Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - From Mars to the Stars With Lou Friedman

Episode Date: November 10, 2015

The founding Executive Director of the Planetary Society has just written “Human Spaceflight: From Mars to the Stars,” an optimistic view of humanity’s future in the solar system and beyond. Bill Nye shares his admiration for his predecessor, Lou Friedman. Emily Lakdawalla is ready for the 2015 Division of Planetary Science conference. The What’s Up space trivia contest once again offers your chance to win Bill Nye’s personalized greeting on your voicemail.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

From Mars to the Stars with Lou Friedman, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. The founding executive director of the Society has a new book. We'll talk with Lou about human spaceflight from Mars to the Stars. Bill Nye reflects on his predecessor as leader of the society, and Bruce Betts will help us find our way across the current night sky. Emily Lakdawalla has arrived in National Harbor, Maryland. We found her

in her hotel room on the eve of this year's meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division of Planetary Sciences. Emily, this must be your idea of heaven, five days of planetary science, new data, new discoveries. I don't know about heaven. It's going to be a lot of work, but it is going to be very exciting five days and a fun five days with a lot of my friends in the planetary science community talking about just about everything in the solar system. And we are talking on Sunday night. You literally just arrived at your hotel, just flew in. It starts tonight, right, with a little bit of the social element, which is pretty important.

It's really the main reason to have these meetings. You know, I went to grad school with some of these folks, and a lot of them are friends of friends. And we all get together, and when we get together, we talk about space exploration, like all the Pluto stuff that we're going to hear about tomorrow. And Ceres is so interesting. And Rosetta and all these results that we can expect from the comet. And even Mars is represented, which is a little bit unusual at this conference. It's mostly a planetary astronomy conference. But there's a little bit of Mars. And in particular, the MAVEN mission is going to be reporting some results. So it's all going to be very exciting. And you have a blog post, which I suspect you wrote while you were on the plane. And it has a nice little preview,

even a little colorful table that you created. Yeah, I put it together to figure out if there were any collisions. And there's a bad one tomorrow. There's a collision between Pluto and Ceres. Well, not literally, of course. They're in very different parts of the solar system. But they are happening in adjacent rooms,

new results being reported from the New Horizons and Dawn missions. So fortunately, while I was on the plane on Twitter, I found a volunteer, another space journalist, who's going to sit in the Pluto session while I sit in the Ceres session. We'll exchange notes. Emily, go get yourself a beer.

We'll be watching the blog all of this week for what you're learning at this year's Division of Planetary Sciences meeting. And have a great time. Talk to you in a week. All right, Matt. Looking forward to it. That's Emily Lakdawalla, in her element, the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society, and we're going to talk with him next.

Bill, I'm told you are somewhere in New York City? That's right, New York, New York. The town's so nice, they named it twice. With no Skype signal, so we've got you on the cell. We'll keep it short. You know, our guest today, you already know, is your predecessor in your job at the Planetary Society, Lou Friedman. We're going to talk about his brand-new book. I wanted to give you a chance to say anything you'd like to about Lou. Well, Lou changed the world. I mean, you and I wouldn't be talking without Lou. He's one of the founders of the Planetary Society.

And on a personal note, he's a visionary. He talked about solar sailing, I guess, back in the 1970s, maybe before that, but I bought his book in the 1980s about solar sailing, and I thought it was a fabulous idea because I had seen my old professor, Carl Sagan, whose birthday is today, by the way. Yes. I saw him talk about solar sailing. So Lou's been at the forefront of this business since the beginning of this

business of solar sailing, the forefront of this business since the beginning of this business of solar sailing. And he was on the mission to catch up with Comet Holly, which never got funded. And we flew light sail this last summer, which is a legacy of Lou. Lou Friedman made us what we are today, Matt. That's a nice introduction, since we'll begin that conversation with Lou in just a few seconds here, Bill. By the way, congrats on your latest book coming out, Unstoppable, Harnessing Science to Change the World. That's it. Yes.

I want people to embrace the problem that is climate change and then work together to change the world. My grandfather went into World War I on horseback, on horseback. When that conflict got extended to what we call World War II, nobody did anything like that on horseback. In other words, everything changed in 20 years. Everything changed. In the same way, I strongly believe we can change the electrical grid here in the United States and around the world in very few decades. We can get this done, and that's what I talk about in the book. Also in Unstoppable, I talk about the importance of space exploration maps. Now, it's inherently optimistic, and it brings out the best in us. And that's why we at the Planetary Society advocate so strongly for space

exploration. And I look forward to talking to you more about those space-oriented chapters, at least three of them in the book, after I finish it. I'm only on page 20, so give me a little while here. But that's something to look forward to. Take all afternoon, Matt. Take all afternoon.

Okay, boss. Thank you. This is very kind of you to join us, and hopefully we'll be back on Skype, or maybe even in person next time. We'll see how it goes. Thanks, boss. Thank you. This is very kind of you to join us, and hopefully we'll be back on Skype or maybe even in person next time. We'll see how it goes. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Full disclosure there, my boss. He joins us almost every week here on the show. Last week, of course, with all those excerpts from more to explore that grand celebration of the Planetary Society's 35th anniversary. No surprise, coming up in just moments is Lou Friedman. Lou Friedman is an explorer.

In 10 years at the Jet Propulsion Lab, he led the Mars program and fought for innovative missions across our solar system, including that ambitious but canceled Halley's Comet solar sail mission that Bill Nye just mentioned. He left JPL in 1980 to join Carl Sagan and former JPL director Bruce Murray as a founder of the Planetary Society. He fought on for the next 30 years, championing planetary science missions and technology around the world. And he never gave up on solar sails. Retired now from the Society for five years, Lou has not slowed down much.

His latest effort is a new book about humanity's future in the cosmos. Human Spaceflight, From Mars to the Stars, presents his deep thoughts and educated guesses about this topic that he has considered for more than 50 years. Here are excerpts from our much longer conversation. You can hear the whole interview, including our discussion about interstellar travel and solar sails, online. So there, former boss, it's great to get you back on Planetary Radio. Welcome.

Well, thank you, Matt, and it's great to be back on Planetary Radio. Let me tell you how, before I read this book but had heard about it, I was all set to argue with you, to argue you out of some of the positions that you take. But to your great credit, you've, I hate to say it, you've won me over. Now, there were things in here that I was... And I'm not even your boss anymore. That's true. Yeah, you can't even hold that over me. It's a very fine book. And it's a great read. And it's an inspiring read. And I recommend it highly. So here's the part that I thought I would argue with.

You convinced me that not only will humans themselves in their own bodies possibly not go beyond Mars, that maybe we don't need to. And I'm going to come back to that. Let me start with this because it is related. Who's winning the new space race, the humans or our robots? Well, I do postulate that there is a space race going on, and it is robots versus humans, not in the old-fashioned sense where scientists would do infighting about my robotic program does more than your human program, or I want more money for robotic missions and you want more money for human missions. That's the petty side, or not the old-fashioned kind of the geopolitical nature where which country is greatest by which achievement they can do in space. But this is

more a hearts and minds kind of space race. And I'm very concerned about it because if we allow the robots to win, and they're doing very well. If you look at the history of the space age, robots have gone through the entire solar system. They've landed on Mars and Venus and Titan. They've landed on asteroid and comet. They now have extended themselves

into the interstellar medium. And humans are stuck in low Earth orbit not even being able to repeat the achievements they did 40 years ago getting beyond low Earth orbit. It's clear the robots are winning and what I'm concerned about is that a new generation of people will be satisfied with that. They'll say the robots could do it all, and they'll lose the whole push toward the human achievement of going out there to evolving as a multi-planet species. And that would be a tragedy. I think we would be less than human to allow that to happen. Well, I agree with you.

But when you say multi-planet species, you're really just talking about one other planet, right? I am. And I even have an internal contradiction, which maybe you noticed in the book, because I sometimes refer to the multi-planet species as humans will evolve on Mars and they will have a home on Mars and Earth as two planets.

And that will keep us busy for millennia, for thousands and thousands of years, just the way evolving on Earth has been a 10 to 50,000 year process for us here. So I view that as an unlimited future and a multi-planet future. At the same time, the human presence is being extended throughout the solar system and beyond. As we extend our human presence and interact with other places, some of astrobiological interests, some of just geological interests, some of understanding the origin and evolution of planets and of the universe, we will, in a sense, be present throughout the universe. And that's a kind of multi-planet species argument too.

And so I have this internal contradiction. Sometimes I use it for where we're just physically, and sometimes I use it for where we are mentally and physically. So do you have any doubt that these robot emissaries, they're just going to become more and more advanced and better able to make us feel that we're part of the picture, that we're up there? You see that much already. You see a younger generation inspired by the great achievements of the rovers, which are actually doing very modest exploration on Mars. They're not going that far, a few kilometers a month, actually. They have very limited science investigation capabilities compared to if we really sent

scientists up there. But still, a whole generation is getting inspired by these terrific robotic achievements. And I imagine as we get out to Europa, they'll even be more inspired. As we get out to Titan, and we discover geysers on the moons of Titan, like they now have discovered quite compelling evidence of an ocean on Enceladus.

People will be very, very satisfied of that. And our instruments are getting only better. We now have interplanetary CubeSats. We're sending a CubeSat to a near-Earth asteroid in a light sail type spacecraft in a few years. There's a whole range of smaller and more innovative sensors that are being developed. And I imagine that we'll see biomolecular engineer payloads in the future interacting on other worlds. I have no doubt about that. Planetary Society Executive Director Emeritus Lou Friedman.

He'll be back in a minute with more about his new book, Human Spaceflight from Mars to the Stars. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Andy Weir, author of The Martian. Do you know how my character, Mark Watney, will make it to Mars someday? He'll get there because people like you and me, and organizations like the Planetary Society, never stopped fighting to advance space exploration and science.

The challenges have rarely been greater than they are right now. You can learn what the Society is doing and how you can help at planetary.org. Mark and I will thank you for taking steps to ensure humanity's bright future across the solar system and beyond. Casey Dreyer here, the Planetary Society's Director of Advocacy. The New Horizons Pluto encounter was NASA at its best. But did you know that it was almost canceled twice? It was saved by thousands of space advocates who wrote and called Congress nearly a decade ago. Today, more missions are threatened by budget cuts,

including a journey to Europa and the Opportunity rover on Mars. You can learn more at planetary.org slash stand-up. Pluto was just the beginning. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and I'm in the middle of a conversation with Lou Friedman, engineer, planetary scientist, founding executive director of the Planetary Society, and now author of Human Spaceflight, From Mars to the Stars. Let's bring this back away from the stars and much closer to home.

You were, of course, as I said in the introduction, away from the stars and much closer to home. You were, of course, as I said in the introduction, the leader of that study for interstellar medium exploration at the Keck Institute, but you also participated in the Keck Institute's work on the asteroid retrieval or redirect mission, as it's often called now, ARM for short. You're still a big believer in this. In fact, you say in the book, you think that we could accomplish some big things within 10 years. Is that realistic? And what do

you actually hope we might be able to do by 2024? Well, thanks for mentioning that, Matt. Indeed, it connects with the dominant theme of the book in a way, because the book, while it deals with robotic spacecraft going well out of the solar system, it then says, does that mean that humans won't? Or is that humans are limited to here on Earth? Will we be so satisfied with robot spacecraft we won't ever send humans off of Earth again? And I think what we're learning is, and what we've seen in the last few years is, emphatically not, to deal with the existential threats of Earth, whether it's asteroid impact or global climate change or volcanoes or nuclear war or plague. Even in our mind, even if these things don't come to pass, we know that Earth is a finite

planet with limits. And therefore, I think we have the drive to extend ourselves to Mars. Now, why Mars? Mars is the only planet with an atmosphere and water on which we can imagine settling. We're not going to settle on Venus. We're not going to settle on Europa. Mars is an inhospitable place in many ways. It's dry and the atmosphere is very thin and it's toxic, but we can adapt to it. We can't adapt to these other places in any reasonable fashion that we can think of. And therefore, Mars is the ultimate destination to if the human species is going to be multi-planet at all. So this leads to the fact that even Mars is tough and we can't get there in one big step.

And it brings back to my political interests in the space program, the policy that we undergo. We learned in Project Constellation that when we try to do something that's just too costly and breaks the budget, all you do is slip the space program and never accomplish anything. And the Augustine Commission reviewed all this, and they said you need a sustainable step-by-step program to go out into the solar system, first to asteroids, then to Phobos-Demos, then to the surface of Mars. And that's essentially what the administration is now doing.

And the first step to the asteroid turned out even to be too big for our existing rockets and life support systems. Very, very cleverly in this Keck Institute for Space Studies study that we did came up with the suggestion we move an asteroid closer to Earth so we can reach it. And that's the Asteroid Redirect Mission. And so in essence, this will get our astronauts flying to a celestial object five to ten years earlier than any other way they could do it, make some scientific measurements, and advance the systems that will take us out beyond low Earth orbit, beyond the moon, and into interplanetary space and onto the journey to Mars. I think the asteroid redirect mission becomes an essential both technical and political step to moving out into the solar system.

I'm sure you're familiar with the work done by JPL, Aerospace Corporation, and the workshop that the Planetary Society did last spring, Humans Orbiting Mars, which, you know, has that same target, reaching orbit, visiting Phobos. Are you generally supportive? It sounds like you are. Well, I'm very glad that workshop held, and I am very generally supportive. It was an excellent contribution by the Planetary Society. It's not new. Nobody expected humans to go to Mars without orbiting it. And it was actually a Planetary Society earlier study led by Mike Griffin before he became NASA

administrator and astronaut Owen Garriott back in 2003 or 2004 that came up with the suggestion of building the interplanetary transportation system that would take humans to Mars, orbit it, and come back, and do all of that before you built a lander to go anywhere to either land on the moon or land on Mars. Now, Griffin abandoned all that when he became administrator, but it really is the right suggestion. And that's the essence of this report by JPL. The real contribution it's made is not merely humans orbiting Mars first, but is delaying the expense and conflict with the very difficult part of entry, descent, and landing on Mars until you have the other capabilities of

transportation built up. And then you can undertake the final step so that you can land on Mars. And by that way, they've come up with a, and I think the Society did a great service in emphasizing this, come up with an affordable program. You can take it in stages, and you can afford, you can come up with a sustainable program, which is the essence and the key to continuing human spaceflight. Let's say this works, that we manage to get humans out to orbit by 2033. How long after that would you want to speculate? It would take us to get down to the surface, humans walking about on the surface of Mars,

as we see in the movie The Martian. Hopefully with more success than the poor Martian had, except he did get back, so that's good. Spoiler there. Sorry about that, those of you who haven't seen the movie yet. But after all, Andy Weir said the same thing on this show a couple of weeks ago. But go ahead. When do you think we'll actually put boots on Mars? If we get humans orbiting Mars by 2033, then I have no doubt we'll get humans on the surface by 2040. The compulsion will be enormous. The example I like to use is it'd be like, oh, we got to the base camp on Mount Everest and we're going to be compelled to get to the summit.

Okay, we can't make it this season, but we'll make it next season. I mean, it's going to happen. So I think that would be relatively quickly. I'm more concerned about the premise of your question, which is getting humans to Mars or in orbit around Mars by 2033. That's still a tall order. or an orbit around Mars by 2033. That's still a tall order. Technologically. The SLS and Orion systems right now have weeks of capability for life support

and can barely reach lunar orbit. We have to take a series of steps after we do the asteroid redirect mission, after we do the mission to distant retrograde orbit around the moon, where we can go out to maybe an asteroid that's further out into interplanetary space or to some kind of interplanetary orbits of months flight duration, even before we get to humans to orbit Mars. Do you have a copy of the book in front of you? I can get one in about one second. That's over here on the other side of the table. Sure, grab it, because I want you to read the dedication because I was very touched by it.

It's kind of a motto that, it's kind of a thought that basically I'm very proud to say is very much influenced by my work at the Planetary Society, very much influenced by my work with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray over the years. And so I dedicated the book to my grandchildren, David, Marissa, and Tristan, explore other worlds, protect ours.

And very much that's something that I think is the reason that space exploration is carried out. Carl once said this in a meeting that I remember he, Bruce, and I were talking. I said, you know what we're really out there doing is we're looking for ourselves, understand our relationship with everything that's out there. Lou Friedman, Dr. Lou Friedman, worked on deep space missions at JPL in Pasadena for many years, and then he left to co-found the Planetary Society with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, the guys he was just talking about. He served as the founding executive director for 30 years.

And much more recently, as we said earlier, he was the co-leader of the Keck Institute for Space Studies, Asteroid Retrieval Mission, and Interstellar Medium Exploration Studies at Caltech. And now he has this new book, Human Spaceflight from Mars to the Stars. It's from the University of Arizona Press. It's available at all the usual places, and I do highly recommend it.

As I recommend that you stick around for this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. He joins us once again to tell us about the night sky and so much more. Welcome back. Thank you, Matt. How are you on this fine and wonderful planet? I'd be better if I was done with jury duty. I'm going in for a tenth day,

and I guess I've got to work around this. Well, we appreciate you filling your civic duty. Thank you so much. I think I filled my duty about three times over. But anyway, let's talk about the sky. Let's take my mind off of mundane Earth-bound matters. Look up. Look up in the pre-dawn in the east. Still, we got those three planets parting together. We've got super bright Venus and above that dimmer Mars and above that very bright Jupiter. And they will be spreading out over the coming weeks

and forming a line basically and still looking lovely. We move on to this week in space history. Carl Sagan would be 81 this week and I was trying to remember his middle name. Well, you got a whole bunch of people who want to help you out with that, but we'll get to that in a moment. 35 years since Voyager 1 flew past Saturn. What? Yes, that's right. Of course, of course that's right. Shocking, I realize. It really is. Yes, those beautiful images of Saturn started 35 years

ago. Yikers. You're on your own this week. Rondon Space Fact. That's great. That's like from a Broadway musical. Thank you. You're welcome. The power output of the sun is equivalent to the output of 100 billion tons of TNT exploding per second. How much did you say?

100 billion tons of TNT per second. Wow, that's enough to make Alfred Nobel want to give out an award. That's pretty incredible. Wow, that was impressively obscure, but I got it. Yeah, thank you. On to the trivia contest, and we asked you, what was Carl Sagan's middle name? And I know we did great on this, Matt. An amazing number of entries for this one. You know,

it was pretty easy and we had a pretty good prize too. Our winner is going to get, in addition to a Planetary Radio t-shirt, Bill Nye's personalized greeting on his voicemail. We are ready to award that. And I think we're going to award it to a first-time winner, Jarrett Smith of Baltimore, think we're going to award it to a first-time winner, Jarrett Smith of Baltimore, Maryland, who said his full name was Carl Edward Sagan. Indeed. Well, Jarrett, congratulations, and welcome to the ever-growing club of winners, and we will be in touch, and we'll get that message that you would like Bill to record for you. In the meantime, you know I always have a few more from folks. I wish I could get to all the really clever ones that we got here, but just a sampling.

Eric O'Day, he's in Medford, Massachusetts. We've heard from Eric before. He says, this prize sounds great. I bet you'll get billions and billions of entries. Ah! And then, of course, there were the people like Ryan Hyken who said, really, his middle name

should have been billions. This one I had to like from Martin Hajofsky. He said, sure, it's Edward, but though personally, I always thought his middle name was Planetary Society,

which would be two middle names, of course. Here's one you might like, although it's from the new Battlestar Galactica, the good one. This from mark little there are many things named after carl sagan but the most obscure one i could find was in the tv series battlestar galactica sagan was one of the gods of kobol which if you haven't seen if you haven't seen the show it it's meaningless, right? Cobol, the obscure dead computer programming language?

No, it's spelled with a K in this case. But you never know. Maybe Cobol evolves in that universe. Finally, this, not even really funny, but this from David Fisher. But he talked about his favorite quote from Carl Sagan. If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. Wow. That is a lot of pressure.

I think I'll just buy one from the store. Yeah. What have you got for us for next time? What was the only space shuttle that had an in-flight main engine failure and reached orbit on its two remaining engines? The only space shuttle to do that? go to planetary.org slash radio contest.

Now that's a robust system. You have until the 17th, that would be Tuesday, November 17, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. We'll try this again. We will give you a Planetary Radio t-shirt, and you can have Bill Nye's voice on your voicemail system, an outgoing message from the science guy. And I think that takes care of it for this week. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about wizards.

Thank you, and good night. He is the former dungeon master, who now serves as director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. Still got a hand in D&D, though. That's Bruce Betts, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its many members.

Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.