Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Can We Touch the Stars? Lou Friedman at the 100-Year Starship Symposium

Episode Date: September 23, 2013

Only days after Voyager 1 reached interstellar space, forward thinkers met in Houston, Texas to consider how humans can become a starfaring species. Planetary Society Emeritus Executive Director Lou Friedman reports from the meeting. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Lou Friedman at the 100-Year Starship Symposium, 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. We'll talk with my old boss about this latest gathering to consider our future among the stars. Lou doubts it will happen soon, at least with humans on board. Bill Nye is back with his thoughts about a recent Space News op-ed piece. And in 20 minutes or so, Bruce Betts and I will announce the five winners of our latest contest that came from outer space. We begin as we should with the Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla.

Emily, would you like to talk about an old friend that you lost last week? It's the Deep Impact spacecraft. It's a mission whose life has been entirely encompassed by my professional life, so I think I feel particularly close to this one. The spacecraft back in 2005 hit a bullet with another bullet. It had a large copper impactor that it slammed into Comet Temple 1 to watch the spray of debris. The spacecraft really went far above and beyond its original designed mission. And went on to another mission as well.

Can you say a word or two about that? Yeah, it actually had a couple of extended missions. One of them was to take advantage of a blur in its main camera to look at some follow-up studies of extrasolar planets. And while it was doing that mission, it actually turned back and looked at Earth, treating Earth as an exoplanet and watching the moon transit in a really cool series of photos. And then it performed another comet flyby, passing by Comet Hartley 2 and getting some really cool pictures of this dog bone shaped comet. And through it all, it was a real small spacecraft with a very small science team, a very friendly science team. And I really always enjoyed covering this mission. You won't be surprised to hear that Emily has a very nice article with lovely photos, including the moon transiting our home planet. the moon transiting our home planet.

It's a September 20th entry in her blog at planetary.org, where you can also read about her September 23rd update on MOM, the Mars Orbiter Mission planned for an October launch by the country of India. Emily, thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our Planetary Evangelist, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, we turn this week to an article by a friend of the Planetary Society, Jim Cantrell,

major Washington consultant in the space business. Sort of a history lesson. I know what you're saying. So Jim Cantrell argues that our current situation in aerospace, at least in the space business, sort of a history lesson. I know what you're saying. So Jim Cantrell argues that our current situation in aerospace, at least in the United States, is left over from World War II. Yeah. That the government mobilized all of these industrial areas, factories, to create aerospace and military parts.

And then now that that is over, this stuff is still lying around. That's true, but he doesn't really mention the Apollo program. And he praises SpaceX quite reasonably. But the difference between then and now for me is when Apollo was built, Congress deliberately or the space program originally was built, civilian space program was originally built. You had the rocket motors built in one state. You had the rocket fuel built in one state, you had the rocket fuel supplied from another state, you had the control in one state and the launch in another state, and so on, over 10 NASA centers. It was spread out on purpose to make it politically,

if you will, impossible to cancel it. Whereas SpaceX is trying to make rockets to sell to people. So they have a factory where everything is in one building or virtually one building. Yeah. So it's a different idea. There's a reason we got here. That is to say the world got here. And to me, it was the Cold War,

the idea of building a space program to get the ultimate high ground. But now that everybody has the internet and cable news channels from the other side of the world and worldwide broadcasts of New Year's celebrations, now that we all have all that, we want to keep it. Space exploration has turned out to be something that has commercial value as well as political and military value. So what that makes me wonder about is, yes, I mean, SpaceX wants to be a successful business. But I don't see too many people jumping into planetary science.

Just so. Planetary science is you invest in the unknown. You're investing. You want to see what's over the horizon, the unknown horizon. the horizon, the unknown horizon. It's very difficult to set up a commercial model to do that unless you're going to sell stuff to an exploring government or a government agency. While this seems obvious to me, maybe it's not obvious to everybody because when we explore these other worlds, we will make discoveries that will change this one. That's my claim. Well, it is a stimulating piece by Jim Cantrell in the September 16 issue of Space News, as I said.

Good to talk with you about it, Bill. Thank you. And by the way, as we speak the day before your second round, good luck with Dancing with the Stars. Thank you. It is all that. It is so consuming, Matt. It's so athletic. It's such an undertaking. And I'm very excited about, as we record tomorrow night's show, in which we will be doing the Paso Doble. It's dramatic.

Get your votes in, people. Yeah, vote 12 times. From both phones. Bones! He's Bill Nye the Science Guy, the CEO of the Planetary Society. And you can catch him on Dancing with the Stars for hopefully many more weeks. I'll be right back with Lou Friedman to talk about not so much interstellar travel as what maybe will come before that. The Good Starship Enterprise may still be only a profitable fiction, but there is a growing international community of people who are considering how we humans can become a star-faring species.

I'll be talking with one of their thought leaders, physicist and science fiction author Gregory Benford, on Wednesday, September 25th. The link to the live webcast or the After the Fact on-demand recording is on this week's show page at planetary.org slash radio. Many more met last week at another edition of the 100-Year Starship Symposium headed by former astronaut Mae Jemison. Lou Friedman was there. You'll remember

that Lou was part of our tribute a couple of weeks ago to his fellow Planetary Society co-founder, Bruce Murray. The Society's Emeritus Executive Director has been writing about interstellar flight for a long time, including a great article in the March 2012 edition of the Planetary Report. I reached him via a shaky Skype connection in his Houston, Texas hotel room. You may remember that the 100-year starship was a brainchild, actually, of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, in cooperation with NASA, to think about the future of interstellar travel. And the idea wasn't so much to create a starship, at least not right now, but to create an organization that could advance the ideas, the technology, the techniques,

the thinking about interstellar travel. I attended the opening workshop on that. I've been involved with them ever since. And some of our listeners will remember a conversation I had with Mae Jemison, who heads the project. She still does, doesn't she? Yes, Mae Jemison's group won the competition to create that 100-year Starship organization, and I've had the pleasure now of working with Mae pretty closely for the last year. We've done a couple of joint papers together, we've presented at conferences. And she invited me now to be on her science board. What have you been listening to in your time in Houston this time around? Well, it's an unusual organization, or it's an unusual

symposium. Actually, the hardcore technical people, the people who really want to do interstellar flight or think they can do it are disappointed because May is doing something that's very different. She's trying to make it a public activity to use it for educational purposes, to bring together different nations, different organizations, different disciplines. We have people here who are fashion designers and sociologists and dieticians and biologists, as well as the physicists and the engineers, all working in different aspects of thinking interstellar. And that's the interesting part. And that's the part that I think she's doing some good with, because I think it is

the inspiring idea that can make this a broad advance for the whole space program. So I guess the idea is, though, that if we're going to send ships to the stars, this is going to affect every aspect of humanity, not just figuring out, you know, how do we get them there in fewer than, what, 40,000 years. Yeah, if you think about the space program, it's a huge subject, even though it occupies a very small part of the budget, a very small part of the bureaucracy, a relatively minor part of the economy even. But it's a huge subject because we're exploring the fundamental questions. Is there life out there?

What is our relationship to the environment, to life, to the universe, and so forth? Well, interstellar travel is that writ large. It's even more so the case of why are we interested in this? And there are a group of people here that still want to do traveling through wormholes or inventing warp drive. Good luck with that. Leaving infusion reactors. And there's a large science fiction component. In fact, tonight at the meeting, there's going to be a whole science fiction reading and panel, and they're going to even have a showing of the science fiction movie Europa Report. now that are relevant and think that we can advance it with what we started, the light

sail type of vehicle, the nanospacecraft with large solar sails that can fly out of the solar system very fast and perhaps put us on a path to interstellar flight. And I think we can be doing that even with very small missions, testing out instruments, technologies, solar sail flights, and maybe even achieving some milestones outside the solar system in the next tens of years. Tens of years rather than a hundred or hundreds of years. Well, I actually think we might be brainstorming a little bit. I think we might even come up with experiments to be done in years, not to go interstellar, but to sort of advance the ideas of how to do interstellar flight.

Now, this is something you've given a lot of thought to for decades. We were talking about it recently, and you kind of use the term precursors to interstellar flight. Are you sticking with that? Yeah, I am, because it captures the notion that we know where we're going. It's a precursor to something, so we know where we're going. At the same time, it isn't it. It isn't interstellar flight. We may be as far from interstellar flight as da Vinci was from the airplane, hundreds of years, five centuries maybe, and things will change. That's what's exciting about it. People like to think about interstellar flight as if it's going to be done by the people of today.

Carl Sagan had a wonderful line about exploration in Cosmos that pointed out it's not the people of today who will be doing these different things. It's the people of tomorrow. And we'll be evolved in different ways. And the way genetics is going, genetic engineering is going, and biological developments and nanotechnology and advanced robotics and information processing. I think human flight of the future will not be done with humans in the vehicles, but will be done in very different ways. And I'm trying to put some of that thinking into the idea of interstellar precursors. Give me an idea, give us an idea of what might be the target, the destination of a reasonable precursor mission in this fairly near-term future that you're talking about. Well, that also makes it relevant for today because, as you know, and as all members of the Planetary Society know, the search for extrasolar planets is a hot field.

And discoveries are being made practically daily. And they're changing the paradigm of what we think planets are. And some days we think they're teeming abodes of hundreds of Earth-like planets out there or thousands. And other days we get discouraged and think, well, maybe, no, it's much more unique and much more problematical. And this is an active area of discovery. So I think the selection of targets is somewhat out in the future. And that works out to our advantage because so is interstellar flight. So the idea of picking a destination will have to be done with a lot of astronomy here on Earth, a lot of space astronomy, space science mission, a lot of observations of planets, and beginning to deduce what are

the targets that are interesting. Interstellar space is very, very big. And it's not going to be, oh, gee, let's pick a target and go there and answer all our questions. That isn't the way any science is done. It's going to be maybe dozens or hundreds of candidate targets. And we're going to need to do dozens, maybe hundreds, or even thousands of missions. Well, just imagine the cost of that. It's unimaginable unless we find ways to do it in really clever fashions. And I'm not talking just the cost of dollars, I'm talking the cost of energy. We're going to have to find ways to send nanoprobes or even picoprobes with incredible payloads that

are genetically interacting with their targets and being able to be launched for reasonable costs so that we can send hundreds of them out into the interstellar space. Yeah, and have radios powerful enough to get word back to us across all those light years. Oh, Matt, now you're being a curmudgeon. You're bringing up practical problems. And yes, communication is one of the really key issues. I keep emphasizing, we don't need a lot of communications. Even if we get a bit per second, we got lots of seconds to get those bits back here. But on the other hand, being able to point a communication system and even getting a low power communication system to communicate over distances is going to be a challenge.

We've got more from Lou Friedman at the 100-year Starship Symposium in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from? And are we alone? This is the most exciting thing that people do.

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

as he was attending last week's 100-year Starship Symposium in Texas. He has been sharing with us his own thoughts about how humanity, or at least its robots, might someday reach the stars. He also just called me, me, a curmudgeon. I leave the curmudgeonly part to folks like you. I like the science fiction stuff. But these precursor missions, something that could take place, let's say, in the space of a decade or two from now, where would you go? I mean, would we go to the outer solar system? Would we go to the Kuiper Belt or beyond? Well, in the article for the

Planetary Report, I wrote about a series of milestones just beyond Neptune. We go to the Kuiper Belt. We go to the Heliopause. We go out to the Solar Gravity Lens Focus. We go out to the Oort Cloud. We might go deeper into the Oort Cloud because that's an area that spans tens of thousands of astronomical units. And you know, of course, we have an interstellar probe out there now, just last week. Right. The Voyager spacecraft moved into what is commonly referred to as interstellar space because it moved outside the region where the solar wind influence is now dominated

by the interstellar wind. Although I need to emphasize, it hasn't moved out of the solar system. No, that's a long way. It will not move out of the solar system for tens and tens of thousands of years, because that boundary is out there, maybe out of 100,000 AU, where the sun's gravity influence finally becomes weaker. I remember you saying in the past that you thought the only practical technology that we now understand for reaching maybe not just the stars, maybe things much, much closer like the Oort cloud or the Kuiper belt in a practical way is the solar sail. Now, that may not be surprising from the guy who wrote the book on that technology, but

do you stand by that? I stand by it very much because every time I go to a meeting like this 100-year Starship Symposium or read, there's a couple of new organizations that have sprung up that are looking at interstellar travel. You can Google around and see that there's at least two or three new study groups that have gotten together and are looking at it. Solar sail still comes out.

And in fact, Matt, I've even become a little more assertive about the subject. I used to say that solar sails will take us out of the solar system, but they won't get us really to interstellar space. I now think that some of the work we're doing may mean that solar sails can achieve such enormously high velocities that they will carry out the whole interstellar mission. And if they don't, there may not be a practical way to do it. We may be relying on communications and other aspects of it, because none of the other technologies seem to be going in the right direction. And I'm assuming that you include in this sort of umbrella term of solar sail, sails that are driven once they get too far from our star by other means, microwave, laser?

I used to. I'm actually getting, I won't say negative on that because that would be too strong a word, and other people are doing good work on that subject. But laser sailing, if you look at the numbers, it's not so easy. You've got to have really big lasers, really big laser stations. They have to be powered by something. Their pointing accuracy, even they diffuse in space. Microwaves diffuse in space even much more greatly. So it's not obvious at all that those technologies, even though in theory we can make calculations

that they would work, it's not obvious at all that they will prove to be practical. So you remain a skeptic, but someone who is clearly very supportive of continuing this development. Absolutely. You know, I got criticized. I always get criticized. But I got criticized for being negative when I suggested humans would never go on interstellar flights. They would stay at home and get the data from interstellar flights. And I was accused of being an old guy giving up on the future. And I thought it was the other way

around. I thought, no, I was doing things now that were making interstellar flight for human benefit come earlier and that we were going to do it in new ways that the old fashioned people weren't thinking about anymore. They were thinking 50 years ago and that I was trying to be more upbeat about doing something about it, even though in a way, yes, I'm a skeptic about the old-fashioned ideas. I'm excited about the new developments that we can put into this. Lou, thank you, as always. It is always fun. I'll see you next year on Proxima Centauri. Let's make it a couple of years. I don't know. There must be a wormhole around here someplace in this crowd of people, my man.

We're going to hear more about wormholes, too. There's a great movie coming out that's going to tell us about how to do interstellar flight with wormholes. I want to see the user manual for that. Lou Friedman, he's the Emeritus Executive Director of the Planetary Society, and as you heard, he is now on the science board for the 100-year Starship Project. He also did write the book, one of the earliest serious engineering considerations of solar sailing. And I'm sure we will be talking to him again, maybe sometime about the asteroid retrieval mission, which is not something that's going to

require the kind of extremely advanced technology we've been talking about here. We've got Bruce Betts on the Skype line. He's ready to feed us another edition of What's Up. What's up is what's low. What's down is post-sunset west, low down, still Venus looking super bright. Saturn has come and gotten close to Venus, so now they'll start separating Saturn over to the right of the much brighter Venus, Saturn looking yellowish.

If you have a really clear view to the western horizon shortly after sunset, you have a shot to pick up Mercury. Mercury is about at its highest this week that it will be for this apparition. And on Tuesday, the 24th, it's even less than a degree away from the bluish star Spica. Pre-dawn east, we've got Jupiter already high overhead and below that Mars. On Saturday, September 28th, the moon is near Jupiter making a lovely view. And also, if you're up in the middle of the night, Jupiter is rising in the east. We move on to this week in space history. Dawn spacecraft launched in 2007, of course, had its very successful encounter and orbiting of Vesta,

and now on its way to a 2015 rendezvous with the largest asteroid, Ceres. Okay, I will move on to... You must be going very close to the speed of light, because there was a lot of time delation there. I am. How may I? How may I? One of those outer solar system objects has the fastest spin rate of any large body, at least so far discovered in the solar system. Its day is only about four hours long.

in the solar system. Its day is only about four hours long. This is so fast that it's taken this object and spun it into an ellipsoid rather than a spherical looking thing. It's about 2,000 kilometers by 1,000 kilometers. I just think it's cool that we can tell this much about that object that is so far away. It's pretty impressive and has required a fair amount of work. All right, we're going to go on to this big contest. Would you remind people of what you proposed? Yes. I asked people to give us, in the spirit of random space facts, give us analogies for the surface area of the moon in other units

or even better, some type of analogy. And I'd ask you how we do, Matt, but I've read them all as well. And we did great. We had a lot of good stuff. Weren't these impressive? With such an impressive audience. You know, not everybody enters the contest like this,

but the stuff we get, every single one of them is worthy of some kind of recognition. We won't have time, of course, for all of those, but I'll give you some of these that are sort of honorable mention from Daryl Gardner in Lake Stevens, Washington. The Death Star. He gave us 471.2 Death Star original flavor or just under 15 Death Star 2.0 with flavor crystals. I did not know they had flavor crystals. I didn't know there were two different sizes between the two Death Stars, but there you go.

I'm a little confused myself. Anders Broland, he's in Sweden. He talked about room for 587 billion Apollo lunar modules. What a shame we didn't get to Apollo 587 billion. So close, and yet so far. We had two people count them, two. 587 billion. So close, and yet so far. We had two people count them, two, David Kaplan and Kathy Dodo, both of whom gave us very similar numbers for the number of Planetary Report magazines,

the quarterly publication of the Planetary Society. How many of those it would take to cover the moon? About 660 trillion, something like that. We've almost produced that many. Torsten Zimmer figured out that you could build more than 717 million pyramids of the Great Pyramid of Giza kind. To be exact, 717,013,232.5. Question is, he says, what to do with half a pyramid? I think there are a few other questions that might be involved. Hockey rinks.

We got that from Randy Bottom. Not surprisingly, someone from north of the border here in the U.S. And finally, this one, the moon's total surface area equivalent to a little more than 500 million Arecibo telescopes. Very hard to get them up there. Yeah, that came from Stephen Coulter, by the way. Let's go into not just one, not two, three, or four, but five winners. And the first of these is going to get the Planetary Radio t-shirt and the other prize package that I'll describe in a minute. But who was our top winner, Bruce?

Our top winner was Ian Cluft from San Jose, California. Our top winner was Ian Cluft from San Jose, California, with the surface area of the moon is roughly equivalent to the area of the United States, Mexico, Canada, Greenland, and the Arctic Ocean combined. So North America, add Greenland, add the Arctic Ocean. There you have it, the surface area of the moon. And I like that for having some type of recognizable visual. Because you are just a natural teacher, a natural instructor. So, Ian, we are sending you the shirt, but get this, folks. We are also sending all five of these people a special swag package provided to us by the folks who have made the movie Gravity.

That's the George Clooney, Sandra Bullock film that is just about to premiere. I've sent in a bunch of stuff. I don't even know exactly what yet, but each of these five folks, including Ian, is going to get one of these packages. And the next person who's going to get that is Linda Tolberg. Over 124 quadrillion Lego bricks. She says that since 1958, there have been 400 billion bricks made at the current rate of production, 19 billion per year. We're looking at another roughly 6,500 years for every Lego brick in existence to cover the moon. Wow. From Craig Hutchinson in Suffolk, Virginia. Assuming a snack diameter of 100 millimeters, the moon's surface area is

approximately 4.8 quadrillion moon pies. Moon pies. Nice connection there. Greg McCarron of Manning, South Carolina. And of course, we had to pick this one. Approximately 73, almost 74 trillion new planetary radio t-shirts to cover the moon. He figured this in the easiest way possible with 2XL size. Our final big winner, Ken Smith. My favorite, by the way. Why does that not surprise me? From St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada. He figured out somehow that he told us not to ask that the average gluteus maximus is about 600 square centimeters. So it would take 632.2 trillion moons to cover the moon. And I would not have been the one to do the measuring, I'll tell you that. Congratulations, Ken.

You couldn't leave it be, could you? I really couldn't. So those are our winners. Congratulations to them and to everybody else who entered. And we're going to congratulate another winner next week, the person who was randomly chosen that answers this question correctly. A little bit more conventional. What is the name of the location where the Mars rover

Opportunity will spend its next Martian winter? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and send us your entry. What are they competing for, Matt? This winner is going to get another one of those swag packages, those giveaways related

to the movie Gravity. So get your entry into us by the 30th of September. September 30, that's a Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about calendars. Thank you. Good night. We'll go to mine right now.

It's pretty busy. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the Faster Than Light members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Music