Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - John Logsdon on the Dawn of the Space Age

Episode Date: October 3, 2018

The Dean of space policy, John Logsdon, returns with stories and a new book of original documents that shaped the US space program from the birth of NASA to SpaceX.  Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye reports in from this year’s International Astronautical Congress in German, while Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla wraps up a working tour of New Zealand.  Then join Bruce and Mat for this week’s What’s Up.  Learn and hear more at: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/1003-2018-john-logsdon-outer-space-exploration-book.html Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Dawn of the Space Age, 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. John Logsdon is back. The Dean of Space Policy Historians and Authors has a new book that includes the many Magna Cartas of American human spaceflight. We'll talk with John about this great read and some of the most fascinating and most surprising milestones on the road to Apollo 11 and beyond.

Bruce Betts will take us back into the black, but I have other Cosmos Crossing colleagues this week. Okay, slight exaggeration. Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy is in Germany. We'll hear a report from him right after we check in with the Society's senior editor Emily Lakdawalla, who is closing out a working tour of New Zealand. Emily has joined us by phone from, where are you? In Hobbiton by any chance? I'm not in Hobbiton, though I was there a couple of days ago. I'm currently in Auckland, New Zealand, wrapping up a six-city tour where I was giving talks about planetary science, but also taking advantage of the trip to do just a wee bit of sightseeing. Tell us about some of those talks and the reception you're getting from Kiwis.

I gave three talks in New Zealand, three different talks at ANSA. There's one that I give about looking for life in the solar system, where I talk about why we're interested in looking to see if Earth is the only place that has life or if it's found elsewhere. And I explain why Earth is a terrible place to understand how life began, which is why we have to go to places in space like Mars and maybe look for it on wilder places like Europa and Titan and Enceladus. and maybe look for it on wilder places like Europa and Titan and Enceladus. I also gave a talk based on the recent Where We Are video that I just unveiled for the first time. So I talk about all the different missions that are exploring all over the solar system. And that's really fun because I get to include brand new images just returned to Earth from missions like Hayabusa 2 and Curiosity. Finally, I gave a more technical talk. This one was given to the Auckland Astronomical Society about how to find and process spacecraft image data.

And that's one of my favorites to give because people are just wowed by the fact that all of these images taken by different spacecraft, they all eventually become available to the public for anybody to download and play with. And there are so many treasures hidden in those data sets that people haven't discovered before, very few people anyway. And so it's really rewarding. I told the people down here, there's a lot of jokes among the Auckland astronomers, among the New Zealand astronomers about the, you know, their sky

quality is very good when it's clear, but their weather can be very bad. So I said on those rainy nights, you can satisfy, scratch your itch to explore space by exploring the spacecraft image data sets. It sounds like you're finding a very high level of enthusiasm. Absolutely. There are little astronomical societies all over the island. I was toured around by Astron, which is a company that was founded by the Auckland Astronomical Society to help them get quality astronomical gear here.

And they actually gave me a pair of binoculars that I've been using to look at things like albatross and other sea birds and stuff as I've been exploring the islands. But yes, they're very enthusiastic. They do have beautiful skies when they're clear, but when they're not, they have beautiful landscapes around to explore as well. I have always wanted to head down that way, so I'm tremendously envious, but look forward to your return here to the States, Emily, and hope to get a report from you when that happens on the status of the Hobbit space program. They certainly have a lot of fireworks.

Thanks very much, Emily. Have a great, safe remainder of your trip. Thank you very much, Matt. That's Emily Lakdawalla, Senior Editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, who is also now the editor of the Quarterly Planetary Report, the award-winning magazine from the Planetary Society. Bill, first Emily in New Zealand, and now you in Germany at the International Astronautical Congress. This is becoming an annual thing with you, isn't it? Oh, yes. I love the IAC, which, you know, is put on by the IAS, the International Astronautical

Federation. And this year, Matt, is the 69th International Astronautical Congress. Congress is European for conference. And so what we have is 6,300 people, a little more than that, 6,300 people from all over the world, really, who come here to share ideas about exploring space, present technical papers, things they've been working on about building spacecraft, getting information up and down from spacecraft, and the data that are produced by observing the Earth and other planets. And the thing that if you're from the U.S. and I know many of our listeners are from the U.S., you're just not aware of the number of space agencies and the size of the commitment from around the world. DLR, the German space agency, JAXA, Japanese Aerospace,

ISRO, Indian Space Research Organization, and all these big companies, Lockheed Martin. The New Zealand Space Agency is here. We met with the head of the New Zealand Space Agency, the new Australian Space Agency. And countries establish these agencies so that they can have weather, communication, and so-called situational awareness, what your neighbors are up to,

and then, of course, to reach farther and deeper into space and make discoveries to change the course of human history. It's no big deal. No, it's a huge deal. And so having a presence here is great for us. Any particular highlights, anything that approaches the level of the panic, the thrill that Elon Musk gave everybody a couple years ago? Well, we'll see. The Milo Institute, which is started by a couple of our board members, Lon Levin and Jim Bell, is a way to get six missions funded to asteroids using small spacecraft for, if I

can use the term, only $200 million, which really is a very reasonable price. That includes the launch. But at this thing, at this Congress, people go around and shake hands and meet each other, and I go through stacks of business cards. And Matt, the other thing that's really striking to me, Bill Nye, your CEO, is people from around the world watch the Bill Nye Saves the World show and have an awareness of the Planetary Society because they're so interested in television made in the U.S. It's really something. I'm glad you're there to represent us. And we can hear about this.

I imagine you're using your social media, but our friend and colleague Andrew is there with you. Oh, yes. Yeah, I bet people can check out his stuff on the Society's social media. So Andrew, Paul, Polly and I are recording a bunch of brilliantly insightful, hilarious comedy videos, no, videos to talk about the importance of the Astronautical Congress. And I guess a highlight, Matt, thinking for a moment was the heads of agencies,

where we get a dozen heads of agencies on the stage at the same time. The Russian, Chinese, U.S. space agencies, Japanese, everybody's up there talking about the same things at the same time. And I was very impressed with Administrator Jim Bridenstine from NASA. He has clearly boned up on what NASA is all about, had a very clear presentation, answered. Somebody asked him directly, do you believe in climate change? He said, yes, let's move on. And so we said, yeah, exactly.

Wow. So it was a very, very cool moment. And the big thing that he, I believe, the administrator and his advisors realize is the U.S. or National Aeronautic and Space Administration, NASA, does not have to go it alone, that you can establish what they're calling a gateway spacecraft near the moon, the Earth's moon, and use it as a way station to send missions down to the surface of the moon or farther and deeper into space to our beloved planet Mars. He gets it. He's done his research and he's passionate. As I've said

before about the administrator, you know, we may not agree on a lot of political things, but we do agree that space exploration brings out the best in us, and he sees the role of NASA as an exploration agency rather than a transportation agency. So he was a real leader at this thing, as well as the guys from DLR and JAXA and ESA, the European Space Agency, and it was a really impressive panel. Bill, this is all very nice to hear.

Good news coming at a time when it's really very welcome. Good news is welcome. Well, the International Astronautical Congress is doing what it is intended to do, bring people from around the world who are interested in advancing space science and space exploration. Thank you for being there on our behalf. And anybody who wants to can follow the progress there. world who are interested in advancing space science and space exploration. Thank you for being there on our behalf. And anybody who wants to can follow the progress there via the social media. At Explore Planets is the Society's Twitter account. You can check us out on Facebook.

Maybe catch some of those videos that Bill is making with Andrew Polly. We're on the gram, too, Matt. We're all about the Instagram. The kids are all doing it with their, you know, electric phone machines. Like the one we're talking on right now. That's the one.

Bill Nye is the CEO of the Planetary Society in addition to being the science guy. And have a great remainder of the trip there, Bill. You and Andrew both. Thank you, Matt. Carry on.

John Logsdon founded the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. He directed that distinguished institute for more than 20 years, along the way serving in various capacities for NASA, including his, along the way serving in various capacities for NASA, including his membership on the Space Agency's Advisory Council. John has also written extensively, including acclaimed books John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, and After Apollo, Richard Nixon and the American Space Program. His newest work has just been published by Penguin. It's the Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration, NASA and the Incredible Story of Human Spaceflight. My boss, the science guy, penned a terrific foreword for the book. And full disclosure, John is a member of the Planetary Society Board.

I welcomed him back a few hours before he left with Bill Nye for Germany and this year's International Astronautical Congress. John, welcome back to Planetary Radio. It's great to hear your voice again. Happy to be back. Let's talk about this new book that actually precedes the next book that you will author. You are the editor of this one. It is a fascinating collection. Your introductions to the documents really provide the perfect backbone. It gives them context. It provides additional insights. I'm really

fascinated by what you've put in this. Well, thank you. I'm basically both an author and an editor. I mean, as you say, the book is built around a series of, I think, 102 documents relating to the history of the space program. And I've written the connecting narrative to put it in a context. Absolutely. And it continues through Apollo, the space shuttle, right up to a 2016 essay about reaching and living on Mars by, of all people, Elon Musk. and living on Mars by, of all people, Elon Musk. But I'm afraid today we'll probably just focus on the first faltering steps taken by the United States toward human spaceflight, if you don't mind. I thought I knew a fair amount of this early history of the U.S. space program,

but there really is nothing like seeing the original documents that guided and recorded that monumental development. Have you always enjoyed digging this kind of stuff up? Absolutely. I think going into the archives or seeing other people's digging that traces or actually shows you what was put down on paper at the time, what people were thinking, their interactions, the rationales they were offering for their choices, all of that is the kind of thing that really motivated me through most of my career. I mean, a PhD dissertation written in the late 60s got published as a book in 1970 called The Decision to Go to the moon. And think of what it was to see the memo that Kennedy had written,

which is in this Penguin book also, asking his advisors to find him a space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win. And that's kind of neat. It's better than neat. It is great stuff. Almost everybody recognizes the names of the people at the top. You just talked about John F. Kennedy, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson. But standing behind these documents are really scores of other men, and I think they're all men, who had nearly as much influence over the first days of American space exploration. Are there standouts in your judgment? Well, sure. I mean, there were several. One, maybe I'll start with him, was Richard Nixon. There's a document in the book of a meeting with Eisenhower, Nixon, the new science advisor, Jim Killian, who was president of MIT and also had a major role, discussing with the leaders of Congress how to respond to Sputnik. discussing with the leaders of Congress how to respond to Sputnik. And Eisenhower says at that meeting, well, maybe we just give it to the Department of Defense and let the scientific community set the requirements. Nixon says, no, I think it should be a separate civilian agency so we can offer the world openness, the ability to cooperate internationally, while at the same time,

we have a classified military program. Killian backed him up on that issue. And one never thinks of Richard Nixon as one of the fathers of the American space program, fathers of NASA, but there it is. While it did not completely redeem my image of Richard Nixon, It was nice to see this since it was also you who revealed, at least to me, that it was kind of Nixon who later would kill off what was left of the Apollo program. Well, sure. Nixon, after Apollo 11, said, we don't want to do that anymore. I'm listening to the public. They want the space budget cut. I see no compelling reason to keep going back to the moon. Let's go do something else. And that's something else with the shuttle, with all that followed. Yeah, with all the mixed results that followed.

There in the book is a transcript, brief transcript of one of Nixon's tape recordings talking to John Ehrlichman about the decision to go forward with the shuttle. And he says to Ehrlichman, it's jobs, John. That's what it's about, jobs. Let's put it in California where the jobs are. And I wasn't going to mention it, but there is another document in this

having to do with Nixon and the people around him like like John Ehrlichman, when there was a proposal made to name the Apollo 11 mission. Could you describe that? Yeah. Bill Moyers, who had worked with both Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson at that point in 1969, was the editor of a paper called Newsday on Long Island, sent a proposal to the White House that they name the spacecraft, basically the command module, the John F. Kennedy. There was a review within the White House with a couple of people saying, yeah, it's not kind of a gracious idea. But Ehrlichman said, you know, next thing is that NBC will be naming the moon. And H.R. Haldeman, Nixon's top political guy, said, absolutely not, written in very bold handwriting on this memo that this isn't going to happen. And as far as I can tell, Nixon never mentioned Kennedy in any part of the Apollo 11 celebration.

Wouldn't that have been something if it had been Houston Tranquility Base here, the Kennedy has landed. Indeed. I'm going to take it back now to where I had hoped to start with you, and that's at the very beginning. I'd heard forever about the series of articles in the long-gone Collier's magazine. I'd seen the great Chesley Bonestell illustrations. I was hugely inspired as a kid when I saw the Disney films

that were kind of based on the series, but I'd never read any of the original articles. And you've included two of them. They make clear that this was, even back then, it was more about defense than space exploration for its own sake that was being pushed. Well, that's certainly true that the editors of Collier's in introducing this series, which was a series of articles that ran over a two-year period. How many of your listeners

remember news magazines? I'm old enough to remember Collier's and Life and Saturday Evening Post, but that was a long time ago. At any rate, the editor said, basically, this is key to the survival of the country, to future's power on Earth will be related to control of space. And that's why we have spent so much time in our magazine or intending to spend so much time talking about space. The von Braun piece, which is the second piece that I've included, is pretty straightforward how to get to Mars. But in other pieces, including a classic one on a space station that von Braun published in Colliers, he talked about it as an observation post or even a base for launching nuclear weapons back to Earth.

So yes, the strategic defense goals and purposes and implications of space activity were seen at the very start. In that von Braun article that you included from Collier's, I thought it was really interesting that he seems to be at least as concerned about human factors of putting humans in space as the technical achievements that would be required. Well, I think he recognized that that was a key to being able to send, I think he was proposing to send 70 people in a number of separate spacecraft out to Mars and then have only a few of them descend to the surface. But he realized it was an eight or nine month voyage and that all these men living together in confined spaces presented a challenge.

Plus the cosmic radiation. And I mean, you have to remember, this is 1954. But the world was seven years away from putting a human in space. So recognizing the difficulties of the mission were as much human as they were engineering, I think, was a tribute to von Braun's perception and depth in engineering. Yeah, pretty prescient, considering that these are still some of the most serious considerations. Well, the article ends that the most likely time frame, this is 1954, is sometime in the next hundred years. So he may not be far off. Sadly. far off. Sadly. President Eisenhower supported the effort to make the first U.S. satellite a civil or non-military one, but I never knew that he had an ulterior motive until I read some of the material, some of the documents in this book. Indeed. I mean, even as early as 1955, the scientists in the United States, scientists loved data. And so once it became

clear you could put a device in orbit to gather data, they were all for it. And they proposed through the International Geophysical Year to launch a U.S. satellite. The Soviet Union provided the same sort of initiative. That had to get to the White House in order to be approved. At that time, Eisenhower was being advised that rather than fly U-2s over the Soviet Union to take images, we might be able to fly a satellite. And that may or may not have been a violation of national sovereignty, where flying airplanes over Soviet airspace clearly was a violation. So the idea of a scientific satellite being launched first and establishing the precedent of overflight in orbit not being a violation of sovereignty was, I think, a major

reason that the Eisenhower administration approved what turned out to be the Vanguard program. So then, as we all know, along came Sputnik 1 and everybody in the U.S. goes crazy, but not Eisenhower. Why not? I don't think everybody went crazy. The Congress went a little crazy and the media went a little crazy. That's never happened since, of course. Of course. Eisenhower had a measured view of the lack of strategic threat from the satellite itself. He clearly understood that a country that could put a satellite in orbit could also lob a nuclear weapon over intercontinental distances. And it was that that bothered him, the fact that the Soviet Union had demonstrated that it had a powerful enough rocket to have a nuclear weapon to attack the United States. But he wanted to damp

down that perception. He said, doesn't raise my concern one iota. We're our enemies across an ocean, not on the moon. Was he in some ways happy to have Sputnik 1 flying right overhead? Well, he was told that inadvertently the Soviets have done us a favor by being first and not raising the issue of national sovereignty. So kind of de facto, if their satellite was going over the United States and the United States did not complain, that established the precedent that outer space was not subject to national sovereignty and that any country, including the United States, was free to orbit a satellite over other countries' territory without their permission. By the way, it came under attack a few years later as the Soviet Union realized we were taking intelligence imagery. And

in 61 and 62, the Soviet Union said, hey, that is illegal, taking images from orbit of our military emplacements. And now we've got Lord knows how many little companies trying to put up constellations of satellites to do exactly this. Yeah, the world is transparent. Yeah, in more ways than one. How close did the U.S. come to beating the Soviets into space? Associates after World War II, had a Jupiter rocket, basically an intermediate range missile that was capable of launching a satellite. In 1956, let's say a year before Sputnik 1, he asked his chain of command, can we do this? And was told no. And it got up to Eisenhower, and Eisenhower said, no, we're not going to deviate from the plan of it being a scientific satellite not linked to a military missile, certainly not launched by someone with von Braun's background. attempt an orbital launch. And in fact, I think somebody was sent down from Washington to put

some additional weight in the payload area of the launch to make sure it didn't happen. Wow. You know, what I find ironic is that then the first civil attempt fails. The von Braun team, working with people like James Van Allen, they are successful and they actually do some great science. They discover the Van Allen radiation belt. Indeed, because they had a Geiger counter on the Explorer 1 rocket and Explorer 3. It took them a while to figure out what the meaning of the data they got. But yes, they did make a major discovery that we didn't know that radiation belt was there. So tied to all of this, you have some documents that explore

the sort of creation of NASA, the generation of the space agency. Was it always certain that the U.S. would have a civilian space agency? Not at all. Eisenhower's first instinct was to let the Department of Defense, which after all controlled the rockets and people like von Braun and JPL were military employees at that point, just give the whole space program to the Department of Defense. He actually created in February of 1958 something called DARPA, Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, which exists today. Its first job was to run the U.S. space program. And eventually he was talked out of doing that by his science advisor, by Richard Nixon, by others, then had his advisors look at alternatives, giving it as a new mission to the Atomic Energy Commission, creating a Department of Space, or basing it on the existing National Advisory Committee for

Aeronautics, NACA, which was a choice ultimately made. What was the relationship between the military and this new agency called NASA in those early days? Well, it was a mixture of cooperation and competition. And the focus of competition was the human spaceflight mission. Both the Army and the Air Force thought that they should be the organizations putting humans in space. Von Braun and his team had a thing called Project Atom, which was using a small Jupiter, but renamed Redstone rocket, to do a suborbital flight. The Air Force had a very ambitious program called Man in Space Soonest. But again, there was a kind of fight between the emerging new NASA and the military in the spring and summer of 1958, even before NASA started operation, over who would have the lead in human spaceflight. And Eisenhower, again, was the one that decided, no, he wanted this to be one of the missions of the new civilian agency.

And so very soon after NASA started Project Mercury, which combined Adam and man in space soonest, was initiated. Speaking of Project Mercury, as we jump forward a little bit, I was interested to see that it also might have been given a different name if things had gone in a different direction. Yeah, the mission was assigned to a newly formed group called the Space Task Group, which was a subunit of the Langley Research Center, which was transferred from NACA to NASA as NASA started. Space Task Group was headed by a man named Robert Gilruth, who's one of the unknown heroes of human spaceflight through the Apollo program.

And Dr. Gilruth said, let's call it Project Astronaut, not Project Mercury. The person that ran all spaceflight programs at the new NASA, a man named A. Silverstein, came up with the idea of naming programs after Greek or Roman gods. And so Mercury was his choice. And Mercury was put in the speech announcing the project in December of 1958. And Mercury it became. Worked out pretty well. Yep. Anyone who has read or seen the right stuff knows that the first astronauts, the Mercury astronauts, Mercury 7, were put through hell in their training and evaluation. But I got to say, there's a pretty good cases made for their suffering in this.

There's a May 1960 document you've included that describes the training of these astronauts. Well, there's that document, which by the guy who designed their regime, Robert Voas. the guy who designed their regime, Robert Vos. There's also a letter from John Glenn to one of his Navy buddies, or maybe Marine buddy, I'm not sure, James Stockdale, later famous as Ross Perot's vice presidential candidate. Yeah. And Glenn describes the routine from his personal perspective in addition to this formal document laying out the training

program. And in a sense, as you say, they were put through every conceivable thing that doctors and others could think of to make sure they were capable of a... Again, you have to remember, this had never happened before. We didn't know what would happen to the human organism. The first exposed to gravity loads going uphill during launch, then the immediate transition to microgravity once in orbit, and then reentry and high gravity coming down. It wasn't even clear that humans could survive that. So they must have been somewhat reassured. Apparently they were, according to the documents, when Yuri Gagarin went up, came back, and seemed to do just fine.

Yep. But before that, the president's science advisors were engaged in evaluating the medical aspects of Project Mercury, and they were still unsure. Their report actually arrived at the White House the same day as the Gagarin flight, but it obviously had been written a few days before. And they were recommending a large number of additional chimpanzee flights before committing a human at least to orbit. The same Bob Gilruth said, we might as well move the program to Africa if we're going to follow that advice. Yes, like up to 50 flights with chimps. I mean, my goodness, that would have been a lot of nice endorsements of products by chimps in the following year. Yeah, but think what the 1961 equivalent of PETA would have said.

That's right. I think what the 1961 equivalent of PETA would have said. That's right. How close did the Mercury 7 astronauts come to meeting some of the Soviet cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin? Well, there are two documents in the book. One, a very early suggestion, I think it's 1960, from all of the Mercury 7 saying, I think it's 1960, from all of the Mercury 7 saying, let's, we, of course, knew that the Soviet Union intended to have humans in space and had selected some cosmonauts for training, just like the Mercury astronauts. And the Mercury 7 suggested, well, why don't we do a little anticipatory space diplomacy and meet with them? They were told to stick to your job and get ready for your flights and don't worry about foreign policy. And then after Alan Shepard's flight, there was a proposal, I think it was, yes, after Shepard's flight, a proposal that Shepard and

Yuri Gagarin appear together on American television. Jim Haggerty, who had been Eisenhower's press secretary, made that proposal to the new NASA administrator, James Webb. And Mr. Webb said, I see no benefit to the country in doing that. We're not going to pursue that idea. Here's another jaw dropper. You've included an image of the actual letter that was intended for Lyndon Johnson to sign, which if it had gone forward, might have literally changed the face or faces of the human space program in the US. You know the one I'm talking about, right? I do indeed. Tell us about that. There were a number of women encouraged by a guy that had designed some of the medical tests for the Mercury 7 called Randolph Lovelace. He put a number of women through the same tests and found that they,

some of them passed those tests. And so they formed kind of a lobby and had as one of those women, the wife of a Senator from Michigan, Philip Hart, Janie Hart, and they had high level connections. So they began to lobby Congress and the White House for Lyndon to sign after that meeting to the head of NASA, Jim Webb, saying, let's give these women some consideration. Johnson wrote on that letter, let's stop this nonsense now. File this in very bold scripts. So that was the end of that idea. Among all the creators of these documents, I wonder if you can guess who I enjoyed the most. You've already mentioned him because of a letter that he sent to a friend.

Oh, I would imagine 7 mission, was just, first of all, fascinating because of its content, his view of this mission, which, you know, had some harrowing moments. But also, it's just charming, his style of writing. That was really not written. It was, I think, a transcription of his debriefing shortly after his flight. These were test flights, and John Glenn was a test pilot. You know, you kind of forget that all seven of the Mercury astronauts were. Eisenhower decided over Christmas 1958 that any person that was going to be selected as an astronaut first had to be a military test pilot. And so they all were. This was a test pilot's report on his flight. That was a point of the flight was to get results and see

what happened. He did it in very straightforward language. I got to know John Glenn later in life and he was a very straightforward person. So it reflects his personality, certainly. It's wonderful reading, as are so many of these documents. I got to mention at least one more, even though, again, it jumps us forward to the Apollo days. Can you talk about the document that you've included that Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins had to sign after returning from the moon and reaching Honolulu? had to sign after returning from the moon and reaching Honolulu. Indeed. I mean, most of this book is text, pretty dense text.

This is a pocketbook-sized book. But I think there are four images of one-page documents in the book. The original Kennedy memo, that's the charter of Apollo, this Lyndon Johnson writing on the letter about female astronauts, the Haldeman writing on the proposal to name the spacecraft, and then the customs form, which is what you're talking about. The astronauts had to file as they got back to Hawaii on the carrier after their flight. They had to file a customs form because after all, they had certainly left the country. And it says, you know, origin, Florida, destination, moon, re-entry point, Hawaii, Honolulu, baggage, moon rocks.

Moon rocks. Rocks and dust, I think it says. Wonderful stuff. I had no idea that going back to the original source documents would be so fascinating and so much fun to read, John. So thank you for this. But it's also wonderful to see the history of space exploration, space development through your eyes. Remind us of what you are working on now, or I guess it's pretty much finished and ready to publish. I hope so.

Well, I've done over the past now almost a decade a book called John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, a book called After Apollo, Richard Nixon, and the American Space Program. Those are out and available. And the next one in that series is Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier, which traces the civil and commercial space decisions made during the Reagan administration. It doesn't deal with SDI, Strategic Defense Initiative, in any significant way. And that book will be out hopefully December of this year. I just finished proofing it. And so it's now in the final stages of production.

Well, congratulations on that, John. I look forward to reading it. And I will ask you on behalf of our Director of Space Policy at the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer, who, as you know, he and Jason Callahan do with me our monthly Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio. I happen to know that Casey is looking forward to talking to you about that book once he's had a chance to read it. So I hope you'll rejoin us on Planetary Radio in just a few weeks. I look forward to it, Matt. Space program historian and policy expert John Logsdon. The Penguin Book of Outer Space

Exploration is available in all the usual places, and we will have a signed copy to give away on next week's show. Time again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. He also runs our education and outreach department and has other jobs, other duties as may be assigned. But we know and love him because he joins us every week here to tell us about the night sky. Right? Hi, Matt. How are you doing? I'm doing well.

Right? Hi, Matt. How are you doing? I'm doing well. I'm looking forward to my vacation, which is why, sad music, we won't have a new contest this week because I won't be around to pick the winner and record about it with you. I have to prerecord the show. So sorry, folks, but we will be back in the following week's show, next week's show. I know how much you look forward to it. But we will have a winner to announce in just moments.

But first, tell us what's up. The evening sky, still playing with planets. You can still maybe check out Venus, but you got to check it out soon after sunset, really low in the west. Don't confuse it with Jupiter, which is higher up in the west. Venus is lower to the lower right. Jupiter should be pretty easy to see in the early evening, and if you rotate towards the south, you can pick up Saturn looking yellowish, and farther to your left, farther south, is Mars, which is dimming, so check it out, but it's still looking like a very bright reddish star.

We move on to this week in space history, 1957, first artificial satellite in space, Sputnik 1. One of the topics that I talked with John Logsdon about moments ago on this radio show is we talked about the earliest days of the space age. Well, good job. Yeah, thank you. It was a really fun conversation and a good book. Good. He knows stuff, a lot of stuff. He really does.

I don't know where he puts it all. All right, we move on to Random Space Fact. And you are getting compliments. I'll have one for you in a moment about the intro to Random Space Fact. That's amazing. I don't know. Well, I know you, Matt, have seen these spiffy pictures coming from little tiny rover hoppers from the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft on an asteroid.

They call them rovers, but they hop. spacecraft on an asteroid. They call them rovers, but they hop. They hop around using a thing inside that spins kind of like a turntable, creates torque. Well, they're not very big. Minerva II, Roman numeral, 1A and 1B, you could hold them in your hand, at least if you have a big hand. And I was trying to look at analogies for this. Two and a third is bigger in diameter than a hockey puck, but about three times higher. It's kind of a small cheese wheel size. It's that hockey puck shape. That's the one that Jason Davis likes, the cheese wheel shape. But I have found the ultimate analogy. Actually, it's not because you have to happen to be familiar with it. Turns out there's a thing called a seven-inch cheesecake.

These are about seven inches or 18 centimeters in diameter. They even make them about three inches thick, which is about seven centimeters thick. about 7 centimeters thick. And so, yeah, for those of you who enjoy making or eating 7-inch cheesecakes, just imagine two of them flipping their way around, taking pictures on an asteroid. That's the Hayabusa 2 hoppers. Well, at least the ones that are down now, they're about to release a mascot lander,

which is kind of like a big shoebox size. It comes from the Germans and the French. And then they've got another mascot 2-2, I'm sorry, Minerva 2-2, which is a bigger, you know, stacking some cheesecakes on top of each other. Anyway, what do you have to say about seven inch cheesecakes, Matt? I'm wondering what anyone else is having for dessert. What do you have to say about seven-inch cheesecakes, Matt? I'm wondering what anyone else is having for dessert. It's almost lunchtime.

I got to figure out where I can go score some cheesecake. Of course, I'll have to tell them, I'm sorry, that's not the right diameter. Right. Well, maybe if you give it to them in metric. We are ready to take care of the contest that we started two weeks ago, even if we're not going to have a new one this time. All right. We asked you, what is the tallest mountain on Ceres? Discovered, of course, by the Dawn spacecraft. Tallest mountain on Ceres. How'd we do? I'm going to give this to you with the emphasis that was applied, not by our winner, but just one that I want to start with, Ian Liu in Carson, California. Ahuda Mons!

How exactly did he convey that on the web? Big type and four exclamation points. And he says right after that, a mountain so much more serious than I am. Seriously, seriously. You're breaking up. You're breaking up. All right. Here's our real winner.

It's Robert Johansson. Robert Johansson in Bergen, Norway. Another of our many Scandinavian listeners. Something I'm very proud of. He also said Ahunamans, which actually, did I even ask you? Is that correct? Ahunamons, as far as I know. It's no passing thing.

It's that problem-free mountain on a series. Robert, you are going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, So Robert, you are going to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt, which you can check out at chopshopstore.com in the Planetary Society store. By the way, they have an Indiegogo campaign going on at Chop Shop. It only has about eight days to go as this show is published. He's bringing back the historic robotic spacecraft posters that are just gorgeous. We have some on the wall at the Planetary Society. It's an Indiegogo campaign, great rewards for backers, and you can check it out at chopshopstore.com. Also, of course, a 200-point itelescope.net account from that worldwide

nonprofit network of telescopes. Robert can donate that to a charity, to needy kids if he wants, or he can use it himself, which I think is perfectly fine. And the last of those codes for a free download of Distant Suns VR. That is Distant Suns Virtual Reality, the astronomy app supreme

that is only for iOS devices. So hopefully, Robert, you're dealing with maybe listening to this on an iOS or iOS device. I've got some other stuff. Joel Lecter in Montreal, Quebec. He also had a Hoonamons, but he wants to thank you. He wants to thank Don, and I assume by extension the entire Don team for this discovery. Yes, they did an amazing job orbiting not just one object, but two objects,

and providing a look into the weird nature of Ceres, like the four to five kilometer high mountain standing alone, Ahunamons. Anarahari Rao out of Sugarland, Texas, where everybody rides the express. He says, since Ceres is named after the Roman goddess of corn and harvest, they named the tallest peak after a harvest festival celebrated by a certain tribe in eastern India. That's Ahuna. Ahuna. All right, you can stop now.

Martin Hajoski in Houston, Texas. All right, you can stop now. Martin Hajoski in Houston, Texas. He says, you may know this mountain by its more common name, the Big Ahuna. Rad dude. Surf's up. Surf's up. It's under the surface, but the surf's up on series.

Finally, from Adam Ladek, he says, with volcanic activity consisting of salty water and mud, if it's a cryovolcano, I wonder if many would consider this a good location for a spa. It's on the chilly side. Lack of air is going to be kind of a drag, too. Love the podcast, he goes on to say, and the increasingly creative introduction to Random Space Fact. Well, thank you. And that's it. No contest, but remember, we'll have another one next week, and we'll have the winner from a week ago. So I think we're done.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about whether pillows sometimes call to you, because they do call to me. Thank you, and good night. Oh, it is a siren song, isn't it? It is indeed. That's a weary Bruce Fentz. Crash upon the rocks of our beds.

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 historical members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan,

Ad Astra.