Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - How to Build a Starship: The 2019 Starship Congress

Episode Date: September 18, 2019

The biannual Starship Congress attracts starry-eyed believers in humankind’s destiny among the stars. We talk with several of them about their ideas for technologies and science that may help pave the way. Science fiction author David Brin dropped by the Congress and spends a few fun and speculative minutes with us. The September Equinox edition of The Planetary Report is ready for all to read. Editor Emily Lakdawalla gives us a sneak peek. The Milky Way has at least 54 satellite galaxies? Who knew? Bruce Betts, that’s who. Learn more about this week’s guests and topics at:  http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/0918-2019-2019-starship-congress.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

How to Build a Starship, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and way beyond. I don't want to oversell our theme today. The attendees and presenters at the Starship Congress aren't building a starship, but they'd like to, and building one starts with a lot of ideas that may seem just as wild at the outset, we'll hear several, and we'll wrap up our coverage of the Congress with the great science fiction author and futurist David Brin. We'll start with the Planetary Society's senior editor and editor-in-chief of its magazine, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, congrats on yet another great issue of the Planetary Report. The paper copy,

mine is in my hands as we speak, but of course it's available online as well to everybody, whether they are members of the Planetary Society or not, at planetary.org. It's a great issue. There's so much here. There's no way we're going to be able to cover all of it. I will say that beginning with the cover, you have a nice celebration of light sail. Not surprising and very welcome. And there's some great stuff inside, including a nice message from our boss, the science guy. I'll also note there's a little tiny

sidebar here about International Podcast Day, which has the logo of my favorite podcast, Planetary Radio. But what are your favorites out of this issue? Well, this magazine gives me the opportunity to talk to scientists and engineers and get them to actually write for me about the missions that they're working on, other projects that they're working on. And in this particular issue of the magazine, I managed to rectify an absence from the Planetary Report for a long time, and that is an absence of Venus. We have a great article about Venus science from Javier Peralta, summarizing what we've learned from two fantastic missions, European Space Agency's Venus Express and Japan's Akatsuki, both of them investigating Venus's atmosphere. And I learned so much editing

this article about how many different layers there are to Venus's atmosphere and clouds and how they all communicate with each other, or in some cases not. Akatsuki is still there doing science. And I'm just so pleased that we have this great article about Venus. And we're going to have Javier Peralta, the author of this piece, on the show fairly soon. He's been out of town. We're just waiting for him to come back so that we can record a conversation. Speaking of those layers of atmosphere, it's another great thing that you find in these features in the Planetary Report. There's a great graphic that very graphically shows these layers. It's pretty, but it's also very instructive. Yeah, that's another thing I really like about editing this magazine is I can make graphics that I will use again later. And

I've never, you know, I've thought a lot before about Venus's atmosphere. I know it's thick. I know there's sulfuric acid clouds, but I didn't realize how high above the surface those clouds are, that there's three different cloud layers. You know, we could send spacecraft down that could just get underneath the lowermost cloud layer and would be able to see the surface with cameras. We should be flying around there in balloons. Yeah, we sure should. There's a lot of other good stuff here in that article. And then it goes right on to one about planetary defense with author Vishnu Reddy, who has already been interviewed for Planetary Radio. And we'll be hearing from him in a week or two right here. Yeah, I love doing articles like this where we can get updates on what's going on on topics that

are of great importance to the Planetary Society, because it helps me understand how to talk about an issue like planetary defense with the public. In this article, it explains that we've actually discovered, probably discovered, the asteroids that could potentially cause civilization-ending disaster. And the good news is there's no asteroid currently known that could cause civilization-ending disaster. So the search has moved on now to what they call the city killer asteroids, the ones that would ruin your whole day if they landed on New York. Now, it's likely because Earth is mostly empty and it's mostly ocean that an asteroid of that size would impact in a place where it may not cause any major problem to humans unless it caused like a tidal wave or something. But it's still, it's great to get an update on this, find out how we're looking for them, find out where we need to put our efforts in order to find them. Hazards like the ones that come from the direction we can't see, like coming out of the sun, which is

why we need future spacecraft like NEOCHEM that could orbit between Earth and the sun and be able to see those potentially hazardous asteroids. It's just a real great update and Vishnu's a great writer. And he's a great guest on Planetary Radio as well, as people will hear very soon. If you don't mind, I want you to comment on this last feature on the inside back cover of the magazine called Why I Explore. And it has this nice little essay by our chief operating officer, Jennifer Vaughn. It's important to me as an editor of this magazine to reflect the fact that although space is about the places we explore and the spacecraft that we explore it with, ultimately, it's a human endeavor. And so I really wanted to get a bunch of different voices on why

we explore. It's one of the more common questions I get asked when I do radio interviews, like, why is it worth it? Why spend money on space missions when we have so many problems to solve here on Earth? And I started out with our COO, Jennifer Vaughn, and she has her own perspective. And I really look forward to exploring the diverse perspectives of other Planetary Society members from all over the world, from all different walks of life, to see why different people want to explore space. And that will, I think, really help inform us as the Planetary Society in the kinds of activities that we do in the future. Besides, it's inspiring. You have a link here that tells people how they can get in on this. Yes, that link is planetary.org slash why explore. And we really

do invite people to come explain to us why they think it's important to explore the solar system. It is a terrific issue of the Planetary Report. Again, it's available at planetary.org. Keep it up. Will do, Matt. That's Emily Lakdawalla, our senior editor and also now the editor-in-chief of the Planetary Report. Rather than start by telling you about the Starship Congress, let's hear from just one of the many presenters who spoke at the mid-September gathering. I'm John Hunter. I'm with Green Launch. I'm your CTO, and we've been doing tests at human proving grounds the last couple years. We've been successful. The last shot, the 22nd shot,

we got really good data. We're Mach 5, and then we hope to get to Mach 8. In the spring of 2020, we hope to start shots to the Kármán line. And this is a great illustration of how this conference, even though we're talking interstellar, is also talking about enabling technologies, which are going to be short of getting us to the stars. That seems to be, in part, what you represent. Right now, we want to take one baby step at a time. Before you get to warp drive, you've got to get into low orbit affordably. And I think that's consistent with what Elon's been doing.

So we want to be the other horse in the race with the good old Elon. If they don't kill the guy, he's going to bring the cost down to 500 a pound. Give me the briefest version, the sort of elevator speech version of your technology, which is working. Yeah, certainly. Our technology is something that's been overlooked, but it's a rapid expansion of hydrogen down a tube. Not a hydrogen explosion, no combustion. Not at all. It's not even combustion.

In this case, you just get hot hydrogen. You heat it up because it increases the sound speed, and you let it expand out and just push a projo down the barrel. This projo or projectile is basically a multistage rocket, but it's a much smaller rocket than you would need if Elon was doing this from the ground with no first stage. So our giant launcher, this green launch thing, is our first stage, and it delivers 6 kilometers per second. Pretty fast. Extremely fast, yeah. Mind-numbingly fast. The shot you guys saw was about a mile per second, and so we're going to be about, you know, several times that

when we get to the six kilometer per second speed. Where are you doing this work, and how far along is it? Yeah, we're at YPG. It's an Army base not too far from Yuma. What is that, Yuma Proving Ground? Yuma, Arizona. Yeah, it's Yuma Proving Grounds, about 30 miles northeast of Yuma, Arizona. The Army's been extremely accommodating. We get in there with this one building that used to be an electromagnetic gun building, but see, electromagnetic guns fell by the wayside. They were the flavor of the month for the last 20 years, but they've never delivered the goods, in my opinion. And so the gas guns took all the records. In the 90s, when I built Super Harp, or my team built Super Harp, we crushed their records, and it was done for a few million dollars.

We just wanted to get results, so we just got massive data. We were launching scram jets at Mach 9 back in the late 90s. With gas guns. With gas guns, absolutely. And the world record for speed, by far, was set with a gas gun in the 60s. What's the ultimate? Talk about what you're hoping to be able to deliver stuff in orbit. At what price? far was set with a gas gun in the 60s. What's the ultimate? Talk about what you're hoping to be able to deliver stuff in orbit.

At what price? Yeah, this is just something that we recognized long ago, is that the speed of these hydrogen systems matches orbital speeds. Orbital speeds are 7, 8, 9 kilometers per second, those kind of things. You know, 7.6 is your orbital velocity, but the actual velocity to get to orbit is about nine typically. That's right in the sweet spot for hydrogen gas guns. So we call them impulse launchers and they're green because there's no emissions. You can actually make one that has no gunpowder. If you hate CO2, you'll love our system because we don't emit any CO2. You got to give

your slogan. What slogan? They? Having to do with FedEx. Oh, well, we're just in time delivery. We're basically just in time. So I don't know if it's any sexier than that. But the idea is we launch 10 pounds, 20 pounds. Maybe you need O negative blood on the space station. You got to have it tomorrow. You can't wait for the next Russian resupply mission two months later. We launch it up.

You get the order to us. Launched up within 10 hours. Best of luck with it. Hey, great. Thanks. Thanks a lot for the us. Launch it up within 10 hours. Best of luck with it. Hey, great. Thanks a lot for the interview. Appreciate it. That's John Hunter. We've got links to Green Launch and all the other presenters or groups you'll hear from on this week's show page.

Get there from planetary.org slash radio. The 2019 Starship Congress came to my hometown of San Diego and set up shop at the terrific Air and Space Museum in Balboa Park. The organizers were the men and women behind Icarus Interstellar, a non-profit that works toward making interstellar flight a reality. The relatively small turnout was offset by the passion of the participants, many of whom are experts in fields ranging from propulsion to biochemistry. I couldn't be there all three days, but the presentations I heard were generally fascinating. I'll share several more conversations with you, beginning with the guy in charge.

My name is Andreas Zioulas. I'm the president of Icarus Interstellar and one of the co-founders. I'm a physicist in my background. I have a master's degree in spacecraft engineering. I worked at NASA JPL for a couple of years, on the Pathfinder mission to Mars and the Galileo mission support when the Huygens probe was dropped into the atmosphere. And I now live in Alaska. I'm a grants analyst. I used to be a professor at the university there.

How long has this been going on, and why do you bring people together for this? Starship Congress started in 2013 as a continuation of the DARPA 2011 symposium in Florida, which was the 100-year Starship at the time. We thought that that kind of meeting of interstellar luminaries, people who brought out ideas was something that was needed. We've continued it every two years. And then this year, you have this interesting theme, bending metal. I haven't seen anybody putting together a starship out there yet. I get to tell you the story I always came from. Myself and Richard Abusi went to NASA headquarters to meet with some NIAC folks back in 2012, I think. Since we were there, they decided

to start walking us around the corridors. And we walked into, I wish I remember his name, but he was a project manager who was working with one of our colleagues. And as soon as we sat down, he looked me and Richard Abusi in the eye and he says, I know what you guys are doing, but my question is, when are you going to bend metal? And then was born a theme. And then was born a theme. He blew me out of the water. That was a note in my life that was an affirmation that not only was the things that Icarus Interstellar were doing were important, at least to us, but they were important to others.

That people at NASA HQ were monitoring our work and that people really wanted to see it happen. So, you know, it was a challenge and he was really blunt. And, you know, he explained this is what you need to do. Define your missing parameters. Build a team. Come and tell NASA what you're doing. We may not be able to help you today, but maybe, but we'll definitely be able to help you tomorrow. And that's the kind of thing that we really needed to help to keep going.

What a great conversation. What great encouragement to hear at NASA headquarters. There has been a lot of, what should we say, virtual bending of metal. A lot of interesting practical stuff and sometimes less practical stuff. We're going to hear from some of those people. You seem to be able to entertain pretty much anything. We do. I have to be a little careful how I respond to this question, but I want to be clear. Icarus Interstellar and Interstellar Flight tends to borrow ideas from the scientific literature, from novels, because that's where the concepts were born. And sometimes we have to work back from those things, because that's where the concepts were born.

And sometimes we have to work back from those things, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. You know, we see David Brin that just spoke to us today. He's as much a scientist as he is an author, you know, well-respected and well-formed ideas. But we had to set some tenets as an organization of what it is exactly that we do. And there's two, three things that we follow strictly the number one our number one tenet is that there is no one way to the stars people tend to get entrenched in one way or another so someone that you know perhaps some people that have worked on light sails you know planetary society had amazing success you know we'll say we have to only use light sails is the

only way to go to explore the solar system another person who's a who's who's worked on nuclear rockets and has done his phds he's so believes this so much that he'll say no no it's got to be nuclear rockets other people will say hey look chemical propulsion works just fine it's scalable we know how to do it if we could do it right now why are you trying to come up with this fictitious stuff? But the purpose is not just to achieve interstellar flight, it's to learn along the way of the process. So whenever I get the opportunity, I make sure that I point out that what we call a starship is both a term of art as much as it is a factual object. So the effort towards achieving a starship

is the education, the know-how, the cultural changes that we would go through. Those are just as important as actually building it. Even if we don't actually get to the point where we build a starship, but we're capable of doing something like that, the benefits to humanity and the benefits to Earth and just in education are worth the goal

because in some sense, that is the grandest achievement of any civilization to be able to proliferate. Throughout the last two days, we've heard lots about these technologies and approaches and new science that do have at least potential benefits for those of us who stay here on Earth and never venture out to Proxima Centauri. Before we finish, though, you've got to say a word or two about your own presentation

from a few hours ago today, which you call the minimally viable starship. You had several approaches to that and several answers, but one of them involved a format, a form of spacecraft, which is pretty near and dear to us at the Planetary Society. A CubeSat, yes. It has a funny story. It was just before the first Starship Congress. So we were working on, we were doing a huge crunch of some modeling that we had done for the Icarus spacecraft. And we should say Icarus is the spacecraft, the starship design, right? Icarus is the name of the flagship design, which is a successor to Project Daedalus. So we

have heritage in the British Interplanetary Society, but Icarus Interstellar is the... The descendant. The descendant, yes. The descendant, the mythological descendant, and the ideological. So I made a mistake. I want to kind of make a long story short to get to the Joker a little faster. I made a mistake. I forgot like a couple of orders of magnitude. My payload was a few kilograms instead of a few thousand kilograms. And I figured I'm getting such good performance. Like, what did I do in my code?

You know, this is probably not true, but what did I do? And then I realized that the size of my spacecraft was about 5 kilograms instead of 50,000 tons. I laughed it off. Everyone laughed it off. And then I thought, well, that's about the mass of a CubeSat. And probably a few hours later, I was emailing people saying, we need to do a CubeSat, an interstellar CubeSat study, and see what the best performance of a CubeSat is. What are we going to call it? Well, it's got to be small.

Let's put it in an Altoids tin. Let's see if we can fit it, because initially we were thinking about a CubeSat. So instead of Altoids tin, people were calling it Tin Tin, and then we did win some through certain iterations, Tin 1, Tin 2, Tin 3, Tin 4, and then it ended up at Tin 10,

and then no one liked Tin 10, and everyone started calling it Tinintin after the comic books. So Project Tintin was born, and it's an interstellar cube set which actually uses the Icarus spacecraft's secondary propulsion and uses actually a modified light sail as a retroreflector for communications. I was happy to see that in your animation that you shared with us. That was fun.

It's really kind of cool to see other spacecrafts arrive at very similar design choices. And a vindication and just an affirmation, I guess, is the word that we're on the right track, that we're doing really good work. We've actually reached an ideological conclusion to an almost 10-year arc where almost all of the projects have reached their end point. They've delivered their final reports

and we know very, very well what we don't know. It's fun. We're going from research into development. We're really looking forward to what the next steps are. It's an inspiring mission and I want to thank you for inviting me to be here yesterday to talk about our light sail, too, which we find inspiring and we hope others do, too. But keep dreaming and keep bending metal. Thank you so much. And we found your mission absolutely inspiring. And we're actually, you know, members and we appreciate the work of our community. Hey, if you're members, you're a part of it. Thanks, Andreas. Yes, thank you very much, Matt.

Andreas is president of Icarus Interstellar. I am so proud to welcome back to Planetary Radio the Great Courses Plus. Some of you have been with us for a while. You'll remember me mentioning that my wife and I, we own a whole bunch of these courses. With the Great Courses Plus, you don't have to own them. You have access to all of them, hundreds of different courses. It really is an amazing collection of instructors. The one that I'm doing right now, perfect for planetary radio, Black Holes, Tides, and Curved Spacetime, Understanding Gravity,

with physicist Professor Dr. Benjamin Schumacher. He is a great, very entertaining presenter, and the production values are just first-rate. There's animation, the graphics are terrific. I'm loving it. You can, too, because right now, The Great Courses Plus is giving Planetary Radio listeners a special limited-time offer, a free month of unlimited access to the entire library. But you've got to go through our special URL. Here it is, thegreatcoursesplus.com slash planetary.

Easy as pie. You can start your free month today. That's thegreatcoursesplus.com slash planetary. Back to the Starship Congress. In addition to the formal presentations, there were a handful of exhibits. One caught my eye because it featured living creatures. My name is Christoph Laatz.

I have a Master in Biochemistry and a PhD in Cancer Epigenetics. And currently I work in a biotech company developing and inventing cancer drugs. I'm here right now at the ICARUS Interstellar Conference as a director. I'm a member of the board and I'm more interested into the biological problems in general for interstellar flight. Those biological challenges are, I'm gonna go out not very far on a limb and say they are as big as any other challenge like propulsion?

Yes, we have a big radiation problem. Speaking of propulsion, we are under this dome at the Air and Space Museum in San Diego and the jets are going to be flying over periodically. Yes, radiation is a big problem but also the microgravity. When we cannot build a spaceship what has artificial microgravity? The recycling within build a spaceship that has artificial microgravity. The recycling within the spaceship will be a problem. We need to be 100% because we cannot get some nutrients from somewhere. So we need to take it with us and we need to recycle. And the food production is also a big issue on these interstellar flights.

I don't know if you've read the book Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. And he basically wrote the book to say, interstellar flight, at least in a so-called generational starship, you know, one that might take 100 years or 200 or 500 years to get someplace, the challenges are enormous. And some of the biggest are biological, ecological. Yes, there's a question what we want, what kind of starship we want to build. Most likely as a generation is a starship the best option, but then we need a certain amount of

people, several thousand people to have the gene pool in the right size to not degenerate over time on the journey. Let me ask you about, because you brought some critters along, they're not exactly extremophiles because here we are in a nice shirt sleeve environment, but why are these here? I brought these to illustrate how different life can be. So we have here one that is Triops canceriformis, that is a shrimp-like, horseshoe-shrimp-like looking creature, and it didn't change since the dinosaurs its shape, so it's a living fossil. But more interesting is actually that the eggs,

what it's laying in the ground, can survive several decades until the next rain comes and they hatch. And so this guy, he hasn't changed much. I mean, some of his best friends were trilobites. No, no, trilobites. I think the whole strain of trilobites totally died out. So there are no living ancestors of trilobites anymore. But he goes back to their era, right? Not that far, but he was living while the dinosaurs ruled the world, so 65 million years ago. My mistake. And he's here to represent, in a sense, how, well, it was, as Jeff Goldblum said,

that great line in the original Jurassic Park, life finds a way. Yes, life can be very resistant and can enter all corners of all ecosystems, actually. So, and this little guy lives basically in temporary waters. So we have a field that can dry out for decades, and then it rains and you have a puddle. And then the eggs hatch, and it's there, and then laying eggs again for the next generation. And you've got some other stuff here. I mean, you brought along some Mars simulant, regolith simulant?

Yeah, this is an alpha version of a product I think about to launch with my soon-to-be company, what I want to found. It's basically a kit for kids where they use simulated Mars regoliths in different ways

so they can put that in water and they can put that in soil and they have a different outcome of an animal or an organism. What shows them there are different ways life can emerge out of the same sample. Of course, that is not real mass sampling. I don't claim that. I tried to raise these guys as a kid. I bought them out of a comic book, brine shrimp. Yes, brine shrimps are actually kind of real extremophiles because they can live in a very, very high saltwater concentration,

so up to 35%, which is basically the highest amount of salt that can dissolve in water. So they are very, very resistant against that and can live in this salt water. We are learning more and more that there are these extreme environments where not long ago most biologists would have thought there can't possibly be anything living there, and yet there is. Yes, there's actually very interesting bacteria. I come from the biochemistry field, and we used to autoclave our stuff to be to be sterile and that goes up to 121 degrees Celsius to be to be sterile. Some time ago they found actually bacteria what survives actually this autoclave process and they call that strain 121 and these

extremophiles have also a very, very huge potential for biotechnology. Let me switch back to your interest in all of this. As a biologist, but also, you know, you have this other career looking for cancer cures, it sounds like. But why then this interest that has brought you here to the Starship Congress? Yeah, that's a long story. I was always interested into space, also interested into biology. That is my day career, but I always circled back to space and then I tried to combine that. And then I tried to combine both careers and then astrobiology emerged. It's a really, try to combine both careers and then astrobiology emerged.

It's a really, really interesting field. And biochemistry kind of goes into this because biochemistry tries to solve the riddle how life emerged and what is life exactly. It fits together, yeah. Our boss, Bill Nye, the science guy, he is one of those who likes to talk about the two big questions. Where do we come from and are we alone and this seems to fit into all of that

yes, yeah, I love Bill Nye of course and the big question is really a numbers game because just because of the vast number of planets there is no question there is somewhere life in the universe the question is if we can find it and yesterday in my talk I talked about Europa and Enceladus there is somewhere alive in the universe. The question is if we can find it. And yesterday in my talk, I talked about Europa and Enceladus as very good candidates for life under this ice sheet.

I would love to be alive when they find something outside of our planet. Then wish the Europa Clipper mission luck because it could happen and maybe not too far off. Maybe we'll both still be around. Yeah, yeah, I really hope so, yeah. Just one more question. Where did you come from to get here to San Diego? Actually, I live in San Diego, but originally I come from Germany, and I started my postdoc here in 2010.

Thank you, Christoph. Thanks very much for the samples here, your critters, and for helping to bring off the Starship Congress. Thank you very much. Biochemist and Icarus Interstellar board member Christoph Lotz. Perhaps the most out-there proposal presented at the Starship Congress was one that is apparently backed by experimental evidence, as you're about to hear. I'm Daniel Sheehan. I'm a professor of physics at the University of San Diego. So you didn't have to travel too far to get here today, and we are in one of the exhibit areas here at the fantastic Air and Space Museum. Beautiful campus, by the way. I've been there several times now since I'm a local as well. I wasn't the only one who was utterly fascinated and captivated by your presentation yesterday.

Let's start with a bit of what I think you would call dogma. Nobody, nobody gets to violate the second law of thermodynamics. Well, that's sort of true. You realize that there are a lot of classical physicists who are now sitting up in their graves. Well, that's fine. I mean, laws serve their purpose, but there are very few laws of nature that haven't been updated over the years. The second law dates back to the mid-19th century. It was developed for steam engines, and that's 150 years ago, 170 years ago now, and things have changed. You have quantum mechanics, you have general special relativity,

chaos theory, so many new discoveries. It would be surprising if such a law as the second law would actually survive all of that. No doubt the audience for this program, Planetary Radio, knows all the laws of thermodynamics. But just in case, can you give just the 30-second elevator speech definition of the second law and where we're all going to end up if it's true? Sure. The second law says the entropy or disorder of the universe never decreases and tends to increase and we're all going to die. That's good. That's a good elevator speech. A little depressing, but why is there now this possibility that this law, which has stood the test of time for over a hundred years, that it's being questioned and with experimental evidence?

Well, I think it's simply because we've moved far enough into our paradigm that the paradigm is becoming crystalline and kind of hardened. When a paradigm reaches its endpoint, what really stands out are the exceptions. So over the last 25 years, poking around the edges, we found a number of exceptions to the second law. And so I think it's run its course. It's time for it to break and be considered a very good principle, rule of thumb, but not absolute. I don't know if it's possible to do this because you did it at length and with good slides yesterday, but what's an example of some experimental evidence that may indicate that

the second law is not really a law? Oh, okay. Well, the experiments that were done at the University of San Diego about five years ago were able to show that you can create two surfaces in a closed cavity where everything should have the same temperature. These two different metals in the presence of a particular gas come to two very different temperatures and stay that way. That is a formal violation of the second law. And with this kind of temperature differential, you could in principle run a heat engine forever and pull energy out of this surroundings and create electricity or something else. So experiments now indicate that the table has been set for a breakdown. So you could basically just recycle that heat energy almost endlessly?

Basically, yes. Yeah, heat would become recyclable, which it isn't right now. I mean, the universe or our surroundings have tremendous amounts of native thermal energy. And if you could actually straighten it out and organize it, which is what violating the second law would amount to, you would have access to virtually unlimited amounts of energy in our environment, and it would be inexhaustible because you could recycle it. So I'm going to come to starships in a moment, but are we talking about the possibility, therefore,

of, let's say, perpetual motion or at least an endless energy source? Well, yes. I mean, the typical kind of derogatory remark made against second law violators is that the perpetual motion machine is as if that's sort of some sort of magic incantation that drives you away. Well, it doesn't drive me away. The second law is just another law, which means that it should be tested on a regular basis with the most modern technology and techniques. And the evidence now indicates that it's breakable. All right, so why here? Why the Starship Congress? Is there an application for getting humans across the cosmos?

Well, why the Starship Congress is because people at this conference think big, and like I said, they're anti-dogmatists. They don't necessarily kowtow to dogma. And I thought I'd find a receptive audience. But in terms of its actual utility for starships, one of the major problems with starships or starship technology is to find an energy source that will last maybe 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years as you go from one star to another.

But it turns out that if you can recycle heat or thermal energy in the environment, you're carrying all the energy you ever need just in the air and water that you take aboard. You never have to bring any extra fuels along. So it reduces the weight of your starship and makes it much easier to travel. And you demonstrated how, as we've heard before, I think on this show, chemical rockets, fission, fusion, even matter, antimatter, probably not going to cut it. Well, they have their downsides. I wouldn't say they can't work, but if you can find a way to efficiently turn heat into work, it would just obviate them and make them unnecessary and unattractive.

So what's the next step? I mean, where is your research, where is other research around the world going? Well, there are a number of researchers around the world, and in our group at the university, we're working on several avenues, which we discussed in the talk, epicatalysis and superdegeneracy. And so I'm running roughly, I'm running three laboratory experiments right now, two at the university and one in conjunction with a local company. Have you got some stuff online that we'll be able to share with listeners if they want to learn more? Well, I guess there are other talks that I've given at various conferences.

more? Well, I guess there are other talks that I've given at various conferences. I've published all of my work to make sure it's not lost, so if you want to find it, you can easily go to the University of San Diego website, look me up at the University Library, and download a good number of my articles. All right, we'll provide some links to some of this work that is underway, the work that you've done at USD. Fascinating stuff. Keep bucking the system. Well, thank you very much. Physicist Daniel Sheehan of the University of San Diego. There's a reason we don't often talk about space elevators on planetary radio. The reason is that

no one has yet figured out how to create one that could stretch from Earth's surface too far out in space. But what if you didn't build it on Earth? Hi, I'm Michael Lane. I'm the president of Liftport Group. You want to build a space elevator, but not down here under all this air up on the moon. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was a part of the original NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts research team on the Earth elevator many years ago, almost 20 years ago. And over time, my interest has kind of shifted to the moon.

And it shifted because it's much easier to build the lunar elevator than the Earth elevator. So I know the guys at ISEC, International Space Elevator Consortium. I love them all right guy yep yeah absolutely yeah and i what i say to them when i if they ask come back i want to talk to you when you have a hundred kilometer long tether that can support 10 tons or whatever of course they're working on it and you know it's almost a cliche carbon nanotubes right but in your material on your website and we'll put a link up on this week's show page, you say you're not dealing with carbon nanotubes because you don't

need them. Right, exactly. The nanotubes are required for an Earth-based elevator, for sure. I don't think anybody really argues that. The lunar elevator, though, is really pretty different. The environment's completely different. The gravity is 1.6. We don't have a pesky atmosphere, which means we don't have wind. And so our requirements are much easier. What that means is that there's now, depends on who you ask, there's either 11, 12, or 13 candidate materials that are all already strong enough. None of them are perfect. In engineering speak, we call it, they're not Goldilocks. They're not just right. They're all already strong enough. None of them are perfect. In engineering speak, we call it, they're not Goldilocks. They're not just right.

They are all mass produced. They all have the ability to be the core strength of this elevator. Now, some of them don't handle ultraviolet radiation very well. Some of them don't handle other kinds of radiation. Probably it's going to be a composite where you've got a thick, you know, a middle layer and then a thin extra layer. But the string, the string exists. The string is doable technology. And the rest of it, I mean, is that easier? Imagining the elevator itself that's going to crawl up and down this thing? It really is. Again, because of the atmosphere, it's going to cost less money. The original

earth elevator might have been 15 to 20 billion dollars. This one's probably in the neighborhood of 800 million. Holy cow, less than a billion dollars? Less than a billion, by a lot. Less than by a lot. And that includes getting everything out there, all the launches? Yeah. One of our mandates, one of the things, I don't know if you know, but our original company, Liftport, closed down during the financial crisis. So we had 14 people then. The new version of Liftport's only two years old. And when I created the new version, I was very, very clear that there were kind of three mandates that were unbreakable one had to be purchase orderable technology will assemble it

however we need but it's got to be technology that already exists it's got to be simple I refer to it as Sputnik like simplicity because I really admire how that one brick in the sky did it basketball in the sky really did something really remarkable but it didn't do 27 different remarkable things. So Sputnik-like simplicity. And then the last thing that's one of our core mandates is single-launch solution. Everything that we need is going to go on one rocket.

So when we first looked at this about 2011 or so, we were really looking at Atlas or Delta or Falcon, early Falcon rockets. But now the world has moved happily our direction. We've got Falcon Heavy. We've got some interesting stuff on the horizon with Blue Origin and maybe the Space Launch System, right? So we have other rockets that are larger, which means ultimately with a bigger rocket,

we can have more string. More string means more safety. More safety means more cargo. And so, yeah, it's one rocket. We're going to build it with one rocket. Why the moon? What will make this a viable business? I'm going to go with my own philosophy first is that the moon

is the necessary stepping stone to the rest of the solar system and because we're at the interstellar conference Starship Congress I think it's the necessary stepping stone for the rest of all the other solar systems. There's really good reasons you've got all the brain power on one side of the equation at Earth and all the resources on the other side of the equation at the Moon, and then the Lagrange point becomes the glue that holds those two things together. That's the gravitational middle between the Earth and the Moon. Our string goes right through the middle of it. That makes for a great place to build a space station. If you have a space station there

and all the smarts and all the equipment on the Earth side and all the hardware and resources on the lunar side, they meet in the middle. You can build out a fuel station for further solar system exploration. You can build out a shipyard where you construct new hardware. It's a port just like any other port. And that's why we named our company Liftboard a long time ago.

Pretty exciting stuff and worthy of a longer conversation. But all of this that you've described with a lunar space elevator seems to fit into what you spent most of your time talking about in the presentation that you did here at the Congress yesterday, which, let me see if you would agree, that the theme was kind of, we have reached critical mass for space development, exploiting space. I do believe that. I do believe that. It's been kind of a long road, 20 years to kind of watch it develop, but it has developed.

Depending on who you ask, there's 120 to 150 different launch companies. I mean, that is fundamentally amazing to me. Compare it to the days of the Cold War where we had America versus the Soviet Union, and there were two launch organizations. Yeah, the critical mass is happening. Everybody all around us sees that there's energy, there's capital, there's demand, there's market requirements, there's government requirements, there's academic requirements, and they're all pushing us towards first the moon. And then, you know, other people want to go beyond that absolutely i agree with that i'm really focused on the moon as the jump off point for everybody else to build

what they need michael we'll talk again i hope yeah and i hope that things move along i wish you the best of success because uh i would love to be able to uh get a ride back uh ride down to the moon right on uh happy to have you uh i'm hoping everybody wants to come yeah thanks a lot I would love to be able to get a ride back, ride down to the moon. Right on. Happy to have you. I'm hoping everybody wants to come. Yeah. Thanks a lot. Michael Lane of the Liftport Group.

We'll finish our visit to the 2019 Starship Congress by visiting again with someone who regularly turns the highly speculative, even the outlandish, into best-selling science fiction. highly speculative, even the outlandish, into best-selling science fiction. Whether it's The Postman, The Uplift series, or his grand novel Existence, a disturbing but exciting twist on First Contact, his work is always entertaining and thought-provoking. Not surprising that here at the Starship Congress is David Brin, another San Diego local, another member of the UCSD science fiction mafia, as I call you guys. Hi, David.

Oh, it's great to be back with the, well, the people who look up. That's good, yeah. Keep looking up, as they say. You just got off the stage here at the Starship Congress. I love to listen to you talk because it's great fun. One of the themes certainly was moon versus, not moon versus Mars, but moon versus those little rocks out there. Yeah, Mars has a constituency. I happen to think we're going to have to do something before we do much with Mars

because if we don't build up a space industry, then we may just go to Mars and do what we did with Apollo. And that's a mistake. We should concentrate on things that will help us to make permanent presence out there. Now, those who defend going back to the moon and they say, this time for good, they claim that there are resources there we can exploit. They claim that there are resources there we can exploit. And what I do is I pretty savagely demolish that. The only resource that we know that is of any industrial value or value to humans are two things.

One is there seems to be some water ice at the lunar poles. My doctoral advisor was the guy who predicted it would be there. And I hope so. You know, it could leverage lunar colonies in the future. But this whole helium-3 and all of those things, it's all mythological. There are reasons why there are no metal ores at the lunar surface. It's been thrice melted and the metals sank away. Whereas there are some asteroids that are made from the core of a broken planet. In other words, absolutely pure refined metals.

There's water in the asteroids, far more than we could ever get from the lunar poles. Now am I saying we should never go back to the moon? It all depends on who we are. Humanity is going back to the moon. Absolutely. The Chinese, Indians, Russians, billionaires, they're all desperate to have their, what I would call, bar moons fuzz.

Their rites of passage. Today I am a man. today we are grown-up moments there and god bless them they'll spend whatever it takes to do it and plant footprints in that dusty plane and if they find anything america can go back to the moon then we can sell them landers for crying out loud the one thing the moon is. We can sell them landers, for crying out loud. The one thing the moon is really good for, that Andy Weir, the author of The Martian, said in his latest novel, Artemis, is tourism.

And that's why the Chinese and Indians and all that are going there. That's why we went in 1969. Highly motivated tourism. So we should build a lunar orbital station, call it a hotel. Or a gateway. Or a gateway. And commercial enterprises, Jeff Bezos' lander, Blue Moon Lander and all that, sell them, rent them landers, rent them hotel rooms.

Welcome to our moon. We've been waiting 50 years for you tourists to come. Drop in any time, you said. Yeah, yeah. Well, give us a little bit of notice. I mean, for heaven's sake, there's orbital parameters and we have to stock up. I mean, you are billionaires after all. We want the caviar to be ready for you. Asteroids, however, are another story. Within the last 18 months, the Japanese especially, but also America, did several fantastic asteroid missions,

unbelievably competent and glorious asteroid missions that our voters hardly know about, that advanced our progress and our ability to do these things tremendously America and Japan could team up and do stuff none of the others can do why should we repeat doing what others can barely do 50 years after we already did it, when we can do things that are 50 years ahead of them, that can advance human civilization and our capabilities in space. And I just want to throw in the European Space Agency, because Rosetta. Well, yeah, I mean, the sample return aspects

and some of the lovely, lovely details that the Japanese put in their mission. But yes, absolutely, the Europeans straddle both worlds. So you must be excited about the Psyche mission, the one that's going to one of those iron-nickel asteroids. Oh, I think that's terrific. You know, my doctoral dissertation was on comets and asteroids many, many years ago. My doctoral dissertation was on comets and asteroids many, many years ago. I'm not sure how much we can learn from an iron-nickel asteroid because we have samples of iron-nickel asteroids that have landed on the Earth, and what are you going to find? A bunch of steel.

But I might be wrong. I expect to be wrong. I expect to be delighted. Let's switch to what really is going on here today, what you're a contributor to, and that is the fact that these people have gotten together here in San Diego to talk about something which you mentioned Kim Stanley Robinson said in his wonderful book, Aurora, humans may never be able to do,

at least not in a generational spaceship that takes 100 or 200 or 500 years to get there. And that's where each other stars. And yet, this still motivates a lot of people, although maybe not as many people as certainly I and maybe you might have hoped would be interested in an event like this. Well, there are many, many. You said a mouthful there, Matt. Too much. No, no, plenty. I mean, compared to me, yeah.

The people within the sound of my voice right now tuning into Planetary Radio, we all want to be a civilization that's moving along. These conferences are a bit fan-ish. On the other hand, you're starting to get some real billionaire monies put into this. Jeff Bezos with his Blue Origin, Elon Musk with SpaceX. But beyond that, you have Yuri Milner's Breakthrough Project, which is funding the preliminary development of laser-driven light sails

that might send probes to other stars, similar in concept to the interstellar self-replicating probes that I have in my novel Existence, and that have evolved in some creepy ways. Almost criminal ways. Yes, well, you know, what survives, survives. And it's a very different story than, shall we say, the postman. But in any event, the point is that there are some possible ways

in which we might check to see if there are already probes in our solar system that arrived maybe millions of years ago and have been waiting around and have been lurking, they're called lurkers, listening to our radio and then watching our TV and then maybe participating in our reality shows, which is a scary thought in about 40 different ways as an American. The notion that such lurkers might be detectable is a very interesting one. And there are some asteroids that come very close to the Earth that Milner's

breakthrough project wants to have a look at with radar scans or possibly looking for the glints off flat or manufactured surfaces if there's a robot on these. And what did I just do? I just warned them. I just warned them. I certainly hope if there are lurkers and they listen to this show, they can go to, what is it, davidbrin.com, and they can contact you and let you know, yeah, we're here.

You better shut up about this. Well, that's actually been something that I have shouted defiantly over radio at UFO and other type lurkers. I did it once with my father's CB radio in our van. Oh, yeah. Yoo-hoo, beasties out there. It's me again. I'm about to give you the phone number of the Jet Propulsion Lab. They'll arrange visas of both kinds.

You want to date Madonna? I'm sure she's willing. You know the great Fireside Theater line, aliens, you must register. Yes, there you are. One of the hypotheses is that we're kept in isolation. Of the 100 explanations for the hypotheses for the so-called Fermi paradox, why we see no sign of aliens. Of the hundred or so that I've cataloged over the last 35, 40 years, one class is the zoo hypothesis, and one of the zoo hypotheses is we're too valuable to them as reality TV. We're just so entertaining. A few years ago, we were starting to act too sensible. So they intervened to bring reality stars to the fore,

and we've become a lot more funny. So it's not the Truman Show, it's the True Earth Show. Yeah, you ought to be on radio. Back to gatherings like this, though. They continue to happen. You've been a participant in this kind of effort for decades, and yet we're still a long ways from a starship. Why is this a valuable process?

Well, I think we're making progress. It's exactly, pretty much this month exactly, 100 years ago, that the Allies at the end of World War I started selling off hundreds, thousands of rickety biplanes to anybody who could pony up five bucks. Curtis Jennings, a lot of them. Yes, and it opened up what was called the barnstorming era. Now, that doesn't mean that governments weren't involved. Governments were very involved.

Governments provided the mail delivery contracts. They made the airports. They made the roads that went to the airports. Nevertheless, there was a boom in private endeavors. Now, we've seen the preliminary signs of this already with billionaires financing investigations of asteroids. And again, in my novel existence, I portray mere multimillionaires getting involved in all of this. millionaires getting involved in all of this. The barnstorming era, you know, there was an event, a tragic event, three or four years ago in which Branson's spaceship, too, crashed and only one of the two pilots survived. The public acted very differently than they had

during when, with the death of official NASA astronauts astronauts there was a bit of an outcry but very quickly it subsided and and people took the attitude that well private endeavors are judged by a different standard so we may be entering an era in which more and more private endeavors take place and are willing to take greater risks while the government steps back and works on helping deliver the infrastructure, just as happened a hundred years ago. Before we finish, I know you like to talk about the Clark Center at nearby UC, University of California, San Diego, Clark Center for the Imagination, which you're a major contributor to. Just one piece of it this time, which you finished your presentation with a few minutes ago.

Is it pronounced TASAT? TASAT is, there's a story about that. Let me back up and say I'm trained as an astrophysicist, and I'm on NASA commissions, and I still wear that hat. I'm best known as a science fiction author, you know, Kevin Costner's movie The Postman and all of that sort of thing. One of the things I do is I'm among the two dozen science fiction authors who consult with government agencies about the future, about things that they might not have thought of. And one of the things I point out is that a time may come when something weird happens. It may have already happened. I mean, I may be just too much of a blabbermouth for them to have told already

about this or that or the other Area 51 absurdity. But if mole people ever come out of the earth, you know, with their big twisty drills, a commission will be formed to quickly evaluate the situation. What I point out is that there's been about a hundred years of science fiction thought experiments about what if this happens? What if that's were to happen? What if that were to happen? And these what ifs, these gedanken experiments, as Einstein put it, or thought experiments, many of them were silly, many of them were, you know, dumb or, but a great many of them were very thoughtful. Shouldn't any commission that's working on a,

something weird that's just happened have access to this vast library of thought experiments. What if this? What if that? And the feature of a good science fiction story is that if some weird thing happens and a government commission forms or a private commission or something else, always they go for the obvious answer for what's going on, and it always proves wrong. No, it's this instead.

Isn't that exactly the kind of thought experiment you would want such a commission to have at hand? Dozens of thought experiments about mole people out of the earth or flying saucers landing or whatever it is. So TASAT is called There's a Story About That. And you can find it very easily with Google, but it's tasat.ucsd.edu. What we're trying to recruit is a critical mass of some thousand or so nerds, geeks, who've read a lot of science fiction, who toss ideas at each other and say, oh, can you name stories in the past that were about this? And someday, one of those little bombs tossed into the discussion will be from some guy on a government agency saying,

quick, does anybody know any stories about this? So that's tasat.ucsd.edu. And we're trying to get a critical mass. Because if you don't have a critical mass, people will get bored and drift away. We need a critical mass of utter, get bored and drift away. We need a critical mass of utter, utter geeks. This is your moment, or the moment may not come for 20 years, but this is your home. You're talking to the right crowd, and we'll put that link up on this week's show page. It is always fun, David. I look forward to seeing you as we speak now, seeing you in Huntsville in about a week at the NIAC symposium.

That's right. NIAC is NASA's Innovative and Advanced Concepts Program. I'm on the Council of External Advisors. And we'll be at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville looking at some of the NIAC funds, some of the small grants for some of the ideas that are just this side of science fiction, which is doing what NASA ought to do. And you should be proud as taxpayers that a little bit gets spent on ideas that are just this side of weird.

I am. Thanks, David. And thank you, all my fellow geeks out there. Ride high. This is our time. Science fiction author and futurist David Brin. I thank Icarus Interstellar for allowing me to attend the 2019 Starship Congress, and I say to them, Ad Astra. Time to close out yet another episode of Planetary Radio, as we always do with Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society,

also the program manager for LightSail2, still going strong up there. How are you? You going strong? Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. I'm going strong, Matt. That's more like it. That's the right stuff. strong, Matt. That's more like it. That's the right stuff. Just speaking with you has made my life stronger. It only takes moments, doesn't it? It really does. What's up? Strong stuff, but in the evening sky, Jupiter, it's dropping lower. It's been hanging with us for months, but it's still there. Brightest star-like object in the southwest after sunset. To its upper left is yellowish Saturn, which will be around longer. It is hanging out above Sagittarius and the teapot of Sagittarius, so check all those out. We move on to this week in space history. It was five years ago, 2014, that both MAVEN and the Mars Orbiter mission went into orbit around Mars, just adding to the fleet of Mars orbiters. Time is going much too quickly.

It really is. There's some type of age-dependent relativistic effect. I'm going to write a paper on it at some point. Yeah, please do. I don't think that'll help us, though. That would be what? The biological theory of relativity or something? Exactly.

Perfect. You can be a co-author. Thank you. I've always wanted to be a co-author on a paper. We move on to... That sounded like the Indy 500. Oh, gosh. It really doesn't work when your engine's voice cracks.

All right. I thought it was okay. Oh, thank you. Thank you, Matt. See, that's why you make my life stronger. There are at least 54 satellite galaxies tied to the Milky Way, gravitationally hanging out with the Milky Way. There are a whole bunch of them hanging out with the Andromeda galaxy as well. Yeah, that's right. That's right. You heard what I said. And there are probably a lot more because

that whole Milky Way thing gets in the way of seeing stuff on the other side. So most of these are dwarf galaxies. Well, we'll come back to that. But it's just a little something to note that we got a bunch of stuff hanging around with us. Had no idea. I mean, I knew about the greater and lesser Magellanic clouds. I thought that was it. But 54.

Well, they're big and fun and visible in dark skies from the Southern Hemisphere with just your eyes. Whereas most of the others aren't, being smaller or farther away. All right, we move on to the trivia contest, and I asked you, name the last three Venus orbiters. Here's the answer from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild. Venus doesn't get the love that other planets do. Akatsuki was the last to orbit. That is true. If you research through the list, I'm rather prone to guess

the one before that lander we have called Venus Express. Magellan made insertion during 1990s scene. And last behind Magellan was Venera, Flight 16. So he gave you four. Bonus points. Yeah. Thank you, Dave.

Nicely done. By the way, it was Paul Swan in Texas who pointed out that those four most recent Venus orbiters, they all came from different agencies, four different space agencies over all those years. Nice observation. Yeah. But you're waiting for the winner. It was Adam, Adam Ladak or Ladak in Toronto. Great city. What a wonderful town.

He came up with the three that we were looking for, Akatsuki, Venus Express, and Magellan. And he said, Akatsuki, great example that success is not final and failure is not fatal. I'm not sure who he's quoting there, but he says, as always, love the podcast. I guess that's because Akatsuki had had its problems reaching Venus, didn't it? It did. It failed to enter orbit its first time around, and they came up with a clever solution and waited a few years as things lined up again, but then they were able to get into orbit. So it is a nice example of tenacity, persistence, and fixing things in space when they go wrong. So here's a question from Sean Young in South Africa that you being the solar sail guy, I bet you can answer. He asks, is Icarus an orbiter?

Because we know Icarus was headed out with Akatsuki, right? In the general direction of Venus. Right. Icarus being the first successful solar sail mission flown by the Japanese space agency with a piggyback on Akatsuki, then split off. No, I mean, it is in as much as any of us are orbiting the sun, but it had no capability to go into orbit around Venus. So it's in a heliocentric orbit.

There you go, Sean. This came from Mark Little, our regular listener in Northern Ireland. He said, all of these missions have done fabulous science, but failed to uncover the secret base of the Mekon to humanity's peril. I had to look it up. Had you ever heard of this? Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future, which really should be done with a British accent, because apparently Dan Dare was a British comic book. And sure enough, there is this bad guy with a big green head called the Mekon, if I've got it right. Dan Dare. Dan Dare.

That's better. Finally, from Marcel John Craigsman in the Netherlands, he looks to the future. India planning the next orbiter in 2023, that they're thinking of sending a balloon along with it, something that has been talked about for years, right? Yes, it was actually done by the Soviets in the 80s with the Vega balloons. I forgot about that, of course. Yes, there have been many talks of doing more elaborate and longer-lived balloons, but they did balloons. Venus is so friendly to balloons because it's got that thick atmosphere,

as long as you don't dip down too far. And I'll remind everybody that you can learn more about Venus in the current issue of The Planetary Report, as we discussed with Emily Lakdawalla, editor of the magazine, just not very many minutes ago. Adam, our winner, he's getting a Planetary Radio t-shirt from Chop Shop.

You can go to chopshopstore.com, by the way, and see the entire Planetary Society store there. Fantastic designs. A 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account and a signed copy of a certain book, Super Cool Space Facts, a fun fact-filled space book for kids by some guy named Bruce Betts. We're ready for the next one. Satellite galaxies of the Milky Way is the topic. I want you to name your three favorite Milky Way satellite galaxies. There's no right answer other than in your heart, as long as they're considered satellite galaxies of the Milky Way, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. So they have to be real satellite galaxies, right? You can't have people, I mean, you want to make one up, go ahead, but it's not going to

help you win the contest. Yeah, it needs to be the fourth one. You need three that are real. You've got until the 25th. That'd be September 25 at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. And we'll send you a Planetary Radio t-shirt and maybe a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account as well. All right, we done? Yeah. Okay, everybody, go out there, look up the night sky and think about if you lived in a dwarf galaxy,

what would you call galaxies like the Milky way? Thank you. And good night. I'm just still thinking of names for the dwarf galaxies like sleepy and sneezy and grumpy. Or is it grouchy? I forget. Anyway,

he's Bruce Betts. He's none of those. Well, sometimes. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society 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 Star-Crossed members. You can join our Star and Planet Trek at planetary.org slash membership. Mark Hilverde is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Ad Astra.