Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Conference on the Future of the American Space Program with Bill Nye

Episode Date: April 19, 2010

Bill Nye the Science Guy reports on last week's conference about the future of the US space program.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Putting America's space program back on track, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. On April 15, Tax Day in America, the American President flew down to the Kennedy Space Center to talk about that historic facility's future, along with the future of NASA and America's role in space exploration and development. Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, was there, and he'll give us a special report.

Devious carbon-based animals found gazing earthward. The plot of a new sci-fi horror flick? No, just a way to remember Saturn's rings, courtesy of listener B. Clark Williams. Bruce Betts and I will announce the winners of our Saturnian ring mnemonic contest during today's What's Up segment. Let's get underway by enjoying another online visit with Emily Lakdawalla, the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator. Emily, lots of coverage on the blog over the last week that you didn't write, but a lot of things about the topic we'll be

picking up with Bill Nye in just a moment or two, and that was the conference in Florida just last week. And one photo in particular I want to call attention to, Buzz Aldrin, second man to walk on the moon, and the President of the United States looking like they are just fascinated by a potato. It looks an awful lot like a potato, but so do lots of other small bodies in the solar system.

And that, I think, is one of the biggest messages that the President delivered at his speech, which was that we want to send astronauts like Buzz to potatoes. Or in this case, little moons. Yeah, little moons or little asteroids. Actually, he announced that the intended plan was to send astronauts to an asteroid first. Let's go on to some of the things that you actually contributed, including, I guess, no news is bad news from Phoenix.

Yeah, this isn't really a surprise to anybody, but Mars Odyssey has been listening a lot for Phoenix. There were three different listening periods in January, February, and April, and no signal has been detected from Phoenix. Now, I suppose you could hold out hope that the spacecraft is still alive and just for some reason unable to communicate, but that's no different from dead as far as Earthlings are concerned. So it looks like they haven't completely given up. They haven't committed to doing any further

listening, but they could do some more listening around the solstice, and maybe then they might hear something. But odds are Phoenix is gone for good. Ah, well, certainly not a surprise. Let's move on finally to a topic that you don't get to talk about a whole lot in the blog, and that is, speaking of solstice, the sun. That's right. It's not so much that I don't get to talk about it. It's not a geologic world, and I'm a geologist at heart, so I like to talk about worlds of solid surfaces. But once in a while, the sun does something dramatic enough that even I have to notice.

And there was a really dramatic coronal mass ejection that was caught in action by the SOHO spacecraft, just this gorgeous prominence jetting up off of the sun. And Soho is still out there after so many years and captured a beautiful series of images. Now, the thing that I find very interesting is that, you know, the Solar Dynamics Observatory was launched recently. We haven't seen their first light images yet, but there's no reason to expect that they couldn't have taken a picture of that. So I'd say stay tuned for news from SDO to find out what they saw when that coronal mass ejection happened. It is a spectacular animation from SOHO, but you also included the next day something from a much smaller spacecraft. That's right. This was from a European Space Agency spacecraft called PROBA-2. They caught in action the coronal mass ejection that produced

a geomagnetic storm that I blogged about last week. And this one didn't look as dramatic because it wasn't silhouetted against space. It was actually coming straight at us. And you can see it forming and dissipating on the disk of the sun in this European Space Agency animation. Lots of fun stuff in last week's Planetary Society blog entries. No doubt much more coming together this week. As you hear us, she is Emily Lakdawalla, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Talk to you again next week and see you on the 30th at Planetary Radio Live. That's right. I'll see you there, Matt. More than 200 people gathered at the Kennedy Space Center last week for a conference on the future of the American space program.

There isn't much question that the meeting was seen as an important political move by the Obama administration, which had been criticized in some quarters for cancellation of the Constellation program begun under President Bush. But we will actually reach space faster and more often under this new plan in ways that will help us improve our technological capacity and lower our costs, which are both essential for the long-term sustainability of spaceflight. In fact, through our plan, we'll be sending many more astronauts to space over the next decade. How about a mission to a near-Earth asteroid or a similarly challenging destination by 2025? You can read about that and more at planetary.org. Listening to the president with much of the

Planetary Society's leadership was Bill Nye. We usually hear Bill's commentary at this point in our show. This time I asked him to spend a bit more time with us to talk about his experience at the conference and where the new plan appears to be taking us. Bill, nice to actually have a chance to have a conversation with you this time. And we're forgoing your little two-minute commentary so that you can give us a somewhat more complete report on this conference that you just attended last week in, of all places, Florida. Yes, at the Kennedy Space Flight Center. So people from all over, I guess, the world were invited to talk about the future of the American space program.

And at the Planetary Society, at least in the leadership of the Planetary Society, we very much want to move forward. We strongly feel that retiring the space shuttle is a good idea. But the reason it was held in Florida, I'm pretty sure, was political. And that people in Florida, Alabama, that area, are very concerned that with the canceling of the space shuttle, their jobs will be lost and their futures sufficiently uncertain where they don't want to cancel the space shuttle. Everybody who's thought about it, I think, sees why we have to cancel the space shuttle. First of all, it was canceled six years ago. It was already canceled. Just certain Congress people, senators, have brought it up in a last-minute effort, I guess,

to get more money for their districts rather than, if I may, being concerned about the future. Well, and I guess another big part of this was that the new wrinkle, it was the cancellation of the Constellation program, those two new Ares rockets, if not the capsule that was designed to go with them. Well, yeah. So the Ares rocket, the Ares 1, is this very long, skinny thing. People have called it Scott's Stick. Scott being one of the guys, one of the managers on the program.

It was going to be all solid boosters, the Ares One. At least right now, those systems have limitations. You can't make them too big around, and you can't make them too long. And it just turned out to be mathematically, that is to say, as people analyzed the design, it was too much vibration, just too long and too thin. So that went around for years. But finally, the president and his people decided that that thing just it's really time to move on. Let's build the new deep space rocket, as I like to call it. So it would be a new thing that would get the job done for real. See, the thing about Ares, which was part of the Constellation program,

there's three words. There's Constellation, that's the big idea. There's Orion, that's the crew capsule. And then Ares I and Ares V were going to be the rockets that would lift these things into orbit and beyond. Anyway, the idea was to cancel Constellation because even though Constellation guys, people have been working on this for the last four or five years, they weren't even going to get the United States back on the moon with humans until at least the year 2020. So just think about it, my fellow taxpayers and voters, that's 15 years to not get back to a

place we were 40 years ago. So somebody finally had the political will or courage to cancel that program. Whatever happened, it's mismanaged, something's not working right, we're going to finally cancel it. So that's what happened. And people in Florida were very concerned about that. And then along with that, analysts, budgetary people, engineers decided that the Orion capsule, the crew capsule, was probably not a bad thing. That that was, no matter what the rocket it was intended to be lifted with, it was probably a pretty good design. So they're going to keep that at least in the near term or medium term for escape from the space shuttle, from the, sorry, International Space Station. And so that's good.

And that people would say, well, that's just throwing them a bone or letting certain people keep their jobs. But I think it's actually based on very good engineering decisions. So new deep space rocket, old capsule to get back from the International Space Station, and then the United States, NASA, will go on to new, interesting, exciting destinations on our way eventually to putting people on Mars. You're giving me the idea that there was a lot of agreement at this conference. You're giving me the idea that there was a lot of agreement at this conference. Were there any dissenting voices?

Because obviously the president, the administration, and NASA have taken a lot of heat for this. Well, I would say that the journalists who came up to me, these are people who would approach me and they know how I feel about all this. They have a pretty good idea of how I feel about all this. As soon as I would point out the following couple things, hey, Mr. Florida journalist, constituency in Florida, readership in Florida. You know, the shuttle program was canceled six years ago before the current president, President Obama, took office. And the thing is 30 years old. And the thing has a one in 70 chance of killing everybody on board.

a 1 in 70 chance of killing everybody on board. Once you start your response, when I would start my response with those couple or three facts, the journalists would back off. I think everybody in the space industry knows really deep down that the shuttle has been canceled. And there are pretty good, very good reasons for it. And it's just when you make a souffle, you've got to break eggs. And there's no painless way out of this. The Constellation program was started many years ago, and it got a lot of inertia, no pun intended. And then to cancel it is just not traumatic, but there's going to be some trouble. Bill Nye with his impressions of last week's conference on the future of the American space program.

More in a minute from Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail,

informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show. Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're talking with Planetary Society Vice President Bill Nye about last week's conference on the future of the American space program. The science guy was at the Kennedy Space Center to hear President Barack Obama and discuss NASA's new plans with 200 other officials, academics, and leaders. What else was talked about as a part of the new space program? It looked like part of the reason the president wanted to make a personal appearance on this

was to tell everybody, hey, you know, people going around saying I'm against human spaceflight, that ain't true. That's another ironic thing, I must say, as a guy who doesn't live in Alabama or Florida. How it got out or how it was believed or perceived that the United States was canceling the human spaceflight program is quite odd. Even Neil Armstrong was nominally opposed to canceling the shuttle or canceling the program that the previous administrator, Mike Griffin, called Apollo on steroids. He was opposed to it, believing that the United States had to relearn how to go to the moon and stuff. But we remind you, everybody,

that the idea is to take humans to asteroids, to the gravitationally balanced Lagrange points, and then on to Mars. And the reason you want to send people is because people are better at it than our very best robots. We build the robots as good as we can, Spirit and Opportunity Rover, for example. But a human does, apparently, in less than a minute what a robot can do in a day. A human just makes better decisions. If you're looking for water or life, humans are just better at it than the machines that the humans are able to design. So we want to go out there because we want to know the two old questions. Where did we come from?

Are we alone? And if you want to address those two fundamental questions, you've got to go to Mars. That's the next logical place. The key. The key. Take us back to the conference. That's the next logical place. The key! Take us back to the conference. What was the discussion like? I guess the big event, like I said, was that the president was there and you got to shake his hand. I did.

I suppose he got to shake your hand, I guess. That's right, yes. Well said, of course. He goes, hey, you're Bill Nye. You know, my kids love your show. See ya. Okay, that was quick. He doesn't always say that to everybody. That was very nice. He's never said that to me. Yeah, well, the year is young. So the thing is, this is the first time a president has gone on the road, if you will,

to talk about the space program since Kennedy did it in 1961. I mean, it's quite a thing. The NASA people were all talking about, now these are people nominally who are nonpartisan, but at any rate, they're people, many of whom very conservative, were complaining that George Bush came to NASA, which is a few blocks from the White House, spoke for less than an hour and left. And the only other time you saw a president or even the administrator of NASA at a remote center was when there was a funeral. That is to say when one of the shuttles blew up. So this story came from several people. They're very happy that the president of the United

States, the United States still being the nominal world leader in space exploration, the president of the United States took the trouble, took the time to go to Florida and meet people, shake hands, listen to people complain. And still he's stuck by his decision, which is let's go to new advanced destinations and let the commercial sector, which launches all of our weather satellites, or how about most of our military satellites, all of our spy satellites, these are all launched on commercial vehicles. Even the first astronauts, the Mercury astronauts, were launched on commercial rockets, everybody. So were the Gemini guys.

The only exception is the Apollo, which was quite a thing. But even the U.S. military doesn't need a thing as big as a Saturn V. So this is all very exciting. I am very excited about the deep.S. military doesn't need a thing as big as a Saturn V. So this is all very exciting. I am very excited about the deep space rocket. So at the conference, we talked about the reasons to include humans, the intermediate destinations, Lagrange points and an asteroid or two, and the energy required to go to Mars and orbit it, the energy required to go to a moon of Mars like Phobos, go around it and come back, and the energy required to land on Mars.

It turns out it takes less energy to go to Mars and come back than to go to the moon and land and come back. If you're not going to land to get in the so-called gravity well, it's not that expensive measured in terms of fuel. Fascinating. I didn't know that. When you think about it, it's true. But you would say, well, why would you want to go to Mars and not land? Yeah, maybe you would. But what we did with Apollo 8, went around the moon, came back, trans-lunar. Circumlunar, rather. We're just about out of time. Any other comments about sort of where it sounds like things are going to go from here and how the conference ended up?

Thank you. I've never been more excited. This is it. We're back on track. The United States is once again going to be the world leader in this business. We're going to send people to new, exciting destinations. We're going to develop the commercial sector of rocketry. And we are, dare I say it, going to change the world in a politically sustainable way. That is to say, the intermediate destinations are chosen in a way that will still be making firsts. First people to get beyond the influence of the Earth's gravity. First people to visit an asteroid. First people to go to a moon of Mars. These are going to be exciting new milestones, or kilometer stones, that will change the world in a way that future administrations

won't feel the need to just cancel. It's going to be very exciting. It was a great conference. Bill, always a pleasure. We'll have you back for your regular commentary next week. And then, in two weeks, or not quite two weeks, April 30th, we'll see you at Planetary Radio Live, where you're going to join the conversation. Very exciting at Pasadena, right? Pasadena City College. Close, close by.

Where are we going to be? Actually, the Moan Broadcast Center, the new headquarters of KPCC. Yes, KPCC. Links on the website at new headquarters of KPCC. Yes, KPCC. Links on the website at planetary.org slash radio. Thanks, Bill. Thank you. Bill Nye joins us every week here for his regular commentary. He's also some kind of science guy, I think, and a planetary guy as far as we're concerned

because he is the vice president of the Planetary Society, just returned from the Future of the American Space Program conference. When we return, it'll be to talk with Bruce Betts, this week's edition of What's Up and some great new mnemonics for the rings of Saturn. Stay with us. We are having fun now. Well, actually, we've been having fun for the last 20 minutes or so. But now it's time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. We are going to have fun because we've got those Saturn ring mnemonics to announce the winners of and runners up in a few minutes.

Tell us, what's up? Fun and educational. Evening sky, can't miss Venus, super bright over in the west after sunset. Can check out reddish Mars high in the southwest, moving from Cancer into Leo around now. And yellowish Saturn is high in the east in Virgo. And in the pre-dawn, you can check out Jupiter low in the east. Oh, and I did want to mention the Lyrid meteor shower. Kind of lame, typically, but I'll mention it. Could be good Thursday, Friday, April 22nd, 23rd best time as in the pre-dawn

before the first light of dawn. But I wouldn't count on it. Moving right along, this week in space history, a couple of biggies. Apollo 16 landed on the moon and 20 years ago, Hubble Space Telescope was deployed.

God, so hard to believe. Two decades in space. Time flies. Yeah, I'll say. Having fun. On to one more space flight. It's the Al Jolson version. Apparently I'm getting more Al Jolson-y recently.

You mentioned another one that was that way. Trojan asteroids, commonly just referred to as the Trojans, a bunch of objects that are in the same orbit as Jupiter, but either plus 60 degrees ahead or minus 60 degrees behind, hanging out at these so-called L4 and L5 Lagrangian points. It's a nice stable place for asteroids to hang out. Almost 3,000 of these things have been found. And I found this rather amazingly total number of Jupiter Trojans larger than one kilometer is believed, obviously this is based on serious estimation,

to be about one million, approximately equal to the number of asteroids larger than one kilometer in the main asteroid belt. But they just don't have as good a press agent as the main asteroid belt. Apparently not. That's impressive. On to the trivia contest, because we wanted to check out the mnemonics people came up with for the rings of Saturn,

which have this, they were named alphabetically in the order in which they were discovered, which means they are not alphabetical as you go outward from the planet. They are D, C, B, A, F, G, E, going from inward to outward. We had some great entries, so I know how we did. How would you like to proceed, Matt? Why don't we start with me going through some of the runners-up? And we do want to thank everybody who entered. We are in awe of your creativity, and I wish we had time to go through many, many more of these. But let me go through a few that didn't quite reach the brass ring, or any other ring of Saturn, for that matter. How about this one?

This one from Kevin Bradley. Dutch Christian's book advances flat giant ellipses. Takes a little bit of explanation, but that would be Christian Huygens, of course. I like this one. This one cracked me up. I don't even really know why. Don't count backwards again, frivolously generating entropy. That from Kevin Hecht. Well, you enjoy frivolous entropy, so it's obvious why you like it. I do, actually. We had several from Philippe Espy,

our listener in Brittany, France. We'll just read one of these despicable Kronos, the Greek god who is equivalent to Saturn in the Roman, what do you call it, panoply of gods. Despicable Kronos brutalizes a fine-grained entourage, as in the moons and rings of Saturn. Your dogs are going there. Well, you know what they really like? Dogs chase big autos for great entertainment, and I think that's what they're going out to do right now. I don't blame them. They were waiting for that, obviously. Here's one from Torsten Zimmer, who just was at a loss.

Didn't come by any fantastically good entry. But we did. We did, actually. We had several winners, and why don't you do one of those for us? Well, we really enjoyed the topical thematic nature as well as the amusement of Day Cassini Breaks, All Fun Gonna End, from Susan Noe in Texas. And by the way, I ran that one past Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Cassini mission to Saturn, who will be on the show next week, by the way, with another of her mission updates.

And she loved that one. So, Susan, that's good enough to get you a T-shirt. Can I read one? Here's one that we thought was pretty funny. Did Kathy buy a fat, glistening eel? Ew. From Mallory Turner in Marion, Illinois and have you got our last big winner there?

Do children believe a fairy godmother exists? Which as you pointed out was one of the easiest to remember. From William Wood in Minnesota Yeah, there are three winners. Susan Noe, Mallory Turner and William Wood.

We're going to send all three of you Planetary Radio t-shirts. Many thanks again to all of the rest of you who entered. Do children believe a fairy godmother exists? Do children believe that we have another trivia contest ready from Bruce right now? I hope so, because we do. Speaking of Trojan asteroids, what was the first Trojan asteroid discovered? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

All right. The very first Trojan asteroid. And that'll win you a Planetary Radio t-shirt. You've got until the 26th of April at 2 p.m. Pacific time. One more topic to talk about. And that is, after all, you are the director of projects. And one of those projects has been getting some attention lately. Well, more than one, but one in particular, something called the MicroRover project. Can you tell us about it? Yes, we received a grant

recently from NASA. We partnered with Cornell University, and we're working with Society President Jim Bell there, and Professor Mason Peck and a lot of other people. We are looking into micro-rovers to assist human presence on the Moon and Mars as part of what's called the Steckler Grant Program. We're also trying to engage our members with this, but the basic concept is that what we're calling micro-rovers, and everyone has different definitions of these things, but we're saying one to a few kilograms. So think the Muses CN rover, if you know that, that was designed but not flown to an asteroid, up to kind of sojourner size.

How could these things help astronauts out, whether they be on the moon, Mars, an asteroid, and how could they make their jobs much more efficient? And we think they can make them more efficient, make them safer, so you can send the micro-rovers out, and you can have several of them because they're small and cheaper than their larger brethren, send them out to do reconnaissance, to do first tests on samples, really optimize then where the astronauts go out in order to both make it more efficient and to only use the astronauts for the, since it is risky, for the things with the most return. They can also do other things ranging from communication relays to facilities inspection.

Check out the underside of your spacecraft or whatever, but basically what we're doing is working on both partially just what are the things that micro rovers can do that are neat and spiffy, and then work on the design elements. What are the requirements? What are the design pieces? And we have an engineering class at Cornell working on that this semester, and also our friends and colleagues at Stellar Exploration working on that. We've got a lot of colleagues as collaborators on the proposal, including from JPL. And Tom Jones, the former astronaut, gave us a true astronaut perspective on things. So I'm excited about it.

It's a new project and kind of a different route for us with some great partnerships. And we're having fun. I'm glad. And it sounds like it's worth a longer conversation at some point in the future right here on the radio show. But we're out of time. Everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about your rover and where you'd send it. And what would it look like, and what brand would you imagine on it, and what color would it be? Well, you get the idea. Thank you and good night. I suppose there are rovers who go where the sun don't shine. He's Bruce Betts,

the director of projects from the Planetary Society, and he joins us every week here with What's Up. I'm sure you meant permanently shadowed craters. Yeah, yeah, wasn't it obvious? Mea culpa. I goofed a couple of weeks ago when I said listener Joe Plassman had won a T-shirt. Joe now knows he actually won the Celestron 50th anniversary First Scope. We still have a seat for you at Planetary Radio Live on Friday, April 30. There's a link to all the details at planetary.org slash radio. You'll also be able to put your name on the will call list for this free event in Pasadena, California.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up. Редактор субтитров А.Семкин Корректор А.Егорова