Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Donna Shirley and Science Fiction's New Home

Episode Date: June 14, 2004

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Science Fiction Gets a New Home This week on Planetary Radio Hello everyone and welcome back. I'm Matt Kaplan. Pardon us as we stray from our usual realm of science fact. You may remember her as the head of Mars programs at JPL, but Donna Shirley is now the director of the new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle. And wow, does she have a lot of cool stuff to show off.

Later, Bruce Betts has a Venus Transit wrap-up and a new trivia contest. First, though, here's Emily with a Q&A about rocks that aren't just rocks. I'll be right back. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, What percentage of meteorites found on Earth contain organic compounds or amino acids? What does this say about the population of asteroids in the whole solar system? Traces of organic compounds, materials made of complicated carbon-based molecules, have been found in a certain type of meteorites

called carbonaceous chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites make up about 5% of all meteorites found here on Earth. The organic materials in these meteorites formed when the solar system itself was condensing from its original cloud of gas and dust. This environment contained abundant hydrogen, carbon monoxide, and dust. With the help of a little ammonia, these substances can react to make amino acids, the building blocks of all Earth life forms. But do the chance finds of meteorites on Earth have much to do with what's out there in space? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out.

There must be a handful of space scientists and engineers who weren't inspired by reading science fiction when they were kids. But only a handful. Of course, there are also millions of us in other professions around the world who are lifelong SF fans. Now, thanks to Paul Allen of Microsoft fame, we can dream of making a pilgrimage to the brand new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington. The director of this place of wonder is a woman who spent most of her life turning science fiction into science fact, especially in her years at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Donna Shirley was manager of Mars Exploration Programs at JPL and oversaw the marvelously successful Pathfinder mission. I learned in a recent conversation that her new job is in some ways a return to her roots. Donna Shirley, welcome to Planetary Radio. Thank you. While you were busy sending missions to Mars, were you reading science fiction? Absolutely, although I wasn't reading science fiction or much of anything else for a little while before we actually launched and landed because we were just too darn busy. And you were, of course, talking just now about the Mars Global Surveyor and the Sojourner mission?

And Mars Pathfinder and Sojourner, yes. That must have been an amazing time to be managing Mars programs at Jet Propulsion Lab. But you had a life experience that was leading up to this for a long time. When did you start reading science fiction? Actually, I read my first science fiction book when I was 11, and I grew up in this very small town in Oklahoma called Winniewood, and they only had one science fiction book in the library. And I checked it out over and over and over and read it,

and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of it. Oh, well, of course, that was my next question. read it, and I cannot for the life of me remember the name of it. Oh, well, of course, that was my next question. But I do remember the names of a bunch of other books I read when I was 12 and 13, things like the Martian Chronicles, of course, Ray Bradbury as a stalwart in the Planetary Society, Sands of Mars, Arthur C. Clarke, all the Heinlein books. So I read all the standard science fiction books and got really turned on about space. I was 12 when I was loaned my first science fiction book. And I can tell you what it was,

Robert Heinlein's Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. Yes. But it wasn't long before I moved on to some of the other guys you just mentioned. So here you were being inspired by them as a kid in Oklahoma. Now, some of these amazing people are on your advisory board. And it's extremely exciting. I mean, I email with Arthur probably once a week or once every two weeks, talk to Ray occasionally, and it's just always such a thrill to think that, oh, my gosh, you know, these are the people that I just revered their work when I was a kid and still enjoy.

I mean, I go back and reread their stuff all the time. And it's just such a thrill. Plus, we have just an incredible breadth of people on the board, from people like Dennis Murin, who are very big in special effects, to directors like Lucas and Spielberg and Cameron, to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. Cameron to Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com. We have Octavia Butler and Fine Mitchell and Jane Yolen and Astrid Bayer on the board. So we have some women on the board as well.

And the chair of our board is Greg Bayer. And we have the other two killer bees as well, David Moran and Greg Binford. Some of the other very best of breed science fiction writers working today. Absolutely. There is another name that we need to mention, and that is Paul Allen. And I just realized, just before we started this conversation, that three days after your grand opening on Friday, June 18th, Paul Allen, who is as responsible, I guess, as anyone for the museum opening up, he'll probably be in the Mojave Desert for a little science fact of the first flight of Spaceship One.

Yes, Paul is involved in many exciting things, and the Science Fiction Museum is, of course, science fiction is something that he's been reading since he was a kid, and he now owns first editions of all of those books, and we've got a lot of them in the museum, but absolutely it's very exciting to watch the Spaceship One progress, and I really believe that Bert Rutan and crew are going to win the X Prize. Sure looks like it.

Let's talk about the museum and what the experience is going to be like when those first patrons come through the door on Friday, June 18. What are they going to see? Well, they're going to see very cool stuff. We have typical museum-type exhibits. We have lots of books. We have lots of artifacts. We have, for instance, E.T.

and E.T.'s spaceship from E.T. We have the alien queen from Aliens, and she would be 18 feet tall if she were standing up straight, but we had to only put her in a 12-foot case, so she's crouched over. Boy, is she threatening. It's a strong case, I hope. She's cryogenically cooled. Thank you.

I appreciate it. It's quite safe, although you don't feel that way when you're looking her in the eye. We have the power loader that Sigourney Weaver used to fight the alien queen, which is just as big as the alien queen. And we have a selection of robots, including the original B-9 from Lost in Space, signed by the cast. We have just all these terrific artifacts. And then we also have some real eye candy stuff.

The first thing you see when you walk into Homeworld, which is the gallery that tells you about science fiction, is a 68-inch globe suspended from the ceiling, but it looks like it's floating in space. And stuff is projected on it so that it's totally spherical. And, for instance, when Mars is projected on it, it's the whole Mars. When the moon is projected on it,

it's the whole moon, or Jupiter, or Solaris, the living planet from Stanislaw Lim's story. What we do is we're putting previews of coming attractions on that, so we have an 8-minute and 20-second loop that's just got clips from a lot of the video we have in the museum, a lot of the book covers and quotes. I mean, I have stood there for 30 minutes at a time and watched this thing and still been excited by it. And this is just where people start, in the home world?

That's where they start. And then there are different exhibits that they move off into from there? Yes, we have. And home world is to tell the story of science fiction. So we have what if, which is what science fiction is about. What if your best friend were an alien? Or what if you could clone yourself? Or what if, to your scattered bodies go, all the dead people went to a river, an infinite river, and receded with an afterlife?

Oh, yes. Philip O. Z. Farmer's River World series. Exactly. We have Not-So-Weird Science, where we're focused on genetic engineering and nanotechnology and the interplay between science and science fiction in those two areas. We have science fiction in society, which has confrontational themes like Godzilla and feminism and homosexuality. We have science fiction community, which is about fans. We have a timeline, which goes from 1818, from Frankenstein, that Mary Shelley wrote the first science fiction book,

to the present day with a reader rail with historical events that correspond to the science fiction periods. And we have the Hall of Fame, which is 36 of the most outstanding science fiction writers, people like Brian Aldiss and H.G. Wells and Jules Verne and Ursula K. Le Guin and C.L. Moore and Kate Wilhelm and you name it, they're in there. Each one of those people has a glass brick that lights up with their picture etched in it, and then we see a little 15-second documentary about their work, and then there's a kiosk that you can go and call up information about each one of those. And then finally we have The Changing Face of Mars, which has a lot of my stuff in it,

including a half-scale Mars rover. And it talks about the interplay between science and science fiction, again, only on Mars. I can't wait to see it. We need to take a quick break, Donna. I'm hoping that when we come back we can talk more about the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, but also why you think that science fiction and a facility like this can play a role in advancing science and technology education and awareness in the United States. So we will take a break, but we'll be back in just a minute with Donna Shirley. Please stay with us.

This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first-ever solar sail.

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Donna Shirley is our guest. She is the brand-new director of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, Washington. It opens on June 18th. And while we're at it, Donna, I noticed that your book, Managing Martians, The Extraordinary Story of a Woman's Lifelong Quest to Get to Mars, End of the Team Behind the Space Robot That Has Changed the Imagination of the World, that's one of the longest book titles in history. I'm sorry about that.

It wasn't my idea to make the title that long. Well, Amazon doesn't seem to mind. It's still available on the Amazon site. And, of course, you can get there from the Planetary Society site as well. I have to ask about one more cool item that you've got there. You've got so many, but he's still my favorite robot. Forbidden Planet, and then went on to a lot more movies than many of the actors in that movie went on to. Robbie the Robot.

Well, unfortunately, we do have Robbie, but he's only a reproduction, because the original Robbie had been pretty much just destroyed. He's been used so much that there wasn't anything left of him. We do, however, have the original B-9 from Lost in Space, and we have a reproduction of Robbie, and they talk to each other, and their lights flash, and their heads turn, and they carry on a conversation. They're in our robot display, which is called Metal or Mortal, which is in our gallery called Them, which is about aliens and robots. I said that in the second half we wanted to talk about why having a facility like this

and why science fiction is so important to you, someone who has a tremendous background in science and engineering, and you've talked a lot about this, about the importance of science fiction. Absolutely. As I was saying earlier, I grew up reading science fiction. Science fiction certainly inspired me to go into the space program because when I was a kid there wasn't any space program. It was such a long time ago.

But I got to thinking, okay, there could be. I could go to Mars. I could fly on a spaceship. I could build spaceships. And so I never got to fly on one, but I did get to build them. And it was science fiction that was really quite inspirational for me. The other thing we're interested in, we have a very strong educational program coming up. And one of the things we're interested in is literacy, the Harry Potter phenomenon. Kids

are reading Harry Potter who never read anything before. And we want to have that happen across the board. So we've got kids interested in reading. And then hopefully they'll get interested in the science and technology aspects or even the societal aspects of science fiction and say, gee, I'd like to read more about that. So they go off and see, say, Blade Runner, and they say, gee, this came from a book called Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? And so then they might want to go read some Philip K. Dick. And that's the path we hope we're going to pull kids into. You know, I'm not sure that a lot of people who don't read science fiction realize that it's not just about machines and a future made possible by these machines,

but the best science fiction is about people and society. Absolutely. Ursula K. Le Guin, for example, writes wonderful anthropological science fiction. Octavia Butler does. Greg Baer writes a lot of sociological fiction. In fact, even like David Brin, who's a physicist in Earth or The Postman, those are basically sociological treatises as opposed to, there was a lot of high tech in them, but they were really more, you know, what happens to society when something happens? The kiln people, what

happens to society when you can clone yourself? What about the events that I'll bet you'll be sponsoring there? We have a number of educational events already scheduled for the summer, mostly lectures and book signings. And so well-known science fiction writers will come, give lectures, sign books, talk to people about how they could write science fiction. give lectures, sign books, talk to people about how they could write science fiction. We're going to have film series where we'll show a science fiction movie and then have a discussion about it.

And we're mostly focusing a lot of our education on our website, which is going to be sfhomeworld.org. And when you get on that, you'll be able to download curriculum for teachers to use to use science fiction in their classes. And that website is up now, sfhomeworld.org. We will, of course, put it on the Planetary Radio page on the Planetary Society website so that you can link to it directly from there if you need to. To go back to that theme of this symbiotic relationship between science fiction and real science and engineering.

I wonder if you noticed there was a period when I would hear people from NASA, even including astronauts, saying, no, no, no, we don't want to deal with those Star Trek people or even with those science fiction writers because we're talking about the real thing here. We don't want people's heads up in the clouds. But then you would hear people like Gene Roddenberry, the father of Star Trek, say that the greatest joy in his life was when men and women would come up to him

who were working at JPL or elsewhere in the space program and say, you're why I'm here. Absolutely, and that happens all the time. I mean, for instance, Arthur C. Clarke just loves people like Gentry Lee and me who were in the space program. And he loves to interact with people like us. Buzz Aldrin loves to interact with science fiction people. Neil Armstrong, I was on a panel with him recently, and he started out talking about Rossum's Universal Robots, which was the first play where the term robot was invented.

And Neil himself talked about the importance of science fiction to help people visualize what is possible, what you could do. We have just a couple of minutes left. I'm going to bet that particularly because of your location, if nothing else, that music is going to play a big part in the museum. It is indeed. We are co-located with the Experienced Music Project, which is a four-year-old popular music museum and has a wonderful set of interactives so that you can go in and experience playing a guitar

or experience cutting a record or experience being in a rock band. And we have some interactives, not as many as EMP, although we're hoping that in the future we'll be able to get some sponsors and build those up. But indeed, we have wonderful music throughout the museum, some of it themed music, but some of it is actually original music. Some of the people who are actually working on the project, the technical people, have written music for certain parts of the museum. Okay, it opens June 18th, and again, you are in Seattle, and I've read right at the foot

of the Space Needle. How appropriate. What a great location. I don't know any other organization that has such cool levels of membership. You can be anything from a Terran, a symbiote on up through a star child. You can be an immortal. If you want a $10,000 membership, you can be an immortal. With benefits to boot, I suppose. Absolutely. And by the way, we are working a deal with the Planetary Society

to give something off of the membership for the Science Fiction Museum if you're a Planetary Society member. But if you just happen to find yourself in Seattle after June 18th, you can just wander over and buy a ticket. Let me give you a phone number. Sure. 877-SCIFICT. That's 877-SCIFICT.

That's our toll-free number to call and find out about tickets or anything else. So between the website and the phone number, you can get all the information you need, and please come and visit us. It's beautiful in Seattle in the summer. So last question, Donna, was the transition from science fact to science fiction pretty easy? Absolutely. I'm enjoying it a lot. Watching people get turned on to science fiction who weren't turned on before has just been very exciting.

We're just thrilled to be opening. Well, we are thrilled to have you on as a guest and hope that we'll be able to talk to you again in the future on this program. Thanks very much for joining us. Thank you, Matt. Donna Shirley was the manager of Mars Exploration Programs. She worked out of the Jet Propulsion Lab. She's moved a ways north to Seattle where she is just about to open the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

We'll be back with our own Hall of Fame member, Bruce Betts. Well, somebody's Hall of Fame. With our What's Up feature right after this return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. How common are asteroids that are rich in organic materials? Although we can split the meteorites on Earth into categories, and the asteroids in space into categories, we can't yet be certain which meteorites on Earth match which classes of

asteroids in space. Still, it's considered very likely that carbonaceous chondrites found on Earth that contain organic materials are pieces of C-type asteroids. Ceres, the largest asteroid, and Matilda, which was visited by the NEAR spacecraft, both fall into this category. C-type asteroids are very dark and originally formed in the outer part of the asteroid belt. Evidence suggests that this part of the asteroid belt once extended further into space than it does now. But after Jupiter formed, many asteroids from this region were gravitationally grabbed

and thrown into the inner solar system. So the newly formed Earth is likely to have received a bonus of organic material from the asteroid belt, possibly helping along the beginning of life. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Dr. Bruce Fats. Bruce, welcome back. Well, thank you very much, Matt.

What have you got for us this week? Well, we've got things to look for in the sky, as always. I know many of our listeners saw the transit of Venus last week. Very exciting. You've got, in fact, one report you want to share. Is that right? Yeah, I guess this would be a good time to do that. We have a regular listener.

He enters the trivia contest every week. Mehdi, who lives in Iran, he wrote in to tell us that on June 8th, he and a bunch of his buddies were on the roof of the library in his hometown in Iran. Some guy came out and said, What are you doing up there? Are you crazy? It's hot. You're standing on the roof of the library in his hometown in Iran. Some guy came out and said, what are you doing up there? Are you crazy? It's hot. You're standing on the roof in the sun. And he said, well, you know, is it madness or is it love?

So we know, don't we, Mehdi? Anyway, I'm sure a lot of other listeners did the same. So Venus Transit gone, but in another eight years, you'll get another one. You don't have to wait over 100 years like the last time. They actually come in pairs, separated by eight years, it turns out. Darn it, I could have used that for the random space fact. Anyway, you can still go out and the planets are just disappearing like crazy in the night sky after many months of having lots of planets there. You can still see Jupiter very easily, though, in the west, pretty high in the night sky

shortly after sunset, brightest thing up there, looking like a really bright star. If you look right after sunset in the west-ish, then you have a chance of seeing Saturn and Mars still down low. But they're vanishing. Venus, of course, gone, crossed in front of the sun. But Venus shortly will be coming up before dawn, but not quite yet. I'd wait a little bit. Not as convenient.

No, no, not as convenient, but good stuff. We still have those two comets up there, comets neat and linear, and they are getting dimmer and dimmer, tougher to see, but you can still especially comet linear pick out in binoculars, certainly from a dark site, the fuzzballs that are the comets. We will continue to give you links from our website, planetary.org, slash radio, of how to find those. There you go. Let's move on to this week in space history. We had two famous female flights.

June 16th, 1963, Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. And 20 years later, almost to the day, June 18th, Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Great timing. Didn't realize that those were so close together in the time of year. Indeed they were. So something about June. Anyway, let's move on. Random Space Facts!

With the Phoebe encounter of Cassini having happened on June 11th, and you can go to planetary.org and see all sorts of coverage of Saturn and Cassini and pictures of Phoebe. It turns out that Phoebe is probably dumping its darkness onto Saturn's moon Iapetus. That's one of the things that hopefully the data from the Cassini flyby will tell us more. Saturn's moon Iapetus is very interesting in that one side is very, very bright, one side is very, very dark, and it's the leading side that is very, very dark, like it's sweeping things up in its orbit. It's tidally locked to Saturn just like our Earth's moon is to Earth,

so it always has the same leading side. And it might be from dark Phoebe that those particles are coming and coating the surface. Well, that would be fascinating if Cassini could determine the answer to that mystery, which is something people have been wondering about, I guess, since Voyager, right? Yes, even longer in some ways. It actually was taken as a very odd moon as viewed even before then from the Earth because it actually appeared to appear on one side and then disappear on the other because you were seeing the dark side when it was coming closer,

coming towards us, and the bright side when it was going away. Which I guess leaves open the question of why Phoebe was so poorly made that it's falling apart and depositing dust on its neighbors. Well, there are those pesky impacts out there in space. Even if you're well-made, at least if you're small, you end up losing a lot of stuff out to space, which is usually it looks kind of like your neighbor's stuff. But in this case, it may not have. There's just something for you to ponder in terms of your own neighborhood. There's some analogy there.

I just can't quite put my brain on it right now. Let's ponder the trivia contest. All right. The trivia contest last week, speaking of Phoebe, we asked you how far is Saturn's moon, Phoebe, from Saturn? Because it's way out there. How did we do with answers? I think we got more entries for this, I don't know why, than we've ever gotten before in the history of the show. And a lot of new people...

Because we're darn popular and getting more popular, man. God, I hope that's it. That didn't even occur to me as a possibility. But here's the one that was selected as this week's winner. You have to have the right answer and then we choose from among those. It is Anthony Arkwright. Anthony Arkwright said 8 million miles.

We said to the nearest million miles or a million kilometers, which I guess translates to 13 million kilometers. Anthony is in Chicago. And congratulations. We're just going to get a hold of you, Anthony, and find out what size Planetary Radio T-shirt you would like. Congratulations.

Move on to the trivia contest for this week, where those of you who want to enter can go to planetary.org slash radio and see how to enter. Trivia contest this week. I just cannot get enough of Phoebe and the first encounter of many that Cassini will have. So tell us, who discovered Saturn's moon Phoebe? Who discovered Saturn's moon Phoebe? Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Win a fabulous T-shirt. And remember to get us your entry by noon on Thursday, June 17, if you want to be considered for next week's contest or this week's contest. And you guys out there at WMUH listening in Allentown, Pennsylvania, go to the website. You can find out what the current trivia question is.

Bruce, I guess we're there. Next week, I think we might be doing What's Up from somewhere special. Tune in. Special, special, special, special. Yep. Lend Your Radio takes a field trip to a fun place. Special, special, special, special. Yep. Planetary Radio takes a field trip to a fun place. Yeah, very fun.

Very fun. So that's it. We'll say goodbye for this week. Should we invite people to the fun place? Oh, we could do that, I guess. It's going to be a little tough for our European members. Yeah, we could do that. But for those of you in Southern California, hey, go to Legoland, California, on Saturday, June 19th. See Planetary Radio recorded live and ask questions of fabulous, entertaining people, astronauts and me.

And see the debut of Florida Miniland, including Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral. Be there. So that's Saturday, June 19th. And you'll be speaking, and then I'll jump up and we'll do what's up for a few minutes. It would be fabulous if you're a Planetary Society member before then or now. You can buy tickets ahead of time for a $10 discount. Oh, I didn't know that. And we might even, who knows,

maybe we'll throw a couple of Planetary Radio T-shirts out to people in the audience if they answer questions. It could get crazy. It could cause a riot, Matt. You have to be careful. All right, everyone, look up in the night sky and think about peace of mind. Thank you, and good night. That was Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society,

who joins us each week here for What's Up on Planetary Radio. That's it for this week's show. By the way, to paraphrase Dave Bowman and his creator, Arthur Clark, something wonderful is going to happen to Planetary Radio. Our little show will soon be available to public radio stations all over the United States. We'll have more to tell you soon. In the meantime,

drop us a line at planetaryradioatplanetary.org. We'd love to hear from you, even if you're not entering the trivia contest. Have a great week.