Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Bleeding Edge--NIAC Chooses 12 New Out There Projects

Episode Date: August 12, 2013

They might be happy if one in ten of the projects they fund makes it in the real world…because that project just might change the world. We talk with Jay Falker, Program Executive for the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program about 12 crazy and not so crazy ideas that have just received early seed funding. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We return to the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program that has just given early funding to 12 fascinating projects that excite the imagination. NIAC Program Executive Jay Falker is our guest. We've also got Bill Nye, Bruce Betts, and the Planetary Society Senior Editor, Emily Lakdawalla, who joins us right now. Emily, it's a topic that we already talked about a little bit last week,

but it seems that this one-year anniversary of Curiosity has ignited a little bit of criticism. I won't say a firestorm. I don't think it's that strong. But you answer it in a recent blog entry. It might even be too strong to call it criticism, but I do have scientists talking to me about, oh, what has Curiosity accomplished so far anyway? And the fact of the matter is it's been on Mars for a year and has driven about a kilometer and a half right now, about a mile, and has drilled two holes, and they've got four scientific publications. So those are the statistics, which doesn't seem all that impressive for one year. But of course, you know that they've been doing an awful lot of work.

They've been getting this incredibly complex machine to operate on Mars, and now they are off for their journey toward the mountain. And we have so much great science to look forward to. You point out something that I had no idea that this was the case, that apparently good old Opportunity is a smarter driver than Curiosity? That's right, because after all, Opportunity has had 10 years for her programmers to work on developing her software. Curiosity landed on Mars with a version of driving software that was based on what has been operating Opportunity and her sister Spirit for so many years on Mars. But you know, they couldn't start out, they couldn't jump out of the gates with all the software and all of the possible features working at once. They had to validate each piece of it one bit at a time. And of course,

it's also important that Curiosity is a completely different rover that weighs a lot more with bigger wheels that has different kinds of cameras and different positions on the rover. So they had to work through everything and make sure everything was safe before they enabled some more advanced capabilities. So Curiosity has done most of its driving so far through blind driving, which is where the rover drivers basically pick a target that they can see in Curiosity's images and say, drive this way for so many meters and then turn so many degrees and that way for so many meters and then you're done. Well, there are some extra levels of sophistication that can be added to that. There's hazard avoidance where the rover

checks the HAZCAM images right in front. Those are the belly-mounted camera images to make sure that there's no rocks that are in the way that are going to be hazardous to the rover. And then there's something called auto-nav, where the drivers basically pick some waypoints and then say, okay, rover, now you find the best way to get there. And it's auto-nav that Curiosity is not able to do yet, but which hopefully I understand from the mission should be brought online sometime in the very near future. And then I hope we'll see that rover making a lot more progress toward that very promising ridge that is visible off in the distance. Emily, I also want to mention you have the cover of Sky

and Telescope this month. I'm looking at the cover right now. We didn't mention the topic last week. You want to say something about that? Sure. It's water on Mars, which I know is a topic that sets a lot of people's eyes rolling. But in this article, I endeavor to actually answer the question, what do we really know about water on Mars and why are we still studying it? I'm pretty proud of this article, actually. I've heard back from a couple of different professors who say that they plan to use it in their introductory planetary science classes in the fall. So I'm kind of excited about that. Very cool. It's the September 2013 issue of Sky and Telescope magazine.

And Emily, we will talk to you again next week. See you then, Matt. She's the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist. And need I say, once again, a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye. Bill, as always, lots of news out of the space industry, the world of space exploration. Would you say that the top story of the last week is the imminent departure of Lori Garver? Yeah, the deputy administrator of NASA, the world's largest space agency.

She just, if I may, up and quit. Now, I saw her last week because I was at last on the NASA Advisory Council, which we call the NAC. Yes, an acronym within an acronym. And we talked about the education budget essentially being zeroed out. Everybody was supposed to come forward by everybody. Different organizations within NASA were supposed to come forward and reestablish their education, public outreach, their so-called EPO goals and objectives and plans. But it sends the whole thing in a kind of disarray. And then Lori's quitting. Ms. Garver's quitting. Somehow part of it. She is the big advocate, you know, of commercial space. This is to say of spending about $750 million, $780 million U.S. to develop independent companies, contractors to make new rockets, new ways to get into low Earth orbit. This is SpaceX, Sierra Nevada Corporation,

Bigelow. With her quitting, I don't know what's going to happen. Do you? Not in the least. I was going to ask you the same question. There have to be some of these companies have got to be a bit nervous with their number one advocate gone. Yeah, because the administrator called me Charlie Bolden. He's a pilot. He flew space shuttles and he's been supported by Congressman Bill Nelson from Florida. He is an advocate of NASA doing things the way it has done it for so many years, is building their own rockets, their own capsules, albeit with commercial contractors, but it's NASA-designed stuff. So without this competition, I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen. For those of you who like

to worry about things, this is a good time. And by the way, right on the heels of the meeting of the NAC and all this uproar about cutting the EPO budgets was the anniversary of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars. Here's NASA celebrating this big accomplishment. At the same time, the future is uncertain. Well, let me just say, Planetary Society is in there, man. We are following this thing very closely, and we are going to advocate what we strongly believe is the most productive path for humankind in deep space. Thank you, Matt. Thank you. And you can bet that we're going to try and talk to Lori Garver on this program,

if she'll have us. Maybe hear a little bit from her about where she thinks her former agency, soon-to-be former agency, will head from here. In the meantime, we'll keep talking to the chief executive of the Planetary Society. That's Bill Nye the Science Guy. Up next, another NASA official, the head of NAC. I can't say it any better than the NIAC webpage. The NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program nurtures

visionary ideas that could transform future NASA missions with the creation of breakthroughs, radically better or entirely new aerospace concepts, while engaging America's innovators and entrepreneurs as partners in the journey. We first talked about NIAC on Planetary Radio back in 2005. It was a conversation with its founder and longtime leader, Bob Casanova.

More recently, we visited a NIAC symposium to talk about ways to protect astronauts from deadly space radiation. The program is now headed by Jay Falker. Jay was only able to join us by cell phone for a recent conversation. Jay, thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio, and congratulations on yet another round of awards by NIAC. Hi, Matt. Thank you very much. Yes, we are extremely excited about the new collection.

Before we sample some of the so-called Phase I awards, please remind people who may not have heard our 2005 conversation with the NIAC founder, Bob Casanova, tell us what NIAC is all about. Glad to. NIAC stands for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. And I'm glad you mentioned Bob Casanova and the original NIAC because it started as the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. And that was a new construct for NASA. It was funded by NASA, but an external virtual institute. And what Bob Casanova did was find a way to fund truly revolutionary

research, visionary concepts that might change the future. Things that are close to science fiction, but not truly science fiction. They were scientifically and technically credible, and they enabled NASA to help figure out where future plans might go and direct the investments toward them. NIAC, when it started, was from a consortium of universities, and then it kind of went away. How did it end up coming back and very much within the NASA umbrella? Good question. The original institute ran for nine years, and when it went away, it did not do so because some part of NASA said, we don't need NIAC anymore. It was unfortunately funded out of a part of NASA that received a budget cut during the time when NASA was extremely focused on return to the moon.

So it was sort of an unintended side effect of when we received a budget cut and that part of the agency had to respond, they just said, well, it's not directly helping us get to the moon in a few years? And of course, that was not the mandate of NIAC, so that program was cut. And only one year after that, I think, the National Research Council

was asked by Congress to take a look at it. And they did a review of the original institute, and they basically concluded it was doing what it was asked to do. It was exploring visionary, revolutionary concepts that others were not, and that some of those concepts were making it into NASA plans, and some were being picked up by development

by both NASA and others outside of NASA. So they said, this is a good thing. There should be an early research program like this, and we encourage NASA to bring it back. There was a new position created called the Chief Technologist, and we encouraged NASA to bring it back. There was a new position created called the Chief Technologist, and the first one brought in, he worked directly for the administrator, was Bobby Braun. And he called me out in Houston, asked me to come to headquarters and help him stand up this new set of space technology programs, one of which would be

bringing NIAC back. I called Bob Casanova, the original director of NIAC, asked him if he would do it. He said no, he was retired, he didn't want to come all the way back out of retirement, but he was really glad we were bringing NIAC back and he would work with us to help do so. We basically took a look at the NRC report and they said the original NIAC was very good, there are a couple of things you could do to make it stronger. One of those recommendations was allow NASA to participate as well, because when it was purely

external, it was hard to get NASA researchers aware of the ideas and the concepts, and sort of partnered or interested in developing them further. And it's so good to hear that Bob Casanova had a hand in bringing back this concept, which

really was kind of his brainchild for so long. And I'm glad that he's enjoying a full retirement now. Let's get to these projects. First of all, how do they get selected? And how do they get presented to you? Is there a peer review process here? Yes. Twice a year, we have a solicitation goes out, a NASA research announcement

or NRA. And for phase one, that's completely open. So anybody working in the U.S., whether a university, company, NASA, other agency, can apply for a NASA phase one award. And then the phase two NRA is also open, but to be eligible, you have to have completed a phase one study. So phase twos are only open based on phase one. They continue to work. That's exactly the model that Bob Casanova had set up. In fact, when I asked him about sort of the secrets of success of the original NIAC, he

felt the peer review process was the most important thing. You have to write a proposal that stimulates people to be creative and think differently and push limits, challenge the rules. And you need to get reviewers to come together and be open-minded. They need to be expert enough to review these advanced concepts, understand the physics and the engineering, but they have to be open to new things that maybe aren't the way we usually do it. And so we in NIAC have a panel peer review process where individual reviews are written in advance.

Then the reviewers come together and discuss it in a panel. And then the top rated ones are brought forward to headquarters for selection. More innovation at the edge is a minute away as we continue our conversation with NIAC program executive Jay Falker. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water in the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do. And together, we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds.

Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in

through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. NIAC is the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. Program Executive Jay Falker has been giving us background information. Of course, I wasn't going to let Jay go without hearing about a few of the projects

that have just received roughly $100,000 each in seed money. So now you have this group of 12 newly funded projects in this phase one group that was just announced two or three weeks ago. They certainly fit the profile that you're talking about as I look over this summary. They are well outside the box, if you'll pardon that expression. Would you just, I know you don't want to play favorites here, but I wonder if there are some that you could single out just to give us an idea of the diversity of projects that have been funded in this round. I'm happy to do so. So one of the things I love is that we get the opportunity not just to give these visionary ideas a chance,

but to fund a suite of them, a portfolio at a time. And so when we get to the final recommendations from our review panel, it is really great to look at the top, whatever number we get to fund. This year, we have 12, as you noted. Last year, we had 18. The year before, we had 30. So I want to take a second to say we are not on a declining going out of business curve. What really happened is the first year we had only phase ones, no phase twos, hence 30. Second year we started off phase twos and my boss is the source selection official,

selected 10, which is actually a higher number than our steady state will be. If you guess on average with a stable NASDAQ budget, we'll fund about 18 phase 1, 6 Phase 2s. And our budget's completely stable. Nobody is trying to move it down. They haven't given me more yet. Good.

I'm glad to hear that because, of course, in this time of sequestration, I was a little worried about you guys. Thanks. Yeah, we are really fortunate to have so many supporters of NIAC inside and outside of NASA. And so this budget is stable, and it looks like it's going to continue to be so. So what happened was my boss selected more Phase 2s the first time he could on purpose to give those Phase 1s a chance to go forward. And what that did since Phase 2 to two-year award is it put a lien on our budget for this year. So before we selected any new ones, we knew we'd be funding those 10 in year two.

That's the reason there's fewer phase ones this year. We got 12. I hope we'll get about six phase twos selected later this summer. And anyway, the NIAC budget, the award pool is staying the same. It's just paying for the different numbers at different times.

Now let me turn to the question you asked. When we end up with this set set it's great to look across them and we see you know are there some that might help science or human exploration or aeronautics are there some that seem crazier than others or or closer to science fiction and are there some that may help people here on the ground i am so proud to say that every year what has come out of our panels has been a set where all of those are met. One for aeronautics is called Eternal Flight as the Solution for X. I guess a little bit of a cryptic name, the Solution for X part refers to the Google X Prize.

But the important part is Eternal Flight. If you picture the blades, the rotors of a helicopter, this sort of looks like that, but the blades are stretched far apart on tethers, like cables, with a sort of central Frisbee-like thing. And the idea is that those blades can spin faster. They can generate more lift. If each of those has, at its tip, perpendicular, a tiny propeller, so almost a little propeller on the end of each of the rotors,

making it rotate around, and they're held together by the central tethers. The reason for doing this is that it's extremely, extremely efficient. The tethers let those blades be far apart. The end of the blade's going fastest, so it gets the most lift. And so it can essentially stay wherever you put it, and it doesn't require much power to do that. And the idea this NIAC proposer has proposed is to put these in the high altitude as a geo-aeroset, so like a geostationary satellite, but not far, far up in geostationary orbit. Instead, here in the atmosphere, wherever we want it. And this can have applications for science. You put one where you want to take measurements.

You leave it there. It's essentially free. That's why he called it eternal flight. Essentially free to operate. Both solar power and wind power, in fact, can be harvested by this. Could be used for Wi-Fi. Generated anywhere you want, everywhere you want. So the applications for this are just enormous.

We will put up the link to where all of these Phase I selections are listed, and there are links to each one of these projects. And so I got to see the rendering of this flying machine that looks like nothing else that has ever taken to the sky, and it really is quite, quite fascinating. How about, have you got a space one for us? An odd space one that I want to talk about is biomaterials out of thin air. Oh, yeah. So this one, the idea is a little bit like 3D printing, and that is bigger and bigger. And NIAC has explored it, in fact, just in our last two years of studies, in several different ways. A way to

use a small 3D printer in space to create a giant structure in orbit, or to basically 3D print whole buildings on the moon or Mars. Those are both being studied right now in NIAC. There's a new proposal. It says biomaterials. And so this is an extremely clever idea to use in C2 resources. Say if you go to Mars, you send your printer and you send certain kinds of microbes and bacteria and you print with those.

They send certain kinds of microbes and bacteria, and you print with those. You sort of feed them the right chemicals from the local environment, and they are able to grow a structure with the 3D printing. And you can then create extremely advanced materials. This is a revolution. It's well beyond anything done in 3D printing, in fact, that I've ever heard of. So I'm really excited NIAC's going to explore that. We also have propulsion. The kinds of things that we often explore in NIAC would be a new force for propulsion,

like the plasmonic force, or an extremely advanced fission-fusion one called PUS. Absolutely fascinating stuff. I mean, new ways to get to Mars, and a place already ready for you to live in when you get there that's been built by microbes. So we got time for maybe one more. And I'm going to ask you to tell us about this. And I hope I pronounced the word correctly. Topher-inducing transfer habitat for human stasis to Mars.

Are we talking about suspended animation? Almost, Matt. So I'm glad you picked this one to ask about because it's a really good NIAC candidate. It's controversial. It's the kind of thing where people look at that and they say, what? Is that even possible? So no, suspended animation or stasis is not possible. We love the idea. It's in science fiction for a reason. If you could just go to sleep and then wake up and be at Mars or some other system, that would be the most painless, easiest trip you could possibly take.

Yeah, just don't give HAL 9000 the controls. Exactly. So while that's not possible yet, what these proposers said might be is something closer to hibernation, like bears do in the winter. And one of the technical terms for that is torpor. In fact, in this proposal, I learned there are four different kinds of deep sleep, at least, that higher mammals do. And that's as opposed to the things that, like, frogs can just be frozen under a pond for a while, fall out, and be fine. So the more complicated you are, the more complicated it is to go into a deep sleep.

But this might be possible for humans one day. They essentially said, we have a medical doctor on the team who will be looking into what that might take and how far into the future it might be. But the key to this study right now is, let's assume that torpor works. If you could do a human mission to Mars that way, how much smaller would your crew vehicle be?

What other systems and consumables would you need? Do they use much, much less air? Do they require much less food? Of course, you would also need more automation, more safety. We would not want to have 9,000 mishaps. We might even need to keep a crewman awake at all times. If we wanted to keep somebody awake, you would have to have more volume for them, more air, more food, and everything else. But this trait study will actually do a preliminary design, flesh all that out, and then go tell us, how does that compare to the missions that we've analyzed before? Is it much less mass?

Is it much easier to do? And if we learn from that that one of these options with torpor would be really attractive, we can then guide future investments and say, all right, we want to work with some medical doctors, find out if we can really do this. I wish we had time to go into every one of these 12 that have been funded in Phase 1 by NIAC. But we're out of time. We'll just tell people, go and take a look at the website. We'll have that link up at planetary.org slash

radio where this individual show is listed. Maybe sometime we can talk more about some of the stuff that's come out of this phase two and beyond innovations in this effort really to create a brave and innovative new world. I congratulate you, and anybody who listens to this show knows that this is a program that I think is just outstanding. Thanks so much for joining us on the show. Thank you, Matt. I am so excited in your interest and that of your listeners. I'll mention real quick that a short way to find us on the web is www.nasa.gov slash NIAC, N-I-A-C. And also on there are the other space tech programs.

So there's a portfolio of things we're doing from the very visionary to the very near term. Yeah, NIAC is hardly the only innovation being sponsored by NASA. Jay Falker is the NIAC program executive. That's the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program. He has worked for the agency for a long time, also out there in the private sector. He was awarded the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal for some of his work.

It continues as he runs this pretty amazing program. We're going to take a look at the night sky, as always, with our friend Dr. Bruce Betts when we get to What's Up in a moment. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Got him on the Skype line. It's Bruce Betts, the Director of projects for the Planetary Society. Welcome back.

I hope that you will tell us about the night sky, and we're going to have fun revealing the answer to the trivia contest this week because people just love this. I found this very amusing, which is why I asked it. But we'll get back to that. Perseid meteor shower time peaking on August 12th and 13th, but I mention it anyway, no matter when you're hearing it this week, because it is a rather broad peak to the Perseids, so you should have increased meteor activity throughout this week, and you can check them out by going and staring at the night sky. The good news is there's very little interference

from moonlight. You can have 60 to 100 meteors per hour at the peak from a dark site, but in any case, you should be able to see some if you're patient and stare up at the sky. Better after midnight, but even in the evening, you can do pretty well. Also, still got groovy planets up, so Venus still looking super bright low in the west shortly after sunset, and in the pre-dawn, we've got Jupiter looking super bright and also reddish Mars over in the east, and they'll just keep getting higher as the weeks and months go along, and even easier to see and eventually move into the evening sky. Move on to this week in space history. This week, 2005 Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, MRO, launched, and it's still just returning such very cool data from orbit around Mars

as part of the Mars Armada. Pictures of little tiny things. Yes, and really big things. But yes, the wonderful spy camera in orbit around Mars gives us really cool resolution. Can't quite read the license plates on the rovers, but we can see the rovers. Random space fact.

That was quite a transition of style there. It became kind of a cruder at the end. So in approximate numbers, Venus surface pressure is equivalent to about one kilometer under the Earth's oceans. I love that one. But going a little farther, the deepest point in the Earth's ocean is about 11 kilometers under the surface of the ocean. If you were a Venusian exploring the Earth, you would say that the pressure at the bottom of the deepest part of the Earth's ocean is about 11 atmospheres. 11 Venusian atmospheres, that is. But you see, they'd say just atmosphere. I love this.

Yeah. Even better would be if you came from like deep in the ocean of Europa. Oh, well, they've already visited and they just they didn't like our Russian. Not enough pressure. Too open. Yeah. Too open to the sky. Really? Kind of creepy for him yeah

yeah okay all right we'll move on to the trivia contest and we have this uh this fun one i i'm just so amused by this in a sick kind of way i asked you what does the mission insignia so things that would be used like on patches for the Skylab 2 mission say on it besides the crew member's name. What did we find out, Matt? We found out that our audience or that portion of them that entered the contest this week also found this very amusing. Many of them were surprised and amused and thanked you for giving them this piece of information. So what did it say, Matt? It said Skylab 1. It did indeed. The Skylab 2 insignia said Skylab 1. Technically Skylab with a Roman numeral 1, so like Skylab I, which was I only mentioned because by the time they got to 3, they actually switched to Arabic

numerals just to keep it completely confusing. And did anyone discuss why this was true? Quite a few people came up with this, and they said, now I only know what I read, but they said that it was because the first Skylab mission, Skylab 1, was unmanned, or we would say now un-humaned. It was indeed. So the first human Skylab mission was technically Skylab 2, but some type of hideous miscommunication led to patches being designed for Skylabs 2, 3, and 4 that said Skylabs 1, 2, and 3. Texas. We're going to send her the brand new Planetary Radio t-shirt, the redesigned t-shirt. I want to mention this one that we got from Omaha, Nebraska. Someone who also said it was called Skylab 1 on the patch and added a 1970s family road trip had less confusion than the numbering debacle for the Skylab missions. This came from Clark Griswold. No, actually, it came from Matt Lathrop. Wow. Movie trivia. Yeah, that's what we're here for.

Speaking of trivia, shall I move on to the next contest? Please do. What were the two most recent missions launched specifically to explore Venus, and what have been their fates? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and enter and try to win what, Matt? Another fabulous new Planetary Radio t-shirt? Oh, yeah. We're going to keep giving these away for a while because there are so many people out there who have the old one. And, you know, they want to remain stylish.

They want to be mod. Cool. And when do they need to get that in, Bob? By the 19th this time. By the 19th of August. That's a Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody go out there, look up in the night sky and think about what amusing thing you could use super glue on. Thank you and good night. I don't want to tell you some of the things that we did with super glue at the college radio station many, many years ago.

Oh, boy. Terrifying. Yeah, actually it was, at least for the victim it was. He's Bruce Betts, and my lips are sealed. Oh, gosh. are sealed. Oh, gosh. I'm going to keep a bottle of acetone around now that I know you have this

penchant for super-gluing inappropriate things. You're a wise man. He is not just wise, he's the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society who joins us each week here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California

and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the innovative members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.