Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Could the Soviet Union Have Won the Space Race?

Episode Date: August 23, 2016

Space historian and policy expert John Logsdon joins Mat Kaplan for a fascinating conversation about how the US could have lost the race to the moon.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What if the Soviet Union had won the space race? 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. An alternate history this week as we welcome back distinguished space historian and policy expert John Logsdon for an utterly fascinating conversation. It's T-minus a few days till OSIRIS-REx rockets away to asteroid Bennu. Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla will give us a status update.

And as I speak, it's T-minus 364 days till the great North American total solar eclipse. Bill Nye prepares for that occasion and more in his segment. Down the line, we'll visit once again with Bruce Betts for a night sky preview and yet another space trivia contest. Emily, we are creeping up on the next big launch to someplace else in our solar system. That's right. We're talking about OSIRIS-REx, NASA's first asteroid sample return mission. It's also going to be NASA's first planetary launch since MAVEN in 2013, and it'll be the last NASA planetary launch until InSight in 2018. So it's a big five-year gap we're filling with this one mission, and let's all hope it goes well.

You bet. And it will be, what, a couple of years before it reaches the asteroid? Yeah, this is a leisurely mission because although the asteroid is relatively close to Earth, it's not easy to rendezvous with an object that doesn't have very much mass. When you have a planet like Mars, you can kind of do this direct-to-Mars trajectory, use the planet's gravity to grab you into orbit, but you've got to kind of creep up on it when you've just got the small mass of an asteroid. So it'll take a couple of years to get there. It'll take a couple of years to do some survey. It'll take a couple of years to get back

with the sample. You've got a complete timeline for, well, the opening of the launch window, I guess, is what, September 9th? That's right. And it's a fairly long launch period. So if it doesn't go up on September 9th, then they have a lot more chances to do right. And it's a fairly long launch period. So if it doesn't go up on September 9th, then they have a lot more chances to do it. You also give a little thumbnail descriptions of the instruments on this spacecraft. Really cool suite of instruments. I was struck by the legacy that a lot of them have. That's pretty common in spaceflight. You know, they tend not to fly brand new things for everything on every mission. This mission has one brand new thing, which is the sample capture technology. Everything else has as much heritage as possible.

The spacecraft bus is based on the MAVEN spacecraft, which itself was based on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And most of the instruments have a lot of heritage going back through lots and lots of other NASA and ESA missions. This is mostly out of a blog that Emily posted on the 17th of August, and you can find it, of course, at planetary.org, along with another one that just has all these great images of the spacecraft and its booster rocket being prepared. It's always fun to see those last images of the spacecraft before they button it up inside the rocket fairing and get ready to launch it into space where no human will ever see it again. Although on this mission, we will hopefully get a chance to see that sample return capsule come back from the asteroid with samples. Let's hope so. And maybe with more sample material than

any mission since Apollo. That's the hope. That's Emily Laktawalla. She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Thanks, Emily. We're going to go on now to Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. Bill, a year to go, actually slightly less than a year now, to a very big event. The great American eclipse next year, it's just like you took a felt tip marker and went from Salem, Oregon to South Carolina, right across the United States. And it's going to be a totality. It's 100 kilometers wide. It's 60, 70 miles wide. You'll

be in total eclipse. But like in Seattle, it'll be 90 some percent total, which is pretty impressive. I've seen a couple and they are amazing. They're people that really get into it and chase eclipses all over the world. And I understand that. So anyway, next year, mark your calendars. A year from now, there'll be a total eclipse in the United States. But make your hotel reservation very soon, because I just read today that a lot of hotels are already booked up. But as I say, in the United States, we drive everywhere.

Just get someplace where you can drive underneath it. It's only for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, but it is spectacular. I've got to make my plans because this would be my first one, and I don't want to miss it. I don't want to miss the first launch of a space launch system either, but that has also been in the news. Some claims about attempts to make it cheaper. Well, let's call it a goal. some claims about attempts to make it cheaper.

Well, let's call it a goal. We want to get the cost down to less than $2 billion a year, $2 billion U.S. I'm all for it, but NASA just historically just never meets those goals. And the reason is I think human nature, you try to tell congressmen and senators what you think it'll cost, and then things get delayed, they don't commit the money and then the cost goes up because you have to keep all the engineers and technicians working for extra time i am hopeful matt i'm hopeful first of all it would take people humans farther and deeper into space than ever and the other thing for us planetary explorers the sooner the space Launch System is available,

it's a big rocket, everybody, the SLS Space Launch System. As soon as it's available, we can send missions to Europa or to Mars much faster than we can right now. It's a big rocket, and let's do something cool with it. Yeah, they're saying eventually one a year, and actually down the line, two of these big big rockets hopefully headed to maybe the outreaches of the solar system something to hope for for those of you who long for the glory days of Apollo and stuff the cadence the regularity of launches is part of what enabled all that was launching more frequently the workforce workforce is engaged all the time. They don't

have to go off and do other stuff between launches. So here's hoping we get all that done. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy, member of the board that is his boss. John Logsdon is going to join us next to talk about what if the United States had lost the space race. What you are about to hear is an excerpt from The Soyuz Files, a dramatic podcast series that explores a space history that is very different from the one we know.

The unthinkable has occurred. Human beings have set foot on the surface of the moon. This is Moscow. This is something very beautiful. The color is so vivid. There is no doubt that yesterday, October 31st, 1968, will be a memorable date. We are hearing what was estimated to be nearly 250,000 people gathered yesterday in Moscow's Red Square for an event many politicians are calling either the grand finale of the Cold War.

For an event many politicians are calling either the grand finale of the Cold War. There will be an invasion. Cubans and Russians coming up through the Mexican border. Or an overture to World War III. And I'm urging everyone in the great state of North Carolina to start building bomb shelters in the basement. Civilian life in the West seems to be continuing as it always has, but one thing has certainly changed. The United States has decisively lost the space race. A very brief sample of The Soyuz Files,

an alternate history podcast produced by the Los Angeles-based storytelling collective that calls itself The West. Full disclosure, my daughter is a member of that group, and the online series includes a scene or two with yours truly as an American commentator. You can hear the entire series at www.soyuzfiles.com. It was that experience and my ongoing fascination with this pivotal success by the United States that led me to invite back one of my favorite guests. John Logsdon founded the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington

University. He ran the institute for 21 years, earning a reputation as one of the world's leading space historians and policy analysts. Along the way, he also wrote John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, and more recently, After Apollo, Richard Nixon, and the American Space Program. John recently joined me via Skype from his home. John, it is a pleasure and an honor to welcome you back to Planetary Radio. Thank you for this. Oh, as always. I'm glad to be here. I'm glad you feel that way.

We've already played a little excerpt of that series of podcasts, The Soyuz Files, which begin with this premise of an alternate history in which the Soviets won the space race, beat the United States to the moon. Let's start with talking about whether that was even a possibility. How close did they come? Well, I think in the real world, not very close. Soviet Union didn't make the decision to send people to the moon until three years after Kennedy's speech in August of 1964, and funded it at about one quarter the amount of the Apollo funding. So the program really didn't have the basis for success in getting to the moon before the United States. And then there were a whole series of technical problems along the way,

centered around the lunar rocket, the so-called N1, that had a series of failures, never was successfully launched. And even if it had been successful, the timeline for it and the lunar landing spacecraft wouldn't have made it by July of 1969. The N1 was essentially the Soviet Saturn V. That's true, but with lots of differences. It was a heavy lift rocket. It was designed by the Soviet chief designer, Sergei Korolev. But Korolev and his colleague, Valentin Glushko, who was the chief developer of rocket engines, were rivals back from the 1930s. Glushko had been the person whose testimony sent Korolev to a gulag during World War II. Wow. So they had good reason not to get along. And so when Korolev designed this big rocket, Glushko refused to allow him to use his

rocket engine designs. And so Korolev had to go find someone else, and he found a man named Kuznetsov, who had never built a rocket engine, just jet engines for airplanes. Ended up that there were 30 of these rocket engines in the first stage of the N1. Just sidebar, these same rocket engines were used by Orbital Sciences in its Antares launch vehicle, which hit a rather spectacular failure, what, now about almost two years ago. Yeah, same engines. I had no idea that was that engine. That's fascinating.

The NKA-33. But that was the first stage engine for the N1. And that engine is still generating political controversy in this country, as some people, you know, want to keep buying them from the Russians, and some people say, no, no, no, we should be building our own. No, that's a different engine. That's a different engine. Oh, my mistake. That's actually a derivative of the Glushko engine, which was an extremely good engine called the RD-18. I think it's ironic that the capabilities the Soviet Union could have had because of personal and bureaucratic rivalries

were not put to the service of the Soviet lunar landing program. Their both organizational and personal rivalries were much worse than anything in the United States. I read for a while that the Soviet hierarchy actually had them on somewhat parallel paths to the moon, one to orbit and one to land. Yeah, there were two Soviet lunar programs during the 1960s, one aimed at just flying around the moon, not even orbiting, like Apollo 8, but just doing a loop around the moon. And that came close to success, came close to success before Apollo 8.

Interesting question, if the Soviet Union had reached the moon, not landed, but reached the moon before the United States, what that impact would. Wow. Then there was Korolev's program for a lunar landing, which never really came close to success. It certainly didn't help that Korolev unexpectedly passed away, right? Well, he died during a botched surgery in 1966. And yes, he was a charismatic leader. I mean, the comparisons to Wernher von Braun are not very far off target. But Korolev also designed spacecraft as well as rockets. So he was kind of the master designer of the Soviet space program. And he died in 66.

And his deputy mission was not the kind of charismatic leader and not the kind of risk taker that Korolev was. And it was mission that brought the N1 program and the spacecraft. The Soviet Union built a landing spacecraft, did the training of Alexei Leonov, was going to be a one cosmonaut landing on the moon. That was all done. So a lot of the steps required for success were carried out, but they couldn't get the rocket to work. I read that Leonov was at, I don't know which one of the four launches, but the one where the N1 exploded, I think, that he was watching and his heart just sank because he then knew not only would he not be going to the moon, but they would lose the race N1 launch pads. So it required a couple of years before the next launch could be attempted.

And by that time, the United States had already reached the moon, but the Soviet Union was still trying. And in fact, even at the end of the N1 program in 1972 through 74, the Soviets had come up with a proposal saying kind of the United States made these little short sorties to the lunar surface. We're going to establish a lunar base. So there

was a plan to do this until, again, ironically, the Soviet leadership replaced mission of all people with Glushko. And his first step was to cancel the N1 program. Well, one last dig at his old nemesis. Indeed. It's not hard to find images of some of this hardware that was developed for the moon landing. And it's fascinating to compare, for example, their version of the lunar module with the American lunar module quite a bit smaller. And as you said, just one guy intended to go down to the surface. And it wasn't even going to dock and have a tunnel from the command module, if you wish. The cosmonaut would have to do a spacewalk to get out of the lunar orbiting ship and

into the lunar lander. I mean, the Soviet Union in general takes a much more rudimentary approach doing its space achievements. And this is a good example of that. Yeah, kind of rough and tumble. And, of course, they had many successes with that approach. Yes, yes. All right. They didn't come that close is the overall answer, it seems.

To the landing. To the landing. They did come close. They had a successful test flight of the circumlunar in September of 1968. Still a mystery how much influence that had on the decision to do Apollo 8, by the way. Our intelligence services knew that this was going on. But then they had a second test flight in November of 68 that reentered badly and the live specimens, not humans, didn't survive the landing. And so the Soviet leadership refused to give the permission for an attempt in

December, which would have been before Apollo 8, even though the cosmonauts were ready to go and actually travel to Baikonur in case the permission came through at the last minute. Somehow, I think that those Soviet cosmonauts probably would not have been reading verses from the Bible had they made that decision. That's very true. Did this have an influence in Europe, not just opinion, but through your study, in the decision that since the lunar module wasn't really ready for testing, to send Jim Lovell and his colleagues out on Apollo 8 for that real trailblazer of a mission?

Well, it's still an open question in my mind. Frank Borman, who commanded Apollo 8, said, of course, we did it to beat the Russians. But I've looked very carefully at the paper trail of the decision to do Apollo 8 and have seen no evidence that the possibility of the Soviet Union being first was a factor in that decision. It was a very bold decision basically made in a few hours in August of 1968 that since we didn't have a lunar lander that was ready for its Earth orbital test, why not launch the command module? And if you're going to launch

it, why not go all the way out to the moon? And it was a tremendous success. I mean, in terms of politics and public relations, as well as a test of the technology, right? Oh, I think it was the mission that won the race to the moon. Apollo 11 was certainly not an anti-climax. But once we got to the vicinity of the moon, orbited the moon, it was clear that the landing would follow soon after. after Apollo, Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, which I recommend very highly, was how close Frank Borman became to Richard Nixon, who, of course, became president early in 1969 and, you know, got to be in the White House when we reached the moon. That became such an interesting relationship. And you bring out a lot of this in the book.

The Apollo 8 crew came to the White House after their mission just a couple of weeks after Nixon arrived there. And apparently Nixon and Borman hit it off from the start. Borman, in conversations with me, said he really found Nixon a no, I'll say, bulls**t, and you can edit it. A little bleep there for you folks listening on the radio. Either that or a no-nonsense president, and Borman was a very straight-shooting guy. So Nixon, as he was getting ready for all the events surrounding Apollo 11, asked NASA to send Borman to the White House to help him in his preparations. And the two became not friend-friends, but very close associates in terms of planning for Apollo 11.

Now, we have to have another conversation sometime before too long about what actually happened after Apollo, because that, of course, is what you've written a whole book about. happened after Apollo, because that, of course, is what you've written a whole book about. But at the time, Nixon was almost giddy, right? I mean, from reading your book, I learned he loved this stuff. He loved the astronauts, and he loved that he'd be president for the moon landing, and took some chances based on that, some risks. Well, yeah, he insisted, for example, over NASA's objections on going out to the recovery ship to meet the crew as they returned. They told him, well, gee, they're going to be in quarantine. You can only look through a little window. He said, I'm going. And then he planned a whole international trip

with this as its first stop. He immersed himself in all the positives surrounding Apollo 11. He recognized winning the Moon race was indeed a propaganda victory of the First Order for the United States, and he was determined to associate it with his agenda. He changed his mind. He rather quickly soured on repetitive trips to the Moon. But for the first one, he was all in. More from John Logsdon is just a minute away. This is Planetary Radio. Bill Nye here of the Planetary Society. Now, this is the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service.

So for 100 years, the Park Service has been preserving our natural wonders so that we can go to the parks and wonder. Wonders would drive so much of science. And as astronomer Tyler Nordgren likes to say, half the park is after dark. So when you're in our national parks, please look up at the night sky and wonder. Because we want everyone in the world

to know the cosmos and our place in space. Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels Hi, Emily Lakdawalla here with big news from the Planetary Society. We're rolling out a new membership plan with great benefits and expanded levels of participation. At the Planetary Society, passionate space fans like you join forces to create missions, nurture new science and technology, advocate for space, and educate the world. Details are at planetary.org forward slash membership. I'll see you around the solar system. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Our conversation about what might have been continues with John Logsdon, Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International

Affairs at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs and the founder of its Space Policy Institute. We've talked about the Soviet side of the race to the moon. Let's talk about what could have stopped the United States from winning the race. I mean, most of us know about the horrible catastrophe of Apollo 1 and the setbacks that that brought about. The horrible catastrophe of Apollo 1 and the setbacks that that brought about. What else might have pushed things back? I mean, I think, what about if Saturn V had not been as successful as it was? Well, I think you go back to really 1963.

The man that was running Apollo at the time, Brainerd Holmes, was complaining he wasn't getting enough money. Ultimately, he got into conflict with NASA Administrator Jim Webb and left. The new man, a man named George Miller, came in and found that the program was behind schedule, that it had a very elaborate test program that would have been an obstacle to meeting the end-of-the-decade goal. And Miller changed the test philosophy to what he called all-up testing. I think it's a kind of unknown but critical decision in terms of Apollo's success is cutting a lot of intermediate steps out along the way in order to meet the end of the decade schedule. And it was a kind of gutsy call. Kind of taking a page out of the Soviet book, right? Well, I'm sure Dr. Miller wouldn't say so.

And we did, you know, at that point in the mid-60s, we really didn't know a lot about how the Soviet Union was managing its program. Our intelligence capabilities were relatively limited. We could see them building launch pads and doing rockets through radar and voice intercepts, but not their testing philosophy. So I think it was Miller. So that was one point where the program was in jeopardy. Then Kennedy in 63, right before he was assassinated, had a large review of the total US space program. And some of his advisors said, you know, we're in good shape now. We don't really have to continue to spend the money to aim at the end of the decade goal. We could,

you know, turn off the clock and do it. And after all, Kennedy went to the UN in September of 1963 and said, let's do it to the Soviet Union. Let's do it together. Why should it be a matter of competition? So there were a lot of kind of early happenings that could have led to the end of the space race or the loss of the space race. If Kennedy had survived, the whole space race might have been a very different animal, and we might even today be seeing more collaboration in space. He, I think, was totally serious with the idea that it made no sense to compete if collaboration were possible. And the U.S. by 1963 made it clear that it was aiming at a leading space capability so we could cooperate with the Soviet Union on an equal or even leading basis. And Kennedy never knew that the Soviet Union was not racing him to the moon. Again, that's an alternate history.

What if Kennedy had lived? What if his call for cooperation had, in fact, gotten a positive response from Nikita Khrushchev? What if Khrushchev had stayed in office and Kennedy had lived? You could have had a very different scenario than what actually eventuated. Yet another interesting alternate timeline to maybe follow up on someday. I learned also from your book that Nixon had sort of embraced taking a more international effort as things move forward after Apollo 11. Yeah, he was very focused on getting other countries involved

in our human spaceflight program. He called it his pet idea. But his idea was not hardware cooperation. It was flying non-U.S. astronauts on U.S. equipment. He kind of pushed it. Wasn't it possible to fly them on even Apollo missions? And was told, no, the training was too rigorous. on even Apollo missions and was told, no, the training was too rigorous. And indeed, in reality, there was a line of U.S. people wanting to go to the moon and inserting a Japanese or a European

or a Russian would have been kind of a cause for rebellion, I think, or mutiny inside of NASA. NASA would have done it, after all, if the president decided, but it never turned into reality. It did lead to the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975, which was a Nixon initiative, and to bringing Europe and Canada into the space shuttle program with Space Lab and the robotic arm. So it did have some benefits, therefore, it sounds like. Well, I think it established a precedent that led time passing to the International Space Station. Boy, there's topic after topic here that I would love to follow up on another time, because you do talk in After Apollo about the plan to build a truly magnificent space station with a crew of 100.

But we'll leave that for another discussion. A hundred men. A hundred men, of course, but we'll leave that for another discussion. A hundred men. A hundred men, of course, right, at the time. Well, yeah, there's another area in which we've evolved a little bit. Back to the central question that I was hoping to talk to you about today. If things had gone terribly wrong with the American program, if we'd lost, let's say, a couple of Saturn Vs, or God forbid, we can say now because it didn't happen, more astronauts in either a test or a mission.

Or even, Matt, once we started flying again after the Apollo 1 fire, every mission was a success, and that was not a given. If the Soviets had had more success, and Apollo 8, 9, 10 had not been total successes, our landing could have slipped to 70, 71, and the Soviet Union might have been able to pull it off. What do you think that might have meant for the U.S. and really for across the world in terms of space development if we had seen Alexei Leonov standing there next to the CCCP flag on the surface, the image, the national pride that resulted from the United States being first, we would not have achieved. So there would have been a significant loss in reputation and morale and pride inside the United States. The Soviet Union, I think, clearly would have reaped some of those benefits of global leadership,

of the image of a progressive, successful society. So it was a real turning point to win the space race. I think it remains today an image of what was good, what is good about the United States. To have lost that to our Cold War arrival, I think would have been a major loss. I'm going to ask you to go even further out on that speculative limb. You've already talked about how Nixon very quickly lost interest in returning to the moon, if not the space program overall. Do you think this might have rekindled his interest or may have convinced him even sooner we got better things to do? Well, the premise of us losing involves things going wrong in 68, 69, 70.

For example, if Apollo 13 had been a catastrophe, it is reasonable to think we would have quit. You know, they would have shut down the program. I think that our failure or Soviet success is unlikely to have rekindled a Nixon view that we have to be first, we have to keep doing this. You could make the other argument. I mean, there's no strong evidence one way or another. You have to wonder, though, how this would have affected

what became the effort to build the space shuttle, which, as you point out in After Apollo, came to dominate almost all of what the United States was trying to do in space, certainly with manned, our human spaceflight. Well, I'm not sure it would have done anything more than maybe delay the decision to move forward with the shuttle. I don't think the United States was ready to abandon human spaceflight, even if Apollo had not been first to the moon. And essentially, once we achieved the lunar landing, we went back to first principles and started over in our space program and said, well, the first thing we need is a good, low-cost launch system that had lots of capability and was clearly linked to having people living and working in Earth orbit as

the first step in the outward movement. So I think the shuttle would have emerged maybe not in 1972, but in the 70s as the next step in the U.S. space program. There was a certain inevitability about the idea of reusability and the idea of having something that could do all the roles in space that we were talking about. And an international space station? Well, a space station. Would it have been international? Given Nixon's proclivity to want to bring other countries into our space effort, I think that's a real possibility. I mean, it happened 10 years later with Ronald Reagan, which I put my commercial in, is the book I'm working on now is Reagan in Space and how the station became international is a key aspect of that narrative. So the seeds of International Space Station were certainly there with Nixon's desire

to internationalize the human space flight program. John, I am so grateful to you for, as a researcher, a guy who meticulously looks into these things and goes back to source documents for getting out on that limb that I talked about and speculating a little bit with us today. are with programs like, and you know, I hate to do this because we could go another half hour just talking about the space launch system and Orion and so on, but how do you feel about where human spaceflight is right now, at least from the U.S. program? Well, I have mixed feelings, Matt. Charlie Bolden, NASA administrator, says we're closer to boots on Mars than we ever have been. And I think he's right, because we've never built hardware for going to Mars before. And the SLS main rationale is as a Martian transportation system. We've got in this year's budget plans for the first steps in the habitat that can carry crew out to Mars.

So we are working in that direction more than we have been at least since Apollo period. On the other hand, and this is a matter of controversy, I think it's a mistake to skip the moon on the way to Mars, which is our current plan. I think we should be part of an international coalition that returns to the moon while the United States has a lead in getting out to Mars. she is, kind of keeps stability in the current planning, allows NASA to be totally open about its plans. They can't talk yet about all the intermediate missions that they have planned because basically OMB won't let them because that involves budget commitments not yet made. I think we're on a reasonable path. You know, one can argue is the SLS the right system, but at least it's a piece of hardware that's being built. And so far, successfully?

So far. I mean, schedule is slipping a little bit, but it's on budget. There's no reason we can't do it. We did it 45 years ago, and NASA's still a very capable organization. Good place for us to end, although, John, I look forward to any and all opportunities to sit across from you virtually or in person and talk about this topic that you obviously love so much. It is absolutely fascinating. Thank you for all of this, especially for the speculation. My pleasure. John Logsdon was the founder and

for the first 21 years of its existence, the director of the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University. Past member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and the NASA Advisory Council. I could talk about his honors, but they're pretty much endless. Suffice to say that he is almost certainly the most distinguished historian of the American space program. He's also the author of a couple of books that are still very much available and highly recommended. John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, and After Apollo, Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, both available from Palgrave Macmillan. And as you heard, he is working on

the next step in what I think has to be seen as a series, Reagan and Space, President Reagan and the American Space Program. John, since you're still there, when might we see that? Well, I think 2018. I'm just starting the writing. I've got most of the research done. I'm kind of drowning in paper. The writing started. It will take me probably a year of writing and then the production process.

So my hope is 2018, early 2018. Early 2018. We'll hold you to that. And you'll be back on the show, I'm sure, long before that. Thanks again, John. Before we leave this topic, here's one more excerpt from The Soyuz Files, the podcast series created by Spencer Devlin Howard and Nathan Turner of the storytelling collective The West. You heard from John Logsdon what John F. Kennedy proposed just weeks before that terrible November day in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy said the next step in nuclear non-proliferation was filling the heavens

with the instruments of knowledge and understanding to explore. And then he was killed. And then he was killed. Whatever comes next for our two nations will not include working together in peace. If Kennedy were still alive, we would be living in a very different world. The space race would have lasted exactly seven years. The Cold War would have stopped dead in its tracks. Perhaps we would have finally finished the disarmament treaties and you would not be fighting a ground war in Vietnam right now. Our efforts at mutually assured destruction would have been refocused on a mission of peace and fruitful exchange. Things could have been very different.

Bruce Betts is once again on the Skype line. He is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, a very busy guy nowadays, what with OSIRIS-REx and LightSail 2 and all kinds of other stuff. Thank goodness he still takes a few minutes to talk to us on What's Up. I enjoy it, Matt. I'm glad, I'm glad. But I have to go now. Thank you. That was Bruce Betts.

Tell us, what's up in the sky? Not OSIRIS-REx yet. We've talked with Emily about that. No, it's alliteration week. It's the planet pairs parties. Oh, then you're going to love one of the entries we got in this week's contest if you're going for alliteration this week. All right. So early in the week, Mars is moving between Scorpius's brightest star, Antares, which we will come back to later in the show, and Saturn. So Mars and Saturn are lined up with Antares. So you got the Mars-Saturn pair that's around the 23rd, 24th, but they will continue to be near each other for a few weeks

afterwards. Tough to see, but well worth it. Shortly after sunset, low in the west, Venus and Jupiter, the two brightest planets that we see, you know, besides Earth, are coming together. So maybe 20 minutes after sunset, look low above the horizon in the west. The two planets will be less than less than half a degree apart on the 27th, but close together. All right, on to this week in space history. Voyager 2 had busy, a couple busy weeks this week in space history. In 1981, flew past Saturn, and eight years later this week week flew past Neptune. Eight years from Saturn to Neptune. Space is big. Even the solar system is big.

It is. It's big and mostly empty with little pockets of coolness. Wow. You got anyone famous for me this week or shall I just do it? No, it's all up to you, big guy. All right. Random Space fact. You really stepped up.

In the time, I've been watching a lot of Olympics. In the time that Usain Bolt runs 100 meters in the Olympics, all humans on Earth travel about 300,000 meters in orbit around the sun. So we're all fast. We are all super fast. That's great. I just watched him in that amazing run and the others he made. He's an amazing guy.

Yeah, yeah, he's super fast. Trivia contest. Olympus Mons, well known as the tallest mountain on Mars. I asked you, what is the second tallest? How'd we do, Matt? Wow, number two, but trying hard. A whole lot of entries for this. People obviously wanting to go for that Chop Shop Beyond Earth poster, along with the rubber asteroid and 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. Chop Shop, a very cool place with all those great graphics, and now selling the little individual icons that he came up with,

selling those on their own. You could buy them one at a time. Our winner, chosen by Random.org, I believe is Adam Kojokar. Adam Kojokar in Calgary, Alberta. He said that that second highest mountain on Mars, Ascreas Mons, discovered by Mariner 9 in 1971. Is he correct? It is indeed Ascreas Mons, one of the three big Tharsis volcanoes that are all in a row. Did we learn other things about Ascreas Mons, Matt?

And did we deed? Did we learn other things about Ascarius Mons, Matt? And did we deed? Did we deed? Adam himself told us that it's thought to be 18,209 meters high, although some people pointed out that's a little bit difficult to claim on Mars since there's no accepted sea level. Do you have a comment on that? Well, they're still trying to find the sea, but yeah, no. There have been various standards, and there is an agreed-upon standard for the

mean altitude, the average altitude, replacing what we consider sea level. Yeah, you can measure things from various arbitrary points, but you can certainly compare things relative to each other. So relative to each other, Ascreas wins, except for the big guy, Olympus Mons. However tall you may think it actually is, and there was some minor disagreement about that, Claude Plymate was one of those

who made other comparisons, like the fact that Ascreas Mons is more than twice as high as Mount Everest, or for those of us who call other comparisons, like the fact that Ascreas Mons is more than twice as high as Mount Everest, or for those of us who call California home, four times as high as Mount Whitney, the highest mountain in the continental United States. Jenny King in Bailey, Colorado, said Ascreia, or Asker, was described by Hesiod, and that is kind of where this name came from. Ascreia was the birthplace of the Greek poet Hesiod. His homeland was described by Hesiod as, quote,

a cursed place, cruel in winter, hard in summer, never pleasant. Jenny added, he probably should have been grateful he wasn't born in the middle of a Martian shield volcano. Okay, remember I mentioned some cool alliteration? Here it is from Jonathan Aguilar. Your missive motivated my mission to demystify method by which Martian mountain measurements are made. Montes, massiveness measured with MOLA, Mars orbiting laser altimeter on the Mars Global Surveyor. Good on you, Jonathan.

Wow, I had no idea. My alliteration pales in comparison. Mars orbiting laser altimeter on the Mars Global Surveyor. Good on you, Jonathan. Wow. I had no idea. My alliteration pales in comparison. Finally, this from Mike Hutchings in New Rochelle, New York. He's looking for people to join him in a GoFundMe page to build a ski resort on Escrizman. So good luck with that, Mike. Ha! Yeah. And with that, we're ready to move on. Because of where Mars and Saturn are, I've been talking a lot about Scorpius'

brightest star in Aries. It's pretty groovy because its red supergiant star looks reddish in the sky, though not quite as much as Mars. But how bright is it? What is the apparent brightness ranking, so first, second, third, fourth. The apparent brightness ranking of the Scorpius star Antares compared to other stars in the night sky. Night sky, so don't count the sun. And to anticipate pickiness as well, count multiple star systems seen by eye as one, like the brightest star Sirius, which is actually a multiple star system.

So apparent brightness ranking, sorry for all the details and words, just trying to anticipate. Get your entry in by going to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 30th of August, Tuesday, August 30 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. We're running low on asteroids, so I guess we'll, but we can do one more. A Planetary Society rubber asteroid, a 200-point itelescope.net account, and a Planetary

Radio t-shirt. Why not? You are so generous these days. Much more than we used to be. We're feeling magnanimous at the Society. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky and think about eating cereal on your couch. Thank you, and good night. Don't eat the little Cheerios you find under the cushion, anyone. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology

for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Mmm, crunchy. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its historic members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle

composed the theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies. Thank you.