Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Exploring Europa and Mining Asteroids at Yuri’s Night

Episode Date: April 19, 2016

Our special coverage from the Los Angeles Yuri’s Night party continues with Chris Lewicki of Planetary Resources along with Bob Pappalardo and Boback “Mohawk Guy” Ferdowsi who are preparing an orbiter for Jupiter’s ocean world Europa.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mining Asteroids and Skimming Europa, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier and back to Yuri's Night. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more from the Los Angeles edition of this year's worldwide celebration of space. edition of this year's worldwide celebration of space. We'll join the party with Chris Lewicki, president and CEO of Planetary Resources and a founder of Yuri's Night, then a conversation with two leaders of the team that will take us to Jupiter's ocean moon, Bob Pappalardo and Bobak Ferdowsi. Bill Nye and I are just back from Space Symposium in Colorado. He'll tell us about that gathering. And we'll learn from Bruce Batts about the first person to lose his lunch in space right after he tells us what's up in the night sky.

Grab your red-blue 3-D glasses. We're going for a ride with Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla on the Mars Science Laboratory rover. Emily, you published your regular Curiosity update on the 13th of this month. Looks like rough going for Curiosity up there on Mars. Yes, this last couple of months has been difficult driving for the rover, especially the last month. They've been crossing this feature called the Knocklift Plateau. And if you look at it from orbit, it looks like a set of parallel ridges. And then when you get down and look at it at much higher resolution,

still from orbit, you can see that it's got a much rougher texture than the rocks that are around it, the much lighter colored Murray rocks. And from the point of view of Curiosity, man, it looks like difficult driving. The rocks are very spiky. I look at them in 3D and it looks like a very choppy ocean surface. I imagine for the drivers, it's really, it's kind of like, I imagine they're gripping the steering wheel. Of curiosity on a steering wheel, their knuckles would be white right now, but they're almost done. They're almost off the plateau and back onto much friendlier rocks.

Thank goodness. Now, along the way, though, there has been some interesting viewing. If you don't have those 3D glasses, there are alternatives that Emily has made available, but it really works well with the glasses. I'm just going to mention one of them. They're these really interesting erosion, what would you call them, eroded objects? It's this fairly close-up scene. Yeah, so these rocks that Curiosity has been driving over is a sandstone that seems to be fairly well cemented,

and it's up at a very high elevation where it looks like the winds must just whip, sandblast these rocks. Because wind and sand have had such a long time to operate on these particular rocks, it's eroded the sandstone into these funky shapes. Sometimes you have very thin plates of rock. Sometimes you have these fingers, these tendrils. There are little nodules of slightly more resistant material embedded within the rock. Sometimes you have these fingers, these tendrils. There are little nodules of slightly more resistant material embedded within the rock, and those kind of remain attached to the host rock, kind of like eye stalks. It's just a bizarre landscape, and it's really rewarding if you do have those 3D glasses. Seriously eerie and beautiful. As curiosity proceeds, it has run into

some trouble. You talk about some shorting that they've had from the RTGs, those radioisotope thermoelectric units, but also little problems with the deep space network, which is kind of disturbing. Yeah, they've lost about a dozen sols in their extended mission due to problems with either uplink or downlink through the DSN. And it's not something that I saw during the prime mission, so I'm trying to understand what's going on with that. You know, there's only so much you can do. It's so hard to get data up to Mars and back from Mars. We don't really give the Deep Space Network the respect that it deserves. It is so absolutely crucial. It's like freeway bridges. You just don't think about it. But it's an absolutely irreplaceable connector between us and all of our spacecraft that are

out there in deep space. And I just want to take a moment to give the Deep Space Network some love for all of the work that they do to make sure that we get all these amazing pictures with the reliability that we do. You bet. And we are long overdue for a field trip out there. That's something I'm going to try and do pretty soon, because it's certainly going to be worth the visit. Always worth visiting with you, Emily. Thank you very much for the update. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Coming up next, a visit with the CEO, Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, I was thrilled to attend

this year's space symposium. My first time there, you'd been there many times and you were pretty busy there as usual. Oh yes, in Colorado Springs, it's industry. That's how I describe it. People that build rockets and sell them. And a lot of the people that buy rockets are in the U.S. military. There were lots of uniforms and lots of conservative business suits. Yes, yeah, there were. There were. I was a little out of place, but just a little. Yes. Yeah, there were. There were. I was a little out of place, but just a little. But you got to lead a really great science panel. After they talk about the needs for security and the needs for new cameras in space to observe the Earth and a little bit about weather and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, then we had a cool panel about the science in space. And we had Bernard Foy, longtime guy, been around for many years. I've known him, knew Lou Friedman real well. He's a big moon guy. And we had Amy Meinzer,

a big asteroid explorer at Jet Propulsion Lab. And they gave a very, very nice presentation. What I really liked about it, Matt, frankly, is it was a discussion rather than just a presentation, presentation, presentation about these amazing things that we get done in space at such a low cost. But Matt, aren't you just too excited about inflatable habitats on the space station? I sure am. And I'm so glad that you wanted to talk about this. I mean, people have talked about this inflatable module at the Space Symposium for at least the last eight years, I guess maybe the last 15 years. And now we finally have one mounted and they're going to be running tests. The astronauts will be running tests for several

weeks and then they're going to inflate it. And so it's the dream is this thing would be so low mass, so much easier to get up and on orbit or out into deep space if you can count on it. If you don't want to have a leak, that would be bad. And how radiation resistant is it and how comfortable is it? These are all questions that they're going to start to answer. It's very cool. I will refer people to the time I spent at Bigelow Aerospace, where they built the beam that is now attached to the International Space Station. I'll put up a link to that show from about a year ago. It was a pretty fascinating visit, and they had good answers to all these questions you've got.

Also announced at Space Symposium that the bigger unit from Bigelow, the B330, is going to be going into space too, working with the ULA, United Launch Alliance. And it's very reasonable to me that in just a decade from now, everybody will presume all deep space habitats are inflatable. They'll just be, that's how we do it. Oh, I remember when we used to have to make them out of aluminum. But now, no, it wouldn't surprise me at all. It's a very reasonable idea, and we're finally going to test it.

Thank you for talking about that reasonable idea and a lot of great stuff that happened at Space Symposium. We're going to have a lot more coverage in the upcoming weeks on Planetary Radio. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. That's Bill Nye, the science guy. Very popular guy at Space Symposium. Fun to hang out there with him. We're going back to Yuri's Night before we go to Space Symposium on the show.

A couple of great, great conversations at that worldwide celebration of space. Our Yuri's Night coverage began under Space Shuttle Endeavor last week. I promised you more, and we're ready to deliver the goods, beginning with Chris Lewicki. You'll hear how I first met Chris in a minute. He went from driving rovers and helping to run Mars missions at JPL to Planetary Resources, one of several companies that plans to turn asteroids into a wealth of raw materials for space exploration and development, while also generating a profit. It's a long, hard road, but the company has already put the first of its Arkyd spacecraft in orbit, with many more to come.

We met in the midst of a celebration. We're at a party. We are at a party. Yes. And it's a party that you and I helped to start years ago. Years ago, the very first one. I remember that night and how much we were running around in that club trying to get everything going, trying to get some sort of video broadcast thing going five years before YouTube had been invented. That's so true. God, God, when you put it that way, I wonder how we survived. Now, I was okay because I had a bunch of people and we had cameras. You were the one who had to get it out to the world because you were running the network. Yes. I was master of electrons for

a number of years with Erie's Knight and I'm still on the board today. So how did that directly qualify you, Chris, to become a rover driver? Directly? I don't know. Maybe there was a DNA test or something, or a urine test. I'm not quite sure. But I passed some tests. A URI test, you mean. Yes, a URI test. That sounds more appropriate. Chris, you've been a little busy since then, as our audience, at least our regulars, know. What's up with mining asteroids? Mining asteroids is good business. Making

a lot of progress. Been very busy at Planetary Resources. Heads down on a lot of different things. Probably the most significant thing is that we're working on our next round of spacecraft, the ARCID 6 satellites. Getting ready to launch the first of two of them hopefully in June on a SpaceX

launch out of Vandenberg Air Force Base. And this one's a little bit bigger, a little bit better, a little bit more complicated than the last one. And it has on it the very first commercial infrared camera to be able to detect water and asteroids. So a lot of other technology and a number of other things. We have heard from people like Amy Meinzer why infrared is so important for doing that kind of job.

But give us the 30-second explanation. Yeah, so Amy, in her work with NEOWISE, is using the infrared spectrum to detect the warmth of asteroids against the very cold background of the sky. And it's an excellent way for detecting asteroids. It turns out, in the infrared, certain wavelengths are also very good for seeing the absorption of water and water-bearing minerals on carbonaceous chondrites. So in working with advisors, folks like Dante Loretta, who is leading OSIRIS-REx, and other folks in the community, this is really for us the highest leverage,

simple measurement that we can make to say this asteroid is interesting enough to go back to. So we're not trying to age-date the solar system or trying to get to very detailed measurements, but really from a prospecting standpoint, we're answering the very simple question, is there any amount of water on this asteroid, and should we go back and take a closer look? Is there a clear timeline from where we are now,

and you've already made a lot of progress, to going out there and starting to capture these things and mine them. Yeah, well, we're on our same roadmap, and that's to build a series of satellites, each better than the last, a lot like we've seen SpaceX doing, a lot like we've seen Blue Origin doing, doing testing, trying things out, having things work, having things not work, proving out kind of new approaches for doing things, lower cost, higher repeat. So we've done two ARCID 3s, we'll have two ARCID 6s. Next year, we'll start with the ARCID 100. And we're beginning to work on the details of the ARCID

in 200 and 300. And we see kind of in the John F. Kennedy kind of way, by the end of the decade, we will be ready to venture out to that first near-Earth asteroid. And the end of the decade is not that far away. We're getting into, you know, almost being done with the first half of 2016 now. So we've got a few more years before we think we'll be ready to leave Earth orbit. Talk about this key piece of legislation that passed in November that made folks like you very happy. Well, in November, President Obama signed into law the Commercial Space Launch

Competitive Act. And that's a mouthful. But in that law is a number of great things for the development of space and commercial space in particular. Title IV in that has the topic of space resources and asteroid mining written into U.S. law. And what it does is it sows the United States support for a very basic thing. And this is to say that when you or I as a U.S. citizen or a U.S. company, or actually any company in the world that operates under U.S. law, goes out to an asteroid and picks up a piece, the piece that you just picked up is your property. And you can keep it, you can sell it, you can transfer it to someone else, you can move it, you can sell it, you can transfer it to someone else, you can move it, you can put it back. But it's a very important thing that, of course,

when you're asteroid mining, our investors and our future customers need to have that assurance that we'll be able to essentially keep what we'll be able to mine. So it's just the very beginning. It's a very basic framework that describes essentially the U.S. support for this, and of course there's a bit more work to do and a lot of details to be added, but it's very exciting to be, you know, living in a year when so much has happened in space, including new legislation in the United States of America. And it's not just the U.S. We've actually seen recently the United Arab Emirates talk about having this type of stuff in their space policy. And even the tiny country of Luxembourg has put their hat in the ring of being interested in doing this. I've got to ask, because this was not without controversy.

It's really more a question I should ask Congress or the President. But there are nations and some international law experts who had a problem with this because there was this understanding by at least some people that if it's out there, it belongs to all of humanity. How do you answer that? Well, yeah, and this has been a topic of great debate, which is why the U.S. law is such an important step forward. Because in this case, Congress and the White House and the State Department have kind of made their point that, well, in this particular case, you know, the U.S. isn't claiming this as the 51st state, and there are millions and millions of asteroids out there, and what

we are doing is actually holding up what the Outer Space Treaty says that we need to do. This is something that I think a lot of people don't realize, that international treaties and international laws actually aren't really effective until they're written into domestic laws. And in this case, what the U.S. did was to fill in kind of an unwritten piece that was ambiguous since the beginning of the space race. There certainly will be lots of discussion, and that discussion has been more specific and more productive than it ever has been in 50 years of space exploration, and we're excited that it's here. Well, and you guys, Planetary exploration, and we're excited that it's here. Well, and you guys, Planetary Resources, you're largely driving that discussion.

Yeah, we're happy to be, and we're happy to be joined by many other innovative companies and nonprofits and other groups who see this really as one of the most important human endeavors that we've ever taken up, is to make humans into a multi-planetary species. And that's part transportation, it's part technology, it's part resources, and it's a lot of inspiration and hard work. You brought a pretty stupendous object. I did. Tell us about this.

So I am holding in my hand the world's first 3D-printed object made from material not of this Earth. And this is something that we talked about at the consumer electronics show recently working with 3d systems and what we did was take a meteorite that landed on earth and we pulverized it using plasmas put it into one of the most advanced direct metal printers that are available and proved that you can take straight asteroid and print it in a printer. And a lot of people are like, okay, well, so what?

You know, 3D printing is everywhere. We're doing a lot of that. But imagine not having to send everything into space. Imagine just sending the blacksmith. Now what you get is when you arrive at an asteroid, you can use that material to print something that never has to experience Earth gravity. It never has to experience the acceleration of a rocket. It never has to fold up to fit in a shroud.

And there is no limit to how big you could make something, how lightweight, how thin you could make something. And there is an abundant amount of material in the near-Earth asteroids and beyond that you can use as raw stock for your printer. And it all begins with this print that I'm holding in my hand. I can think of an organization that might someday want you to build a really, really big solar sail. Perhaps. This object, which is, this is one of those times when I regret that we're only radio and podcast, audio podcast.

It's beautiful. What is it actually? It's a very complex object, as, of course, you can do with 3D printers. But it looks like rocket engines on both ends. Yeah, well, it is kind of thinking, like, what if you were to hollow out an asteroid or to take a part of it? And, you know, why print something and separate it from the asteroid when you can perhaps print the propulsion system to the asteroid? and separate it from the asteroid when you can perhaps print the propulsion system to the asteroid. So if you wanted something to perhaps de-spin it or stabilize it,

you could use the metals that are in a carbonaceous chondrite as some of the contamination. You could actually print something there and use that to use the propellant or use it to contain the propellant that you're there. Any structure you can make is no problem at all. And this is what's exciting about 3D printing is the complexity is free. You just have to have the CAD program to make it. And in a few years, we'll have AI and software making our structures anyway because they'll probably be a lot better

at optimizing it than us humans. One of a kind object. It is. Worthy of a TED talk all by itself. And you carry it around here in your pocket. Please take it back. I'm nervous holding it. I don't do it frequently. I was asked by Loretta to bring it tonight, so for her birthday, I will. That's right. I forget that one of the primary founders of all of this, Loretta Hidalgo Whitesides, is it's also her birthday usually. Yeah, she wanted to throw a big party, and she got George

Whitesides, now Virgin Galactic. I met George first when we were all working together with Peter Diamandis at a company called Blastoff many, many years ago. And that was the prelude to my experience in the very first Yuri's Night. Chris, as usual, it is a blast to talk to you. I am so glad that you have not only not lost that passion that I first experienced back for the first Yuri's Night, but you're making it into reality in space. Keep it up. All right. Have a great night.

Chris Lewicki, President and CEO of Planetary Resources, talking with me at the California Science Center during the Yuri's Night celebration. We'll stay at the party even as we leave for Europa with Bob Pappalardo and Bob Akfordowski. That conversation is a minute away here on Planetary Radio. This is Robert Picardo. I've been a member of the Planetary Society since my Star Trek Voyager days.

You may have even heard me on several episodes of Planetary Radio. Now I'm proud to be the newest member of the Board of Directors. I'll be able to do even more to help the Society achieve its goals for space exploration across our solar system and beyond. You can join me in this exciting quest. The journey starts at planetary.org. I'll see you there.

Do you know what your favorite presidential candidate thinks about space exploration? Hi, I'm Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy. You can learn that answer and what all the other candidates think at planetary.org slash election2016. You know what? We could use your help. If you find anything we've missed, you can let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016.

Thank you. let us know. It's all at planetary.org slash election2016. Thank you. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with even more treasures from Yuri's Night LA, the Los Angeles celebration of the first voyage of a human being into Earth orbit. It's about much more than that accomplishment by Yuri Gagarin 55 years ago, Yuri's night is also a celebration of what's to come. That includes the mission to Jupiter's moon Europa, where Learweiss shields a deep, world-spanning ocean of warm salt water. Bob Harpalardo of the Jet Propulsion Lab is project scientist for that orbiter. His colleague Bobak Ferdowsi still sports the Mohawk

that helped make him famous during the Curiosity rover's seven minutes of terror. Now Bobak has joined Bob on the Europa mission team coming at it from the engineering side. They sat down with me as the party raged on around us. It's the boys from Europa. Gentlemen, thanks for joining us here in the middle of the party. Bob, I'll start with you. We're going to Europa. Things are great. We are. We're working on what they call accommodation of the spacecraft, figuring out how all the instruments will go onto the spacecraft

and working with the individual instrument teams and getting our science story all together, who's doing what and how it's going to be done, and it's been a blast. The technical challenges. I mean, the last time we talked, you were showing me that armored box that you're going to have to put all your electronics in. Is it looking pretty good? You're going to be able to survive in that nasty environment? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. We can engineer the right amount of shielding and make sure all the instruments will be protected for the mission, not an an issue and now that we're a full project it's pretty

yeah well we're all really excited well of course you are yeah and so are we on the outside this is absolutely thrilling we're gonna get to go out there and and taste this world right Bob yeah it's wonderful we got a great team together JPL and and not just JPL, the team now consists of the instruments teams as well, so all over the country. And yeah, we're going to get out there with a suite of instruments and explore Europa with a launch sometime next decade. We're still not sure when. NASA has even asked us to look into the possibility of a lander, not for this mission, but potentially

as a follow-on mission. What's weird about the lander is I wrote my senior paper on a lander in college, and they haven't asked me anything about my senior paper at all. I got an A on that paper. It's an oversight, I'm sure to see. Yeah, and I think it's a big mistake. I'm just saying.

We talked about the challenges for an orbiter. The challenges for a lander, those have got to be what? An order of magnitude? Yeah, it's pretty tough. It's tough. I think one of the amazing things about a lander is still don't know that much. What an orbiter could provide, you could design a lander to work around, but now we kind of have to design the lander and the orbiter possibly in parallel.

I think that's pretty amazing. There are a bunch of folks who work in the lander and the orbiter possibly in parallel. And I think that's pretty amazing. But there are a bunch of folks who work in the lander study, and it's really a feasibility study at this point. That's right. And to look at how long a lander could survive on the surface and how you get down there. There's no atmosphere, right? So you've got to slow down using propulsion.

But in the meantime, we're working hard on this orbiter concept and really getting ready to go. Even though earliest launch will be 2022, we're busy every day. And you've got your instruments. They're chosen now, right? We've got the instruments, and we're working with those teams to finalize the plans for those instruments. What do you think of this package? Is it going to be able to deliver the science that all of us want from Europa? NASA selected an outstanding instrument suite. It's about 10 instruments. We'll be able to see

the surface up to about a half a meter per pixel. We'll image lots of the surface at lower resolution. We'll be able to sniff the gases that are out there and understand what the dust particles are. They're knocked off the surface to get at the composition. We'll look at the spectral fingerprints of the surface for composition. We've got a radar to understand where there's water under the ice. It's an amazing suite of instruments. I think one of the really cool things for me is we get to, as the engineering team, kind of meet all the scientists for the first time.

But it's actually going, I would say, really well. And they're all really interesting folks. They have really cool perspectives, different backgrounds. And they're all really passionate about this, which is, I think, kind of a really neat place to be. So everybody's really excited. And I got to say, every time I go, we have these kind of science talks every so often for the project.

And every one of them gets me super excited. I'm like, this is going to be amazing. So I think that even coming from an engineering background, I personally feel really excited about the Europa mission. The world knows you as a Red Planet guy. This is a pretty big transition. You know what's really great

about our project in general, and kind of Bob alluded to it a little bit, which is we have a great team, and the really great part of that team is it's both people from the outer planets and the Mars world. I think historically they were more of a separate tracks, and the really great part of that team is it's both people from the outer planets and the Mars world. I think historically they were more of separate tracks, and Europa is one of those places, and maybe also the timing at JPL, but it's really kind of brought together, I think,

I would say maybe the best of both of those domains. And so there's definitely some interesting, you know, like we used to do it this way versus we used to do it this way on Mars, but I actually think that's the benefit of the project. We have really two different kind of, more than two, but at least two different perspectives. And from the science side, too. There are scientists who have worked on Cassini and New Horizons, but also scientists have worked on the Mars Exploration Rovers and MSL and Messenger and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter.

And, yeah, everyone brings their flavor to it, and the best of each come together. So it occurs to me that if we were trying to do this 25 years ago, you wouldn't have this wealth of experience across so many people, scientists and engineers, to try and pull this off. I mean, that's kind of a blessing. Yeah, it's really true. There's now a much broader base of experiences. And in the past, it was, well, the Voyager folks then worked on Galileo, who then worked on Cassini.

But, yeah, now with so many missions under our belt, so to speak, we can reach out to that broad experience base. Just one more question, which is very exciting to people like me, listeners to this program, but all this talk about an ocean world's initiative, so maybe not just Europa, maybe Enceladus. You guys have got to, even though you're looking at Europa, that's got to be pretty exciting too. For me personally, just the idea of it makes me excited.

The Mars program has worked out so well for continued Mars presence. And I like the idea of having an Icy Worlds program so that we can kind of continue that track and keep all these people engaged and that community always kind of bearing new fruit, which is, you know, that's where you want to be, I think. You need that continued presence and you need to keep the sort of the knowledge base and grow new people and new talents in there. So it's a really good opportunity.

And all those icy worlds to explore, right? Not just Europa and Ganymede and Callisto at Jupiter, but Enceladus and Titan at Saturn and maybe someday we'll get back out to Triton at Neptune as well. Good times. Yeah. It's kind of a golden age. Yeah, things are good. Yeah, let's hope it continues this way.

I'm sure we will be checking back as this mission progresses to the point where you'll be headed out there to the Jovian system and reveal Lord knows what from that moon Europa. Thanks guys. Looking forward to it. Thanks for asking us questions. Yeah, and especially thanks for taking a moment out from a party. It's a good party. I mean, we're celebrating space. What's not to like? Bob Pappalardo and Bob Akfordowsky of JPL and the mission to Jupiter's moon Europa that they are preparing for the 2020s. A bonus now for you podcast listeners. I was on my

way out of the Yuri's Night LA party when I was introduced to the costumed young couple that was handing out potatoes. You know, those staples of the Martian diet. Little did I know that Marcia Femingo and her husband, Steve Hicks, had another story to tell. Marcia is one of the 700 men and women anxiously waiting for their turns to fly on a Virgin Galactic spaceship. First of all, I mean, it was a huge chunk of change. I'm not a millionaire. It was pretty much my entire life savings. And I didn't put a deposit down. I put the whole chunk, the whole 200 grand down. I thought it was going to be something that I sat on for five years and they called me up and said,

hey, your spaceship's ready. Come down and fly for a couple days and then, you know, go home. It was immediately not that. Very inclusive, very involved. The first big event I went to was at the spaceport opening in New Mexico. And it was ridiculously amazing. For the first time, I felt like I was in a community of people that weren't aerospace nerds. I'm a huge aerospace nerd, and I'm an engineer. But here were people, you know, real estate barons and businessmen and paper company crazies.

Just incredibly wealthy people that were still very cognizant of the impact that space has on humanity. This is a commitment that we're making, and we're going to change the world with it. Why was this so important to you? I've wanted to be an astronaut since I was six. I don't think there's ever been a moment where I didn't want to go to space. My husband at the time, he's since passed away, had said, okay, we're going to do this when we retire. When we're 60, we can finally go to space.

And he unfortunately died early, and I sat on a ridiculous amount of insurance money, didn't know what to do with it, had the ultimate realization that, you know, he died before he was 30 years old. Like, it could be me tomorrow, and that I wasn't going to waste any more time. Well, it occurs to me, and I'm sorry to hear about the loss, of course, that you might have also been thinking you were honoring him. Oh, yeah, definitely. He barely graduated high school, totally got bored, nobody connected with him,

and here's this brilliant guy. He enlisted the U.S. Navy and thankfully the Navy recognized it but I just kept thinking of all those kids that are insanely bright that don't have that connection and I kind of wanted to use this experience to make that. You're the ground support guy. I gotta tell you it's been a wild ride but it's been a great ride. So it's changed your life too. Absolutely. It has given me experiences and insights into a world I would have never gotten to see before and never gotten to be a part of before. And it's a good world. It's not

a bunch of super wealthy people just playing with money. This is changing the world for the better and it's really great to see that. That's my definition of a successful life. The time's going to come when you're going to be standing down there at the spaceport, watching her

take off for the wild yonder. Besides the obvious jealousy, which just makes complete sense, no matter what you want to talk about. Marcy's really, this is her life, this is her passion, this is her spirit, this is her mind, this is her education, her profession, this is everything.

So, I'm honestly not terribly worried about it. If, God forbid, something was to happen, that's the absolute perfect possible way for it to happen for her. And since it's extremely unlikely, having been to like four or five rah-rah space parties of the best pilots in the world, the best engineers in the world, the best people in the world, Virgin's got some really, really phenomenal people with them,

I'm just excited. It's going to be such a cool experience to be in Spaceport America and watch her fly and then just to see my wife come home glowing with excitement. Nice guy you got here. Tell me about the tattoo that I saw when you turned around a moment ago. When the accident happened, there wasn't a lot we could do as the community to really show our support. I mean, we wrote letters, we wrote emails, you know, short of baking cookies, we did everything we could to reach out to the folks at Virgin and the families to let them know that we weren't going anywhere and that accidents happen and space is bigger than that. And I don't know, I can't remember who did it first, but we have a private Facebook group.

And then in the days after the accident, astronaut after astronaut after astronaut was showing up with their tattoo, like the tattoo all over them. So I don't know even how many there are now. But yeah, I went I went I think two days after the accident and got the tattoo done. That's actually very touching. And I know I said that was my last question. very touching and I know I said that was my last question but there is obviously a community if not a family that has grown among you astronauts you astronauts to be yes probably some of the closest friends I'll ever have have come out of this there's been a close group of us probably about 25 or 30 that have formed galactic unite and it's a foundation where we can pour money into it and then a virgin galactic can can figure into it and then Virgin Galactic can figure out who's deserving, really get back to the communities.

And that's something George has talked about on this show. All right, I lied yet again because for the benefit of our buddy Andy Weir, let's turn away from Virgin Galactic and tell me about the costumes you're wearing. Okay, so Mark Watney and Commander Lewis from the Martian. My lovely, wonderful wife has made me carry around a sack of potatoes all night, and I am giving them to people because that's what you eat on Mars. I mean, it's just what it is. She's got herself a red wig, and I've got myself the name tag.

We both got NASA patches, and I'm excited about it. It was good. It's a good costume. I've got to say, wearing workout clothes to a costume party, best idea ever. And, yeah, he really does have a bag of potatoes, and we keep handing them to people. And this is how we met, because there was a potato, and that led to me finding out all this other stuff about you. Thank you so much. Best of luck. I hope you don't have to wait too much longer for that ride. And add Astra. Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot. Marcia Femingo and Steve Hicks closing out our time at the 2016 edition of Yuri's Night Los Angeles. Our thanks go to Yuri's Night and the California Science Center, where you can party or Director of Science and Technology at the Planetary Society, and I are both under the weather for this edition of What's Up? Apparently not us. No, but this will brighten our mood and I don't know. Just kind of fell apart there. I know.

I know the feeling. Trust me. Actually, there's a lot going on in the sky. We've got Jupiter dominating the south in the early evening, but Mars coming up around 11, Saturn just a little after that, and Mars, brightest Mars, followed by yellowish Saturn, and then also kind of reddish like Mars, the star Antares, are making a lovely triangle over in the east and around the middle of the night. And then Mercury is maybe still okay to see in the early evening shortly after sunset over in the west as it darkens. But it will be dimming and going away rapidly. Some things to look forward to,

we've got most notably a Mercury transit, Mercury going between us and the sun. That'll be on May 8th. I will mention it again. You will need proper solar filters and some type of solar telescope where you can watch it online. Just kind of cool and doesn't happen that often. Although there will be another one in three years, but then it'll be a really long time before the one after that. Would never know that you were sick.

You sound fine. I'm just faking it. Keep it up. Wait, can you cut that part out? No. Okay. On to this week in space history. In 1972, Apollo 16 landed successfully on the moon. On to our random S space F fact. Orcus. This is a world out beyond Neptune that F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F-F- They both are in two to three resonance with Neptune, so they orbit twice for each time Neptune orbits three times, so-called Plutinos. This Pluto-like behavior, but kind of opposite, was a major consideration in selecting its name, named after the deity Orcus, who was the Etruscan equivalent of the Roman god Pluto, god of the underworld. Oh, how interesting. And they apparently don't care for each other.

They don't get along well, so they stay far apart, which is good. They do. They stay far apart. On to this trivia question that involves something that, fortunately, neither of us is quite sick enough to do. It's true, but a lot of people in space have been. Who is the first person to vomit in space? Yes, high class, you get it here. We had quite a few entries for this. I am pleased to say that our

regular listener, he's been around for a long time, but is not one for, I think it's about two and a half years. Curtis Lewis was chosen by random.org. Curtis is in Missouri City, Texas. He says it was, do I have this right? Your Russian is better than mine. German Stepanovich Titov? Yes, although I'd just go with German Titov, but that works. Was the first person to get space sick and vomit while he was up there. And he has all kinds of other great records. That agrees with your thinking, though? Yes. You can talk about his other records. Well, I'll be happy to. But first, I'll say that now that we know he's right, Curtis is going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, and a rubber asteroid, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. We heard from a whole bunch of people that Titov still has the record

for being the youngest person in space. He was not quite 26 years old. Katie Fritcher, Katie's in Seattle, Washington, she said among his other records, he was the first to orbit more than once. He was the first to spend more than a day in space, to sleep in space, and as we know, to upchuck in space. We got this from Norman Kissoon. I don't know where he found it. I don't think he wrote it himself. But apparently, this illness by Titov was so disturbing that the chief engineer himself, Korolev, put a halt to human

spaceflight in the Soviet space program for a year because they thought this might be, you know, something that would keep humans from going into space for more than an orbit or two. I love this one from Jacob Pribnow, Jacob in Lincoln, Nebraska. He talks about, yeah, Titov, of course, but it was Jake Garn, Senator Jake Garn, who kind of set the record for the quality of sickness in space. Was this one of the experiments? Apparently it became one. He had such bad space sickness that astronauts now measure their space sickness on what they call the Garn scale. Oh, bummer.

I'll say. I guess we can move on. I'll add one thing, which is, although not clear, this is true, the sickness by Titov may have ended his cosmonaut career. He never flew again, although he did become a high ranking in the Soviet military

because space sickness was not yet realized to be common since he was the first one to break through that barrier. Well, the things we do for space. All right, we move on to our next trivia question. What is the name of Orcus's moon? Straightforward question. What is the name of Orcus's moon?

Go to planetary.org slash radiocontest. You have this time until the 26th. That would be April 26th, Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us the answer. And we'll stick with that same prize package. Got some other interesting stuff coming up. But this one will win you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a rubber asteroid from the Planetary Society, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account for that worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes. And that's it. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky,

and think about staying away from sick people. Thank you, and goodbye. That's where Skype comes in very handy. Get well, Guy. You too. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for, no matter what, for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California,

and is made possible by its Iron Stomached members. Josh Doyle created our theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.