Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Future American Space Policy, Part 1: President-Elect Barack Obama's Plan

Episode Date: November 10, 2008

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Hi again, podcast listeners. It's Matt Kaplan with another one of our secret messages just for you guys. I just wanted to let you know that as you're going to hear at the end of the show during What's Up, that we are looking for more entrants in the 6th anniversary contest. And I'll tell you right up front that you've got until Monday the 17th to get us your suggestion for a new slogan or motto for the radio show. And that'll make you eligible for all the cool prizes, including our first-place prize. That's the Celestron SkyScout from Oceanside Photo and Telescope. While I'm at it, I guess I will mention to you

that those of you who at least were in reach of Oceanside, California, OPT is doing another sort of a star party, Winter Telescope star party, telescope demo and sale. On Saturday the 15th, they're going to have a bunch of companies showing off their wares, Meade, Coronado, Explorer, Scientific, and Vixen. And then the following week, a bunch more, led by Celestron. That'll be on the 22nd, just to let you know. And that's it.

Let's get on to the first of two weeks in which we're going to talk about space policy, future space policy. Oh, and don't forget that you can become a member of the Planetary Society and get yourself a Planetary Radio T-shirt, but only if you join online at planetary.org slash radio. Here's this week's show. Here's this week's show. A new American administration and a new space policy, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

We'll be doing something we've never done before, spending two weeks down here on Terra Firma, talking about how we're going to turn our future toward, well, out there, as Captain Kirk once said. Planetary Society Executive Director Lou Friedman will introduce us to the Roadmap to Space next week. Lou travels to Washington in a few days to unveil the Roadmap in a major press conference. This week, though, our guest is Florida space activist Tim Bailey. Tim helped create the Obamanauts, a grassroots group that is excited about what President-elect Barack Obama's campaign said it plans for space exploration and development. No matter who you were rooting for in the American presidential election, it's clear that Obama and his new staff will be steering a somewhat new course among the planets and stars.

We've got lots more on today's agenda. Emily Lakdawalla will take the measure of big rocks that make it to our planet's surface. And Bruce Batts will take us into the night sky, where we can learn about both our regular trivia contest and the big PlanRad 6th anniversary competition. Let's get started with our friend Bill Nye. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Planetary Guy here, Vice President of the Planetary Society. And this week, it's very important to talk about the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft.

By the end of the week, this Indian Space Research Organization spacecraft will be in orbit around our Moon. Now you can say, another spacecraft around the Moon? Yes, but this one carries the M3, the Moon Mineralogy Mapper. So this is a spectroscope, a thing that looks at the color of rocks. And it is reasonable that we will find ways or places to go looking for water. Now, you know, a lot of people have claimed that there's water on the moon. Other people say there probably isn't. Well, this spacecraft will help us explore that. If we found water on the moon, it would affect,

first of all, our understanding of the origin of the solar system and the origin of our moon-Earth system, but also get people all excited about going there. Wherever there's water, boy, humans want to go have a sip. But the main thing, I think, for us as Planetary Society members, the success of the Chandrayaan-1 spacecraft is the success for all humankind. As another country becomes space-faring, as another country has decided to spend some of its resources on exploring nearby worlds, I claim it improves the life of everyone on Earth. And Lou Friedman, Dr. Lou Friedman, the executive director of the Society, were in India two years ago. And we had people in the audience, students, Indian students, asking the Indian Space Research Organization principal investigators, why are you guys doing

this? Why aren't we spending money on teacher salaries and improving schools and sewers and so on? Well, the thing is, the Indian space researchers said the same thing that we have said in the United States and people have said in Russia and Japan and Britain and around the world. When you explore space as a nation, it raises the level of expectations of success, of technological achievement, technological leadership for everyone in the whole country. Every citizen is lifted through space exploration. And this is another case, my friend, where international cooperation is going to lift the expectations and the leadership of everyone on Earth. So keep an eye on Chandrayaan-1 this week, my friends. It, of course, is exploring our neighboring moon, and who knows what discoveries it will make. But I claim it's improving the lives

of everyone on Earth. Well, thanks for listening to Planetary Radio. I'm Bill Nye, the Planetary Guy. Among other things, Tim Bailey does a lot of work for the Zero-G Corporation, the folks who will, for a price, give you a taste of weightlessness. He's made over 100 flights in their version of the Vomit Comet. But Tim is also a longtime space activist, working with the National Space Society, Yuri's Night, and other groups. He is co-chair of the 2009 International Space Development Conference coming to Orlando, Florida, in May.

So it's no surprise that he took a strong interest in the positions taken by the presidential candidates regarding space development and exploration. What he saw led him to creation of the Obamanauts. We recently talked about the grassroots organization and what they have learned about Obama's plans for the final frontier. Tim, thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio. Have you and the Obamanauts stopped celebrating yet? No, absolutely not. In fact, we just had an article written in NewScientist.com that was talking about what we're going to be doing next. And that's kind of up in the air. We've had a lot of discussions about we had the outcome that we wanted from the presidential election. Now, what's next for us? What are we going to do? How do we keep this momentum going that we've built up? And I think that's what the rest of the country is asking as well. Tell us how the Obamanauts came into being. I understand you're the co-chair.

Yeah, we were down here in Florida talking about the space program like we always do. But it came up that Obama had released a really extensive space policy paper, seven pages long. It detailed all kinds of pieces about education and outreach, transition issues. And we were all very impressed by it. We were, a lot of us, already Obama fans. But when he came out with this impressive space policy, that kind of pushed everyone over the edge. And they said, wow, the space industry really should know about this. The information that was going around at the time was still Obama plans to cut NASA, he's going to put money into education instead of space. And that was no longer true. But that was still the impression everybody had. So we were kind of

talking internally, you know, talking around the different groups that we had across the US. Somebody said, you know, well, if they're astronauts and cosmonauts, why can't we be the Obamanauts and just push this space policy out to the people that we know and make sure that our community is informed about what Obama has planned for the space program? And it really bloomed from there. Who came up with what really ought to be a prize-winning logo? Eddie Elligood, who does some work down here in Florida with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. He puts out a digest of different space stories, but he had kind of thought along the lines of Earth, rise, and putting the stars in the background. I played with it a little bit. And then a friend,

Jason Cranford Teague, who's up in Virginia, actually did the final logo design and put together a lot of the different merchandise we did. Like we produced a bumper sticker down here that's got the cool Obama-not logo, and it says, I'm an Obama-not, and they've been a hot commodity. T-shirts online, some buttons, and so Jason's been doing all of the graphic work for us. And of course, we will let people know that the website is obamanots.org, and we'll put that up at planetary.org slash radio, along with some other useful links that we may be talking about over the course of this conversation. You picked up a lot of support and a lot of it pretty prominent. Talk about some of the people who got involved.

Sure. Well, as we started getting rolling, we went out to the Obama website to see what else was there. And they had some general aerospace groups of volunteers that were coming together. So we pinged the space policy group. We started a Florida space policy group. And the co-chair of the group was Lon Levin, who is one of the co-founders of XM Satellite Radio. He's also involved with National Space Society, Planetary Society. So Lon and I started putting this thing together. He was a great resource to get us involved with some other people. Sally Ride actually did an endorsement for Obama. We had Rusty Schweikert, who's an Apollo 9 astronaut, come down and actually meet some of

the Obama workers here. He did a meet and greet with people who had voted in Titusville. We actually got an endorsement from Peter Diamandis, who everybody knows from the XPRIZE Foundation, Rocket Racing League, Zero Gravity. So we really just got the ball rolling. And as we got one or two in, they would tell their friends and everybody kind of wanted to jump on board. It became a race of astronauts. McCain camp had had a few astronauts come out and speak for them. And so we responded in kind and had astronauts come out and speak for them. And so we responded in kind and had astronauts come out and speak with us. Yeah. And to be fair, they got some pretty prominent folks, astronauts on the McCain side as well, people like Gene Cernan. And the

question is now, where do we go from here? And I hope that you can talk a little bit about, you know, what you learned about at least what the Obama campaign has said about what it will do with space policy. There is a link to a space policy page, an Obama space policy page, at obaminauts.org. And one of the very first things that I noticed is the intent of the Obama administration to bring back a council that played a key role in driving American space policy years ago. One of the neat things about the National Aeronautics and Space Council, it brings space up in the world, I guess is the best way to put it. The intent, as far as I've read, and I'm new to the politics game, so I don't know how everything actually shakes out. This is not something I do on a regular basis or ever before. But reading the policy and the plan,

it was awesome to see a candidate for president who said space is important enough that it should report up to the president. Previously, that committee, when it was in a former incarnation, had reported to the vice president. And that was neat. It was great to have White House support. But in his policy, he says it'll actually be a committee that reports directly to the president that it's that important to have across the board coordination on space activities. So that means that the DOD, anybody that's using space stuff, the NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, all those people that launch things that are interested in space, that are developing space technology, need to talk on

a super high level and make sure that we're integrating programs, that we are having synergy between things so that we don't duplicate efforts. And to have that be on a White House level all the way up to the president, I think is just amazing. Bringing back the council at all is a great way for people to work together and really open up the lines of communication between the different agencies. But having it report to the president, I think, says a lot about how important space is going to be in an Obama administration. What else are you excited about in what you've seen of the president elect space policy? One thing that really got us all going was that he kept talking about space a lot. And I've had these questions that, well, everybody puts out some kind of information.

You know, everybody, McCain included, said something about space, especially when they were in Florida. But Obama consistently said things about space. Even in his acceptance speech, he referenced landing on the moon as one of the great achievements of the U.S. In the national ads that he put out, he put out so much space imagery and talked about watching those Apollo astronauts from his grandfather's shoulders. And so I'm really excited that it seems to be embedded in a lot of what he's doing. And reading over the space policy document, if you go there and look it over, it's long.

It's a long document to read. It's not a summary by any means. But it also integrates a lot of interesting points that I think a lot of people forget about the space program. That's Tim Bailey, co-chair of the Obamanauts. He'll be back in a minute to tell us more about what the Obama campaign said it will do in space. This is Planetary Radio. do in space. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe.

I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Our nearly 100,000 members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio.

The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We're spending this week and next talking about American space policy. Not so much where it is, but where some people hope it will go. Next week, we'll talk with the Planetary Society's Lou Friedman about the roadmap to space. Right now, we're hearing from Tim Bailey, space activist and co-chair of the Obamanauts. Tim was about to tell us more details of the Obama campaign's space policy statement. It touches on the technology and innovation side,

where space is an incubator for a lot of early technologies and far-reaching technologies that have huge impact back on Earth. It talks about the impact on education and how you can use the space program to inspire kids to take a more science and math-directed path in their studies. It talks about the use of space as an international tool to really talk with our international partners, open up some dialogues that may not be there otherwise.

It does touch on the strategic defense issues of space and the fact that it's the ultimate high ground. And if we cede that high ground to anyone, we've lost a hugely valuable defensive position for our nation and the planet. So the fact that there's so many different aspects that are talked about in this policy, and they go into depth, they have specific, I don't know if I'd call them deliverables, but specific intentions for each one of those pieces. So it's great to see it branch out and that it's not going to be just about launching things into space or looking at stars, but really how that integrates into the whole rest of the U.S. economy

and different pieces says a lot about the thoughts that went behind this and I think how it's going to be moving forward for the space program in general. Can you talk about what it has to say about space science? Since we represent the Planetary Society, you might imagine that that's a subject that's pretty near and dear to our hearts. Right. Well, it does touch on a lot of the science aspects and there was some contention for a while whether or not Obama was for or against human spaceflight versus robotic spaceflight. And I think that it's best put that he's for a balanced program where you need both.

Earth-oriented research is a huge piece of the program, studying Earth and talking about how it ties into climate change and making sure that we understand how other planets and other ecosystems out there may have developed so that we understand our own space better, how this planet is functioning. Human exploration is definitely a piece of this and making sure that we have humans on site to do the type of research that only we can do. But it definitely balances it out. So for those

people in the Planetary Society, it's not all about sending people and it's not all about sending robots. It's definitely about looking at what works best for the situation that you're talking about. And I think that's really good to have that balance in there and making sure that there's a dialogue going on between the two sides. What is needed for this? What can we do better? Who can we partner with to make these things move forward? Is there anything that you'd like to see in the space policy that hasn't showed up yet or that you would, actions that you'd like to see the new administration take that maybe haven't been discussed? I really like where they talk about the commercial space sector and involving the private enterprises and getting things going for space.

One of the things that excites me most about the space program is that we're finally to this tipping point where average people can start, well, not that everybody's average, but that normal citizens can start going into space. I watch people like Richard Garriott, who is the latest private space explorer to go up to the International Space Station. Charles Simone, who is planning for his second trip into space. And that's so amazing to see those people that were not selected by NASA

and are not classic, the right stuff astronauts going up there and reading about the different pieces to expand public-private partnerships, to make sure that we have commercial space development taking over areas that NASA is no longer pioneering. Those pieces are really what excites me, and I would love to see that piece move forward quickly to make sure that the commercial sector businesses and startups that are out there trying to get a piece of the pie have that opportunity through programs like COTS, Commercial Orbital Transportation Services contracts, offering up manned spaceflight to them and saying, if you can figure out a way to safely take our astronauts to the space station, why don't you do that?

And we'll focus on the long term and the leading edge, cutting edge technologies that we need to go farther. long-term, and the leading-edge, cutting-edge technologies that we need to go farther. So that's really what excites me about it. And they do have that in there about supporting commercial access to space, dropping down, perhaps, and revisiting some of the ITAR restrictions. It's the International Traffic and Arms Regulations. That's the piece that doesn't let us cooperate with other countries when we're developing satellites and space launchers. So there's a lot of commercial stuff in there that I would love to see move forward quickly because those are long lead time items. Tim, we're almost out of time. Do you want to put in a plug for your own blog? And I think you said you've got a podcast as well. Yeah, if you go to spacetaskforce.com, we periodically go

through and talk about space news and updates, kind of take a journalist and scientist approach to it. It's a fun way to continue this type of dialogue that we're having now, what's going on in the industry, what's happening. And I think that's probably what pushed me a little bit to start having the dialogue publicly through the Obamanauts, too, was this is something that I think is really important, and I'm glad to see that we have an administration that's got a policy on the table. I want to make sure that we can move it forward and keep it going. Thanks very much, Tim, and Ad Astra. Thank you so much. Tim Bailey is co-chair of the Obamanauts.

As we said, you can find them at obamanauts.org. And his co-chair serving with him is Lon Levin, who, as you also heard, is on the board of the Planetary Society. Tim, though, is also with the Zero-G Corporation, one of those many companies started up by Peter Diamandis, the man who I once said could someday be the man who sold the moon for you Heinlein fans. But Tim is also involved with Yuri's Night, the National Space Society, and is helping to put together the International Space Development Conference, the ISDC that the Planetary Society had a hand in just a couple of years ago. We'll take a hand in looking at the night sky, although we'll leave the heavy lifting to Bruce Betts

when we get to our What's Up segment for this week. And we'll remind you of the 6th anniversary contest you still have time to enter, plus the regular trivia contest, of course. All that right after we visit with Emily. And we'll remind you of the 6th anniversary contest you still have time to enter, plus the regular trivia contest, of course. All that right after we visit with Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, What's the minimum size for an asteroid to survive a trip through the atmosphere to hit the ground?

What's the minimum size for it to make a crater? It depends in part on what the asteroid is made of. The vast majority of asteroids that fall toward Earth are made of rock. About 5% are made of iron metal, and about 1% are a combination of the two. As you might predict, for a given size, iron meteorites are more likely to make it to the ground than stony meteorites. The conventional wisdom has been that a stony asteroid has to be at least 40 meters across in order to make it to the ground. Smaller ones usually explode in the atmosphere, like the asteroid 2008 TC3 did over northern Sudan. Only small fragments of these bodies usually survive to reach Earth.

But conventional wisdom was challenged in 2007 when a stony meteorite only about a meter in diameter crashed in Peru, leaving a crater 13 meters across. This unusual event proves that under the right conditions, for a sufficiently hard rock, it's possible for the smallest asteroids to create craters. The conventional wisdom for iron meteorites is that bodies as small as a few meters in diameter can make it to the ground. There may be some special smaller cases like in the Peruvian crater, but it seems likely that most meteoroids smaller than 30 meters just don't survive the trip. Otherwise, our planet would be littered with small impact craters, and we just don't see them. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio.

Here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. From Venice, California, this is What's Up on Planetary Radio with Dr. Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. We've just watched a dance performance. Indeed, a fabulous dance performance by Vaughan Dance Company presenting Reaching Out for the Unlimited. And it was really good, a modern dance performance by Vaughan Dance Company presenting Reaching Out for the Unlimited. And it was really good. Modern dance performance. Jennifer Vaughan is the artistic director of the company, and that's a name you'll see on the

Planetary Society website. One of the people responsible for getting this show done. Who says we science types don't appreciate the arts? Exactly. We are the arts. And we appreciate the night sky too. Yes, we do. When we reach out for the Unlimited, we appreciate the night sky, too. Yes, we do.

When we reach out for the unlimited, we will see in the evening over in the west Venus after sunset looking extremely bright. Starlight object over there low in the west after sunset. Turn your head to the left looking towards the south kind of and you'll see Jupiter, another really bright starlight object. And they will be approaching, getting closer over the next very few weeks in the night sky. Both looking lovely. And in the pre-dawn you can check out Saturn over there in the east in the pre-dawn. And it keeps getting higher and down below it near the horizon you might still catch Mercury. I want to go on to Random Space Fact! And I love that little pirouette thing that you did at the end.

It was so inspiring. Why, thank you. I was so inspired by the dance this evening. I couldn't help myself. So Venus, let's talk about Venus. It's so much brighter than the brightest star in the sky. It gets to about minus 4.4 magnitudes for those playing the magnitude game. And it's really hot there.

Yes, it is. All right, well, let's move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you, what are the three major geologic time periods on Mars? How'd we do, Matt? We continue to get a huge response, and I don't know if it's because we're still making people members of the Planetary Society, the one-year free membership,

or if it's because they're excited about the sixth anniversary contest, but we're getting a lot more entries than usual. The winning one this week came from Mr. Stacey Henniger. Stacey Henniger of Ontario, Canada. I'm going to let you go through the three Martian epics. Okay, well, oldest, we've got the Nowakian. Nowakian, and that's really heavily cratered old stuff. A lot of the southern highlands are Nowakian. And then the middle time period, which is also pretty darn old, measured in billions of years, is the Hesperian, named after Hesperia planum, kind of an intermediate age.

And then you have the Amazonian. Amazonian is the young stuff. Now, the young stuff may still be a billion or two billion years old, but, you know, it might be younger. Did I read correctly the Amazonian is when some of the interesting stuff like the volcanoes probably popped up? Yeah, especially the Tharsis volcanoes. That's where you find most of your Amazonian terrain there and elsewhere in the northern lowlands, although they're high,

but then you also have the northern lowlands, which go either Hesperian or Amazonian. There's also, I should, some people reference, there is a new proposed different parallel system based upon mineralogy. But we'll stick with, for now, the longer entrenched geology, crater counting kind of thing. Yeah, we got a few responses who gave those to us. But Stacy, you've won yourself a t-shirt and a one-year membership in the Planetary Society. I've got to mention this.

From this fellow, Walter, who wrote to us and did provide the right answer. Didn't win out, I'm afraid, but said this. We're originally from Austria, traveling around a lot since I'm working for a major oil company. A year ago, we moved to Scotland. Before that, we listened to your show from Brunei, where we lived the previous five years. And he said, of course, I'm a member of the Planetary Society. He said, my children 12 and 10 and wife also enjoy the show. Big fan out there trotting around the globe. That is so cool.

Isn't that fun? That is. That's very fun. Enjoy your world travels while we talk about solar system travels. And speaking of which, it is time once again to play Where in the Solar System? I'm going to give you an easy one this time because we want you to also be thinking about that 6th anniversary contest. So you're just going to find this annoying. Where in the Solar System is Hadley Rill? Go to planetary.org slash radio.

Find out how to enter. That will enter you in our contest to win a t-shirt and a Planetary Signing membership. you in our contest to win, t-shirt and a Planetary Signing membership. And then also, don't forget our sixth anniversary contest, which anytime now you can be sending in slogans, mottos for Planetary Radio. And we're getting a few, not a lot of slogans, not a lot of new mottos for the radio show. So it's a good time to jump in and give us your candidate because you have a decent chance of winning out. And that's, of course, if the judges, the esteemed judges who happen to be Bruce and me, decide that we like what you send us. The deadline for both the weekly contest and for the sixth anniversary contest is Monday, November 17th, Monday the 17th

at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Let me tell you about those prizes once again. Oh, please do. We're going to start with a copy of Space Station Sim for first, second, and third prize winners. Space Station Sim, that great simulation game, build and operate your own space station. And you're going to have a great time doing that. If you want to check it out, it's at spacestationsim.com. Second place, we're going to hear from our friend Florian Knoller who has spaceflory.com.

He's chosen a set of five commemorative covers made by the JPL Stamp Club for Mars Pathfinder, Global Surveyor, other stuff, and that cover that flew on the helicopter during the Apollo-Soyuz mission in 1975. Is that Apollo-Soyuz or is that Apocalypse Now? I'm not sure. Grand prize!

The Celestron Sky Scout, the personal planetarium provided to us by OPT, Oceanside Photo and Telescope, at optcorp.com. Great prizes you've got till the 17th at 2 p.m. Fabulous. Go get them. Are we done?

We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky, and think about duct tape. Thank you, and good night. Bruce Betts is the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up? Quack Quack. Not duct tape. Duct tape. Next week, the Roadmap to Space with Lou Friedman. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week.