Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Human Spaceflight: Coming Back to America

Episode Date: May 24, 2017

Astronauts may soon ride on US rockets and in US spaceships for the first time since the last Space Shuttle flight. Jon Cowart of NASA is working with SpaceX toward the first launch of a Dragon spacecraft with humans on board.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Astronauts on American rockets, an update 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 beyond. Boeing and SpaceX are working toward the climax of NASA's Commercial Crew Program, the effort to once again regularly get humans to low-Earth orbit and the International Space Station, and do so on U.S. rockets and in U.S. spaceships. We'll talk to the agency's John Coward. He's working toward this goal with Elon Musk's company.

The only human spaceship that has landed on another world will win someone this week's space trivia contest prize package. Bill Nye has the week off, but Planetary Society senior editor Emily Lakdawalla is here to present a visual knockout. Emily, I am crazy about this May 17 piece, Saturn Small Satellites to Scale. It is one of your, as you refer to it, patented images, these collections of bodies in our solar system. You have gained well-deserved recognition for these, and this is just as fascinating as any as I have seen. What amazing diversity among these moons of Saturn. They really are quite strange.

Each one you look at is a unique world unto itself. really are quite strange. Each one you look at is a unique world unto itself. And looking at one, sometimes I can kind of predict the appearance of the next size one, but often it doesn't. They're just so diverse. You've got a whole bunch of the small bodies here, and then you zoom in on some of the smallest of these. They're tiny. I mean, not even a cubic kilometer. They get quite small. And of course, as you might imagine, the boundary between what is a moon and what is a ring particle is getting a little fuzzy. It has partly to do with Cassini's ability to resolve the features in the rings. But it also seems to have a little bit to do with how big you need to be in order to clear even the tiniest space within the ring system. The smallest

of these do do that, but they have a hard time and they wind up getting covered with ring material. You said fuzzy, no pun intended, I assume. You used a word I never thought I would hear you use in your writing, sploof. Sploof, yes. You know, geologists love making up wonderful onomatopoetic words in order to describe the processes of smooshing and smashing rocks together. And in this case, we're talking about ring material that's moving around in a gravity regime that's, I think, just really difficult to comprehend because everything's moving. Centrifugal forces are equal to gravitational forces in a lot of cases. So these moons are just barely held together, agglomerations of ring particles.

We know from their density that they're mostly empty space. And so there has to be just this barest kind of cohesion between the particles. And I'm just imagining, I don't know for sure, but I'm just imagining that if you were in a good space suit and you kind of floated up toward one of these moons that you could just essentially pass right through it. And of course, do a fair amount of damage to the surface of the moon while you were at it. Someday somebody will pass regulations preventing people from doing that. Just one other question. When you zoom out in an image that includes most of the larger moons, in fact, all the larger moons of Saturn, except one, why is Titan not included? Well, Titan would fit in the width

of this image, but it would be about the width of this image and it would dwarf all the other moons. And also it would really look out of place because Titan doesn't have the kind of immediately apparent huge boundary between the bright, solid, icy surface and the blackness of space that the other ones do. Titan appears very hazy. And when it's at its actual proper size up against all these other moons, it's really fuzzy. And we don't actually have super high resolution images of Titan at this scale that would make sense to compare to these other images. I mean, I could make it happen, but it would be an awful lot of effort and it just wouldn't fit. So I think you have to zoom out again in order to really appreciate Titan with the rest of the moons. And then you would get

to include Saturn or a little bit of it anyway. Congratulations, Emily. These are dramatic and beautiful and you should zoom in on them at planetary.org. It's her May 17 blog post, The Small Satellites of Saturn. That's Emily Lakdawalla, senior editor for the Planetary Society, who joins us many weeks here on Planetary Radio. Up next, let's talk about the Commercial Crew Program, specifically the SpaceX portion of that program that might put some people in a dragon capsule as soon as next year. as soon as next year.

Space is hard, and getting humans to space and back is harder. A lot harder. That truism is well known to Boeing, which has been in the business from the start, and to SpaceX, which is only now preparing to put the first men and women on its rockets, and it may be even better known to John Cowart. John is NASA's partner manager, working with SpaceX on the Commercial Crew Program, and he'll be the agency's mission manager for the company's first human spaceflight. In his three decades at NASA, and an Air Force career before that, it's safe to say this recipient of NASA's

exceptional achievement medal has become one of the world's leading experts on human spaceflight. The Commercial Crew Program has been running since 2010, with upwards of $8 billion directed to Boeing, SpaceX, and in earlier phases to other companies. Now the goal is within reach, with both companies hoping to put humans in low Earth orbit as soon as next year. John Cowart, thanks so much for coming down to Planetary Society headquarters here in Pasadena for a conversation about the Commercial Crew Program. I am very excited to be at the Planetary Society. I've been a member for a while. I love what you folks do here, and I got to meet Bill at the OSIRIS-REx launch.

And with all of that, like I said, this is like a little kid's dream come true. Well, Bill and other people tell me what good care you took of our folks. I only wish I'd been there to enjoy it as well. But thank you for that. We will have to get you down to the Rocket Ranch at some point and let you watch some smoke and fire. I love it. And putting robots in space, you know, we love that too. I'm a big fan. But we like people in space too. I'm a bigger fan.

Yeah. And we'll talk about that because that's been a lot of your professional life. Yes, sir. Specifically, you come out to California a lot because you go down to Hawthorne, maybe a half hour drive down the freeway from here, to that company that Elon Musk has called SpaceX. Oh, you've heard of it. Yeah, I have. Oddly enough, they've got Crew Dragon. We're going to talk about what you have to do with that effort. First of all, tell us, from your viewpoint as the NASA interface with what's going on down there. Are they on track? I mean, the last word

I heard was that we're maybe a year out from humans riding that up to the International Space Station. I hope that's true. As you know, this is a tough business, very unforgiving. Schedules are tough. I mean, there is development work being done by a company that has not done human spaceflight before. And also Boeing is doing the same thing. But as you've said, I work primarily with the folks down at SpaceX. It's tough. And we have to, that's why I'm here this week. We have to go talk about little things like coupled loads and qual test planning, qual test procedures, spacesuits, all the things you have to normally do. I'm sure everybody in the audience knows you got to go do a lot of things to make a human spaceflight happen. So we're going to talk about, we're doing it every week, but we have

these, every quarter we have these meetings where we get together and we talk a little more formally. And that's what we're going to do this week. And we have a bunch of meetings beforehand. There are always technical conversations going on and you can imagine they really do get very, very technical. But we are working very hard to make the schedule come true. We want to launch the first one without crew here in 2018. That's the goal. I remember a very famous quote by a launch director, which is essentially, if you're a little bit late,

no one will remember that five years from now. But if you don't do it right, they'll remember that forever. So that's one of our guiding principles is let's do it right. So the schedule will fall out where it falls out, but we're making every effort to get to something this year. Elon is a smart guy. Every chance he gets, he likes to talk about the great relationship he has with NASA and how important that relationship has been to SpaceX. We talk about that on this show and on the Space Policy Edition program as well. Talk about that relationship, maybe beginning with your job. What is it that you're assigned by NASA to do? So specifically, I am right now the mission manager

for the first flight they will have with crew on board. And's called demonstration two or demo two that's the name we give it within the program so working with SpaceX I'm just a mission manager I have a whole bunch of people that I work with all my compatriots down there in NASA and with SpaceX and and we're just trying to make sure that all the I's are dotted T's are crossed the work is done we have as you can imagine, we have requirements. We have to do verifications and validations of these requirements and things that we do. So my job working, and so one of the first things we do, we're going to do two demonstration missions. The first one, Demo 1, will be without crew.

And that's the one we hope we can get to this year. Mine with crew on board, hopefully sometime next year. After that, we enter into a period where we, at the end of the second mission, second mission is the first one with crew, at the end of that, we are theoretically, we will try to be certified. And then comes the post-certification missions where SpaceX and Boeing will routinely take crew and some cargo up on those same flights up to International Space Station. So working with SpaceX is an exciting thing. They're very much younger than we are in NASA by and large.

I love going down to their Hawthorne facility. I get a real energetic vibe there. I think it's probably very much like what a lot of NASA places were like in the 1960s when we were going to the moon. A bunch of young folks who didn't know what all the rules were about doing this thing. So I love the speed with which they move. They're very agile with doing things. I love their testing philosophy.

The way NASA became NASA, why we're not the NASA of the 1960s, is over the course of time, events happen, bad things happen. And every time you have a bad thing happen, you say to yourself, boy, that was really stupid of me. What can I do to prevent that from happening again? And so you implement new rules and new procedures, and so things get drawn out. Torquing a bolt, you'd think that'd be pretty simple, but it might be 20 steps in a procedure just to go torque a bolt, little things like that. So I like seeing SpaceX young.

They don't know all that. They haven't been burned as much as NASA has over the course of time. There's a nice push and pull from both sides. NASA trying to give them the benefit of our experience and our knowledge, and these younger folks just trying to go do something. You know, let's go get it done. Between the two of us, I think we're good for each other. If I had the chance and if they allowed it, I'd pay them to go hang out at SpaceX because it's just such fun to be in that environment. Even if you're just out, you know, where all those CAD stations are and the engineers have all those desks. Right. But especially back where they're building the rockets and building the Dragon Capsules. Right. I mean, it's just an exciting place to be. It is. And it's like no other place because when you walk in the door and you see the

area where all the engineers sit and they got three floors of that, and then you go out back where they're making rocket parts and spaceship parts. And I don't know the exact percentage, but I'm just going to throw one out there. I think it's somewhere around 75% of the rocket and spaceship come in one door as raw material and go out the door as a rocket or a spaceship. And that's unprecedented in one organization. Yeah, almost the way Ford built cars many years ago. Yeah. And they're very thorough in what they do. And when I arrived yesterday down at the facility, the first thing I do is I say, hey, let's go walk the floor and go take a look at the hardware. And I can see the Demo-1 capsule. And best of all, I can see my Demo-2 capsule.

That's the one the crew is going to ride in. How big of a jump is it from a pretty well-proven rocket like Falcon 9 and a very well-proven spacecraft like the Dragon capsule? Right. How big a jump is it from there to a human-rated system? It's really, really big. You now have to increase your fault tolerances. All of your margins have to increase. And you have to demonstrate more reliability, all sorts of things associated with human rating. So it is not trivial, even though the Dragon has flown to the International

Space Station as the cargo version, the crew version will be very different inside in many, many ways than the cargo Dragon. So we have to help them and shepherd them and work with them in order to make that happen. But it is not trivial. I mean, I know a lot of people will think, well, they're already going into space, and they're already birthing the International Space Station. How much more difficult could it be? Well, folks, I'm here to tell you, a lot more difficult.

And the folks at SpaceX know that too. And the folks at Boeing who are working on the Starliner, they're all very much aware of it. So I love the collaboration that has to go on and engineers are smart people, but we don't always agree. And I love getting in there and having these discussions. We root out things when we talk these things through. So it's great. It's neat to see the renderings of these two spacecraft, the CST-100 Starliner and the Crew Dragon, next to each other in space, which, you know, I don't know if that will ever actually happen. Maybe docked at the ISS someday.

It probably will, right. Good thought. They look pretty different. I mean, they have similarities, but they look like different approaches to getting to low Earth orbit and back. They are. But as you say, the basic principle of a capsule with a heat shield. And I know that I've talked to a lot of folks over time, and they go, wow, that seems like a giant step back.

I've heard that argument for years. All the time. And about Orion, too. Exactly, with Orion. And it's not. What's very fortunate for us is that the laws of physics have not changed since the 1960s. And capsules are just inherently easier to build and design than the space shuttle. And I worked on the space shuttle for a long, long time. And I love the space shuttle. And I will tell you

right now, I think space shuttle was way ahead of its time. You will not see another vehicle like that for another 50 years. There's nothing on the drawing board I know of like that. That'll take seven people and 35,000 pounds to low earth orbit and do all the things they can do and then come home and land on a runway, it's almost still science fiction. And I do miss the shuttle dearly. But this is, for right now, a cheaper, better way to go for the agency so that we can do all the things that we want to go do, not just human spaceflight. Now, it didn't occur to me to bring it up until now,

but the one that you make me think of, certainly not space shuttle capabilities, but the Sierra Nevada, the Dream Chaser, which is kind of a mini shuttle, right? But didn't get one of those contracts that Boeing and SpaceX did. Did not get the human contract, but did get a cargo, right? And so they're still moving forward. Yes, they are. And I have great confidence.

I mean, the folks at Sierra Nevada are very, very smart folks as well. I have great confidence that someday they will find a way to put humans on board their spacecraft and take them up. I don't know that it will be on a government contract, but they will find a way. It's a pretty ship. I hope they do. Me too. Are there parallels between this kind of a program where the government has come in and said, this is not our spacecraft, but we think it's important that industry in America create this.

And we get the feeling you may not be able to do it by yourself. Right. Is there any time you can look back to and say, here's where this was done before and it worked? Oh, yeah. There are many examples, but my favorite one and the one that draws the most parallels and even brings out one interesting story I'll try to get to. In the early days of aviation, aviation used to be a far more dangerous business and especially commercial aviation. But the U.S. government finally saw that there was some value in trying to nurture this industry.

And so the first thing they did was the U.S. Mail Service. And so originally the U.S. government did air mail. That was all on the government. They said, well, tell you what, we've done this enough. We've advanced the science. Let's start farming that out to little companies. And so smaller companies started to take over the contract and deliver the air mail. And so smaller companies started to take over the contract and deliver the air mail.

One of those was a very small company back in the day that flew mail from Miami to Havana, Cuba. And coincidentally, they were named Pan Am. And you can see where from that very humble beginning, they finally grew into a mega company before finally going out of business. That's the sad end part of the story. company before finally going out of business. That's the sad end part of the story. But you can see because the government nurtured the industry at the beginning, when private industry would not be willing to take the risk, the financial risks, to go do those sorts of things, because the government stepped in and helped, that furthered the industry. And now because of that, because of that very thing we did back then, you see the aviation industry that we have now that has a paralleled safety record. There's really nothing I can think of that would compare to what their record has been,

especially in the last 20, 30 years. The one cute story and one parallel that draws us in with our brethren in the aviation industry, in 1947, there was a Pan Am flight that was over the desert, flying, I think, from Karachi to Istanbul or vice versa. But anyway, there were several crew members on board this Pan Am flight and, of course, several passengers. One engine caught fire. It went down in the desert. There was a crew member on board who managed to help drag a whole bunch of people out of the aircraft before it finally was completely consumed by fire. This individual then took charge.

He wasn't the lead crew. This individual then took charge. He wasn't the lead crew member, but he took charge of the rescue, made sure he got to a town, had help come back and rescue all the people who had survived the crash. This gentleman was named Gene Roddenberry. Oh, no kidding. And so I like to think that the United States government, by nurturing that industry, in its own way, nurtured the Star Trek Enterprise.

Thank God. I'm glad he survived to inspire a lot of us not too many years later. And for anybody who doesn't know, he was a bomber pilot, right, in World War II. I believe so. What an interesting. So that's my tie back to Star Trek. So when you support commercial crew, you're supporting Star Trek. Yeah. You never know what's going to pay off. That's exactly right. We've got much more to hear from John Coward, including his deep involvement with our recovery from the loss of Space Shuttle Columbia. That's when Planetary Radio continues in a minute. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos?

These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore. This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us. Encouraging people from all walks of life to work together, to achieve a common goal to know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to

advance space science and exploration. With your support we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan in the middle of a fascinating conversation with NASA's John Cowart. John is the agency's mission manager for what will be the first SpaceX launch of humans into space. Eventually, we all expect and hope that we're going to reach the point where these companies, Boeing and SpaceX, and maybe someday more. Somewhere else someday. They're going to be set free.

Right. And they're going to be saying, okay, we're ready to start having you folks buy tickets for astronauts to use the ISS. How much is that going to cost? I mean, I don't think that's well known now, is it? But we do expect it'll be less than we're currently paying for Soyuz seats. Right. So a lot of it depends upon how well the technology develops. And, of course, with SpaceX, if they can start reusing rockets, put humans on top of those. Boy, trying to put a price tag on it, humans are generally pretty bad

at guessing the future. I know every year in Scientific American, there's probably an issue about flying cars. And we've been wrong about that since 1955, probably. But trying to predict how much it's going to cost, I am sure it's still going to be in the few millions to start with. But there will come a day when it will be achievable by just normal folks. It might cost you a lot. You might take out a little bit of a loan. But if you really want to get to space, I have no doubt that that day is coming. And there are two prongs to going forward with human space exploration. The first part is the exploration part, putting people on Orion and the SLS.

It's going to Mars, going to Enceladus with robots. So it's a combination. But humanity is going to explore, and that's one leg of our future. The other leg is making it available to the common person. And that's the side that I'm on right now. I would tell you I joined NASA back in 1987 because I wanted to be on the cusp of going to Mars. And I've been through two episodes of we're going to Mars, no we're not going to Mars. My truck down in Florida since 1993 has the license plate that says,

Go to Mars. Big fan. And even in a TED Talk I did, I talked about us going to Mars in 2033, which, by the way, this was a TED Talk five years ago, it looks like that's what's going to happen. That's what I heard last week at the Humans to Mars conference. Maybe some prescience on my part. We'll see.

I hope so. I hope you're right. But with the exploration part, and then let's make it available for all humanity. There will come a day when you and I will go to a spaceport like we go to an airport today, and we will board a flight and go to wherever. Hopefully, we're going to develop something that gets us going a little bit faster at the speed of light at some point. That's a tough one.

We're not going to crack that nut anytime soon. That'll be hard. But with those two problems. So humanity is going forward. The guys back in the 1700s, 1600s who were exploring the western part of the U.S. were not the guys developing the steam engine that would make the trains that would carry people out west. So you can do these things in parallel, and that's what NASA is nurturing on both sides.

west. So you can do these things in parallel, and that's what NASA is nurturing on both sides. I'm glad you included me when you said we'll be catching those flights up to at least low Earth orbit, because I sure hope that I make it that far. I am hoping so. John Glenn was 77 years old when he went up into space, and so I've still got a lot of time. So that's my plan. Yeah, quite an inspiration. Speaking of going up there, I didn't know until I started prepping for this conversation that there are already NASA astronauts assigned to Boeing and SpaceX who are working. You're working with the SpaceX guys, right? Absolutely.

I was sitting with a couple of them yesterday watching the SpaceX launch. And what's their job? I mean, they're the experts, right? As to, okay, here's where you should put the control panel and here's how I want to be able to sit and see everything. That's exactly what they're doing, Matt. They go visit with both companies equally and sit down with them and tell them, okay, here's what I would like. They sit down in their seats and tell them what's comfortable, what's not comfortable. They try on their suits because both companies now have spacesuits. And although you haven't seen SpaceX's yet, the day will come when they will reveal their spacesuits.

But you have. Well, you have to. You're talking about the design and the things it's got to go do. But when they want to make it public, they will, and that's on them and more power to them. But both companies have spacesuits. They have displays. They have switches, whatever. The crew also stays very much informed on just the other aspects of the design.

How's the rocket coming along? Because, Matt, they have a very vested interest in the success of this rocket. Both of the capsules have the abort capability, which the shuttle really did not have. So they're very interested in the abort system designs and abort planning and when do you trigger aborts? So the crew is essential to all this. And like you said, we've got four of them right now. They get out there regularly and are a big part of moving forward with this because astronauts have always been a part of the design. And we should say that we're talking the day after the most recent Falcon 9 launch.

That's correct. A big communication satellite. The NMARSAT, right? Yeah, headed up to geostationary orbit. There you go. I'm really glad you mentioned the control panel because there is a webpage that SpaceX has. There's a video on it, too, that gives you like a tour of the interior. They're very cool.

I mean, it does look like science fiction. It looks the way we have always been brought up to feel the interior of a spaceship ought to look. Right. None of the clutter you see in the ISS, I have to say. It's a well-used space. So there are these great-looking seats. They look like they were designed to save weight and be comfortable. And there's this beautiful touch panel control panel.

Right. And there's a close-up of that control panel. Now, I'm assuming that this is just a design prototype because at this point, and they're sharing it with us. On that control panel in one shot, there's a button that is labeled cabin depress, depressurize. Right next to it, I'm not kidding, is the button that says de-orbit now. And I, okay, to be fair, there's a separate execute demand button above those. There you go.

You want to have a two-phase? You don't want to- Oh, at least I would think. Exactly. But I'm just wondering, would it be part of your job if you saw something like that to say, hey folks, maybe these shouldn't be right next to each other? I'm sure that's playing into the design. I have not seen all the cockpit layouts. That's something that's pretty young right now. But there are people, very smart people who are looking at, they understand human interfaces and the way humans behave. And that's actually in the

specifications. You've got to go do human error analysis. And if there's a button that says blow up spacecraft right next to the one that says give me fresh air, I'm sure someone's going to notice that. Yeah. And again, to be fair, so nobody takes this out of context, it was just a PR video. Absolutely. And both companies will do that. And that's a perfectly good thing to go do. So, yeah, we're looking at all that and making sure the buttons and the switches are all laid out properly. Maybe we'll put that image up on the show page that people can check out at planetary.org slash radio. So, you know, I'm dying to ask you about stuff that I don't think you've got much to do with, like, you know, Red Dragon, the plan to send a dragon to the surface of Mars.

Right. Nobody on board, at least not for the first few years. Right. And then, of course, that announcement that Elon made going on three months ago about a couple of crazy rich people that have not been identified who want to pay him to ride a dragon capsule around the moon, one of that free return trip around the moon, which has been done. Apollo 13 made it work.

Absolutely. Do you have, does NASA have anything to do with that stuff? I know there's some collaboration regarding Red Dragon. Right. We're helping them with the science and the trajectories and analysis of when to go, those sorts of things. That's the best of my understanding. That's not something I deal with routinely.

I've got plenty of work to go do, making sure that this thing is going to be safe for putting a crew on board and actually getting to those first couple of missions where we're going to do test flights. So I'm not intimately involved with those. I get peripheral information about that. But, hey, as long as they stay focused enough on the things that I care about, those folks can do whatever they want to go do. And I think that's very much what I think it was the acting administrator, Robert Lightfoot, who said the same thing. More power to you, Elon.

Just don't forget we're paying you to develop this thing for us. Absolutely. You take that money we're giving you for this commercial crew thing, and let's spend that wisely. And it seems like they are. I'll talk a little bit more about your background. We already said you've spent a lot of your professional career working on human space flight, space shuttle. The Ares rocket didn't get to carry people but worked the one time we fired it off. International Space Station. Is that by choice that you've wanted to be involved with getting

people up there? Oh, absolutely. I will tell the audience what got me inspired because I think there are at least a couple of generations now who don't have what I have from this perspective. It was Christmas Eve, 1968. I'm laying in bed trying to go to sleep. I'm a nine-year-old kid, and by golly, you know, if you don't get to sleep, Santa's not going to come. But I am obviously very excited because there's all these gifts I might get. And so my mom comes in, I think it was sometime around nine o'clock. I can't remember that part exactly. But I do remember opening the door and her going, Johnny, are you awake? And I thought very briefly about faking it.

And I thought, no, Christmas Eve, not a good time to be naughty. No, Santa knows. Santa knows. So I said, yes, ma'am, I'm awake. And she said, well, I want you to see something. So she took me outside, and to this day I can still see it. Looking out over the pine trees there in my little town of Tucker, Georgia, and I can see the moon coming up over there. And she tells me that there are three people from the planet Earth going around the moon,

and we're going to go back inside, and we're going to listen to them, and they're going to show us Earth from the moon. And I go inside, and up to this point in my life, I had not been even remotely interested in space travel. But that event right there captured my imagination. From that point on, that's when I really decided I think I wanted to go work in space flight. And I worked fairly hard, obviously hard enough to get there. All these things I've done are all an outflow of something that happened to us as a kid. So I feel sorry for the folks younger than

me who don't have that kind of an inspiration. They get to see all kinds of neat things, the robotic explorers, and Hubble has revolutionized. I mean, you can look at the things Hubble has done and get inspired by that. But human spaceflight, that's what captured me. Apollo 8, of course. Absolutely, Apollo 8. Borman, Lovell, and Anders. Very, very cool.

Yeah, still makes me want to slap my chest. Me too. You know, if it's not too painful, could you talk about your role in the recovery after the Columbia disaster? Yeah, Columbia is one of those things that obviously sticks with you. And a couple of times a year I'm asked, because I'm so old now, Matt, I'm asked to go speak to the new NASA employees at Kennedy Space Center. And I will tell them about the history of NASA. And one of the things I always get to is Columbia and my role in that. I watched Challenger happen.

I was actually at Kennedy Space Center that day. I wasn't a NASA employee yet. I was still working for the Air Force. But when Columbia happened, definitely working for NASA. When something like that happens, Challenger and Columbia, everybody I know, we take it very personally. Because initially, when the event happens, you don't know, was it something you did? And so you get a very hollow feeling inside. And I wouldn't say it's panic, but you're very concerned.

Did you know some of those people? Absolutely. Definitely. I had briefed them and talked to them. We had probably had a couple of drinks together somewhere down in Cocoa Beach, that sort of thing, when we'd done the crew equipment testing beforehand. So you know the folks. You don't know what happened initially.

You're very, very concerned. And as time goes by, you slowly find out. But that initial feeling you get get that wave of almost nausea when it happens I tell them don't ever forget that. You want to carry that with you. The role I got to play was we did the reconstruction in a hangar down at Kennedy Space Center. There were folks out in the field collecting all the parts and that was a huge effort and there's a lot of good stories associated with that.

In fact I think there may be a book out that talks about going out into the field and collecting all the hardware. They would bring it to hangars somewhere out there in the field in Texas and Louisiana, and then they would ship it to us. And so when it arrived at Kennedy Space Center, I was the engineering director of the reconstruction in charge of all the engineers that were trying to put it in. And we brought folks in from the NTSB. They were very, very helpful, fantastic folks. One of the things about Kennedy Space Center is that we've seen the hardware.

Kennedy, we're putting it together, we're touching it, looking at it, all those sorts of things. So when we see hardware, we recognize it. So that's one of the things is so you bring it to Kennedy, lots of parts run unidentified until they got to the Kennedy Space Center. People look at it and go, oh yeah, I recognize that's a, that's part of a multiplexer demultiplexer or whatever, whatever piece that was. And so slowly over time, looking at, at the data that we had gotten down. And also there was another team we formed called the Debris Analysis Working Group or the DOG team, as we call ourselves, working with a guy named

woody woodworth down there we we ignored the telemetry and we just looked at the hardware that was out on the floor we said what does that tell us about what caused the accident so when you look at the hardware in particular you go look at the pieces of the reinforced carbon carb on the leading edge of the wing and you see where you don't find any, there were no RCC pieces found. RCC? Reinforced carbon-carbon, so those are along the leading edge of the wings. In a particular area, there was no debris found from that area. Some number of reinforced carbon- carbon panels all the way downside, we find pieces from all of them except in one area. So when you look at all the evidence that you get,

just from a hardware perspective, neglecting the telemetry we had down, it becomes obvious that there was something that happened in that region. Because that's where the stuff was already gone. Absolutely. The left-hand side of the wing in the RCC No. 8 region is where we know we had the penetration that led to the whole disaster. where we know we had the penetration that led to the whole disaster.

I sincerely hope that you nor anybody else ever has to piece something together again that way. But obviously it had to be done, so thank you for that. It's absolutely the goal every day, never, ever to repeat that. What else have we learned from tragedies like that and lesser mistakes that are making human spacecraft safer today? Technologically, I'm sure we've learned a lot of good things. The part that I am more aware of is the things we learned about ourselves. The first thing, and I tell this to the new NASA employees, first of all, when a disaster like that happens, the first thing you realize is you're not as smart as you thought you were.

The second thing you learn is you're not as dumb as the people in the media are saying you are. In between there is the right answer. Yes, there are things you didn't think of. The famous quote by Gene Kranz is, this happened because of a lack of imagination. We didn't think that could happen. And that's essentially where these things... Anybody who's studied safety, the way accidents happen,

is there's the famous Swiss cheese model where you see if you lay all these layers of Swiss cheese on top of each other, you would think eventually that there's nothing impenetrable. But if you look really close, you can see there's one hole that goes all the way from the top of the bottom of the Swiss cheese. And when accidents happen, you found the hole. So our processes now are there to keep us from having that sort of thing happen again. So one of the things I'm working heavily on right now is hazard reports that we do for both Boeing and for SpaceX. And these are very – you go and you list every single hazard that you have on board that rocket, that spaceship. And for every hazard you have, you're going to have a control or a mitigation to make sure that that doesn't happen. And we go through and we verify very clear there has to be

objective evidence that you have prevented that from happening. All of that comes together, hopefully, to make a very, very safe spacecraft and rocket. Where are you going to be when that Falcon 9 with a crew dragon on top lifts the first humans up? That's actually something we're still discussing. Where does the mission manager really belong? I will tell you, so having sat through 65 shuttle launches in the firing room, it's pretty cool. If you get a chance to sit in a firing room during a launch countdown and watch it, go do it. But this is important.

Watching a launch is a lot more exciting outside because you can see it and you can feel it and you get that reverberation off your chest because unless you've seen it and felt it, you don't really know how powerful these rockets are, whether it's a Space Shuttle or a Saturn V or an Atlas or Falcon 9. They are very powerful things, and I can only imagine what it's like to sit on top of that much harnessed energy.

So I don't know where I'm going to be just yet. If I get a vote, I mean, they may say, we need your expertise in the firing room. I don't know. But if they tell me it's okay for me to be outside, I'm going to want to be outside and watch it. Because by that point, I'm going to leave the launch to the people that we've trained to go do the launch. And I'm going to trust in them that they're trained and everything is good to go.

And I want to be outside, and I want to feel this thing. I'd love to be standing there next to you, John. Would love. Y'all come on down. Yeah. Thank you. Looking forward to it. And I sure am grateful for your stopping by today and sharing these stories with us and give our

best regards to those folks down in Hawthorne and to the Boeing folks as well. We look forward to seeing them put those astronauts back up into low earth orbit as we move on past the solar system with other stuff. We are all very excited and we want to go do this for that one prong. And I want you to know the Planetary Society, everybody I know loves it and love what you folks are doing, and we're all big on let's get out there. And I'm very excited about what we're going to see in Celadus and those other icy moons out there. I think there's going to be some really cool stuff.

So, yeah, go humans, go robots. Let's do it all. That's right. Arm in arm. You bet. Thank you, John. My pleasure, Matt. He is fresh off the jet, attempting to recover from a serious case of lag.

Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Here for What's Up and just back from the Planetary Defense Conference in Tokyo. Thank you for doing this. You're welcome. I'm not sure fresh off the jet would be the best way to phrase it. Fresh is the sushi you no doubt enjoyed. I enjoyed some good Japanese food. I'm not a big sushi fan. You and me both, bro. How was it? How'd the conference end up? It went very well. As I think we discussed last week, it's a neat conference and that's why the Planetary

Society is the primary sponsor of it because it brings together all the, well, at least a lot of the world's experts in the asteroid threat. By the end of the week, we'd gone through all aspects of things and possible missions and did a simulation exercise of a, I know you loved that last time, of a simulated asteroid on its way to impact Earth. And then on Saturday, along with various Japanese entities, I was part of a public talk in Japanese, but I was translated. You did the translating? No, it was translated for you. Fortunately, it was translated for me by our host, Makoto Yoshikawa. Wonderful. Yes, I do love those exercises at the end of the PDC,

at least when Rusty Schweiker doesn't yell at me, which I'm a name dropper. What can I say? Hey, he threw a rubber octopus at me, but he wasn't. I'm a rubber octopus dropper. Anyway, it was good. You'll be disappointed to know that we saved the Earth in this simulation, so the asteroids did not impact. Nasty, nasty binary pair of simulated asteroids. Well, that's great. We're getting better at this, at least in simulations. In pretend land. Tell us, what's up in the night sky that I doubt that you'll see, because you'll probably go back to bed. Well, yeah, but if you're awake in the night sky,

or for to observe the like like night sky huh then yeah anyway jupiter super bright in the early evening uh over in the south high up brightest star-like object up there in the early evening saturn though now rising in the very early evening in the east, looking yellowish. And then Venus dominating the eastern sky in the pre-dawn, looking super bright. We move on to this week in space history. It was 2008 that the NASA Phoenix lander successfully landed in the near polar regions of Mars. Time is going much too quickly. I'll work to slow that down.

In the meantime, random space fact. Hey, good start. Hey, thanks. It's really easy right now for me. Comet Lexal 2 is notable for being the comet that passed closer to Earth than any other comet in recorded history. That occurred in 1770. It passed within 0.015 AU, or Earth-Sun distance, so about 5.5 lunar orbit radii. And it was not called such at the time, but Comet Lexal was the first known near-Earth object by the definitions of near-Earth objects.

Wow, I'm very impressed. I imagine they had to figure that out by working backwards through its orbit, because they couldn't have known that in 1770. That is my impression, yes. It was observed, and there were observations, and then it was worked backwards. observations, and then it was work backwards. But I have to credit our Shoemaker-Neogrant coordinator, Tim Spahr, pulled out that fact in his talk at PDC, and I stole it mercilessly. All right, let's move forward again to the contest. All right, I asked you, with legs deployed, how tall was the Apollo lunar excursion module? How did we do, Matt? What a variety of answers we got on this, but the preponderance, the majority, maybe the plurality,

got the number Martin Hajoski came up with. Martin, last one a couple of years ago, although we hear from him periodically on the show because he has fun things to tell us, he said with legs extended, which you specified, the Lunar Excursion Module, LEM, was seven meters high, a.k.a. 22 feet 11 inches. That is correct.

Right around seven meters. Kind of tall. Very tall. In fact, Martin said, guessing here based on photos, I think that's about the height of Matt Kaplan, Bruce Betts, Bill Nye, and Emily Lakduala all standing on each other's heads, which he would not recommend. Yeah, we only did that once. The other nice measurement that we got was from Stephen Lehman in Charlottesville, Virginia. Go Cavaliers. Roughly the same size as 100 Big Macs stacked on top of you, one another.

Mmm. Yumbo. Now I'm hungry. George Leonberger in Roseville, California. If you jump from the top of the lunar module while it was sitting on the moon, it would take 2.95 seconds to land on the lunar surface. I also only did that once. James Hutchison in Beijing, China.

Here's what he had to say to you, Bruce. Dude, you said the deployed legs should be counted, but didn't say whether the surface detection probes should be factored in. You know about those, right? The things that hung down below the footpads. That detected the surface? Yes. That's right. That's when surface? Yes. That's right.

That's when they got contact. That's right. Neil or Buzz said something about that. So, yeah, no, you didn't. But it was Martin who won, so he's going to get that Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, the worldwide nonprofit network of telescopes

that you can use to examine the cosmos. And he's also getting Bonnie Barati's book that we talked about a couple of weeks ago, World's Fantastic, World's Familiar, by that wonderful JPL astronomer, planetary scientist. Great book. Congratulations, Martin. All right, we move on to the next contest. And there were talks about this at the Planetary Defense Conference. What is the name of the U.S. mission that plans to slam a spacecraft into an asteroid in the 2020s as a kinetic impact or demonstration mission? So a demonstration of changing the orbit of an asteroid by hitting it with a spacecraft.

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. See, we are getting better at this. You're going to need to get us this answer by Wednesday, May 31st at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And somebody out there with the right answer is going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt and an itelescope.net account. Okay, everybody, let's go out there, look up at the night sky and think about not what time zone you're in, but what time zone you think you're in. Thank you. Good night. My wife claims that

jet lag is all in my mind, and I agree with her. I totally agree with her. He's Bruce Betts. He has just returned from the Planetary Defense Conference in Japan, where he represented the Planetary Society, because he is the Director of Science and Technology for said society. And he joins us each week here for What's Up. Get some sleep. Thank you. Good night. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its very human members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.