Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Charley Kohlhase and the Greatest Voyage

Episode Date: October 18, 2016

How did the Voyager spacecraft manage to weave their magnificent way through the outer planets of our solar system? Mission Design Manager Charley Kohlhase led the team that crunched the numbers to select the best possible trajectory from 10,000 candidates.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Charlie Cole Hayes and The Greatest Voyage, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. And when you talk about adventures across our solar system, your mind naturally turns to the Voyager mission, now exploring interstellar space. Our guest this week led the team that figured out how Voyagers 1 and 2 could weave their way among the outer planets and onward toward infinity. Bill Nye calls in from Canada to talk about something that is shared by millennials and the President of the United States, excitement about getting humans to Mars. And Bruce Batts will help me give away another copy of Star Trek, the official guide to our universe. Emily Lakdawalla is the Planetary Society's

senior editor. Emily, as you said in your blog entry last week on October 11th, it was a very busy week, and the one that we're entering doesn't seem far behind. The one that we're entering includes a big meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society, as well as the European Planetary Science Congress. But that's not the biggest action this week. The biggest action is the arrival of ExoMars at Mars,

and that's going to be real exciting. Now that these two spacecraft have sort of kissed each other goodbye and gone their separate ways, quite literally, what happens next? Well, the two spacecraft are only on very slightly different trajectories, and that has to change or else ExoMars would follow Schiaparelli right down onto the surface, and that would be bad. So about 12 hours after the separation, they planned a very small rocket firing to adjust ExoMars' path so that it just misses Mars and is in a good position to fire its rockets

on Wednesday in order to enter orbit. A lot of people very curious, of course, about Schiaparelli. I'm trying to pronounce that with the proper Italian pronunciation of it. The instrumentation on it, but it's really not a mission that's about science, is it? No, it's an entry demonstration module. Europe has not landed a mission on Mars before, and it plans to land a really big rover in a few years. So this mission is simply designed to test a number of key technologies that they'll be using. The spacecraft is battery operated and is only expected to last a few days on the surface before going silent. The real

science mission here is ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter. Emily, I expect to be in the room at the DPS meeting where they will be doing the live stream as Scapparelli approaches Mars and sets down safely, we hope, and ExoMars goes into orbit. When can people take part in this and how can they take part? Well, I just posted a timeline on the blog that details all of the expected events in a few time zones. So you can follow along with that, as well as links to ESA's live stream. But probably Twitter is going to be just as good for you to follow the events. There are four official Twitter accounts. And then, of course, space fans around the world are going to be collecting online to cheer ExoMars on as it enters orbit.

And Schiaparelli hopefully turns on and sends us its signals. And we can follow it all the way down to the Martian surface. You bet. And I look forward to seeing you at DPS, Emily. I'll be there with bells on. DPS, Emily? I'll be there with bells on. She's our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine, and DPS, one of her favorite times of year. We're going to go on to talking with the boss, the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. And Bill is on the phone this week calling us from Alberta,

Canada. Bill, what's going on up there? The Dark Skies Festival. People come from all over Canada and a few from the U.S. for these series of talks. And I'm one of the talkers. We talk about the cosmos and our place in space and how wonderful it is. Someone else who's talking about space, the President of the United States. who's talking about space, the President of the United States. Oh, yeah, he's kind of a big deal. For a while longer. But he said, let's go to Mars in the 2030s. Now, Matt, I'm, who am I? I'm the happiest guy in the world, right? But the 2030s is a decade, not a date. I think what always slows us down, by us, I mean humankind and those of us interested in space exploration, is we don't set a day. There's songs about setting a date,

and if we don't set a day, then things don't get done. Deadlines are your friend, Matt. I believe you said that. No, I said they're magic. Even bigger. So without the specific date chosen, I just think these things have a tendency to diffuse politically. And having the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA, in the lead is good. It's what you want. By not having the U.S. in the lead without a date and not having a date, there's a very good chance that politically this will just run out of steam. We at the Planetary Society will do our best to keep the steam fired up. Did you see the Ipsos poll

that indicated, among other things, 40% of millennials would volunteer for a trip to the red planet? Now, you say that when you're a millennial and you're excited, and you say, I don't even care if I don't come back, right? But when the chips are down, when shoving comes to pushing, I think millennials will

want to come back. But aren't you impressed that, you know, even if 75% of those 40% It's so romantic. Oh, man, it's so romantic. Yes, yes, yes. And this is what I say all the time about when Elon Musk did this presentation at the Astronautical Congress. It's the enthusiasm that's so amazing, the enthusiasm.

I'll say, and I'm sure you're going to find an enthusiastic dark sky audience up there in Canada, where we have many listeners to this program. Have fun. Oh, yes. Yes, thank you. I will. Carry on, Matt. Good to speak with you. That's Bill Nye. He is the science guy. So carry on, Matt. Good to speak with you. That's Bill Nye. He is the science guy. We're going to talk with the guy who figured out how Voyager would be able to take a grand tour of the solar system, Charlie Colhaze. Ask space fans for their favorite robotic mission, and many will say Voyager.

It's no wonder. Voyagers 1 and 2 are headed toward their 40th anniversaries in space. They gave us stunning close-up views of Jupiter, Saturn, and many of their moons. They revealed Uranus and Neptune as never before. And now they are teaching us about the space between the stars. They carry the Voyager golden records, those magnificent greetings to the universe, from all of us on this pale blue dot. Perhaps the greatest miracle of this mission is that it has been able to accomplish so much and visit so many worlds.

A good part of the credit goes to the Voyager mission design manager, Charlie Colhaze. He arrived at JPL in 1959, fresh from the U.S. Navy. He would spend more than 40 years there, working on many missions, but nothing else comes close to the pride he has in Voyager. Charlie dropped by the Planetary Society studio a few weeks ago for the extended conversation you were about to hear. Charlie, it's been far too long. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Thank you. I have been looking forward to, in fact, it's been far too long. Welcome back to Planetary Radio.

Thank you. I have been looking forward to, in fact, I've been bugging you about this and then not getting to inviting you here to Planetary Society headquarters to have a general conversation about the amazing career that you've led. So thank you for doing this and for being willing to take some time, too. Oh, happy to. No, Matt, it's been a long time. You know, I started in 1959 at JPL and sort of had a little bit of everything. Ranger, Mariners, Viking, Voyager, Cassini. And then even in recent

times, after I retired, I went back as a consultant and worked on the Mars sample return campaign. So I've had a chance to enjoy it all. Out of all those missions, though, Voyager is certainly my favorite. I was going to ask you, your greatest achievement as a mission designer, which was mission design manager, right? That was your title. Yes, that was it. Because, you know, many things that we do in life, in hindsight, we think of some things we might have done differently.

As I look back on Voyager, there's nothing I would have done differently. I think we picked the best flight paths out of 10,000 possibilities. I mean, you have to understand the solar system has a lot of bodies out there. Yeah. And they're in constant motion. So at every instant in time, they're all in a different position. And the trick with Voyager was to find launch and arrival dates that had the largest number of interesting targets

in the best positions possible while still doing gravity assist to go from Jupiter to Saturn to Uranus to Neptune. And orchestrating that was a pleasure. I mean, I jumped up, you know, got out of bed in the morning, rushed into work, and I didn't look at the clock until 5.30 or 6 o'clock. Remind us again what a rare opportunity this was. Well, the planets are going around at their own different periods and so forth. The alignment of Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune happened about once every 176 years.

But it happened for three consecutive years before it sort of fell out of position. In other words, we could have gone in 1976, 77, and 78. But if we went in 76, we had to fly very close to get enough deflection to go on to Saturn. 1977 was sort of the Goldilocks year. In 1978, because Jupiter is overtaking Saturn, you don't want to get too much swing by, you have to fly further out. So the 1977 was the best year. And the interesting thing is, you know, the next opportunity will be what 2153. And who knows, we may not even be what I hope we're doing is saving Earth's biodiversity. I care about that a lot more than I do. As much as you care about the rest of the solar system.

I do. And the last time, of course, was when the first train ran in England somewhere. Last time, of course, was when the first train ran in England somewhere. That's a good way to put it. So this is a unique opportunity for sure, the 1977 one. I was talking just this morning with my daughter's boyfriend, and he was telling me about this app he has for his smartphone. It's basically a 3D model of the solar system. You can fly through it. It's absolutely accurate.

You didn't have that 40 years ago. What tools did you have to try and figure out these incredibly complex trajectories? Oh, how do I answer that question? Well, you basically, you still had computer programs that computed the position and velocity of the spacecraft and the different targets. Initially, we had sort of rudimentary graphics programs that were wireframe. But eventually, I had the good fortune of bringing Jim Blinn aboard. I was going to ask you that. I'm going to bring him up again later. Okay.

Jim and I produced the six Voyager animations. And, of course, Jim wrote all the software. He's brilliant. He's considered the father of modern computer graphics. Not just for places like JPL, but for the movies. Right, right, right. In fact, there's even an algorithm called blend shading. You know, there's different kinds.

There's phong shading. In the world of 3D modeling and animation, there are a lot of terms. And Jim has his own called blend shading. In the world of 3D modeling and animation, there are a lot of terms. And Jim has his own called blend shading. About that time, we were able to, and other people like Paul Penzo and Joe Biro that I worked with, began to create good graphics. So we could fly these missions, point the scan platform, look at the targets, lay down the mosaics. So we had a pretty good feel for that. The scan platform, of course, was that independent little platform on Voyager

that allowed you to independently direct the cameras. That's right. It slewed in cone and clock or azimuth and elevation. I can't remember the terminology anymore. But the main trick with finding the best Voyager encounters, there was a lot of interest in the moon Io at Jupiter. Scientists had seen sulfur emissions, and they figured that there might be a chance it might have some volcanoes.

And, of course, the interesting moon at Saturn was Titan. Titan was Carl Sagan's interest. And Io goes around Jupiter every 1.77 days. But of course, Titan goes around Saturn every 16 days. So we're carving up this huge launch arrival date space in multiples of every 1.77 days at Jupiter because we want the swing by to still go close to iol and then at saturn well you could you could either fly by titan before you went by saturn closest approach or after so we call the the ones before titan befores and the ones after titan afters and uh tb and yeah that's right and so the the act that the sort of so the wonderful puzzle that we got to put together was examining all of these.

There are two ways you can generate trajectories. One is with double precision trajectory programs that have 16 and 32 bits of precision, and they're very slow because they take time steps and they integrate. slow because they take time steps and they integrate. They move all the planets and the spacecrafts a little bit and make very accurate computations. But it takes a long time to run a case. Especially 40 years ago. That's right.

And so what we did is we developed fast conics. You can simulate a more precise trajectory using conic equations. Because basically, when you leave the Earth, you leave on a hyperbola, then you find yourself on an ellipse around the sun. Then as you approach the target planet, you're back on a hyperbola relative to that. And so by patching conics from one planet to the next, we could run hundreds or thousands of those cases in the time it took to run half a dozen high-precision integrated ones. So we could cover the space quickly with the conics.

And these are sections of a cone because if you do that, right, put a plane through a cone and you get an ellipse. Exactly. That's right. Wow. So that simplified it, but you still had 10,000 choices. That's right. I mean, to a degree, as much as this was science and math, there seems to have been some art in this. No, there was.

I know. I don't know. There was. There was art in it. Well, of course, all of this time, we're still having to make sure we can navigate within the propellant budget. we're still having to make sure we can navigate within the propellant budget. So we're not only looking for the best flybys, but making sure the cost to fly the mission was within limits.

Now, the one thing that really frightened us on that, I don't know if you remember this, but the Voyagers were launched on top of a, let me think. Was it a Titan? It was a Titan Centaur. Yes, that's right. With an upper solid rocket kick stage. Okay. And the solid rocket kick stage gave us the last two kilometers per second of velocity.

When we launched the first Voyager, which was actually Voyager 2, which was launched first. Right, I remember. And we had, well, it bothered the press for a while, but in December, Voyager 1 overtook Voyager 2, and everything worked out all right. But for a few months there, they had to deal with that. When we did that, the Centaur used 1,200 pounds of extra propellant to get into parking orbit. See, the Titan would thrust for a while.

The Centaur would take off from the Titan, go into parking orbit, coast around the Earth for 30 or 40 minutes, and then fire up to do the final injection to get on the way to Jupiter. The Centaur used up far too much propellant. In fact, John and I were down there at the Cape, and we could hear the chatter on the launch vehicle net. John was the manager of the Voyager project, right? I think he was at

that time, yeah. And what had happened, they figured out much later, is the Titan had underperformed. The mixture ratio was off. And so it left the Centaur too far short of velocity. Now, when it used all of that extra fuel, we're sitting down there biting our fingernails,

wondering when it gets around to its final burn, does it have enough propellant left to make injection? If it doesn't, our mid-course system could never have done that. We figured it was close, and as it turned out, there was only about three seconds of propellant left in the Centaur tanks. When it shut down properly, guided shutdown,

the solid rocket took off, and everything was okay after that. Then the next thing we had to be concerned about is when the solid rocket, when we were free of Centaur, and you've just got a solid rocket and you've got the spacecraft on top of it, the solid rocket burn still had to be controlled. The thrust had to be controlled and pitch and yaw and roll. And it was controlled using hydrazine from Voyager's hydrazine tanks that we use mid-course maneuvers from.

Yeah, so that was precious. That's right. And so that worked out okay, and I won't go into the details there. But then it came time to do the first mid-course maneuver. And it took more propellant than people thought. And the reason was the adapter is still attached to the Voyager spacecraft. The solid rocket's gone now. But if you were thrusters, Voyager thrusters looking out the back,

your exhaust could impinge upon the wrappings of the struts that held a solid rocket. So this was the structure that attached the spacecraft to the solid rocket booster? Yes, yes, yes. Okay. And of course, what that would do is that would reduce the effectiveness of the thrusting because some of it is sort of bouncing off. Yeah, yeah. Okay. The engineering people had underestimated that effect.

They thought the effect of these struts in the way would be like a 7% reduction in the effectiveness of a kilogram of hydrazine. It turned out to be closer to 19%. Wow. Okay. So that meant that the odds of getting to, well, where we wanted to go were reduced. Now, we still were okay for reaching Jupiter and Saturn, but the worry I had and other people that I was working with was that we had lost enough efficiency in using the propellant

that the odds of getting to Uranus and Neptune might be lower. One of the challenges I and my team had was to find some way to make that back. After all the work you had been doing for months, if not years, you had to go back to the drawing board almost literally. That's right. That's right. You had to go back to the drawing board almost literally. That's right. And the way we did that, we had originally planned to do trajectory corrections, let's say, it's hard to remember the numbers, 60 or 70 days out from Jupiter.

And then we would do some on the outbound leg to correct it going to Saturn. And the maneuver after Saturn was, let's say, 30 days later. It's much more efficient to use velocity when you're going faster. The faster you're going, a meter per second, believe it or not, it may not sound right, a meter per second is more efficient at changing something than when you're going slower. So what we did is we put in an Earth-line burn at Jupiter closest approach on Voyager 2. What do you mean an Earth-line burn? Well, we didn't want to take the high-gain antenna off the Earth.

So it just turned out, fortunately, that the direction of the velocity vector at Jupiter closest approach was just about aligned to the Earth's sun line. So we could continue to point at Earth and send back data

without turning off. And at the same time, we could do this maneuver. That's just luck, right? I mean, yeah, it wasn't the equations, but still. That's right. It wasn't luck to think of it.

No, we were searching for ways, and that came to someone. But it was fortunate that, in fact, that was the direction. Yeah, that there was a solution. Because I'm sure, I mean, the scientists would have gone crazy if they thought you couldn't be sending back data during that critical moment. Because, I mean, Voyager's recording capability was pretty limited, wasn't it? Right. And what if it didn't survive? Right, yeah.

Wow. So that all worked out. And then, of course, you know the story of the Voyager 1 successfully returned the Titan science. I mean, Titan had a very dense atmosphere. But at least the conditions for Voyager 2 to continue on to Neptune, to Uranus and Neptune, were these. If Voyager 1 failed to capture the Titan science, we would retarget Voyager 2 for another Titan before. On the other hand, if it was successful, that cleared the way for Voyager 2 to use this further out aiming point at Saturn, give up Titan, pick the gravity assist corridor to go on to Uranus

and Neptune, and that all worked out. So there were a number of, if you could think of the logic flow chart on Voyager from the time we started designing it until the time we went through everything that happened, it was a beautiful path for any decision maker. Uh-huh. I bet. I hope that exists someplace. I hope somebody actually drew that out someplace. That would be a lot of boxes, I bet. As we know, it did make that Titan fly by,

and it couldn't see much. Didn't have the right tools. But Linda Spilker on this program told us very recently that was one of the big incentives to send Cassini, because then we knew we've got to send radar. That's right.

We need to send infrared, these other tools, and it worked. Oh, the radar was magnificent. You know, to image, was it Crocon Mare, that big shallow lake on the surface? Yeah, I think that's right. Oh, no. And Dr. Elachi headed the radar team. Yeah. And that was, oh, the surface of Titan that has been constructed from all the images and data is amazing.

Absolutely amazing. And Cassini has made many passes by Titan. Yep. That's right. Yeah, it pays to stick around in one place for a while. On the other hand, nothing quite has the romance of Voyager. You were involved in picking the name of that mission, weren't you? Oh, yeah.

That was funny. Voyager was originally called Mariner Jupiter Saturn 1977 or MJS 77. Yeah, not very sexy. And John Cassani called a meeting one day with the staff and he said, you know, we've got to find a better name than MJS 77. We came up with a sort of a list. People just sort of said, all right, how about Nomad? How about, I can't remember them all now, Voyager and so forth. And there were probably 10 different candidate names. And we liked Voyager, but there was a little fear that there had originally been a project named Voyager. You may not know about it.

It had been canceled. It was a very expensive mission to launch two orbiter landers piggyback on a Saturn C5. Oh, this was to Mars? That's right. Wow, on a Saturn C-5. Oh, this was to Mars? That's right. Wow, on a Saturn V. Right. And fortunately, NASA realized it was too expensive and too risky to have all your eggs in one basket. And so that Voyager got canceled.

And I think in its place probably arose Viking. So we'd said, oh, my goodness, is this going to be bad luck if we name MJ a 77 Voyager, given that a previous Voyager never made it? And we said, come on, we're scientists. We're not superstitious. And we like the name, so we went with it. So we went with Voyager with a little bit of nervousness.

And it was perfect. It was perfect. That way it worked out. I mean, it's just right. Oh, it is. It is. Oh, it is. You said one of the other candidates was Nomad?

Yep, I remember that name. By that time, there had been a Star Trek episode with this Nomad that was an Earth probe, if I remember correctly. It's a long time ago, original series. And it had melded with something else, kind of like what they did in the Star Trek movie with your Voyager. Right. It made it V'ger. Right, V'ger. But it melded and it became this all-powerful robot.

But that was Nomad. And I wonder if it was the Star Trek inspiration. I don't know. I remember another name. Pilgrim was in the list. Pilgrim. Pilgrim. All I can remember at the moment is Voyager, Pilgrim, and Nomad.

Those are good enough. But there were others. There were other names. Voyager Mission Design Manager Charlie Cole-Hayes has more for us after the break. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone

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Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Charlie Colhaze was only half his current age when Voyagers 1 and 2 departed Earth in 1977 for the outer solar system and interstellar space. The Voyager mission design manager led the team that figured out how the spacecraft could slingshot through the planets, returning data and images that are still making news and leaving viewers dumbstruck with their beauty. Were you involved with the creation of the Golden Record with that team with Carl Sagan and other folks? No. No, I wasn't.

Because there's a picture of you standing next to it with a big smile, and I just wondered, did you feel good about it being part of the mission? Oh, yeah. No, it was the way the cover to the golden record was designed to allow anyone that happened to discover it to learn where it came from. If you look at that, you'll see that this instructional cover knew that something that was fundamental in the universe that Carl and whoever did this design figured someone advanced enough to find for us would understand is hydrogen. And hydrogen goes through a hyperfine transition where the spin of the proton and the electron reverse and they flip. And that's called a hyperfine transition transition they decided to let that be the unit of time and they used the binary system in different directions of pulsars from our solar system

and what their pulsing rate was using a binary system of zeros and ones but where the time unit was this hyperfine transition. Brilliant. And I thought that was absolutely brilliant. They also put a stylus in to play the record. Yep. Yeah. I thought. So that they could decode those pictures.

Right. You're an artist as well as a scientist. Right. The idea of sending works of art, beautiful photos representing our planet and our civilization, that had to capture your imagination like it did so many people's. Oh, it did. It did. No, I'm very much left brain science, logic, engineering, right brain, artist, and so forth. And in fact, I like best projects that involve both sides of my brain.

And I was totally supportive of all the things they did in that vein. How did the artistic side of your mind, how did that mesh with the science side? Why did those work well together for you? Well, it's funny. In the earliest days, I could visualize trajectory. If I was designing some orbit around some body, I could see it in my head in 3D almost to scale. And I consider that the artistic side and not the scientific. The scientific side would sort of write all the equations down and generate whatever.

But I could picture all of these things in my head, and I loved it. I've loved photography, and I eventually taught 3D modeling and animation at PCC. Yep, Pasadena City College. I read that sometimes you would go to bed with a problem in your head. Oh, yeah. And you'd wake up eureka.

No, I know. I know that sounds like BS. But that saved me a huge amount of time. That happened regularly. I would, just before falling asleep, I would sort of think about a problem that hadn't been solved that day. And when I woke up the next morning, I knew the answer just like that. And it was solved in my sleep. And that really helps when you've got a lot of work to do. I'll say, yeah, man, I wonder what that dream was about. You already mentioned Jim Blinn.

Oh, yeah. One of the artists you've worked with. Right. You worked with Don Davis a lot, too. Famous. Oh, Don. Don's a wonderful person. Space artist. Yeah. Yeah. You also got the chance, I think, because of what you did, to meet a lot of the greats in science fiction, another kind of art. Oh, yeah. Right? I mean, kind of art. Oh, yeah. Right? I mean, you're a long-time fan. No, Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury. Heinlein? Briefly. I spent a day with Neil Armstrong. So, no, I've been very fortunate in meeting the greats. You know, most of them, I mean, many of them are gone now. Yeah. I mean, Bradbury's gone, Armstrong's gone, Clarke's gone. And I knew them at the time and had enormous respect for them.

I wouldn't take it back. I would want my life over again because I don't think it could have been worked out any better. I met great people and got the assignment of a lifetime everybody dreams of. And I was kind of worried about that. You know, several people, you know, Ralph Miles had the Voyager job in the beginning. He decided he didn't want to continue. And I never understood it. And Bud Schirmeier said, okay, we're opening up this position of science and mission design manager. And I applied for it. Oh, geez, you know, I don't know if I'll get it or not. One thing that happened that probably gave me a leg up on the other candidates. Earlier, Gentry Lee had been running a large

department at Martin Marietta in Denver. And Gentry was about to leave, and they decided to interview me for that position. One week, they said, we want you to fly up and be interviewed. Now, I was happy at JPL. I wasn't looking for anything. I thought, what have I got to lose? And I took a Friday off, went up on a Friday. And I remembered, Thursday late, my boss said, are you going to be here in tomorrow, Friday? I said, no, geez, I've got to go. He said, where are you going to be here in tomorrow, Friday? I said, no, Jesus, I've got to go. He said, where are you going to be? I said, well, I'm going to Martin Murrieta.

He didn't look too happy about that, but he said, okay. So I go up there. The morning is great. I'm seeing all these department heads and everybody's being nice to me and treating me well. And I thought, Jesus, I, probably going to get an offer. And then someone takes me to lunch in the executive dining room at Martin Marietta. And Gentry comes in and he says, listen, we all, you know, love your qualifications, but you're going to find after lunch, there's a noticeable change. They're not going to be

that interested. They're going to kind of be going through the interviews in a rote fashion. And I said, why is that? They said, well, Pickering called the director of Martin Marietta. Pickering, the head of JPL at the time. And told him to lay off. Okay. So I got back. Hands off our guy. Yeah. So I get back and my boss at the time said, we know we shouldn't have done that. But so how can we make it up to you? I said, listen, if there's ever an opening, this was before the voyage, ever an opening on a mission that has, you know, in the beginning stages, I'd like to be considered. And that opening came along on Voyager. Now, whether that sort of promised to make it up for to me for not letting me have the interview.

I'll never know. But that was – it turned out I was the third person Martin had tried to get away from JPL, and that just did it. Pickering said, number three, I'm going to draw the line. JPL must have been a very special place then. It still is, I think. Right. A lot more politics there now than there used to be. Well, tell me.

I mean, how was it different in those days? Well, in the early days, the atmosphere was very academic. You had to remember what happened. NASA eventually, when the Ranger program started having failures, claimed that it was because JPL had too loose an academic atmosphere. And that's when they started appointing military generals and admirals to be the deputy directors at JPL. Which continues.

It continues, right. And the only one that sort of was really acceptable was Dr. Allen because he also had a PhD in physics. So General Allen was also known as Dr. Allen because he also had a PhD in physics. So General Allen was also known as Dr. Allen. Well, he was actually director. I'm talking about deputy directors. Yeah, yeah. But then with that change from the sort of Caltech studious academic atmosphere

came a lot more reviews, constantly reviewing things over and over. Well, you had so many creative people, though. I know. And creative people didn't like that, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, and it's interesting because, after all, JPL is still part of Caltech. Right, no, I know. An academic institution.

In spite of anything that may have changed there over the years, it's such an amazing record of accomplishment out of JPL. If I meet people and they learn that I worked at JPL, they immediately havelean algebra at a very young age and then built a puzzle-solving machine. fighter decision thing that it'll be hard for me to go into well. But then the next thing I did is, you know, there's this famous little problem of the man who has a fox and a chicken and a dog, and he has to take them from one side of the river to the other. Oh, yeah. But he can't. If he leaves the dog with the fox, the dog will eat the fox. And if he leaves the fox with the chicken, but if he's with them, it prevents one of

these climes from happening. And so I built something that had five switches on it that when they were all in the down position was, let's say, the south side of the river and up position was the north side. And I would throw them, okay, man takes fox over first, man comes back alone, man takes chicken over, brings fox back. He has to do it in this sequence. And it worked.

It worked great. And so. Did this light up little lights or something? Oh, yeah. No, no. If I allowed one of these creatures he's trying to get across to be hurt by another or eaten by another, it flashed a red warning light. So you had to throw the switches in a way that you never got that. And so that was Boolean algebra.

You know, Boolean algebra is a bunch of and. Not and, and, or, not or. That's right. Yeah. That's right. And it still is the basis of what runs deep inside computers. That's right. That's right. That's right.

So you go from the Boolean algebra to the circuit design, which is made up of series and parallel connections, and the switches are in there, and it all worked out. You were doing this stuff when you were 10, 11 years old. Right. I read that your father didn't really approve of your interest in science. He didn't. What did he do or say when you told him,

Dad, this is what I want to do with my life? No, he told me the only thing worth studying was mechanical engineering. So when I went to Georgia Tech, I enrolled in ME for my freshman and sophomore years. But I still had to take courses in math and physics, and I realized I just didn't want to stay in engineering. So I switched my major between my sophomore and junior years. And as soon as I told him that, he said, you have made the greatest mistake of your life.

And he cut me off. He never gave me – I had to pay the rest of my way to college. Wow. And, no, he really meant it. That was it. He was dead wrong. Well, and he only acknowledged that I had done okay on his deathbed. In the last three or four weeks of his life, I went back to see him and he said, well,

son, you did okay. But for 60 years or 45 years or so, he really didn't approve of it. I'm glad he didn't influence you too much, at least to the point of going in the wrong direction. What did you do before you got to JPL? After graduating, you had a few years, you were doing other stuff until you reached the lab in 1959. To shape me up, he sent me to a military academy for high school. So I had, from the 7th grade to the 12th, I carried a rifle and marched around a field and, you know, whipped into shape all the time. Did it work?

I don't think so. the time. Did it work? I don't think so. As I approached my senior year, I knew that I had to put some time in the military somehow. So I had gone through the Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps, the NROTC program at Georgia Tech. I was what's called a contract student. I only had to put in two years and not four. And that's all I wanted to do. So I graduated as an ensign, I got commissioned as an ensign in the Navy. And I served on two aircraft carriers, in both cases as the electrical officer of a nuclear weapons team, assistant electrical officer. And I finally was promoted to Lieutenant JG. And when I got out in 1959, then I came to JPL. But just to be clear, you were working on circuitry in nuclear weapons

that were stored on this aircraft carrier. God forbid this should have been used. I know, I know. Well, the funny thing is the training for this took place in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was called the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project or something. So I had to go to Albuquerque for,

I can't remember, three or four months to go through the training. And I remember the final exam, we were matched up in partners. The final exam my partner and I had is we're going through a simulated checkout of a nuclear weapon. Unbeknownst to us, the instructor had shorted, had put a pin in a cable to short out two lines that caused the weapon to start counting down for an explosion. And here we've got 60 seconds to find it. And we found it.

Unbelievably, we looked at all the charts and said, the only way this can happen is here. We quickly disconnected it, pulled the pin out, and passed. Those were the days, i don't i would be fumbling around now like a like a dummy but to go from nuclear weapon maintenance to exploring the solar system what a transition it is and i obviously i i have no love of nuclear weapons i i wish there weren't any. And the best way I could get away from that was to go into space. Time to provide some advice.

Okay. Young, star-struck man or woman wants to be a part of exploring the solar system with robots. What do you tell them? What should they study? What should they do? What do you tell them? What should they study? What should they do?

Well, hopefully, the best chance you have when you're a little boy or a little girl is you've got to have – this is before they get to the point where the question you asked me. Hopefully, you have at least one person in your life that loves you, that tells you stories, reads you stories, gets you interested in adventure. And I was lucky. My grandmother was that person. So then I began to read all sorts of stories. In fact, one summer at a little cabin in the Smoky Mountains, I was about 10 or 11, and I remembered reading The Count of Monte Cristo, which is 1,200 pages, The Three Musketeers, and Dracula. But then after that, I began to read science fiction. But you need that. You need to always be excited about certain things. Now, in terms of what you should study, I still believe in the fundamentals. I think you've got to understand math and physics. You've got to get at least through calculus. But above it all, there has to be a kind of a mystery to it and a

love that pulls you forward. Would you say a sense of wonder? Yeah, that too. In fact, that reminds me, students from when I was 12 and 13, most of which are gone now, used to say I lay in the front lawn of my house and just stared up at the stars. So you're right, Matt. It's a sense of wonder. But you can't just jump in and do it. You have to be trained in the fundamentals. And so like it or not, as much wonder as you have,

you must take some basic courses. And I think it's important to be a good writer, too. A lot of engineers would send me material that poor grammar, poor sentence structure. That'd be a side benefit of learning to enjoy those stories,

developing that sense of adventure. You might learn how to work with language a little bit, too. Right. You still like to look at those gorgeous Voyager photos? Oh, yeah, I enjoy them. Of course, I've seen them hundreds of times. They're great.

You've got a book behind us here, which you said is coming out in about a month. Right. I don't want to blindside you, but I'm going to reach behind me here and grab it. Actually, there are two books. Right. I mean, we're wrapping up, but I want to blindside you but I'm going to reach behind me here and grab it actually there are two books I mean we're wrapping up but I want to make sure people know first of all I read about this but I hadn't seen it the Voyager Neptune Travel Guide

you said this went through three printing cycles with the government printing office and I actually took a chance on this one I violated the lab has guidelines for everything you do. And the documents were supposed to be eight and a half by 11. I decided to have a coffee-sized table, six by nine book. And that was very popular. It was easy. The press picked it up. They could carry it around. And no one ever slapped my wrist for that, but I was often sort of stepping outside the box,

figuring it was easier to say I'm sorry than to get approval. And so that, each cycle printed about 10,000, so there were 30,000 copies of that printed. And I've got to guess this may not be terribly available anymore. No. Fortunately, I still have two left. I found it was, I tried to find out if it was on eBay. And four or five years ago, I found out you could get a copy on eBay,

but it was fairly expensive. Oh, that's no Daniel Steele, you know, page turner there. Oh, this is the other book. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this weighs a ton. I know. You said this one is coming out soon?

In about a month. It's called The Complete Rocket Scientist by Charlie Cole Hayes. And there's a great illustration of Columbus with a fishbowl on his head standing on the moon. My dear friend and cartoonist Gary Hoblin. In fact, he illustrated a word game book I did in 1985 called Word Pursuit. He did all the cartoons for it. And I told him I wanted something that conveyed rocketry and Renaissance man. And that was what he came up with. And I loved it. It was funny. Rocket in the background. The name, I have to be a little careful here. You say, what a presumptive

title. If you check the literature, you'll find books that are named The Complete Flea, The Complete Gardener, The Complete Cockroach, The Complete Time Traveler. I thought, why not The Complete Rocket Scientist? And so it's with a certain sense of humor that I titled it. But there's only one chapter on space exploration. The rest is how a rocket scientist views the rest of the world, like religion and government and philosophy. Look at the page that I opened to randomly here. It's got a picture of the great attorney, Clarence Darrow.

Oh, God, I know. Well, that's the section probably on fixing government. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Fascinating. Charlie, it's available in like a month, you said? Yeah. Instant Publishing Company, Collierville, Tennessee.

Right. So you're self-publishing it. Yeah. But I assume it'll be available if people want to find it. Well, we'll see. I'm just initially publishing enough copies for my heirs and relatives. I want them to sort of know what I'm about before I pass into the next world and close friends. I'd love to look through it.

When it comes out, I'll buy a copy for you. What else are you up to nowadays? Well, I got married two years ago to a really wonderful woman named Bozena. She's from Poland, and she's a soprano. She sings and used to be in a dance company and we laugh a lot. It's very important when you get older to laugh a lot. And so we're now watching reruns of I Dream of Jeannie

and she had me watching Frasier for a while. Sounds like you're enjoying life. Well, I'm trying to. I'm doing the best I can. Getting older is only for the brave. I mean, I've lost colleagues. You know, they're going quickly. I try to stay in condition, try to keep my mind active. You seem to be in great shape. Well, I think I am. But, you know, I'd like to make it to 90. I'd like to make it. Well, you know what the Hayflick limit is.

That's the maximum theoretical lifespan presently for a human being. It's about 120 years. If you've got good genes and you have low caloric intake and you live at high elevation and don't breathe much oxygen and you're happy and you have a good social surrounding. And the telomeres, which are dividing off the ends of the DNA, don't divide too quickly. You might make it to 120. Now, if you start reading the literature, there are people now that think they may be able to slow that process, maybe cut it in half, which would then increase the lifespan

to 240. Now, I wouldn't want to live to 240 if I'm just in some mediocre physical shape. You have to have some cause. I'd like to be around to 90 anyway. I want to thank you for taking from this unique viewpoint that you've had, particularly with Voyager, but across many years of exploration in our solar system. Well, Matt, I appreciate it. You and I have always been friends, and I miss seeing you at times.

And other times I've enjoyed it very much, and I hope we continue to have this relationship. I have a lot of respect for you. You're doing a wonderful job. And you scored some points with my daughter that time. She said, geez, Dad, he knows who you are. I'm not alone. Thank you, Charlie. Thanks, Matt, very much.

I appreciate it. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. We've got the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Dr. Bruce Betts, and he's going to fill us in. Hi there. Hi, Matt. How are you doing? I'm very happy today. I had a nice conversation with our friend Charlie Cole-Hayes,

and looking forward to DPS next week. I'll get to spend the whole week in Pasadena, which might not excite some people, but I'm looking forward to it. Speaking for those people, you're right. So what's up? Got the evening sky dominated by Venus low in the west. Shortly after sunset, if you look to the upper left of Venus, you will hopefully find Saturn looking kind of yellowish and a lot dimmer.

And go farther to the upper left and you will find Mars looking reddish but a lot dimmer than Venus. In the pre-dawn sky, Jupiter is low in the east, coming up, getting higher over the coming weeks. Easier to see right before dawn. We move on to this week in space history. It was 1967. Mariner 5 flew by Venus. All right, another important milestone in the exploration of our solar system. What's next? As if I didn't know.

I don't know, Matt. I don't know. What could it be? Random space fact? I don't know, man. I don't know. What could it be? Random space fact? This week, the Schiaparelli ESA entry, descent, lander test will be going on on Mars. And I thought I'd point out to you that it was named after Giovanni Schiaparelli, Italian astronomer from the mostly 1800s. Italian astronomer from the mostly 1800s. He was a big Mars observer. In fact, coined the term canali, which just meant channels, natural features in Italian, but got all scrambled, come into English and started the whole crazy there are canals on Mars thing. Also, he has a big crater named after him on Mars. It's 461 kilometers in diameter, and I'm guessing you think of it for another reason.

And why is that? Because in the Martian, that's the crater that our hero had to get to. Completely forgot that. Thanks, by the way, to Percival Lowell for giving us what he thought were actual canals, leading to, oh man, over a century now of fun with Martians. That's true. That's true. I also, since you don't have the advantage of having heard my piece with Emily today

when we talked about ExoMars and Schiaparelli, I think I got that right, or being married to an Italian woman as I am, I will just excuse it by saying you use the American pronunciation. Yes, I apologize for any offense I cause. Giapparelli? Yeah, that's a big improvement. Let's go on to the contest. Okay. We asked you, what are the names of the two asteroids that Rosetta flew by,

as well as the name of the comet it studied and eventually was set down upon recently? And how did we do, Matt? Well, this was one of the tougher questions you've asked recently, and I think that that had its effect on the number of entries. Still a lot more than we used to get. I think just an indication of the growing audience for this program. Would you give us the answers, please? Because I'm hoping you'll do a better job of pronouncing them.

I doubt it. Apparently, I already failed on Schiaparelli. They flew by the asteroid Steins, the very much larger asteroid Lutetia, and then studied for a long time comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. Sounded good to me. And in that case, Mark Selfridge, longtime listener, first time winner, is our winner this week. He hails from Boise, Idaho, way up there north. We're going to send him the Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. So congratulations, Mark. We'll get that stuff in the mail. As you might expect, I had mail from many other people with interesting comments,

including this from Craig Balog in Woodbridge, New Jersey. He said, I believe Rosetta also did observations on a third asteroid named P2010A2, and it helped to confirm that it was an asteroid and not a comet. I guess there was some question about that. It was discovered by Hubble, but I guess Rosetta played a part. By the Hubble Space Telescope, I assume you mean not Edwin Hubble. No, not Edwin. Though I'm sure if he was around, he'd claim it, knowing a little bit about his character.

Undoubtedly. Yeah, that was more a distant observation as opposed to the flybys, which is what I was looking for. But yeah, Rosetta did all sorts of great stuff. And then endless comments, well, not quite endless, from a lot of people who just talked about how much they were influenced by the Rosetta mission. A couple from Israel, Nadav Mayet, who decided to pursue planetary science because of the mission. Danalyn Barnett, who said her three-year-old is a big Rosetta fan, especially of the animation that was done around that mission. And this one from Birko Katerino-Ruzicka in Germany, who said that she's writing her PhD thesis on the geology and morphology of 67P. And so she's a big fan of Rosetta as well. Yeah, I bet. Cool.

We're ready for another contest. All right. For this time, answer the following question. In what region is ESA's Schiaparelli supposed to land? So what region on Mars, region name, or coordinates, or however you choose to convey it in a standardly accepted notation. And we'll give a special advantage to those of you who may be listening to this after that landing. We all hope it'll be successful, and we'll have a leg up on those who enter early. But if you enter, you must do so. You really must by the 25th. That would be

Tuesday, October 25th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And where do they enter? Planetary.org slash radio contest. Okay. Or you can drop a line to Planetary Radio at Planetary.org, which is also where I just welcome your comments about the radio show. And I read all of those, and I try to reply to as many as I can. By the way, the nice people at National Geographic and our guest last week, Andrew Fazekas, the author of Star Trek, The Official Guide to Our Universe,

The True Science Behind the Starship Voyages. You remember that, right? Well, they've given us another copy of the book to give away. And we'll throw in a Planetary Society rubber asteroid and a 200-point itelescope.net account, that nonprofit network of worldwide telescopes. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look at the night sky,

and think about your favorite trace gas. Thank you, and good night. I was going to say I like radon, but it may not like me. I'm not even sure it's a trace gas, is it? I don't know. Just move on. That's Bruce Betts. He's the director of science and technology at the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its ever-voyaging members. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.