Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Bob Richards of Moon Express

Episode Date: November 29, 2017

Moon Express Founder and CEO Bob Richards shares an inspiring vision for a return to the Moon. It includes introduction of a sophisticated line of robotic spacecraft, the first of which may make a soft landing next year.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Bob Richards and Moon Express, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Ed Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. One of five teams may win the $20 million Google Lunar X Prize next year. Bob Richards says he'd be fine with that, but his dreams are much, much bigger. He'll share them with us in a few minutes. Bruce Betts surprises me with an anniversary celebration on this week's What's Up segment. You can join the party. And then there's Bill Nye, the science guy. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, welcome back. We haven't talked for a while.

You've been here and there, all over the United States anyway, as far as I know, with that new documentary about this science guy. It's wild, Matt. It's wild. It's a film all about me. And, of course, there's a part in the middle where I kind of want to kill myself. You know, I signed a deal where I have no creative control over the final edit. You know, it's a revealing portrait, briefly.

It is an honest, sometimes painfully honest portrait of you, the science guy. It is a beautiful film, though I, as you know, I love it. And I... What do you like about it? What do I like about it? I like, first of all, I love it. What do you like about it? What do I like about it?

I like, first of all, it's entertaining. Second, it is a passionate statement for science and the truth to be found therein. And somebody who I admire. That's what I like about it. Okay? You heard enough? Just trying to change the world here, people. How hard could it be? Okay. Let like about it. Okay? You heard enough? I'm just trying to change the world here, people. How hard could it be?

Okay. Let's change it. Oh, and by the way, the film is still making the rounds, and it's going to be on PBS, what, next year, I think, right? Early next year? In the spring, yeah. And so there's a new thing called PBS Distribution. You know, it's a streaming service, PBSD. And it will air on public broadcasting stations at some point.

You know, I don't know if you remember this, television used to come through the sky and be captured by antennas. Yeah, it'll do that too. Okay, here's a good segue. You know what else comes through the sky? Photons from other solar systems that the WFIRST telescope is supposed to catch, but apparently it's getting expensive. You know, it's a flagship mission. Right now, there's a push to cut costs. There's a

discussion about removing, or rather not including one of the instruments, the coronagraph, a gizmo that's able to look at stars and see corona without getting the aperture or the charge couple device overwhelmed by the brightness of the star itself and if you eliminate that sigh big sigh it's gonna it would be harder to look at the atmospheres of exoplanets the planets that would be orbiting these distant stars. And that's sort of the search for life, the fundamental question we all ask, are we alone in the universe? And to take that off the mission is just, what is the word? Arms akimbo. A little frustration from Bill, the taxpayer.

It'd be disappointing. It would certainly be disappointing. It would be disappointing. Yes, indeed. This whole thing of trying to save money on flagship missions, always frustrating. I know, I know there's a lot to spend money on. There's big talk of cutting taxes, so there'll be less money for everybody, NASA included. But it's frustrating. Then, let's see, WFIRST, Wide Field Infrared Space Telescope. I mean, it'll be a new thing. It'll be the next telescope where we will make fundamental discoveries about the cosmos and our place within it. So I hope the chronograph doesn't get cut. Speaking of too much light, as in not having a chronograph, there's this interesting story about light pollution increasing on our own planet.

on our own planet. Yeah, because it is believed that because light emitting diode lights, LEDs, are enabling so many people to have lights that there's more light pollution. People, people, people, that more people have light is good. That means the developing world is becoming the developed world. That's good. We can control this. We can put so-called hats on lights so that we don't waste light by blasting it out into space. This could be, this is an opportunity, everybody. Let's not take away lights. Let's make the lights we have more efficient and use them more wisely. Let's go. And your local astronomer will thank you. Well, everybody. I mean, just think about it for no other reason. If spacecraft can see all the human lights, all the lights we use at night, right there, that indicates to me that we're making more photons than we need. We're shooting them up into space rather than directing them down where we're walking around and playing ultimate frisbee and baseball and cricket and all these other important things. Astronomers win and so does the environment. That's right.

It's win, win, win. Let's put hats on our LEDs. We can do this, people. Carry on, Matt. It's good to talk with you again. Thank you, Bill. It is good to talk to you. The documentary, by the way, is Bill Nye, Science Guy. You can Google it, and it might be coming to your hometown. If not, as he said, PBS in the spring. And of course, Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society. There is an inspired and inspiring group of space entrepreneurs who grew up in what they themselves call the space generation. Driven by watching astronauts step on the moon, by early robots exploring the solar system,

and some of them by mentors like Carl Sagan, they are building revolutionary rockets, learning how to mine asteroids, and creating huge networks of tiny satellites. Bob Richards has set his sights on creation of a line of spacecraft that can land on and return from that nearby body where Neil and Buzz took their fateful steps. Bob is the founder and CEO of Moon Express, which hopes to reach that target in 2018. By doing so, it just might win the Google Lunar X Prize,

which includes the award of $20 million, even more if certain milestones are met. When we talked a few days ago, I learned there is far more to Bob's plans than winning that prize, and there's far more to Bob's long history of enthusiasm for space exploration and development. Enthusiasm he has fostered in others through a

variety of projects and organizations. He joined me from the headquarters of Moon Express on Florida's Space Coast. Bob Richards, this is another one of those interviews that should have taken place a long, long time ago on Planetary Radio. Entirely my fault. Thank you for finally joining us on the show. Matt, thank you for inviting me. It's an honor to be here for sure, and I appreciate the opportunity. You have called the moon the eighth continent. What are you trying to communicate with that way of describing our big natural satellite? Matt, I think we're quite lucky in planetary terms to have a two-world system that can help leverage not just our understanding of the universe, but as a springboard, as humanity expands, as a multi-world civilization. The world as an eighth continent, I like that metaphor.

It's a voyage that's not too far. It's a landmass that we can all see. not too far. It's a landmass that we can all see. And it's very convenient that we have this island in the ocean of space, the closest island in this kind of planetary archipelago that is reachable, and we can learn so much from it. We've learned so much about it, of course, through the early Apollo and other robotic explorations by a number of countries. But there's so much more to learn from a scientific perspective, but also from my perspective, from an economic perspective, and moving humanity's economic sphere outward to the moon that can help propel us as a multi-world civilization

outward to other places in the solar system and eventually the stars. You must be pretty excited about what we've been hearing from Washington, D.C. lately, including from the newly reconstituted National Space Council about this new or at least renewed focus on the moon. Well, you are right. I am very excited about that. It's taken a while. And I was there for that first meeting of the National Space Council and was witness to that event. And I think it was a genuine event. I very much like the transparency of it. And looking forward to an alignment, as much as can be found in Washington these days, toward a return to the moon with a vision beyond, of course. A lot of people at NASA are very excited about this.

I personally know the hopeful to be confirmed incoming NASA administrator, Jim Bridenstine, and I know how excited he is about the moon. So I'm really happy about this. And this comes from a Mars, I mean, I have to say I'm a Mars guy. I mean, it was Carl himself who first sparked my infatuation with the red planet. As I think you know, Matt, I was a graduate student at Cornell and I did my time counting craters on Mars. That wasn't, well, let's not specify too closely here. It was in the 80s. I would say that I was Steve Squires. I might've been there at the same time that Steve Squires was there, but it was 20 years later that I had the honor of participating in a NASA mission to Mars, the Phoenix Mars

lander mission. From at that time, my Canadian company provided the meteorological station, the LIDAR system that went on the Phoenix Mars lander and landed on the North Pole of Mars. And we had the first laser light show on Mars and we learned a lot. So it was a capstone of definitely a bucket list thing, but a funny thing happened on my way to Mars. I discovered the moon. So now you have this company, Moon Express, and it is the first company to get permission to land there. But on top of that, why was November 25th, 2015 such a red letter day for you and others who are interested in that lunar body. That was the day that President Obama at the time signed into law the Space Resource Realization Exploration Act of 2015.

That was a momentous day. We in the industry and government had worked hard to find some definition of how the United States would interpret its obligations under the Outer Space Treaty for private sector activity in space. And this law, although I think implicitly already in the Outer Space Treaty, was explicit to say that it's finders keepers, that materials peacefully obtained in space by private entities and consistent with the other obligations of the Outer Space Treaty are rightfully yours. Not to be confused with any sort of territorial claim, not to be confused with any sort of claim to any celestial body or appropriation of territory. This is just about the ownership of objects or material that

you remove from celestial bodies or that you find in space, that when you obtain those through your own investment and effort, you own those. And that's an important principle. You use an analogy that I really like, and it has to do with commercial fishing. Thank you for that. I often talk about the regulatory void beyond Earth orbit. Earth orbit tends to be well-defined with decades of commercial activity. So there's lots of regulatory frameworks that govern how we behave robotically and with humans in Earth orbit. But when you go beyond Earth orbit, it's not as clear. And we have this outer space treaty that declares a lot of important principles,

that space is the province of all mankind, that no nation state shall appropriate territory, there'll be no weapons of mass destruction. All of these great ideas written in a time of a Cold War era that didn't have at that time any commercial players wanting to do activity beyond traditional Earth orbit. So it's like the open seas. It's not unlike international waters. When you talk about landing on the moon or an asteroid, which is beyond appropriation, you can't plant a flag and say we own this territory. It's like being in international waters with a fishing vessel, that through international agreement, you have a right to be there and you

have a right not to be interfered with as long as you don't interfere with others and you obey the laws of the sea and do regard to others. You have a right to put your net into the water to try to obtain fish that you don't own. But once you've obtained the fish and you've brought those fish onto your deck, you own the fish. Although not a perfect analogy, it's not unlike going to the moon, for instance, and with a robotic explorer and scooping up some regolith that you didn't, from land that you don't own, a regolith that wasn't formally owned by anybody. And now that you've obtained that and brought it into your sample return canister, you own that. And that's not a perfect analogy, but I think it's a useful analogy to how we will be operating our prospecting and eventually resource extraction and utilization

efforts beyond traditional Earth orbit on the moon and in other places. And I want to come back to that, some of these early on sample return plans that you have. But in the long run, how do you think money is going to be made on the moon? I mean, really substantial money. What kinds of resources do you think are going to be profitable? It's a great question. I don't know that anybody knows the answer to that. It could be something that we can't even anticipate right now. We could certainly come up with a list of materials on the moon that we have evidence of through samples, but for the most part have been

remotely sensed from orbit around the moon. And you can come up with a litany of the potential for platinum group metals and gold and silver, and maybe even helium-3, as Jack Schmidt would tell us, is potentially the most valuable resource on the moon? I don't know. It depends what we do as a species. If we have a vibrant cislunar economy and we're building infrastructure that will take us to Mars and beyond, that will be a potential market for lunar resources. The point being that the lunar gravity well is so much smaller than the Earth's gravity well, that once you have solved the transportation problems and the processing problems and all the other challenges, getting those materials

into space from the moon is, from an energy perspective, which often translates into cost, is much more effective than trying to bring all those materials from Earth. Gerard O'Neill pointed this out in the 1970s through his book. So we are in the very earliest stages of that grand vision. And one of the big challenges we have in the private sector and with Moon Express is that how do you bridge that business case from here to there? The idea of having activities, let's say on the moon, tapping into resources that could have either an economic dent on earth or be materially useful in space, there's a huge capital infrastructure, billions of dollars. That's a big stretch for, let's say, a startup enterprise and for venture capital to reach for. So Moon Express, we're taking baby steps. And although the economics of the moon is

in our long-term vision, and I think unlocking resources of the moon will be extremely important to our future in space as a species and maybe even have importance back here on earth. Our first goal is to solve the transportation problem to collapse the cost of getting to the moon by providing low-cost smart robotic transportation systems that won't just serve moon express purposes but will also democratize access to the moon and open up visions and dreams for other people to come up with ways of monetizing missions to the moon. So once we have the transportation cost collapsed, not dissimilar to the focus of, let's say, SpaceX and Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit and Blue Origin and all these great companies that are trying to collapse, are working hard to collapse the cost of access

to space, we are working in the near term at collapsing the cost of access to everywhere else, including the moon. I think also of companies like Planetary Resources with a focus on asteroids. companies like Planetary Resources with a focus on asteroids, they seem to be in kind of the same stage you guys are at, that bridging stage that you were talking about. But you are pretty far along with your plans to actually achieve a landing on the moon. I mean, you've been in the Google Lunar XPRIZE pretty much from the start. What's the outlook for that first landing? And do you expect that that's going to win you the prize? Well, a couple of ideas that I'd love to touch on. I would say it's no coincidence that Planetary Resources and Moon Express are at relatively

similar positions in their advancement. We started about the same time. We're all friends, founded by my good friend, Peter Diamandis, and now run by Chris Lewicki, who was the mission manager for the NASA Phoenix Mars lander mission that I participated in. I've done several missions with Chris, a brilliant engineer from JPL. And a rover driver before that. There you go. Exactly. And before that, Chris was a star at Students for the Exploration and Development of Space, SEDS, another group that Peter and I and Todd Hawley founded way back in the 80s that's still going today. And as a matter of fact, two days, just tomorrow, I guess, their conference starts. Here we are in Cape Canaveral and the SEDS Space Vision Conference is starting just tomorrow here for the, my gosh, 35th time or whatever it happens to be. We love SEDS at the Planetary Society, along with the Space Generation Foundation, another group that you helped found.

Yes. And all of these are a sequence of events. We founded SEDS when we were students, four students. And I just had a group of SEDS students in here for lunch, actually, and I was giving them a little bit of a trip down memory lane. One of the very important, most important aspects of SEDS is that it's run by students. It's not just students coming in and out of the organization run by some administrative body. It's about learning how to run organizations. So in those earliest years, we came to a point, Peter, Todd, and I, that we really weren't students anymore. We had to find a way of handing those reins over. It was that kind of crisis of identity that led to the space generation and a larger vision of

a definition of embodying all persons born since the beginning of the space age, which we defined as the flight of Sputnik on October 4th of 1957. We all wanted to be members of that space generation. So that's, as far as I'm concerned, that's it. That Space Generation Foundation today can be found in a later stage organization called the Space Generation Advisory Council, which has interactions with the United Nations and has a great impact on youth around the world. And that led, of course, to the International Space University a couple of years later. So all of these organizations have been about trying to inspire young people in ways that we were inspired by our mentors, Carl and Lou and Gerard O'Neill and Arthur C. Clarke, who were all so kind to us

and took the time to listen and to advise and to open doors for us. And these organizations still today provide these same inspirations and enabling efforts for the youth of today to get involved in whatever their dreams are in space. And before we go back to the moon, I bet all those names that you've mentioned were pretty familiar to our audience. But I want to say that the Lou, I'm guessing, is Lou Friedman, our founding executive director. Lou Friedman, of course. And I hope Lou will listen.

There's hardly an individual on this world that I can attribute more gratitude toward than Lou, not just his early efforts of the Planetary Society and as being a founding member with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, but the care that he took and how much he was open to young people and to SEDs. And those early years were very formative and important to a lot of us. And Lou's just had such a great impact on the world. Thank you, Lou. Bob, I will make sure that Lou gets to hear those nice things that you've had to say about him. The Google Lunar X Prize, do you think you're going to win it next year? And how is it looking

for that 2018 launch on a rocket from New Zealand? So the Google Lunar X Prize has been a pretty big part of my life for the last, it's 10 years now. And it seems like 10 years is about the right cycle in space for really important things to happen. It seems to take 10 years. My efforts, however, to find commercial lunar business plans predate the prize. I mentioned that a funny thing happened on my way to Mars. I discovered the moon. That was in 2005. The instrumentation that we were developing for the Phoenix Mars lander, which was to fly in 2007, had largely been delivered. And in 2005, I convened and co-chaired the International Lunar Conference. It was important at that time. I'd gone through an amazing experience of participating in a government-funded mission, the Mars Phoenix Lander mission. And even though that was a tremendous honor, still is today, one of the greatest things that ever happened, it also impressed me that there must be a better way to do planetary exploration cost-wise. There must be a more effective way because this is really expensive stuff.

Can't we find a way to maybe find commercial inputs into planetary exploration that would lower the cost? And I started thinking about, well, if that was possible, then what planetary body would that most likely be applicable to in the earliest case? My attention turned toward the moon. And in 2005, through the learning through the conference about the resources of the moon and how much promise it potentially had economically, my attention turned toward the moon. So in 2005, I established a company called Odyssey Moon, which had the same goal of providing commercial, let's call them rideshare services for scientific instruments. It's inspired, by the way, rideshare services for scientific instruments.

It's inspired, by the way, by the Phoenix Mars lander. It had many instruments on it from different universities with a common core spacecraft. I thought, well, maybe we could find an economic model there to fly different instruments from different sources, kind of like a FedEx model where we provide constant and dependable transportation and other people just take a ride. They don't have to build the entire mission around us. So thus began my commercial lunar aspirations. In 2007, the Google Lunar X Prize was announced, which was the follow-on prize, as you know, Matt, to the Ansari X Prize, which had been announced in 1996. And it wasn't won until 2004. So again, not quite 10 years, but a long time. And it was in the glowing aftermath of that magnificent

achievement funded by Paul Allen and the brainchild of Burt Rutan, where Spaceship One flew into the skies that October twice and won the $10 million Ansari XPRIZE. That in 2010, the follow-on prize to that was to reach for the moon, funded by Google. Thank you, Google, for putting up a $30 million prize to incentivize private sector aspirations to reach the moon. Ten years later, when the prize was announced originally, there was a thought that maybe it could be won by 2012. So I was the first entrant to the Google InterX Prize in 2007. Went through a transformation from the first enterprise, Odyssey Moon, into what is currently Moon Express.

Transitioned to a U.S.-based company backed by Silicon Valley with credit, I think great credit to both Google and XPRIZE through many iterations of a colorful group of, let's say, competitive teams down to a select few that might even pull it off. They've stuck with it over 10 years. And I think there's a lot to be said for that. It's a prize that has, by and large, accomplished a lot of its original goals. It's a prize that has, by and large, accomplished a lot of its original goals. It's inspired thousands. It's brought kids into science and math and doing robot explorers. It's brought people that wouldn't have thought of doing anything in space together with investors that have come up with innovative ideas. It has had a social impact.

It has also, especially in the early days, brought a credibility to reaching for the moon that didn't exist. To have a great brand like Google saying that the moon is important helped in my early efforts to try to raise funding for the business plan. You can't raise money to win a prize. Moon Express has always been about raising money to operate a business. But the fact that there was a prize that would help potentially offset the costs of the earliest mission was an important factor in those early years. Whether the prize is ultimately won or not, it's not a moot point because I think it would be an impactful thing to happen. I think it would be great for XPRIZE and Google and the team winning it. To Moon Express,

great for XPRIZE and Google and the team winning it. To Moon Express, it's always been a sweetener. It's never been a motivator. It's never been a dependency, but it's always been a nice to have. As long as a prize is available, we will attempt to win it. At the risk of causing a distraction, I can't resist saying that I was standing on the tarmac with your friend and colleague, Peter Diamandis, when the Ansari X Prize was won. And at the time, after asking him if he had the check in his pocket, I accused him of being the man who sold the moon, which Robert Heinlein fans will remember. I don't know. Maybe I should have applied that to you more than to Peter. Well, thank you for that, Matt. And as Peter may have told you, he flew two books on those flights. One of them was, guess what? The Man Who Sold the Moon.

I did not know that. Yes, that is a point of history, which was an inspirational book, of course, to myself as well, to both of us. was an inspirational book, of course, to myself as well, to both of us. And that story, of course, has an interesting twist that I won't do a spoiler for those that haven't read it yet, but I do encourage you to read that book. But I was there too, Matt. And I must have been, I was in the, probably not quite as close to the action. If you were right on the tarmac, that must've been so exciting. I was in the cage with some of the VIPs and I saw both flights as you must have had. So that was a transitional moment for me. Even having been at the periphery of the X Prize since 1996, I was there in 1996 under the

archers of St. Louis when Peter first announced the competition. Boldly, as the story goes now, before he even had the money, but nobody asked because it was so credible. Do you have the money? The answer would have been, well, not yet. But to be there in 2004 and see those flights into that blue sky and the sense of elation and the possibilities of achievement was transitional for me. And it did inspire me to want to win one of those things. So yes, it did influence me to want to be the first registrant in the follow-on prize, the Google Interact Prize, a few years later. Bob Richards is the founder and CEO of Moon Express. He'll have much more to say after a break. This is Planetary Radio.

Hi, this is Casey Dreyer, the Director of Space Policy here at the Planetary Society, and I wanted to let you know that right now, Congress is debating the future of NASA's budget. The House has proposed to increase NASA's budget and also increase planetary science in 2018. The Senate, 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 petition2017. Thank you. You can share your passion for space exploration by giving someone a gift membership to the Planetary Society, this holiday season or any time of year. Your friend or loved one would join us as we nurture new and exciting science, advocate for space, and educate the world.

The gift of space starts at planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space. Because, come on, it's space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Bob Richards expects the first of his spacecraft to set down on the moon in 2018. The CEO of Moon Express talked to me about his plans in a recent conversation, but we also talked about why he is so driven by this mission and why space is important for all of humanity. First, though, the lunar nitty-gritty. I cannot show people the cool videos and images on your website,

but they can look themselves at moonexpress.com and see the MX series of spacecraft, beginning with this one that you're hoping to send on its way to the moon next year. Tell us about these. They look like they're pretty modular. Am I right? You are right, Matt. And thank you for that. What we introduced, we were a little stealth for a while on what we were doing. But what we unveiled last July, actually on Capitol Hill, was a planetary exploration architecture that could, yes, of course, serve our early aspirations

on reaching the moon, but it could also serve other planetary destinations. So we've introduced a, we call it the MX family of spacecraft. You've mentioned it's modular. You're probably looking at the, what we call the MX-1, which is very R2-D2 like for the listeners out there. Just kind of put your R2-D2. It's kind of, you kind of in form and almost in size. It's a little bigger than R2D2, I think, but about that. We adopted the SpaceX terminology of numbering, where the number represents the number of rocket engines. So the Falcon 9 has

nine rocket engines. The first Falcon vehicle that SpaceX created was the Falcon 1, which had a single rocket engine. And you might remember, Matt, that their plan from there was to create the Falcon 5, which had five. We have the same thing. So we have a MX-1 system, which is a smart spacecraft that once delivered to low Earth orbit by a rocket, we don't really care which. Once delivered to low Earth orbit by a rocket, we don't really care which. We're agnostic when we look at rockets as commodities. We love everybody out there that's creating new rocket systems, but we're just looking for a ride for the right price. Once our spacecraft is released from the rocket in low Earth orbit, it can make it to the moon all by itself. So the MX-1 is a single stage, single main engine space vehicle that has been optimized to fit into the shroud of the Electron rocket, which is built

by Rocket Lab, which underwent its first test flight, as I think your listeners will know back in May. And we're all waiting right now with great anticipation for its second test flight, which is called It's Still a Test, which we hope will happen before the end of this year. And I was just talking to Peter Beck a couple of days ago. I was actually at Rocket Lab, their factory in California yesterday, and saw some of the great activity there. I have great confidence in Rocket Lab. And they're one of several companies introducing small launch vehicles that the MX-1 is compatible with. That completely collapses the cost of access to the moon. You can see on the Rocket Lab website that they sell their Electron rocket for $4.9 million.

You can put it in your shopping cart and give them a credit card and you've got yourself a rocket. So we bought three of them, you know, back in 2015. We contracted for three with an option for two more. Five million is still a lot of money, but it's not 50, which would be about the entry level of getting a Falcon 9 or a hundred or more for an Atlas or something even bigger. So this is a remarkable change that collapsed the cost of access to space. So bundled with our low cost MX-1, we can reach the moon for under $10 million. Even to Moon Express, that's 10 times less than the amount we thought it was going to be seven years ago. We thought it was going to be $100 million. So that has really changed the economics and it's definitely within reach of our capitalization and our private backers.

Then you see the MX-2, which is, as it suggests, two X1s together stacked on top of each other. And that system is a two-stage system that can either deliver more payload to the surface of the moon or reach farther out into the solar system. deliver more payload to the surface of the moon or reach farther out into the solar system. And that's a great MX-2, has enough delta V to reach the moons of Mars, a number of places in the inner solar system. So we think it's going to be a very robust, low cost, agile, interplanetary exploration vehicle to send probes to a number of destinations. As you said, these are modules. So strapped together in a configuration of looking like a table, we get into the MX-5, which has five MX-1s, and then MX-9, which is the king of our ladder system with, as you would expect, engineering and physics tends to result in the same types of answers in space. So if you look at the configuration of the MX-9,

there are eight propulsion MX-1s or propulsion systems around the perimeter with a center engine. So if you looked at the Falcon 9, you see the same configuration, eight rocket engines with one in the center. This configuration has a four meter deck, 12 feet, I guess we're in America, which fits inside a Falcon 9 or other types of commercial launch vehicles. And it can deliver up to 500 kilograms, so over a ton, to the surface of the moon. And we can do a lot with that vehicle. And we hope that we'll be supporting NASA as NASA returns to the moon, sends precursor missions to the surface in the next few years, leading to larger scale activity, we hope, on the moon in the future.

I said we would come back to your plans for sample return. How's that going to work? And what will you be bringing back? Regolith, obviously. The MX-9 system, if you're looking at the website, you'll see that one of the interesting configurations of that is that the central engine can be configured to be a sample return vehicle. So in that configuration, we land the MX-9 on the moon with the eight engines. The center engine actually is open to the sky. So it's a fully fueled MX-1 that is able to launch from the moon and return samples back to Earth, probably tens of kilograms. So we want to be not just the first private sector company to land on the moon.

We also want to be the first private sector company to launch from the moon. And with the first samples, we'll make some of the samples available for scientific research, for sure. But we also intend to monetize to use those samples for commercial purposes. And we think there'll be a lot of value in those early samples, whether it's, it doesn't really matter what they are. It'll be the only privately owned moon stuff on planet earth. I think it's important. I've wanted to have a moon rock since I was a kid, but I can't. People aren't allowed to own moon rocks. Only governments own moon rocks.

And I can go touch one at the Smithsonian, but I can't take it home. And I can't put it, I can't show it to my kids. I think it's important for us to know that we all can have pieces of our dreams. And so when we bring these moon rocks back, we really want to make them available. And I think a lot of people will want them. I have no doubt. You want one? I'd love one, thank you.

And we'll give a chip away on the radio show. That's a great idea. We'll call it chip. Oh, we'll be able to do that as part of our regular weekly space trivia contest. I was kidding, or half kidding. But listen, let's talk when the time comes. You've got a timeline on the website. And by the way, there is also that animation

that shows that sample return mission and your little arrow shell coming right back down to the surface of Earth. How far off is that kind of sophisticated mission? Matt, you won't be surprised that I have an aspirational timeline. All commercial companies tend to do that. We're dreamers. It sometimes takes longer than we think, but the passion takes us through.

I am confident, sitting where we are right now, that we will do our maiden mission in 2018 with the MX-1. We are planning basically a mission a year right now. We think that will scale up, but we think that's a reasonable cadence for the first three years. Proving the technology of the MX-1 with just landing on the moon, hopefully winning a prize, but taking some customers with us as well. Doing the risk reduction and the technical proof of concept that we need for confidence, not just in our customers, but with our investors and with NASA and other space agencies around the world. In 2019, it is our goal to set up a research outpost, a robotic research outpost,

maybe an elaborate name, but we're looking at landing a MX-1 system at the south pole of the moon on a peak of eternal light, which I'm sure your listeners are aware there are some pretty precious pieces of real estate on the poles of the moon, poetically called peaks of eternal light. They're not really eternal light, but they're very close to constant illumination. Many of them over 80%, some of them over 90% of the time. And what that gives you is a great asset in continuous energy, solar energy. Plus the earth is in constant communication above the horizon. So these are really important places. So we intend to put down one of our MX-1 systems at the South Pole. We have a customer for that. Our partner,

the International Lunar Observatory Association, has had a dream for over a decade now. They're actually celebrating their 10th. There is that number 10 again, their 10th anniversary. And the dream of their founder, Steve Durst, is to put a telescope on the moon, an observatory, which democratizes access to a vision, a vista, only seen by a handful of human beings. And not that it's going to rewrite the astronomy textbooks per se,

but it can do reasonable astronomy, a handful of human beings. And not that it's going to rewrite the astronomy textbooks per se, but it can do reasonable astronomy, but it provides access and a vision and a vista that's from the surface of the moon made available over the internet that's just never been done before. So we think it's a very inspirational instrument. I think that an observatory is a great thing to put on a mountain on the South Pole of the moon, because that's what we humans do, right? We put observatories on mountains in remote locations. So I think it's a great aspiration. We will begin in that mission a little bit of prospecting and be doing other scientific things as well. But that's the primary purpose of that mission in 2019. Then in 2020, it's our plan to do what we're calling our Harvest Moon Expedition, It's our plan to do what we're calling our Harvest Moon Expedition to set down a MX-9 somewhere.

We haven't determined where yet. Scoop up some materials and bring them back to Earth. Right now, that timeline is 2020. It is a wonderful vision. right next to some of those places of eternal light are places of nearly eternal darkness with one of the most important resources that maybe we're going to be able to find on the moon. You know what I'm talking about, I bet. Matt, and of course, we haven't really concentrated on it yet, but the most important resource that we're after right now, you're right, is that water on the moon. Water on the moon is, although it's had an increasing body of tantalizing evidence that the hydrogen signatures on the moon could be water, there were some other explanations. So it was not definitive. And it really wasn't until 2011 when our friends at NASA crashed the Centaur probe into the moon. Thank you, Pete Worden, for the LCROSS mission.

probe into the moon. Thank you, Pete Worden, for the LCROSS mission that when the Centaur probe crashed into the South Pole of the moon and the secondary probe flew through what came up, it was basically a gusher of water. So that was really the steaming gun evidence that at least some of the H signatures at the South Pole are water. So it's our intent, the earliest resource that we want to qualify and quantify is the water in the moon. Even though it's there, we just don't know what the way that it's there. We don't know what form it's in. Certainly ice is, but is it the type of ice that's diamond hard that you need a diamond drill to scratch? Or is it fluffier? Is it more prevalent in the regolith? We don't know what form it's in. And until we get down there and understand that, we won't understand either the engineering science or the economics of actually capturing

it, processing it, and utilizing it. In the meantime, you're putting together quite an infrastructure down here on the pale blue dot. Why did you want a bunch of land and a couple of historic launch complexes at Cape Canaveral in Florida? That's a great question. And there's a practical reason. And the practical reason is if you're launching, there's a reason why Cape Canaveral is here and Kennedy Space Center is here on Florida's space coast. It's a great place to launch to the moon. We're in the business of building planetary spacecraft that need rockets. So it's great to be in proximity to the actual rides, you know, kind of being close to Grand Central Station is, if you're commuting every

day, that's a good place to be. That's why we're, that's one of the reasons we're here. Another reason is that we're actually building our own rocket engines too for these spacecraft. And there's only so many places in the United States that you can test, let alone fly, rocket systems. You can go out to Mojave, of course. This is one of the places you can do that. And another reason is that we had an early introduction to the Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral and the 45th Space Wing, which manages everything here. 45th Space Wing, which manages everything here. In our early test flights in 2014 and 2015 of our prototype lander vehicle, we conducted those test flights at the Kennedy Space Center at the end of the shuttle landing facility. And we found such a welcoming environment here at Kennedy for sure,

at Cape Canaveral. It really sparked our interest. For me, it was the emergence of a dream that began in childhood. My earliest memories are walking around the Rocket Garden at the Kennedy Space Center when our Canadian snowboard family came down during winter vacations. As a child of Apollo, who became an orphan of Apollo along with the rest of my generation when the Apollo program abruptly stopped. It's such an honor to be back here working in these historic facilities and not just standing on the shoulders of giants, but working shoulder to shoulder with the giants, with NASA and the Air Force. So it was a great privilege when we were offered through the U Air Force and an organization called Space Florida, which has a purpose of attracting business and commerce to the area for economic development,

that we were offered launch complexes 17 and 18 here at Cape Canaveral. And 17, it wasn't a hard sales job on me. 17 are the old Delta pads, actually where we launched the NASA Phoenix Mars mission. So here we are, you know, with some poetry, here we are back. So we have, as Moon Express, we are now the custodians of this hallowed ground of Launch Complex 17 in particular, where much of the reconnaissance of the solar system has originated. And Launch Complex 18, just to the north of it, which is the site of the very first American efforts to put a satellite into space in response to Sputnik. So it's historic ground. It's an honor to be here every day. It's an inspiration to come to work, but it's also very

practical in that we can test our rocket engines, we can fly our vehicles, and we can build our mission control and be able to tap into the talent and the capability of this area of as we reach to do something that to date only superpowers have done. I want to ask you about that, that inspiration that you feel and that I think you communicate. I'm not alone, I don't think. with and admiration for people like you, Peter Diamandis, Elon Musk. I'd put Chris Lewicki in this group as well, who become, if you'll pardon the expression, kind of hard-headed entrepreneurs and business people, but without losing what our boss, the science guy, calls the passion, beauty, and joy of space. Do you think that's an important combination?

It is. And I think there's the nine-year-old kid in all of us that remembers that if you don't lose that, it fires you every day. There are some practical realities we have to deal with in adult life. And the rocket equation is one of those stark realities that is very unforgiving. But it takes the passion to get you through. And it's not easy to do these things. Even if you're fully funded, an organization has been fully funded to do a space mission. It's still not easy. And when you're in the entrepreneurial

world, like Planetary Resources, SpaceX, Moon Express, others. It's about raising the money at the same time to do these amazing things. So it's all very hard. You need that crazy aspiration, the inexplicable passion that I think was sparked in all of us when we were younger, which brings us full circle to the reason to inspire the youth of this generation. How might becoming a spacefaring and space-dwelling species change what it means to be human? Fundamentally, you know, I imagine that the kids born today will look up in the not-too-distant future and see lights on the moon.

And to me, that's a moment in time that will be transformative in human psychology and our social spheres, because the perspective will be we are a multi-world species. You can see it. But as we move out into different worlds and humanity branches and becomes perhaps the descendants of we earthlings, maybe more homo-spacian than homo-sapien. It's not clear with our understanding of the potentials of technology today and biology in particular, it's not clear that terraforming is what we'll need to do. 30 years ago, it was all about we have to transform planets to suit us. It might be more we have to transform ourselves

to suit other planets. And as we move out as a species into space, we will always have our home in this pale blue dot. But I think that our descendants will be diverse in form, in intellect, but not in origin, because we'll all come from planet Earth. Bob, I want to close with one of my all-time favorite quotes, and I was delighted to see that it's also one that you like a lot. It comes from the great H.G. Wells. It's the universe or nothing, and that has inspired me since college when I read that book.

And that really ultimately is the choice. It's zero or one. So it's not a question of if, it's a question of when. I think it's really important for us to invest a little bit of our resources as human beings into that grand future. It certainly inspires me to wake up every day to think about something as fantastic and awe-inspiring as humanity among the stars. Coming right back to the Planetary Society, if the Planetary Society had not been formed, I'm not sure I would have had the same path, but that inspiration and the opening up of the aperture of my own mind when I was impressionable, I'm still impressionable, but when I was more impressionable,

it was just so important to my own personal path as I know it is to so many others. So thank you very much, Matt. You are most welcome, sir. And thank you for that and for this wonderful conversation, Bob. Ad Astra. Ad Astra, my friend. We've been talking with Bob Richards. He is the founder and CEO of Moon Express that hopes to make its first mission a soft landing on that body that is our closest neighbor in space natural neighbor in space next year, 2018

As you heard, he's also a founding trustee of Singularity University Actually, I don't think we mentioned that but he is a founder of the International Space University of the Students for Exploration and Development of Space, and the Space Generation Foundation and its current incarnation for the Space Generation, which he is a proud member of. We're going to talk to somebody you know, I think, Bob. It's Bruce Betts, the guy who's joined me for every one of these shows for the last 15 years as we go into this week's edition of What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio with Bruce Betts, the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us once again by Skype.

Welcome back. Good to be back, Matt. I hope the sky looks good. It looks kind of cloudy right now, but I assume that's not what you're asking. It's cloudy here too. Yeah. No, night sky looks good. We've got Saturn and Mercury hanging out low in the West shortly after sunset. And then in the pre-dawn, we've also got a bunch of stuff low in the east right before dawn. We've got Mars up highest looking reddish and near the bright

bluish star Spica. Below it is super bright Jupiter. And maybe, maybe, maybe you can see super, super bright Venus below that, but that's going to be tough. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1973 that we had the first flyby of an outer planet by Pioneer 10 flying by Jupiter. And as an addendum to this week in space history, you probably know we just passed the birth date of one of our founders, Carl Sagan, right? Indeed we did. Well, regular listener Ilya Schwartz in Columbia, Maryland, notified us that his new son arrived. They thought he was going to arrive on Carl's birthday. He didn't. He came about a week later, but just the same, they named him Alec Carl Schwartz. So Alec, welcome to the world.

Yeah, that's great. Maybe I should have said welcome to the cosmos. I get it. Now I know we're going on a random space fact and we have a celebrity intro for you today. Someone you know is our guest today, Bob Richards of Moon Express. So hello, Bruce. I'd love to hear what this random space fact is of this week. Long time working together, and I look forward to further efforts together. You're doing a great job there, and all best to you, Bruce. Hope to see you soon. That's great. Always good to hear from Bob. Thanks for the introduction. Matt, now, now is when I choose to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Planetary Radio.

when I choose to celebrate the 15th anniversary of Planetary Radio. Because it was on November 25th, 19, no. November 25th, 18, no. November 25th, 2002, that you birthed this show into the world. And I congratulate you, and it's been wonderful doing it with you, and I've got a few facts for you oh thank you since the beginning of planetary radio on november 25th 2002 15 years ago more than 3 400 confirmed exoplanets have been discovered there were only about 100 known when we did the first show and it was because of the show that they were discovered, right? Yes. And because of the show, there were more than 15,000 near-Earth asteroids discovered of

the 17,000 or so that are currently known. Well, those are lovely. Thank you. And if I birthed this show, you must have been the midwife because you've been there from the start. Well, I'm really excited we're going to add that to my title director of science and technology and midwifery midwifery that's exactly the way they say it on call the midwife my my wife's favorite tv show after outlander of course well thank you uh you only have two of those are we done with those facts about this show i didn't i figured you weren't going to give me extra time so i didn't pull together more but i'd be happy to pull together more over the coming weeks. It would be delightful. Basically, a whole lot of space science has happened. I mean, there have been

so many major planetary spacecraft encounters that you have covered every one of them, and so much science that's been done, so much that we've learned, and you've brought it to the world, to the cosmos. It has been my great pleasure to do so, and to do each of these shows with you, bringing up the rear, so to speak, closing out the show with me, with What's Up, which is not over. It's not, but I encourage people when they're putting in comments for the trivia contest, or just interacting with Matt, give him a big congratulations and tell him how it changed your life or made you happy. What a lovely thing. And I'm sorry that we didn't make more of a celebration out of this.

But in fact, I wasn't going to do anything at all. But so I'm very grateful to you. It would be like throwing your own birthday party if you did. It would. I tried to at least bring something to it. Thank you. We'll come back to you. It would be like throwing your own birthday party if you did. It would. I tried to at least bring something to it. Thank you. And we'll come back to that. But first, the trivia contest we asked was, what is the orbital eccentricity of interstellar asteroid 1I Oumuamua? How do we do?

We got this entry from David Fisher in Craigmore, Australia, who talked about this rather extreme eccentricity. And he says, and I thought Bruce was eccentric. I am. I am hyperbolic. And Agoura Hills, California, said that Oumuamua has an eccentricity of roughly 1.20, which I guess does make it hyperbolic, right? Yes, and also makes it the highest of any object yet observed, not surprisingly, since it's coming in on a hyperbolic orbit from interstellar space. Well, Craig, it's apparent that you got this right.

So congratulations. You get a Chop Shop Design Planetary Society T-shirt available from chopshopstore.com and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account from that worldwide network of telescopes operated on a nonprofit basis out of Australia. And we're going to give away those two once again this week. But first, Andrew Kerr, he said with the velocity of that object, that cigar-shaped interstellar object, he said it peaked at 87.71 kilometers per second at perihelion,

closest to the sun. kilometers per second at perihelion, closest to the sun. He said at that speed, you could watch 2001 A Space Odyssey from start to finish and be finishing the credits as you made a round trip to the moon. Nice random space fact. I like that. All right. We're ready to go on. We all know, or we should know, that the greatest guest Matt ever had on the show was the second episode of Planetary Radio.

But who was the first guest on Planetary Radio? First aired November 25, 2000. I know. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I remember it well, and I think I remember the second one as well. It was you, wasn't it? Yeah. So good.

We had him on every subsequent show. That's how good he was. Well, you had me on the first one too. So anyway, okay. Maybe the second wasn't the best guest we've ever had. It,

I just, it worked for me. You have this time until the 6th of December. Can you believe it? December 6th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get your entry in for this edition of the contest on What's Up and I believe we're done. Oh, by the way, t-shirt and an itelescope.net account will be yours if you're chosen by random.org and have the

right answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think exclusively about Matt Kaplan. Thank you. And good night. This has been very embarrassing. Thank you very much once again. And thank you to all of you listening to the show. I mean, most of you have not been around for 15 years, although I think a few of you have, whoever you are, and however long you've been listening, we're going to try to keep it up. We'll do our best and hope that you will stay with us for, oh, who knows, let's do another 15. What the heck? All right. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its LUNY members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.