Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Interview with Louis Friedman

Episode Date: November 25, 2002

Interview with Louis FriedmanLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is the premiere of Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society and host of Planetary Radio. Part of the Planetary Society's mission is to explore new worlds, and you could say that's what we're doing with this new radio series. Another part of our mission is to share news and advocacy of space exploration with a world full of space enthusiasts. Whether you're hearing us live on KUCI in Orange County, California, live via the KUCI website, or on the Planetary Society's website, planetary.org,

we welcome you to this experiment. We also hope you'll be with us every week as we explore the exciting potential of this series. And we think we've got a great beginning planned with today's show. We'll talk with Dr. Louis Friedman, Executive Director, and one of the founders of the Planetary Society. Later in the half hour, you'll hear Bruce Betts, the Society's Director of Projects, tell us what's up in the sky in his regular segment called Just That. What's up? Have you heard about the Society's contest that will allow a young person to name NASA's new Mars rovers? Bruce will have

that story too. But first, let's get underway with another of our regular features. I'll be back in just a minute. This is a random space fact. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla, science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society. Pluto, the ninth and outermost planet in the solar system, is the only one that has never been visited by a spacecraft. Very little was known about the tiny planet until the chance discovery in 1978 of its moon, Charon.

Observations of Charon's movement around Pluto led to some startling discoveries. And I'll tell you about some of those discoveries when I return in a few minutes. Now, back to Planetary Radio. when I return in a few minutes. Now, back to Planetary Radio. Lou, thanks very much for being the first and very appropriate first guest on this broadcast version of Planetary Radio.

Well, thanks, Matt. I'm certainly glad to be here and certainly glad to talk about things planetary and the Planetary Society. And I really love the name, Planetary Radio, and let's make that our goal, to make this a planetary radio show. Well, we certainly hope so, and we very much appreciate the folks at KUCI, not only for carrying the program on their broadcast signal, but allowing us to stream this around the world.

They have a big audience on KUCI, and of course it will be available on an archival basis at the Planetary Society's website, planetary.org. How did the Planetary Society come about? Well, as most people know, it was formed by Carl Sagan, Bruce Murray, and myself back in the late 70s, 1979, actually. So Dr. Sagan was out here in Pasadena working on the Voyager mission and on his Cosmos TV show, which was being done by the PBS station here in Los Angeles. So he was actually in residence out here temporarily on these twin giant projects, Voyager, with its multiple planetary encounters. It was on its way to a Jupiter encounter.

And Cosmos, which became the largest and most successful science show ever on PBS and highly watched still today around the world. He and Dr. Murray, who was then director of the Jet Propulsion Lab, were talking and they were commenting on the great public interest in planetary exploration. Voyager was making the front cover of news magazines. There was this great newspaper interest. The public was writing in. The idea of going to all the outer planets for the first time was quite an exciting venture. And a Viking had just recently, in the mid-70s, 1976 to actually

81, it was returning a whole lot of images from Mars and lots of data about Mars. First thought to be, oh, gee, a downer on life. And then as we learned about the water and the ancient flood plains and the rivers and the channels, maybe a much more exciting place, a place that remains exciting in our mind. So it was all this public interest, and the incoming administration was planning to cut out, kill, stop, not slow down, not reduce the budget, but actually stop planetary exploration. And so there's this huge dichotomy.

The public's interested, but the political system is going to kill planetary exploration. And what to do about that? And the idea was that a very American thing to do is to form a public interest group. And that's when they said, let's put some effort into forming a public interest organization. I was working in the U.S. Congress on a one-year leave of absence from JPL at the time. And so I was coming back here to Pasadena. And so I was kind of a target of opportunity for them. They said, oh, well, he doesn't have a job yet. Let's give him this to do. And so the three of us began talking, and I had been myself wondering about this same problem,

only I was luing it from the congressional perspective. That's it. We got together, and the rest is history. So you began with this idea of advocacy on the part of space exploration, which we're going to talk more about after a break in a few minutes. But the Society, I think, quickly took on many other roles. Yeah, we didn't really know what, you know, here's three scientists, basically, saying we're going to form a social movement, a public interest organization.

First of all, we didn't even know how to incorporate anything, let alone a new kind of business. And we certainly didn't know we had spent our lives, of course, Dr. Sagan was very involved with the public, but not in a public interest organization sense. So he was at heart a university professor, as was Dr. Murray, and I had been an aerospace engineer, so it's kind of, first thing was to do was to find out what we wanted to be. And we got a lot of good advice. I went around to meet dozens of people in the aerospace industry and around in the political system.

One person who was very influential was John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, who really told us a lot about public interest organizations and public interest organizing. And we met with others and decided it wasn't obvious at first, but then we decided, look, planetary pictures are so exciting, we need a full-color magazine. We're not just going to have some little newsletter go out about us. We're going to have a full-color magazine. And so that was the birth of the Planetary Report, which immediately dictated hiring

an experienced, capable editor. And Charlene Anderson was our first hire and has been with us ever since. She remains Associate Director. Yeah, she's Associate Director of the Society, Director of Publications. And so that dictated sort of the style of the Society. High credibility,

very nice publication, something trying to capture the adventure and excitement of planetary exploration, but always staying close to the science as well. So that dictated, as I say, a number of things. We were involved in advocacy. That was the time the

U.S. was making decisions not to do planetary missions. We alone, among all the space-faring nations, chose not to go to Halley's Comet. And so we did get politically involved, and much to NASA's disgruntlement, because NASA felt that they knew how to do it better, and if they didn't want to do planetary exploration

because they had to focus just on the shuttle, that was their decision. They resented this idea of a public interest group telling them what to do. At the same time, we also began to seed projects, things that the government wasn't doing. The government wasn't doing SETI. And so we funded SETI scientists to do some research activities and have conferences. And I'm sure we should, for the few out there who don't know, SETI is, of course, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence.

That's right. Congressmen were making fun of it. They said, well, there's no signs of terrestrial intelligence. Why should we look for extraterrestrial intelligence? Maybe hanging around Congress, I can understand why they had that point of view. But we had a serious radio astronomical search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and it was a serious topic, and we were able to actually make some meaningful contributions and still do so to this day.

But we got involved with research projects, including the near-Earth asteroid problem before anybody began to pay attention to it, and I think we have made a difference over the years. Did you have any idea when the three of you started out, you and Bruce Murray and Carl Sagan, that the society would become, well, what it is today, the world's biggest space interest group? I don't think we saw everything clearly. We certainly didn't know, as I say, we didn't know a lot. So it was hard to predict what we were going to become. But that's a nice way of saying that, that we were winging it.

But I think we did, of course, have the ambition that we would be influential and that we would be part of a public interest. And we never thought we had to create public interest. Public interest is there. You have to harness it. You have to get people involved about it. But the public fascination with the ideas of are we alone in the universe? What is the nature of life? Are there life on other worlds? Or is life very rare? How does it evolve throughout the universe? What are the

physical conditions of the planets? These are questions that have been occupying human attention for all of our history, sometimes in mythology, in folklore, in religion, certainly. And now we're doing it with science. So we don't have to sell this idea to the public. They have to sell it to the politicians, and that's what we were about. We have about a minute left before we're going to take a break. Really, ten minutes goes very fast. Doesn't it? Yeah.

And so will the second ten when we talk about that advocacy role of the Society. Sometime in the next few weeks, we're definitely going to talk about the Solar Sail Project. But since you are, in addition to your general duties with the Society, the head of that project, we should give you at least 30 seconds to mention something

you're very excited about. Well, that will be just a teaser then. Riding on a light beam to sail between the planets and someday to the stars is what we're trying to promote by carrying out the first solar sail mission. And it's a measure of how far the society has come that we can actually try our own space project and get into space ourselves with our own vehicle. So anybody listening, stay tuned.

We'll talk more about it later. We've been talking with Lou Friedman, who is the Executive Director of the Planetary Society, and we're going to keep talking to Lou, but first we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, we're going to talk about advocating for space exploration, something the Planetary Society has been doing for well over two decades. Back in a minute. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars.

We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds, and we're building the first ever solar sail. You can learn about these adventures and exciting new discoveries from space exploration in the Planetary Report. The Planetary Report is the Society's full-color magazine. It's just one of many member benefits. You can learn more by calling 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. And you can catch up on space exploration news and developments at our exciting and informative website, planetarysociety.org.

That's planetarysociety.org. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. We're back. Matt Kaplan here with Planetary Radio, the premier show on KUCI of Planetary Radio. We hope that you're enjoying the program so far, whether you're listening via the live stream from KUCI, the broadcast signal, or perhaps you're checking us out in the archived edition

on the Planetary Society's website, planetary.org. We're going to pick up our conversation with Lou Friedman, the Executive Director of the Planetary Society's website, planetary.org. We're going to pick up our conversation with Lou Friedman, the executive director of the Planetary Society, and we're going to move to something he talked about a few minutes ago, really kind of where the Society started, which is something I wasn't fully aware of, that you started with this advocacy interest. That's right, Matt, and recently we did a survey among our members and found out that advocacy is one of the chief reasons people belong to the Planetary Society.

They want space exploration to happen. It's our motto. We make it happen. And so we've been involved. Now, one of the things is that space is not a national issue in the sense of Social Security, in the sense of economic matters, in the sense of health care, national security, certainly. Very rarely do you see a campaign discussion of the space program in any sense, and certainly not about the scientific part. We can't pretend that this is a giant public issue,

and yet it does have this enormous public interest, and so we have that job of translating it. I think we've been effective. I think in the last five years, as a matter of fact, we've every single year gotten the Congress to take action on either the Mars program or some aspect of the planetary program, add money in, add some direction to NASA, not always with NASA's blessing. In fact, right now we are advocating a mission to Pluto that NASA doesn't want to do, that the

administration has taken out of the budget, that they've tried to cancel three times. And we're fighting with them about this, and I'm pleased to report we've won. And I think both the houses of Congress now have, for two years in a row, overridden the administration's

objectives and said, no, you can't cancel it, we want it done. Now, for reasons that I find absolutely crazy, the administration resents this. I would think, even NASA resents it. It's a government bureaucracy and they don't like to be told by outsiders how to do things. But isn't that crazy that we have the

Congress in these times of other national priorities actually expressing its will and interest to do planetary exploration to an esoteric subject like Pluto, which people even debate. Is it a planet? Is it not a planet? Was it made of?

Was it not made of? And the Congress wants to do it, and NASA somehow resents that fact. I think that's crazy. But I'm glad to say that I think a mission to Pluto will happen, and then we can argue later about whether it's a planet or not when we get those results. When we get a close-up look, which we've never had. One of the things I like to do is tell my people interviewing me what questions they should ask me.

So you should ask me, Matt, is Pluto a planet? Say, Lou, I've always wondered, is Pluto a planet? And isn't there disagreement about that even within the planetary society? Yes, there is, and somewhat it's a semantics argument uh i'm a simple-minded guy so i take the view if it's round and principally goes around the sun then it's a planet what more do you want rather than going around something else yeah now a moon of course is round but it goes principally around the earth and then so therefore it's a secondary object or satellite, as we say.

Asteroids go around the sun principally, but they're not round. They're not big enough to be undifferentiated. So Pluto, I think, makes it because it's round and it goes around the sun. So I'm satisfied. But there are others, and in fact, Neil Tyson, our vice president of the Planetary Society, who is director of the Hayden Planetarium, who actually initiated this debate by a display at the Hayden Planetarium, says, no, no, no, Pluto is not a planet. It is the largest and most important representative of a new class of objects called the Copper Belt objects.

And he's right. In a strict intellectual sense, I've become convinced that he's right, although I still want to classify Pluto as a planet for various reasons. But these Kuiper Belt objects, which we didn't know about when we were studying astronomy 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 years ago, now see that there's a whole representative class of objects out there that are not quite planets, not quite, but bigger than asteroids, that have their own evolutionary history and importance in the history of the solar system.

We need to learn more about to figure out where they fit into this evolutionary history of the solar system and their effect on both terrestrial planets and outer planets. And so as a Kuiper Belt object, it's probably the most important object to visit because it is the largest and most important representative of this new class of objects that are discovered. Recently, another large Kuiper belt object was discovered and got some newspaper attention. Just a few weeks ago. Yeah, just a few weeks ago. If this had happened 30 years ago, the

newspaper headlines would have said, 10th planet found. Because it is kind of round and goes around the sun and probably would have gotten called a 10th planet. But now we do know it is a Kuiper Belt object. So the boundary is fuzzy about this,

but I want to tell you the most important reason for calling it a planet. Okay. And that's the Planetary Society's phone number is 809 worlds. And it's awkward to change it to 810 worlds or 808 worlds, so we want to stick with it as nine worlds. Inertia is a wonderful thing sometimes. Pluto is certainly a big issue for the Planetary Society and our members, but there are also some targets within the solar system much closer to home, which the Planetary Society has been advocating for.

Yeah, it's kind of funny because then, just like this Pluto is a planet argument, which becomes semantics, then other people start criticizing us. The Planetary Society is only about Pluto, which, of course, is silly. We have been great Mars advocates over the years. There's another out-of-planets mission to a place called Europa, which is not a planet but a moon of Jupiter, but a very important one because it is known to have this ice-covered surface, which has every evidence of having a liquid water ocean beneath it.

If it's liquid water, it must be a heat source. If there's heat and water, you have all the ingredients for life. Every place there's heat and water on Earth, there's life. And so the idea that Europa is important to the idea of extraterrestrial life is absolutely fundamental. So we're pushing a mission to Europa as well. Now, Europa is very tough. It's not as far as Pluto, but it's very tough

to do a mission there because you have to get into a high-energy orbit around the moon, and you have to fight the radiation belts at Jupiter. So, actually, the mission to Europa

is a higher-technology, tougher mission than the mission to Pluto. Having said that, the folks at JPL and NASA do know how to do a mission there, and we're advocating that too. So we're not just about one planet. We're not just about Mars. We're not just about Europa.

We're not just about Pluto. We're for planetary exploration broadly and in a measured program that systematically explores just the way the 16th and 17th and 18th century sailors explored the seven seas, we want to explore the eight worlds, nine worlds, ten worlds, really 50, 60, 70 worlds out there if you count all the planets and moons. And even the ones beyond our own solar system. Actually, a trick question might be how many planets are there, and somebody might say eight or nine or ten. But the actual answer is we're up to about 100 because there's some 85 extraterrestrial planets have been discovered.

Or extrasolar planets. I'm sorry, extrasolar planets. Yeah, planets beyond our solar system around other stars that have been discovered. This is an area of absolute burgeoning research so for the first discoveries are about the oddballs the very big planets that are very close to their parent stars but in the next few years we're going to be discovering smaller planets and bigger planets far away from their stars and maybe even a terrestrial like planet an earth-like planet soon there'll be instruments that can start to measure the spectrum of the atmospheres of some of these planets,

and we'll find out whether or not they have the spectrum that's consistent with life, the atmospheric constituents that are consistent with life. So this is an area that's going to be of exciting research in astronomy, and this is something the Planetary Society has been advocating, and indeed we've actually sponsored some research in this area as far back as 1981. advocating, and indeed we've actually sponsored some research in this area as far back as 1981. Your enthusiasm, I think, is obvious to anyone listening to this or who has ever spoken to you. Scientist, aerospace engineer, but for 22 years you've been running a nonprofit interest group.

Has it been fun? It's a real joy. If you'd ask me at any time in my life, up until the last decade, whether I'd stay at a job for that long a period of time, of course, it wouldn't be my nature. I'm restless. What has been really gratifying at the Planetary Society is just when you think that the work is getting a little stale, you go to the same office, you meet the same people every day,

you get a really interesting project. You get the chance to put a microphone on the surface of Mars or to get students involved in telerobotic control, first with an experiment that takes place in the Mojave Desert, and then with an experiment that's actually going to take place on the surface of Mars, that you can fly a Mars balloon, that you can fly a solar sail mission. So it is a joy, and more than even a joy, it's an adventure.

And what more do you want out of a job? And that is the best word for it, an adventure. And we hope to communicate some of the sense of that adventure, the enthusiasm, and even the fun of it. Space exploration, it's what the Planetary Society has been about. Lou Friedman, thanks very much for being a part of this very first broadcast version of Planetary Radio. Thank you, Matt. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with more random space facts about Pluto and Charon.

At one-seventh the mass of Pluto, Charon is bigger relative to its planet than any other moon in the solar system. Our own moon, which held this distinction until Charon's discovery, is only one hundredth the mass of Earth. Charon is also very close to Pluto, orbiting at a distance of only 20,000 kilometers, making it the closest moon to its primary of any moon in the solar system. From a vantage point on Pluto, Charon would appear seven times larger in the sky than the moon appears in our own sky. But unlike our moon, Charon never rises and sets in the Plutonian sky because Pluto and Charon are in synchronous rotation, which means that both bodies rotate at exactly the same rate as they orbit each other once every six days.

Join me for more random space facts in next week's show. Here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. We're back with Planetary Radio and Dr. Bruce Betts. Bruce Betts is the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. We actually had a little trouble deciding, you know, how do we introduce this guy? Because he's done a lot of things and continues to do a lot of things. We thought maybe, in particular with this segment in mind, maybe Buddha of the Beyond. But I don't know.

Bruce wasn't really hot on that. So, Bruce Batts, welcome to Planetary Radio. Well, thank you very much. Of course, we hope to make this a regular thing because this segment, which is at least tentatively called What's Up, not to say What's Up, Doc, because, you know, somebody else owns that. But What's Up, because one of the things we're hoping you're going to be able to talk about every week is What's Up, What's Up in the Sky. And we're going to be able to talk about every week is what's up?

What's up in the sky? And we're going to talk about what's up in the sky in a moment, but I think you've also got a little bit of space history for us. I do indeed. This week we're lucky enough to have a truly unusual space history note. On November 30, 1954, in the state of Alabama, a 10-pound meteorite slammed through a roof and hit Elizabeth Hodges in the stomach while she slept.

She was okay, only bruises and scrapes, but it does represent one of the only times in known history that a meteorite actually hit a person. Fortunately for her, after coming through the roof. Does anybody know what happened to that meteorite? I mean, did she keep it? I don't know. I'm sure it was subjected to various scientific tests, Does anybody know what happened to that meteorite? I mean, did she keep it? I don't know. I'm sure it was subjected to various scientific tests,

both by the planetary and medical communities. Maybe there's a little door front museum there. You know, see the meteorite that hit her in the stomach. Anyway, hey, Bruce Bess, what's up in the sky this week? Hey, Matt. Well, what's up in the sky is there are some nice planets to look at. We've got Saturn in the early evening. It rises in the east right around sunset. So if you look in the east in the early evening,

and the brightest thing up there that looks like a star, but it's brighter than any of the other stars in the area, is actually the planet Saturn. A little later on, Jupiter rises in the later evening, meaning 10, 30, 11 at night, also in the east. And it will be much brighter than Saturn and easily the brightest object in the sky besides the moon. And in fact, speaking of the moon, tonight, November 25th, Jupiter will actually appear near the moon. So if you look at the moon later in the evening and then look to the lower right, you will see Jupiter. Now, for those of you who are listening to the show, the archival

version of the show, we still have places for you to go to learn about what's up in the sky. And you probably want to visit the Planetary Society website, planetary.org, planetary.org. But we do take that into account. We hope you can catch us live sometimes. Anything to add to that, Bruce? Yes. One other thing for those early risers out there, really early risers before dawn. If you look in the southeast, you can see Venus and Mars both up there. Venus, very bright, much brighter than even Jupiter. Brightest object out there besides the moon and the sun. Great night for stargazing and planet gazing. Yep. Let's talk about one other thing, something people can get involved with, and that is the Mars rovers that are scheduled

for launch pretty soon. And the Planetary Society is very involved. But what are these contests? All right. Well, we've got two contests that related to the Mars Exploration Rovers mission, which will launch in the middle of 03 and get there in January of 2004. One, in connection with the Lego company, is we're running the Name the Rovers contest for NASA, where students from kindergarten through 12th grade can submit names and essays to justify them, and actually one of them will end up naming the rovers that go to Mars. Very cool. I've got a daughter already working on that. Excellent.

And the other contest is we have what's called the student astronaut contest that the Planetary Society is running, and that will involve more intricate essays and is for basically high school level students, and that will be for students to actually work in operations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the mission and doing science and interfacing with the scientists during the mission. So for both of these, you can visit our website, planetary.org, or redrovergoestomars.org. You can also visit, for the Name the Rovers, the nametherovers.org site. Bruce, thanks for joining us, and we'll have more from you next week, I hope?

Oh, yes. Great. Thank you very much. Bruce Betts with What's Up, what we hope will be a regular feature here on Planetary Radio. That's all the time we have for this very first edition of Planetary Radio. Please join us again next Monday at 5.30 p.m. Pacific Time here on KUCI. You can also hear this and all of our other shows anytime you like at the Planetary Society's website, planetary.org. In a moment, you'll hear how to reach us with your own suggestions, comments, and questions about Planetary Radio. Thanks for listening. Have a great week, everyone. Planetary Radio is a production of the Planetary Society, which is solely responsible for its content. Our producer is Matt Kaplan.

Other contributors include Charlene Anderson, Monica Lopez, and Jennifer Vaughn. The executive producer is Dr. Louis Friedman. The opinions expressed are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect those of the Society or this station. Transcription by CastingWords