mean, really, you amply demonstrate that the moon is still a harsh mistress. Yeah, yes. Thank you. Another Heinlein reference. There's two Heinlein references. It's a tough place, but they have learned how to deal with it. And Jazz, she was born on Earth, but she has no desire to go back. Right.

Her father brought her to the moon. Her mother is not mentioned. And I don't bother to mention her, so I haven't said what became of Jazz's mom. But her father brought Jazz to the moon. They emigrated there when Jazz was six years old from Saudi Arabia. So she has no real connection to Saudi Arabia. Culturally, she is what you'd call an Artemesian. She has grown up in the local culture of Artemis, which is unique in and of itself. That's another thing you see a lot in humanity with immigration or diaspora, is the parents immigrate with their kids to the new country.

The parents still have kind of the old world values, but the kids end up growing up and being thoroughly native to the new country. Jazz is no different. She's one of those people, yeah, she's fluent in Arabic, but she only speaks it to her dad, stuff like that. It's a very freewheeling society. I mean, there's one guy who's kind of a cop, but you get the feeling that, you know, he doesn't, he's not going to sweat the small stuff. I mean, really, it is another Heinlein-like aspect of this society, that it's pretty much anything goes as long as you don't hurt many people. Yeah, as long as you don't hurt people.

Again, it's based on just human history. That's what frontier towns end up being like. They don't have the resources or infrastructure to maintain a super strict law and order. So the way it ends up being is that the society itself, the social norms, fear of ostracization or whatever is what really enforces the rules. Yeah, Artemis has like one cop-ish thing, which kind of, he kind of serves the function of like an old West sheriff might.

He'll put you in jail if you get in a drunken brawl and he'll let you out in the morning, you know, just when you sober up. Other than that, he's really only there to make sure people don't like kill each other. Yeah. And if you commit a big enough infraction, it seems like the biggest punishment is they other than that he's really only there to make sure people don't like kill each other yeah and and if you commit a big enough infraction it seems like the the biggest punishment is they send you back to earth yeah they don't have a criminal justice system they don't have courts they don't have jail i mean they don't have the means to do these things so if you commit a crime in artemis if if the city itself concludes that well it's really up to the administrator who is the person in charge.

But if they decide that they think you've committed a significant crime against another person, they will deport you from Artemis to the country of the victim. So if you rob someone, rape someone, murder someone, whatever, they'll go like, we think you killed this guy. It's not our problem to prove it or not prove it. We're going to send you to that guy's country and let their criminal justice system deal with it. And we'll give them whatever evidence or whatever they want. Part of the economy, and this is something that's very important for Jazz because she kind of runs the outfit, is smuggling. She doesn't seem to make a lot of money at it, but it made me think, yeah, probably wherever humans go, even though it's going to be more difficult to get stuff there, I mean, that's

just supply and demand, it's going to make smuggling in bourbon or fine cigars that much more lucrative. Yeah. So Artemis doesn't have a lot of rules. There's really not a lot of contraband to be had. But one of their rules is they're extremely sensitive about fire. And fire safety is incredibly important because everybody lives in an airtight city. A fire inside Artemis would be like a fire aboard a submarine.

And do they have a pure oxygen? They do have a pure oxygen atmosphere, don't they? They do have a pure oxygen atmosphere, but it's not like an Apollo 1 situation. The atmosphere inside Artemis is 100% oxygen, but it's only 21% Earth's atmospheric pressure. The air is much, much thinner. However, the only part of the atmosphere that your body needs is the oxygen, which is on Earth, it's 21% of our atmosphere. Since a fifth of the air on Earth is oxygen, you can live in one fifth Earth's pressure at pure oxygen. The risk of a fire is based on what the partial pressure of oxygen is. So in other words, fire would burn at exactly the same rate in Artemis as it does at sea level on Earth. So in other words, fire would burn at exactly the same rate in Artemis as it does at sea level on Earth. Still, being in an enclosed space that's airtight during a fire is really, really bad.

Normally, if there's a house fire, most of the smoke leaves the house and goes away up into the atmosphere. But if you're in an airtight area, you're just going to die right away. So they have extremely strict fire safety rules and laws and anything that's flammable. You're not allowed to bring flammable things into the city at all. So that means tobacco is illegal. That's one of Jazza's main things is she smuggles in tobacco for people. That's Andy Weir, author of The Martian, and now Artemis. He has more to share after the break. This is Planetary Radio. however, has proposed to cut both. You can make your voice heard right now. We've made it easy to learn more if you go to planetary.org slash petition 2017. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, returning with one of my favorite guests.

Artemis is the new novel by Andy Weir, author of the phenomenon called The Martian. Artemis is set in a little town of the same name located on Earth's moon, not far from what has become the most popular tourist destination for people who can afford a lunar vacation, Tranquility Base, the landing site of Apollo 11. Just as in The Martian, Andy has worked out the details of what it will take to build, populate, and thrive, more or less, in humanity's first real city on another world. There is a scene involving a fire early in the book, and it's maybe the first great evidence that you have that there's a lot more to Jazz

than just a petty criminal who's clever, That there's a lot more to jazz than just a petty criminal who's clever because she gets involved in dealing with a fire that, as you said, is a really serious occurrence. Yeah, and also they have excellent fire safety. So the fire that you're talking about toward the beginning of the book happens at a glass factory where it's a factory that manufactures glass. Remember, one of the other byproducts of anorthite was silicon. so you've got a bunch of silicon and oxygen you can make glass and that's what this factory does you know for like plates and glasses and bottles and whatever else people need it's cheaper to make it on the moon than it is to ship it to the moon anyway anything that uses high temperature anything that's a fire risk has to be done in a fireproof room. So the whole

glass factory is in one big fireproof room. If there's a fire in there, it can't possibly get out. And the fire safety in Artemis is if you're in a room that's on fire, you're going to get locked in that room. They would rather you die than the fire spread. But those fireproof rooms have air shelters in the back. They have shelters that you can go into and be safe and seal yourself off from the fire. So in this particular case, you got to see, like, there was a fire at this factory. The employees go into the air shelters, and now the fire brigade, which are volunteers, have to go rescue those employees from the fire shelters without letting the fire spread out into the rest of Artemis. the fire shelters without letting the fire spread out into the rest of Artemis.

And it is one of the really ingenious sequences that you've come up with for this book. And those little fire shelters, there is one that plays a key part in the climax of the book, which I am so, if I could get away with it, I would love to talk more about what happens at the end, because it is just a rollicking great adventure and extremely clever, but I can't. But what can we say about this great scheme, this caper that jazz becomes involved with and doesn't go particularly well? Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time. I mean, I won't give away too much, but

basically an industrialist in Artemis, a guy who owns a lot of businesses around Earth and also started to set up on Artemis, he wants to get into this one industry and he wants Jazz to sabotage the competition. And he hires her to do that. She thought it would be simple, but well, things don't go according to plan. sabotage the competition. And he hires her to do that. She thought it would be simple, but well, things don't go according to plan. Like I said, I wish we could go into more detail, but that really would be giving far too much away. Just like in The Martian, you have thought so deeply about all of the, everything that goes into the book and creating this very credible settlement on the moon. What kind of research went into this?

Well, lots of it. I mean, like I said, the first thing I wanted to do was work out the economy, so I did all that stuff, and none of that is in the book, really. It's just the economy is there, here's what it is, and I have the answers to whatever, oh, how much would a beer cost? Well, I know that because of all the work I did behind the scenes. But we learned from The Phantom Menace, don't start off a science fiction story with a description of economics, right? It's like, economics to me is really fascinating, but I understand it's not to most people. So I need to not get too deep into it

in my stories. So lots and lots of research. The main thing was I had to say like, okay, here's this incentive to build a city. Now, what is the best way to make that happen? What is the most economically viable way to build a city? And that's where they started smelting the anorthite to make the aluminum to build the holes. And then it's just lots of research on the chemistry. And I ended up doing a lot of research on welding. I didn't know anything about welding before writing this and so my first step was like okay Wikipedia welding let's start there. And welding plays a surprisingly large role in the book. I mean for one thing it's what Jazz's father does for a living but she's a pretty good welder herself and thank goodness because it

probably saves her and a lot of other lives. Her father raised her with the assumption that she would become a welder and take over the business. She decided to become a smuggler and criminal instead. He's not thrilled. But yeah, so she actually, she was his like apprentice for like ever since she could hold a torch. She's actually pretty good at it. Not as good as her dad is, but pretty good. She has to figure out really fast how to weld in vacuum. That's a skill that people in Artemis have, that welders in Artemis have,

but something she had never done. Her dad did a... Actually, no. Now that I think of it, they didn't do it that way. But whatever. I'm getting way off into my own personal Silmarillion. way but whatever i'm getting way off into my my own personal silmarillion oh gosh a non-heinlein reference oh okay i'm sorry yeah i it is ingenious i mean much like in the martian you seem to have approached every bit of action everything

that any character is capable of doing in this town and does, it is backed by meticulous research. I'm going to bet that you're going to have, I'll bet you already do have, just like with The Martian, the incredibly picky people out there who can't just enjoy the story but have to say, oh, you were off with this coefficient by, you know, 0.1 of some variable. You know, if that happens, that happens. I don't get mad at that at all. I kind of like it.

First off, it means they're engaged and invested enough that they care about that. And second off, I bring this on myself by coming out and saying, like, I make scientifically accurate fiction. Well, if you say that, you're subjecting yourself to review. So I can't complain if people say, like, well, this part isn't scientifically accurate. If you write like a Star Trek story, then no one's going to come at you and say like, uh, it's actually not possible to go faster than light. You know, nobody cares. But if you come out and say, hey, this is a thing that I'm doing. This is my this is my shtick. Then they're going to check. And that's it's right that they do.

Did writing this book make you more confident or less so that we will someday have a community like Artemis on Earth's nearest neighbor? More confident. I mean, it is predictive, right? I mean, I'm not saying like, oh, this is exactly what's going to happen. But I'm saying this, I think, will be the economic incentive for the first city on the moon. And I also think the first city on the moon would be fairly loose-lawed, for lack of a better term, like that, just because it's so far away. I want to go back to just what it's going to take to have a nice week or two-week vacation on Artemis. You figured out roughly what you think it might cost.

Artemis. You figured out roughly what you think it might cost. Yeah, I mean, I'm sparing you about 10 pages of economic analysis that I did, but it comes out to be about $70,000 in 2015 dollars. So for about $70,000, you could spend two weeks on the moon in Artemis. And that's a small fraction of what Virgin Galactic and others are now talking about, just to take people up and back, you know, not even to get into orbit. This is presuming about 70 years. Let's see, it takes place in the 2080s. So, yeah, about 60, 70 years in the future. So we're presuming that much advancement in commercial space technology, which drives the price down, hopefully.

in commercial space technology, which drives the price down, hopefully. Do you see us on track to achieving those kinds of economies? I mean, I'm thinking of like Elon Musk just issuing more details of his rocket that's designed to take 100 people at a time to Mars. I do think we're headed that way. There's going to be a tipping point. Eventually, we'll reach the point where middle class people can afford a trip to space, just a quick be up in space for a few hours or go to a space hotel for a day or two or something like that, and then come back. And once that gets down to the

point where it's like $100,000, that's the sort of thing people will get a second mortgage for, for that once in a lifetime opportunity. And once that happens, then the customer base for space travel goes from eight national space agencies to 50 million people who have the means to afford that trip. At that point, you'll see an explosion in the space industry, kind of like the airline industry of the 1950s or maybe even late 40s. It'll just become huge. And then you'll get all the competition and then even more aggressive technology to drive the price down, etc. I like that future. Did you give any thought to, and none of this is in the book, of course, but to what would

be happening elsewhere in the solar system at the time that this novel is taking place, the 2080s. I mean, are there people on Mars? I didn't cover it in the book, like you said, but I assumed that when we're building our first city on the moon, we may have already put humans on Mars as a government funded mission, but nothing private. It's kind of by definition, right? Artemis is the very first private venture, well, the very first commercially viable city off of Earth. So if it's just like the very first frontier town is being made on the moon, then I doubt there is commercial travel to Mars yet. What are the steps you think that we ought to be taking now whether it's nasa or commercial space to speed us on the way there i mean i want to make this trip i don't think i can wait until the 2080s um i'm

thinking you know next year if all goes well google lunar x prize they may actually go to the moon and crawl around a little bit and there are announcements from companies like moon express for doing yeah they just cut a deal with nanoRacks for developing commercial use of the moon. Yeah, I'm pretty excited by all those developments. I think the biggest impediment right now to commercial space is policy, not technology. Our space policy is kind of steeped in rules that we made in the 1960s so that we could abide by the Outer Space Treaty, rules that are now ludicrously out of date, like communication standards you are required to use that are extremely energy inefficient compared to modern ways we have of communicating

now. And they haven't been updated. So projects like Moon Express, for instance, are like, well, we have to add several kilograms of mass to our probe just to meet this arbitrary standard that we can't, we have no use for this radio, but the US government requires we put it in there, they won't let us launch. That sort of stuff needs to be addressed. The Outer Space Treaty needs to be updated. And I don't see that this is like a particularly difficult thing. Governments and especially international relations moves very slowly. But it's not like anybody has a huge

economic or strategic dependence on the details of the Outer Space Treaty. The important aspects of it, you leave alone. You say, OK, no militarization of space and no one can claim territory off of Earth and that sort of thing. But you could loosen up the other details, like say, like, yeah, you know what? A country is only responsible for things, the private entities within that country launch to the extent of not militarizing or weaponizing space or claiming territory. You could simplify it and it wouldn't be hard, but it would require effort. There are some steps being taken in that direction, but it's slow.

But yeah, in terms of technology, I think we're definitely on the right track. We're seeing the beginning of commercial space companies. What would be awesome would be is if some Elon Musk equivalent guy showed up in another country, Elon Musk equivalent guy showed up in another country, like some guy in Japan who is also just like Elon Musk and has the funds and intellect to make his own rocket company and then having those two compete with each other. So having two commercial space companies in different countries, that's important, competing with each other would be awesome. Because if they're in the same country, then they will compete with each other via policy. It's a lot easier to spend money to affect domestic laws. You can't do that if you're in two different countries. Honestly, I think that the vitriolic competition between Boeing and Airbus is the reason we have such amazing advances in airline technology. Yeah. Competition.

Well, true competition, because Boeing can't affect European policy and Europe can't affect American domestic policy when it comes to airline manufacture. They have to legitimately compete. Is there going to be at any point once this book is released to the public, which, as we speak, is still a couple of weeks away for people to see some of the thinking some of the research that that you put into this over the last what at least a couple of years that yeah i've been talking to about this yes i did write a paper about the economics and how it would work and how i how my reasoning for

why i think the commercial space industry would drive prices down dramatically from where they are now and what those eventual prices would be. We're working on getting that published in an outlet, but can't talk about that just now because the outlet hasn't confirmed it yet. And I don't want to look dumb if they change their mind. That's something I look forward to, though. Oh, Thank you. You wouldn't really be human if you weren't anxious about this. I mean, after all, after the truly marvelous success of The Martian,

the second time out, people tend to be a little more critical. They tend to be, yeah, so how is he going to top that, you know? Yeah. So I imagine you are a little bit anxious yes you imagine correctly i am i am pretty nervous uh you know i i have to follow up the martian which is a pretty tall order the standard imposter syndrome and stuff that comes along with it there's a saying um give a man a book and you entertain him for a night. Teach a man to write and you give him crippling self-doubt for life. I love that. Oh, good. I'm glad you can

laugh about it. Apparently, Hollywood has a vote of confidence in this new story because isn't it already in the works as a film? Fox bought the movie rights. And worth noting is they bought them, didn't option them, bought them outright. That's a pretty big deal. That's a much bigger investment on their part and a much larger pile of money for me. So that makes me happy. They've got Miller and Lord lined up to direct. And I think the next step would be that Miller and Lord or Lord and Miller, whatever the proper order is, I think they will be looking for a screenplay writer to make the adaptation. You know, I'm known for my prescient ability to predict to my hat,

which Andy insisted that I get a hat and wear it. My ability to predict the success of fine literature. And my prediction is that you don't need to worry. I don't think that's going to make you feel much better. But in the meantime, before the book goes on the New York Times— Your constellations are meaningless, Kevin. I'm glad I could be so reassuring. While you wait for this to appear on the New York Times bestseller list, which I will bet you a hat is going to happen very soon after its release, you're enjoying Star Trek Discovery just like me.

Yeah, I think it's really good. And after all the production delays and horror stories coming out about it before it came out, I thought, oh my god, this is going to be awful. I thought, oh, my God, this is going to be awful. Every indication, every secret communique kind of thing that came out in the press about it just indicated it was going to tank. But it doesn't. It's good. I like it. I think they did a fantastic job.

I don't like the way the Klingons look. I think that's kind of ridiculous how they look, in fact. But, okay, so accept that and move on. But the main character is awesome. The premise, once you get past the pilot, the premise establishes itself in full force. And I'm like, oh, wow, okay, this is really cool. So I'm on a crusade now telling all of my friends who watched the first episode and got turned off, give it another shot, go for it. And that's become a part of my mission in life, as it is now my mission in life to tell people about Artemis. Oh, thank you.

The latest novel from Andy Weir, who's been our guest once again on Planetary Radio, anxiously awaiting the release of the book from Crown Publishing, right? Yeah. What's the day in November? Do you know it? Yeah, November 14th is the release date. Okay. It'll be available in all the usual places,

as you might imagine. And then I'm looking forward to buying my ticket to see the movie too. Andy, thank you so much. It is really a great pleasure always to talk with you. And best of luck with this. Thanks. Thanks, Matt.

It's always fun talking to you too. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for that organization called the Planetary Society. Welcome back. Good to be back, Matt. Kind of cold and rainy and gray down here. I don't expect much in the way of great night skies this evening. Now, I hope it's better in Pasadena. What might people see? Well, if people don't live in a cold, cloudy, rainy place, and they look up in the evening sky in the southwest,

they can see Saturn looking kind of yellowish. But the predawn is where it's happening these days. We got Venus super bright, but getting very low towards the horizon. Mars up above it, looking reddish. And on November 13th, Venus and Jupiter just coming up will be very close together, the two brightest planets in the sky. But you'll have to get a clear view to the eastern horizon just before dawn. Good enough for me. All right.

We move on to this week in space history a couple of of uh memories this time we've got 1969 apollo 12 was launched uh gives us an opportunity to remember the recently passed dick gordon who was the command module pilot of apollo 12 and just passed away And then 1934, Carl Sagan was born. A couple of important people. I'll have to find the interview that I did with Dick Gordon some years ago. He was just a delight to talk to. Absolutely a delight. Since we have, I believe, reached the time for Random Space Fact, let me share something with you from Jacob Ray of Oxford, North Carolina. He has a request. He would like to hear your Random Space Facts intro in the tone, as he puts it, of Gollum. Are you up to it, sir?

Oh, I wish I were better at these things. I'll try it. And if it's good, you can be impressed. And if it's not, everyone can just laugh at me. And then it brings a little joy into the world. And you can stay as director of science and technology. Gollum, the director of science and technology? If you choose. But no, I mean, if it's a bad impression, we won't hold it against you. Thank you.

All right, here we go. We move on to random space fact, my precious. I give that at least a B minus, maybe a B. I'll work on it. I'll work on it. So there are at least 2,000 cubic miles or 9,000 cubic kilometers of liquid hydrocarbons on Saturn's moon Titan hanging out in the lakes there. Probably even more than that based upon some recent studies.

But even if it were that amount, that amounts to about 40 times more than all of the proven oil reserves on Earth and about the same as the amount of water in the combined Great Lake, Michigan, Huron. That is a great rendering of random space fact. Thank you very much. You're welcome. I hope it was better than my column. It was. Maybe I was... See, I think I was doing Smeagol. I get confused. I should have been doing that. Yeah, next time you can do the bad side. All right, should we move on to the trivia contest? Please. I asked you, where are the LIGO gravitational wave detectors located? How'd we do, Matt?

Well, no fooling around with this. We got a very good response. Edward Medallis was chosen. His entry was chosen by Random.org. He's in Concord, North Carolina, another North Carolinian. He says that the two LIGO locations, the two originals, are in Livingston, Louisiana, and Hanford, Washington, correct? That is correct. Off to space we go. Edward, you have won yourself a little background music, the Chop Shop Design Planetary Society T-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account,

and a shopping bag adorned by space artist Michelle Roosh with her beautiful artwork titled Apollo. It is absolutely the coolest and most respectable shopping bag I have ever seen. And you can check out more stuff from Michelle, of course, at michellerouche.com. Martin Hajoski, who gets in his comments pretty frequently, he says, I'm perhaps not the first to notice the fact that the stretch from each LIGO roughly mirrors the path of Lewis and Clark's core of discovery, a previous revelatory trip into the unknown. And he's approximately correct.

It's about right. This from Joseph Angeria, one of our listeners in Sweden. He says he tried to come up with something witty, but reading about these instruments just drops my jaw to the floor. Humans at their best are unbelievable. Dave Fairchild, not to be outdone, our poet laureate, there once was a Livingston LIGO that measured our gravity just so. It lasered the wave from a black photon grave that chirped in a Hanford staccato. And I got one more. Mark Little in Northern Ireland. He says, I do wish they'd called it Lego.

That way we all could have built our own. Well, that would have been cheaper. Yes. They got to make a modular, don't they? All right. Now we're ready to go on. All right. I got a new game for you, Matt, and everyone out there.

I'm still working on the title, but it's something like, what does that funny term mean? Tell me, what are Bach globules? B-O-C, globules. And no, they're not Klingons. I think I had some in my soup yesterday. I hope they were tasty. So what about globules? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

You have until the 15th. That would be Wednesday, November 15th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us the answer for this one. And you might win yourself a Planetary Society T-shirt from chopshopstore.com. We have our own little store there. A 200-point itelescope.net account. iTelescope is that nonprofit international network of telescopes that anybody can get access to. 200 points worth a couple hundred bucks. worth a couple hundred bucks. And, as I said at the outset of the show,

a hardcover copy of the new novel by my special guest today, Andy Weir, the book Artemis, that I highly recommend. We'll get this out to you if you're the winner of this new one. And I think we're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what it would be like to surf a gravitational wave. Cowabunga, dude. Cowabunga. I'm going to grab my Surf Titan t-shirt. look up in the night sky and think about what it would be like to surf a gravitational wave. Cowabunga, dude. Cowabunga. I'm going to grab my Surf Titan t-shirt. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena,

California, and is made possible by its lunatic members. Lunatic in a good way. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.