Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Astronaut Tom Jones at SETIcon

Episode Date: August 6, 2012

Skywalker, scientist and author Tom Jones joins us in a fireside chat about Near Earth Objects and much more. Emily Lakdawalla tours the Applied Physics Lab in Maryland. Bill Nye the Science Guy put high value on the mission of Curiosity, the MSL Rover, even if it had not landed successfully. What’s Up in the night sky.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Dear, dear podcast listeners, it is very early in the morning on Monday, the 6th of August. My voice is pretty much gone after a very long day that ended with screaming for joy and a lot of hugs at PlanetFest 2012, where we had just watched humanity and a great piece of American technology with a lot of international cooperation set down on the surface of Mars. We were unable to include a lot of this in this week's show. We will have some great material from PlanetFest at next week's show. But rest assured that we will be covering lots of what's happening with Curiosity. rest assured that we will be covering lots of what's happening with Curiosity.

We'll check in with Emily and see how things were from her viewpoint at JPL, of course, next week. Thank you so much for listening. I do want to let you know that you will hear me say that the extended version of our conversation with astronaut Tom Jones can be heard by listeners online. Well, of course, you are those listeners online, so you're hearing the whole thing. There's nothing more to add. Thanks very much for joining us, and thank you for your support of Planetary Radio

and the Planetary Society. Here's the show. Space traveler, space visionary, Tom Jones, 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. Author, planetary scientist, and four-time space shuttle astronaut Tom Jones is back. He'll tell us about plans to move and mine asteroids, among other things. I talked with him in front of

a live audience at SETIcon. Emily Lakdawalla provides a report on her tour of an institution that is responsible for some of the most successful robotic space missions. Bill Nye will talk about the importance of Curiosity with a capital C, and we'll finish with a return to the space trivia contest in this week's What's Up Report from Bruce Betts. We had to put this episode to bed before the landing of Curiosity, the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Next week we'll feature a new Planetary Radio Live recorded at our celebration of that landing, PlanetFest 2012.

In the meantime, you can find mission updates at planetary.org and from our Twitter feed, ExplorePlanets. Emily Lakdawalla is on the Skype line. The quality is somewhat lower than usual, partly because she's coming to us from the east coast of the United States, but that is also what has enabled her to talk about what she's going to talk about today. Emily, where were you visiting? Well, I visited many fine locations in Washington, D.C. in the area this week, but I'm going to talk to you today about the Applied

Physics Laboratory located in Laurel, Maryland. APL, which of course we spend a lot of time talking to people from JPL, largely because of our minuscule travel budget and its proximity. But there are a lot of things, great things going on there at APL, aren't there? There's a lot of great things going on, a lot of exciting science, and two of my favorite planetary missions are operated out of there. That's the Messenger mission to Mercury and the New Horizons mission on its way to Pluto, which of course bookends the solar system quite neatly. They took you on a tour? That's right. You know, it's the summer, so a lot of the main scientists were gone. So I was led on a tour by quite a few postdocs and students and a couple of my friends who are scientists. And I saw

some really cool labs. There's one lab that I enjoyed the most, I think, was this rock crushing lab, which sounds like something kind of mean to do to a rock, but they do it to rocks in order to understand what's going on in the interiors of planets. And their small lab is capable of crushing rocks to the kind of pressure that occurs on Earth in maybe the uppermost mantle. But on Mercury, it's near the lowermost mantle, near the core mantle boundary. And if you're on the moon, that pressure is the same pressure that's achieved in the center of the moon. So they can crush things as high pressures as is experienced at the center of the moon,

which I think is pretty cool. Also, they keep their lab notebooks in purple pen, which I thought was very cute. Sounds like a very fun tour stop for a geologist like yourself. What else did you see? Well, one of the rooms, I'm not going to be able to even show it in the blog because the chief scientist hadn't replied to an email that gave me permission to take photos. But we walked in and there was this gigantic contraption wrapped in tinfoil with liquid nitrogen smoke coming out of the top. It was so mad scientist-y, I can't even describe it. What is it, a time machine?

It was designed to, you know, irradiate various things at either high temperatures or low temperatures with UV or infrared radiation to find out how they respond. But really, I was so distracted by how mad scientist-y it was, I wasn't really listening to the science. Sounds like you've had a great time with this visit to APL and a lot of other things you did, but I'm very glad that you'll be back in town. In fact, you'll have returned by the time people hear this, and that'll be right after a certain big event or just before a certain big event.

And hopefully that certain big event won't cause me to have a heart attack. We're, of course, talking about Curiosity's landing, and boy, do I hope it worked by the time that you're hearing this. Boy, don't we all. Thank you so much, Emily, and we will talk to you again next week. She's the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. Emily Lachtawalla is also the Planetary Society's blogger and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, no one is hearing this until after we've learned what has happened with...

It was great, wasn't it? Now, we hope that as we speak to you, as you listen to this, we landed successfully on Mars. And the first images from the hazard cameras, the hazcams, are on their way. And we're all rejoicing at these astonishing images from another world. But we have to consider the possibility. We have to remember, as you often say, Mars is hard, and maybe things didn't go that well. Maybe not well at all, and we have a crash on Mars. In even the best case, there's supposed to be some wreckage of the sky crane. And by the way, interesting thing, we're not going to drive over and look at the sky crane. People are afraid that the fuel tanks might still have enough fuel in them that if you got near it,

even with a rover on another world, it would blow up and mess up everything. It's quite a thing to have to think through. Very exciting. Let's steer clear. Literally. And by the way, I've been up all night. At least I should have been. Probably me too. Regardless of the outcome, don't we want to say something about what this kind of effort means to all of us or should mean?

Well, it's the best thing that we do as humans. This kind of exploration brings out the best in us. And as I say all the time, what do you want to know? You want to know where you came from. You want to know whether or not you're alone in the universe. This is the next step to investigating those two questions. And furthermore, whenever you go exploring, go exploring anywhere, whether it's your backyard, sidewalk, or Mars. Two things are going to happen. You're going to make discoveries. You're going to find something you never saw before. And you're going to have an adventure.

So no matter what happened with the spacecraft this morning, last night, we will have an adventure. We will have had an adventure. And it's just the start of things. We should be roving around for two years at least. And it's like your toaster, Matt. Your toaster might have a warranty of one year, but you keep toasting long after the warranty's done. So the spacecraft's got a two-year warranty,

and we're hoping it goes for, pick a number, 22 years. Let's make some great toast on the surface of Mars. Maybe we'll find something that will utterly change everything. It's quite possible. It's exciting. One can hope. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. And now we're going to talk with astronaut Tom Jones, a conversation I had with him not too long ago at SETICON. I dream of spending a day or two, maybe just a few minutes even, in Earth orbit.

Tom Jones logged almost eight weeks there. The consultant, planetary scientist, and author of Planetology and Skywalking joined me for a SETIcon fireside chat a few weeks ago. We thank the SETI Institute for allowing us to bring you this conversation. We're at SETIcon 2 up in Santa Clara, California, in the room where we're doing what are called fireside chats, but our virtual fire has gone away. It's gone out. Maybe somebody could find some kindling for us. But we are fortunate enough to be able to have a conversation with someone

that I've had a delightful time talking to many times before, several times before on the radio show, and not too long ago in Washington, D.C. at the USA Science and Engineering Festival where Tom Jones came by our booth. Dr. Tom Jones, anybody in here really need an introduction? You've probably already seen him on panels or maybe you've read his book or books. Dr. Tom Jones, an 11-year veteran of NASA, four, count them, four flights on the space shuttle. The last one involving three different spacewalks, attaching the Destiny Lab module to the station. Pretty amazing stuff. 53 days in space. But wait, there's more. He's a planetary scientist. In fact, here is one of his books, Planetology,

which he's also, are these in the auction, did you say? Are they for sale? No, they're for sale in the store. Thank you, Matt. My three books, Planetology and Skywalking, which is my astronaut memoir. And I have a World War II true story called Hellhawks that's also there.

And I'm pulling these right off of his website. I have not read Hellhawks, I'm sorry to say. I've looked through planetology, and I even understood a good piece of it. But the one that I absolutely recommend, particularly I would say to young people, but only because it may be the most inspiring to them, is the one that he just mentioned, Skywalking,

which has been declared one of the best books about space and about the experience of being in space ever written. And it's more than that. It's basically a biography, but it is more than that as well. It's much more than that. So thank you. Tom, again, it's a delight to talk to you. And it's good to be with you a second time face-to-face after the May meeting. It is. Thank you. Yeah, usually we have to do this by Skype or on the telephone. So this is a pretty exciting event. It's a nice thing to be part of this.

It's great, isn't it, to be with all of these people who kind of share the dream? SETI is a great outfit, and I was associated with them a couple of years ago working on a proposal to NASA to do an asteroid lander mission. And some of our, not corporate, but institutional sponsorship, as we worked with the team here at NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI organization, came together,

and we put together a very viable and exciting proposal to do an asteroid lander for NASA science exploration. And in the end, we didn't win the competition, but we gained a lot of experience with putting together a vehicle, a science instrument package. And I think that that concept of landing on a binary or this one was a tertiary asteroid system with three co-orbiting asteroids may find life in NASA's human exploration plans as a robot scout

for humans going to asteroids. A lot of your life now seems to be about those big rocks in space, including the ones that we need to be watching out for. Well, true. I mean, they're opportunity writ large. Asteroids visit us here on the Earth too frequently. They are our nearest neighbors in space.

Just yesterday, we had one asteroid come within 20 lunar distances of the Earth, a big one-kilometer-sized asteroid. And then they are potential knowledge stepping stones for humans establishing themselves and sustaining themselves in deep space on the way to Mars. People have begun to talk about using them for other things. In fact, you're an advisor to this new company that has gotten a lot of press lately, Planetary Resources, which has this rather ambitious

goal. Would you talk about that? Well, Planetary Resources is a privately held company that just announced in April that they plan to mine asteroids for profit. And it's put together by Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, Space Adventures, and Peter, of course, was in on the X Prize, the Ansari X Prize competition. And they've teamed up with Chief Engineer Chris Lewicki, who's their president, and he's a Jet Propulsion Lab veteran of the Mars Exploration Rover missions. So that team hopes to bootstrap their way up with small spacecraft to the point where they can manufacture cheap spacecraft, hitch rides on inexpensive rockets, and eventually scratch the surface of their exploration efforts, but also to figure out which parts of asteroids, which components of asteroids might be profitable to bring back to Earth.

Looking at platinum group elements, for example, which go for anywhere from $1,500 to $2,000 an ounce. Asteroids themselves are rich in those metals because they haven't gone through the planet-making process that the Earth has where most of those elements have sunk to the Earth's core and they're left over as these ancient remnants of solar system formation. They're left over in quantities that make them much more rich in platinum group elements, for example, than Earth ores can be.

That may be an eventual terrestrial application of space resources, but in the near term, the only way that we're going to sustain ourselves in space as human beings is to take advantage of the resources that are there, because otherwise the costs are just simply too astronomical to do for decades and decades. This is thinking big, to say the least. It's a great development to get outside the box of hauling everything up out of the gravity well of Earth. And of course, that's what kept me alive in space was taking a two-week, 18-day trip on the space shuttle. Every bit

of our sustenance and survival was dependent on what we brought with us, mostly material goods, but also what we could bring with us in our brains and get from mission control. And we're going to have to break those bonds. We're going to have to get autonomy from mission control on the ground as we go out into deep space. And we're going to have to break those bonds. We're going to have to get autonomy from mission control on the ground as we go out into deep space. And we're going to have to break those bonds of the supply line so that we can use the in-situ resources to keep ourselves alive on a world like the moon where the cost of getting stuff to the moon's surface, for example,

is 30 times as great as getting it up just to low Earth orbit. The economics is just a killer to try to sustain a moon base from the Earth. And then if you go farther out into the solar system, we have to use those supplies of water, oxygen, and then structural materials, radiation shielding, that are already there for the taking, if we can just apply our ingenuity and get some experience doing this. So it's great that Planetary Resources has taken the challenge on of starting this

process of commercializing the use of space resources. NASA may get to that point on its own, but it's so strapped budget-wise that I think that commercial innovation is going to help drive our use of resources. We, humanity, we've been here before. Whether it was Conestoga wagons or caravels going to the New World, and it was the same model. You couldn't bring everything you needed with you.

You had to live off the land, or in some cases, the sea. How does something to say about our nature? I think, obviously, the hostility of the neighborhood that the early colonists were going to in the New World wasn't as great as the challenges of the space environment. But there were other unknowns, I think, that were even more daunting to colonists 500 years ago.

We're lucky in some ways in that we know more about the destination that we're going to, and it lacks some of the indigenous hazards or the environmental hazards that we faced, the lack of understanding of the disease process, for example, 500 years ago. But it's fundamental that we get out of this box that we're in of trying to haul water at $10,000 a pound up from Earth's surface and make use of the abundant water that we're just learning about on the moon

and also we know from meteorite samples it's present in the asteroids. And it's a simple matter, for example, to get the water out of baking it with solar energy to 400 or 500 degrees Fahrenheit and then getting the evaporating water coming out of the right kind of asteroid and distilling it into not only drinking water but rocket fuel and breathing oxygen. So we have to start with a test tube-sized quantity of that stuff and then commercialize it to quantities that are useful in propulsion. But that's the goal of commercial enterprise, and it's also the goal of a few people at NASA,

but they just don't have the budget right now to make that a big part of the plans. In part, it's a catch-22. NASA says that we can't afford to work space resources into our exploration plans because it's too expensive and we don't have the technology. But we don't get the funding to develop the technology and make it less expensive because it's not built into the exploration plans. So we have to get out of that box, and the commercial companies may be able to unlock it for us. It does seem like we're entering into a new era in space exploration.

I think of SpaceX, even the suborbital folks. To a degree, although it's not a commercial operation, I mean, there's a panel going on right now, not far from us, where they're talking about really starting to seriously consider sending a starship to someplace outside our solar system. It just seems like a particularly exciting time. We're very lucky to be alive. I count myself very lucky to be a child of the space age, growing up during the 60s space

race and getting inspired by the Apollo astronauts and the Gemini astronauts to pursue aerospace and flying and planetary science myself. And think of it. We've gone from 100 years ago, a little bit more, from the beginnings of aviation to the point now where people have been on the moon. We're talking about going millions of miles out to nearby asteroids, which I think we'll see in the next 10 to 15 years.

We can conceptualize ideas about going to other stars. It was exciting this week to hear that Voyager 1 may be crossing the heliopause and getting into interstellar space. It's been on a journey since 1977. And Voyager was one of the things that propelled me into planetary science. And now it's crossing that boundary

where it's carrying some information about our civilization out into the interstellar medium. So I think probably the likeliest event is that we're going to catch up with Voyager before anybody else finds it and then play back that record to see how quaint it was. But it is a truly inspiring time, and

I think we'll be successful in the next generation, and we can look back with satisfaction if we can establish people not only on the space station permanently but self-sufficiently on the surface of the moon or getting to Mars one day. I would really like to see humans understand Earth-Moon space and then Mars one day as realms of commerce and industry as well as exploration

to make them part of our global economy where we're generating additional wealth in space as well as here on Earth and making not only scientific discoveries but discoveries about how to enrich our civilization and make life better for us back here. Neil deGrasse Tyson, among others, likes to talk about, you know, why do we really explore? And we'd like to think that it's just because it's the romance of it and what humans do, and that is, that's certainly part of it.

But the truth is, it has often been a profit motive. Martin Elvis is a Harvard astronomer who is working with us, with the asteroid resources community, on this question. And you're quite right in that history has shown that successful exploration ventures are often driven by fear in terms of national defense or security, but also the profit motive has to be one of the prime drivers. And the people who went to Jamestown were not there to analyze the stratigraphy of the Appalachian Mountains.

They were going there to make money and to establish themselves in a new world where there are new opportunities for their individual families. We're not at that point yet, but I would like to see at least us collectively enriching ourselves and investing, taking risks and investing in the future in making money from space. And maybe the most promising thing to look into is energy production in space, not helium-3 necessarily. Still have to invent the fusion reactors for that, but that's doable in a century perhaps.

But maybe just the simple process of capturing solar energy and adding it to the grid back here. And that can be enabled with building those solar power gathering satellites with the indigenous materials that are out there, the structural materials, the nickel, the iron, just the silicon-bearing rocks on asteroids, or the moon might be able to actually in half a century make that a reality. So that's where NASA and the commercial world can cooperate in proving the business case for something like solar power beaming back to Earth. That's astronaut, author, and planetary scientist Tom Jones.

We'll continue our conversation in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe.

this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan.

Tom Jones is back. He was my guest at a SETICON fireside chat not long ago. Tom spent 52 days in space on four shuttle missions. The last of these included three spacewalks. The planetary scientist is the author of Planetology and a terrific memoir called Skywalking. He agreed with me that there are indications of a bright future for humanity in space. Sir, right up here in the front. Yes, I was wondering, are there any plans to use the space station as a platform to launch missions or explorations like Arthur Clarke's expedition in 2001? Not only Arthur Clarke, but Wernher von Braun thought that a space station would be the

first step into the cosmos for humans, and then we would use that as a transportation hub to launch expeditions to the moon and then to Mars. It hasn't worked out that way because of the Cold War and the drive to put people on the moon first. The space station as it's currently constructed, a magnificent facility, and I think the three laboratories up there will really be spinning us some great discoveries in the years to come. But it's not in a great place for transportation. It's in a 51.6-degree orbit suited for us and the Russians primarily, and it's not a great place to launch off to the moon even, let alone the asteroids of the planet. So you get a lot more flexibility by launching spacecraft into a short-term parking orbit

and then heading off to the stars or to the planets. So the space station is more of a knowledge factory rather than a refueling station. And it may be that commercial enterprises looking at asteroid exploitation or lunar resource extraction, they may put temporary transportation hubs into the proper orbit for their uses rather than trying to bend the existing space station

with some kind of a penalty and cost to be a transportation hub. So when we made the transition from the space station freedom concept in the early 90s from an equatorial-type space station to an inclined orbit that suited the Russian launch sites as well as our own, that sort of took it out of the transportation hub purpose that it might have originally served. And besides, it doesn't have room for that Hilton that Kubrick built into, Kubrick and Clarka, built into the space station. But it's only the first international space station. Right. Let's hope. Next question?

I was going to agree with what you were talking about this morning with your work with the U.S. And I was wondering, what is the is it at all realistic for some sort of a rogue nation to try and do their own thing to destroy the incoming asteroid against the will of the U.S.? Is that kind of Tom Clancy novel stuff, or is that potentially realistic? We certainly know that around the world today, not everybody is singing from the same page in terms of our terrestrial interests. And when it comes to extraterrestrial interests, we might be surprised to see everybody cooperating at first. We've heard some great announcements from the Russians over the last few years that they were going to alter the orbit of the asteroid Apophis

to show how good they are at deflecting asteroids and how they can do a good job on that. Well, that's exactly the wrong target to pick to do an asteroid deflection demo because it's only got about a one-and-a-quarter million chance of ever hitting us, so we needn't worry about it. Don't mess with it. If you mess with it and push it into the wrong trajectory, you could raise the odds of it hitting us.

So that was just some ill-informed speaking on the part of the Russian Space Agency had a couple of years back. I think they've actually gotten the straight story since then. But you can never underestimate what somebody might do for their own national interests in terms of demonstrating their prowess in space. I hope they wouldn't pick asteroid deflection as a way to do that. I'd rather the Chinese develop their space station and perhaps do a lunar landing

rather than mess around unilaterally with asteroids. And that's the whole purpose of these UN discussions is to convince the space-faring countries of the world that unilateral action in terms of deflecting an asteroid isn't even in their own national interest. Even if it was targeted on Moscow, an asteroid, we would hope that the Russians would say, we're going to do this in a coordinated fashion, not only to lower the cost of it, but to actually get the benefit of a shared experience in doing a good, effective job of asteroid deflection. So let's start with an international deflection demonstration on a harmless, small asteroid, and then move from there with that confidence built up to sharing decision making about dealing with a real rogue threat. And we needn't worry that one's going to hit us tomorrow that will do anything more than make a nice bright flash in the sky. That's the most frequent event we have are the objects that burn up in the atmosphere. About 30 times a year we see a

Hiroshima-sized explosion in the atmosphere. And we can choose small objects a few meters across, perhaps as the first targets of deflection demos, because they can never make it through the atmosphere anyway. It would be safe to deflect a small object like that and then move up to being ready for future threats as they develop. You've got to remember that even a city-destroying explosion like the Tunguska event in 1908 only happens every few centuries. So it's not as if we have to be worried about an unseen city buster happening tomorrow.

We had an event 100 years ago. It could happen again tomorrow, but it's not very likely. We should say before we move on that this, your interest in near-Earth objects, these rocks that do threaten our planet, you're developing even better credentials for that. Don't you have an official position keeping an eye on these and developing policy? As a consultant, I often get work with NASA on its future path in terms of planetary defense. And two years ago, I was co-chairing a panel with Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikert, making strategic recommendations to NASA for planetary defense and what the agency should do with its budget and priorities on that.

And we made some recommendations to Charlie Bolden, and he hasn't gotten the budget from Congress to enact most of them, but talk is cheap, and talk is one of the most useful things we can do in terms of collaboration and cooperation. We can implement those changes right away. And then in terms of the Association of Space Explorers work I do, I'm the head of the Near Earth Objects Committee for that association, all the cosmonauts and astronauts

in our professional society. And we are the ones who sit at the table with the world's space-faring agencies at the UN and try to urge them to collaborate more quickly and more completely in terms of not only just sharing orbit information and warnings, but also talking about mission planning and getting plans on the shelf so that we know how to harness the technology when we do find an asteroid threat. We don't need missiles sitting on launch pads or in silos ready to intercept asteroids. We need warning, and then we need the knowledge about how to put a spacecraft together when we do see a threat.

And how many of you would like to be a member of that club, the Association of Space Explorers? I'm one. I think we might have time for one more. We have five minutes. To what extent do you think we need to worry about space debris when we can manage space missions in one place? The wrong way of back-touching space debris. Space debris is a big challenge. And I was on the NASA Advisory Council a few years ago where we examined this on a periodic basis and heard from the experts.

It's been a chronic problem as spent booster rockets and satellites that are dead run into each other, create an explosion or a debris field that then rains down on everything else that's working in space, including human spacecraft, like the space station. When I went up to the station on my last trip and we delivered the U.S. Destiny Laboratory at the size of a bus, it was designed and built with debris shields in the design that I manipulated on my spacewalks to put in place. That is the design approach you have to follow because you are going to be struck by the man-made and natural debris that you find in low Earth orbit. When the Chinese shot down their weather satellite with an anti-satellite rocket two, three years ago, I think it was in 2009,

they increased the hazard of space debris to the space station by a factor of two by taking that unilateral act. Very unwise in terms of being a good neighbor and unwise for their own future space station. So we hope that they'll be on board soon following the same protocols for disposing of spent satellites and rockets and not conducting harmful anti-satellite technology tests where it's going to harm everybody else.

You can do that in a way for your own defense that's less harmful to the human spaceflight endeavor. And even if everybody stopped contributing to the problem today, we would see a continuing climb in space debris for the next 30 years or so before atmospheric drag begins to pull some of the stuff out of its Earth orbit and the problem begins to resolve itself. International collaboration has helped get a handle on that problem, and I think that's

the future course for putting it to bed entirely in a half a century or so. We're just about out of time. I see some relatively young people out there. I just wonder as somebody who has had remarkable success both in space and working on space issues down here, space policy, space development, do you have any recommendations for people who want to join you? Well, it's not only just our job to be inspired by the efforts of people at this conference and scientists in all of the endeavors of space exploration, but we're part of making it happen through the political process. And so we just heard from Bill and I over lunch about how vital it is

to energize our planetary science budget again. And we can contact our representatives and talk to them about what the appropriate level of space spending should be on the government side. And of course we can boost the commercial efforts by becoming investors or consumers, perhaps, in that area in the years to come.

But I always tell young people that they have so many more opportunities than I have. I could only follow the government track to my dreams of space flight. And now we're going to have space plane pilots and adventure tour guides and hotel operators all giving you the chance to enjoy the human space experience as well as a core of discovery

that will always be in place, I hope, in this country. So I think that the opportunities in this next half century are really wide open for young people. And the best thing is that they'll have many more choices, which is what our democracy is all about in the first place. Last question, right here. So particularly with your insight involvement into the descending frontier, I mean, you mentioned, you talked about, you know, gathering materials

from asteroids, you know, some of the great and, you know, gardening materials from asteroids, you know, some of the great internet cooperation and, you know, up-weighting, you know, green fueling platform. What are some of the other, you think,

important stepping stones as we certainly move forward into a inter-solar system like ice? Well, I would like to see people establish themselves off-planet and not just 200 miles up

at the space station or in hotels up there. I would like to see a permanent outpost on the moon for scientific exploration. And of course, the astronauts there could also be working on resource extraction and expanding that realm of activity. And then it's very natural to me to think of brief visits to

nearby asteroids for astronauts on the way to establishing ourselves on Phobos and Deimos to teleoperate robots on the surface of Mars in preparation for humans finally taking the big leap out there. But that's going to depend on a foundation of a growing economic sphere around the Earth and the Moon. So we need entrepreneurs in space as well as explorers. And I think the entrepreneurs are going to be more numerous, and then they'll enable

the explorers to get their job done. We've got to get out and establish ourselves and I hope our country decides to do that. But if not, maybe they'll be dragged along by the money makers. And I hope that's going to help boost our fortunes. And I'm really a big believer in the commercialization of space as an innovator and as a way to lower the cost so governments can do more. Last question, Tom, for anybody who didn't hear it on the radio. What does space smell like? The space shuttle was a very laboratory-like environment with not a lot of aroma except

for your friends who were working up there. But when you did have the chance to do a space walk, you would be outside in your suit for seven, eight hours, and you would come back in, and the first thing you would notice when you repressurized the airlock and got the helmet off and could sniff the air again was this ozone-like, sharp, pungent smell. Some people have called it gunpowder-like or an acrid smell. To me, it smelled like a burning electrical insulation type of odor or the ozone that's given off from hot wires in an old radio or something like that.

And I think it was because these suits exposed to the atomic oxygen environment in low Earth orbit were picking up little oxygen atoms and absorbed onto the surface. And when you got back into O2 and nitrogen in the atmosphere of your airlock, those molecules created ozone, O3, which got to your nostrils. And that's created the smell of space. It does dissipate after just a few hours

of that material being back inside. So I think that's the explanation, at least the best one I've heard. And it's there to experience for yourselves when you get to go. I'm saving up my money for my flight. I hope you are, too. Absolutely. Please help me thank Tom Jones for joining us for this Fireside Chat.

It's been a pleasure. Astronaut and author Tom Jones, with me at SETICON. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here. In fact, I'm here in his office for this immediate post-PlanetFest, post-Curiosity Landing conversation. But because we're recording this by necessity before the landing, as we said with Bill, we don't know the status. That's why we're not going to talk about it much.

But everyone else does. You know more than we do right now. In fact, they probably always know more. Just in general, that's true. But in case you don't know, here's some things in the night sky. But in case you don't know, here's some things in the night sky. We got some cool stuff going on. August 13th and 14th, those nights. If you look over in the west, low in the west, you will see a lineup of Saturn above Mars above Spica. So looks like three stars lined up. The top one is Saturn looking yellowish. The middle one is mars looking reddish

and the bottom one is the star spica looking bluish but wait don't order yet if you look about a week later on august 21st there's a nice old square rectangle-y thing where the moon pops in with all three of them but mars just keeps moving relative to the rest of the gang you make me wish i believed in astrology what an odd concept maybe they would tell you that your life will be a disaster i don't know fortunately i don't know uh yeah i'm just gonna leave that uh another cool thing going on it's that time of year again for the perseids meteor shower the perseids peak on august 12th 13th so you can check out the whole gang all at one time pretty much any indication that this will be a better than average year no but it's better

than average in that there is little competition from moonlight so like last year got very washed out by full moon this year we have a early phase moon so good year to go stare at the sky with the perseids as, you'll probably get more after midnight, but you should be getting them all night from a dark site. In other words, not what we have here in Southern California, or at least this part of Southern California. You will see about, on average, about 60 meteors per hour. So go out, relax, stare up at the sky, and look for meteors. It's fun. fun i do have to mention pre-dawn still has super bright jupiter above super bright venus low in the east we move on to this week in space

history 2005 mars reconnaissance orbiter was launched still working great doing great great great stuff around the red planet uh we go farther back 1990 magellan entered orbit around venus and then back to the Martian system. Yes, that's right. It was 1877, this week, when Aesop Hall discovered the moon Temos of Mars. Okay, we move on to... Space fact. We're all kind of tired getting ready for Planet Fest.

That's for sure. I bet we're even more tired when this comes out. I will make some mention of mars science laboratory which deployed its parachute its parachute had has 80 suspension lines they are over 50 meters long and the diameter of the parachute is about 16 meters. That is a hulking chute. Yes, hulking chute. We move on to the trivia contest, and we asked you, what are the features on Saturn's moon Enceladus named after? How did we do, Matt?

People love this one. They were fascinated by the source of these names. And, of course, they come from the International Astronomical Union. They're the ones who decided this should be the source of these names. And, of course, they come from the International Astronomical Union. They're the ones who decided this should be the source, I guess. And the source, as you well know, is 1001 Arabian Nights because, I guess, all the features on Saturnian moons have to come from epic stories. Epic. It's totally epic. Yes, there are these different interesting naming conventions,

which is why I come back with naming conventions, because I think they're cool. Rick Rubio of Omaha, Nebraska. Past winner, but it's been a good long while. He's the one who got in via random.org with the correct answer. We thank everybody else, but it's Rick who's going to get a Fisher Space Pen engraved with Planetary Radio and the Planetary Society. I'm glad people enjoyed the naming because I've got another naming type thing for us.

The International Astronomical Union, the kings and queens of naming, have given the official name now of Aeolus Mons to the mountain in Gale Crater, where Curiosity was sent to land nearby. It's what they wanted to explore. NASA and the science team had applied a name previously before this official name came around. What was the NASA, what turned out to be unofficial name for it, and who was it named after? And a little hint that will help probably none of you. I had him as a professor. Ooh, that's impressive. Alright, well how do they enter? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to

enter. You have until the 13th of August 2012 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And also that week, the week of August 13th, is when you and I will be heard on Planetary Radio Live at PlanetFest because we're going to record the next PlanetFest, excuse me, Planetary Radio Live on Saturday evening at that great event. It's all so exciting.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about sleeping. Thank you, and good night. I'm sorry, I nodded off there. What did you say? He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Join us next time for another Planetary Radio Live.

We'll be coming to you from PlanetFest 2012, the Planetary Society's celebration of Curiosity's landing on Mars. My special guests will be the great author and space enthusiast, Andrew Chaikin, and NASA's former Mars czar, Scott Hubbard. 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 members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.