Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Looking Back, Looking Forward with the Planetary Society All-Stars

Episode Date: January 3, 2018

Mat’s first-ever four-way conversation with Jason Davis, Casey Dreier and Emily Lakdawalla reviews the biggest 2017 events in space exploration and provides their predictions of what to look for in the new year.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Looking back, looking forward with the Planetary Society All-Stars, 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. Happy New Year, all. The celebration continues at the Planetary Society with three of my colleagues. I asked Senior Editor Emily Lakdawalla, Digital Editor Jason Davis, and Director of Space Policy Casey Dreyer to join me for a review of 2017 and their predictions of what to watch for in 2018. It's a nice long conversation, followed by a special edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts. Bruce has his own highlights to talk about and a new space trivia contest, of course. Welcome, everybody. I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me to do this before. Emily, I will give you the credit because

I was already thinking of talking to you, Jason Davis, and Casey Dreyer individually, but it was such a good idea to just get everybody together and we'll have a nice juicy conversation. And no one says anything. Oh, radio host's worst nightmare. Yeah, I blame this one on the host, let's say. All in favor? Let's go into it. And we'll begin with 2017, quite logically, looking back at the year that was. So the way we're going to do this is we'll get to each of you and your top stories, top topics for 2017. And of course, I encourage the other two of you to jump in with your additions to the discussion. Emily, I think we can start with you.

What's the first thing you wanted to talk about as you look back at the year that was? Well, I think it's pretty clear that the most significant event of last year was a bittersweet one. It was the end at long last of the Cassini mission at Saturn. It definitely wasn't a sad event because the spacecraft acquired so much really cool data between the rings and Saturn before the end. And then because we knew exactly when the end was going to happen, there was this reunion of all the scientists and engineers and even the media who had covered the mission for the last 14 or more years at JPL as the thing was coming to a

close. It was kind of a happy occasion. It was like the kind of family reunion that happens around the death of an elderly member of the family, much loved in time. I sure have to agree with that. I was so thrilled to first be at Caltech with those big outdoor screens and then go to JPL. And two former leaders of NASA in tears as I spoke to them for the radio show. It was that kind of a day. Jason? Hey, Emily, I was curious, where does Cassini rank for you in terms of sad death of spacecraft? Which I know you probably have a list that you continually update. But no, I'm curious, this was like a flagship outer planets mission. Where does it fall in for you on sad end of missions?

It is more sad than some, not because of it ending in itself, but because there isn't another flagship mission like it that's been launched to carry on the tradition. Forever, it seems, at least since before I was born, which is my definition of forever, there have been outer planet flagships. There were the pioneers, and then as the pioneers exited the solar system, the voyagers were on their way. Then there was Galileo and then Cassini. And Juno is doing really interesting stuff at Jupiter, but it's not the big flagship missions. And I don't know, maybe Casey can tell me if I'm too attached to flagships, but it's

definitely a little sad to have this giant of outer planets exploration, the whole series come to an end. Yeah, I love flagships. I share your sadness. Flagships are the best. I wish we had more of them. And it's totally true.

It's not even just flagships because now we're finally at least making a new flagship, the Europa Clipper. But even the Clipper is a different kind of flagship, right? Cassini is almost the last in the line of a certain type of flagship, like the big, meaty, school bus-sized, bell-and-whistle spacecraft that NASA now avoids making because they always go over budget by a billion dollars. And now they're doing more of the, I would call them, leaner style of flagship where you have your Curiosity rover that only goes over budget by $800 million. Or, you know, your Clipper is along the lines of this as well. Your $2 billion-ish flagship, which is, that's a lot of money.

But Cassini was a $3.5 billion mission or so, plus whatever contribution ESA had on top of that. It's an end of an era. So you don't think that we'll see the likes of Cassini again, or at least not for the foreseeable future? Definitely not for the foreseeable future, because we have that pretty much mapped out at this point. Maybe with the exception of the Europa lander, at least as currently conceived, but that mission is definitely not happening as it is conceived yet. So that would be the only real hope for that. The difference is this is all in planetary science. You look at astrophysics, there's your meaty flagship right there, JWST. And you look at

the cost and trade-off of something like that where, okay, you can do an $8 billion flagship, but just don't do anything else for 10 years. You know, you can choose one. And certainly Curiosity and rovers of that like, like the 2020 rover, those are flagship missions. They just crawl around on a planet instead of heading out of the solar system. Yeah, well, they're also cheap, right? They're, they're, they're, quote unquote, cheaper flagships. They're $2 billion. They're the low end of flagships. And they are running those in a much different type of way. Cassini was much more in the tradition of your Voyagers where you just, you know, even Cassini had to make compromises, right? You didn't have a scan platform.

You had all these issues that they had to survive its own series of cost cuts at the beginning that Emily could talk far more about than I could. The idea that you would just have a giant, chunky mission that was going to be there for decades with everybody getting a piece of it, your Christmas tree mission, right? You know, hang these ornamentation of scientific instruments on it. That is no longer as much of an expectation, particularly for outer planets.

Emily, before we leave Cassini, the science will continue to flow though, right? Absolutely. There's still another year at least left in the science mission where all the scientists get funded to continue doing research and to archive the data and make it available for future generations of scientists. Before we go on to your second topic, I need to mention the obvious, which is that, of course, if you go to planetary.org and review the blog entries by all three of our guests, you will see coverage of everything that we're going to talk about in much greater detail. This is no more than a quick review of 2017. And then, as I said, eventually we're going to look forward to 2018. So Emily, what's number two on your list? Well, number two is definitely the science mission of Juno at Jupiter. It's the leaner kind of flagship mission, a solar powered mission to Jupiter, the first one of those. And it's been doing a lot of really interesting science on Jupiter's interior that's really hard to explain.

I took a crack at it after the American Geophysical Union meeting to talk about how they figured out how deep Jupiter's winds go into its atmosphere. And the answer to that question is 3,000 kilometers. It's a little esoteric, though, which is why it's really fantastic that they included a camera, a small camera on the Juno payload that is sized in order to take the first really beautiful full globe images onto Jupiter's north and south poles. And those images have really rewarded. We have these really cool circumpolar cyclones that they're seeing at the poles. There's a little cluster of five of them dancing around in a sort of pentacle kind of arrangement at the South Pole and eight of them at the North Pole. It's weird that there are

different numbers. The images are just stunning and the data come down and are posted immediately on the web for amateurs to have fun with and make beautiful art with. So it's been a real fun mission to follow this year. Can I just jump in here and say, Emily, it was one of my highlights that did not happen in the space world. But one of my company organizational highlights was reading through that article you referenced and telling you all the things I didn't understand. And you being very patient and editing the article to at least bring it up to my level of knowledge. So I hope some of the rest of our readers were able to follow along too,

because it really is fascinating. It's one of those missions that everyone loves the pretty pictures, but when it comes to the actual science that it's doing, it seems a little more, like you said, esoteric. It's hard to kind of follow along. But after reading that article and going through it with you, I was like, oh, wow, this is really cool. There's some really awesome discoveries being made here. So yeah, if anyone listening hasn't read that article, definitely go check it out.

And even though we've talked about it before, more proof of the importance of having a camera on a mission, right? JunoCam, the one that was supposedly just there for the public, which has ended up doing much more. Absolutely. And that's a general finding among space missions across the solar system. You know, this year, the VMC camera on Mars Express, which is a tiny little webcam of a camera, it's a lousy camera, actually got promoted to being a full science instrument. They're doing science on the high hazes that the camera can see around the limb of Mars. So I think I'm a huge advocate for just including no matter how small, no matter how relatively simple, uncalibrated even, although it's good if they calibrate it, you can still do great science

with just about any camera on a spacecraft. Well, somewhere Bruce Murray is smiling down upon us. What's third on your list? Well, Mars. Mars was busy. There were seven spacecraft at Mars operating this year. And we had the two rovers operating on the surface through the Martian winter, which makes their activity a little less nimble

because they have to spend more of their energy warming their motors before they can do anything. Opportunity was able to continue toodling down Perseverance Valley and studying this truly ancient gully type feature on a rim of a crater on Mars. And Curiosity drove toward and then climbed on top of Vera Rubin Ridge, this really interesting topographic feature that you can see from space that looks very different from the rocks around it. There's a signature of hematite, which is a water-bearing mineral or a mineral that forms in liquid water on this spot. But what's been interesting is that Curiosity without its drill has not been able to really tell the difference between these rocks

and the ones that it's crawled across before. They're definitely redder, but in terms of the chemical elements that are present, they're not so different. And so we're really hoping that next year the rover is going to get its drill back and be able to drill into these rocks and tell us more about their mineralogy. Oh, but that's just the rovers and there's orbiters at Mars. An orbiter arrived at Mars. That was ExoMars, the trace gas orbiter from ESA. They haven't done much science yet. They're in their aerobraking phase, and that's going to end in March, and we'll have another science mission operating at Mars as of March. How much longer can we expect opportunity to be crawling around on the red planet? That's an interesting question, because there's really nothing

obviously limiting its life. It's a single string on many things, and it's got two slightly sticky wheels. And if it really loses a wheel like Spirit did, it's going to be dramatically slowed down. But Opportunity's future is really limited by those kinds of random things breaking. It's possible that Opportunity could survive indefinitely. It can even survive longer than Curiosity. Who knows what's going to happen? I would love that if Opportunity was still going when the nuclear battery on Curiosity finally dies down. It would just be the ultimate success. Steve Squires would be chuckling from whatever advanced age he'd be running that mission from. That might top Cassini in terms of the saddest end of mission when 20, 30 years from

now, Opportunity finally gives out. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter or Odyssey have been operating at Mars for a very long time now. They're pretty ancient, as is opportunity. And those missions, the likeliest ending for them is that suddenly they'll stop talking to Earth. And you won't get that opportunity to gather all the scientists and media together and see the mission off. It'll just be one day you don't hear from them and they spend a month trying to make contact. And then after a couple more months, they declare the mission over. And that's a much sadder ending than Cassini's ending was. And of course, we went through exactly this with Spirit, where they kept trying for more than a month, right?

Yep, pretty much. Casey, before we leave this, I'll throw an unexpected one at you. What is sort of the attitude toward Mars exploration, robotic Mars exploration as Washington, D.C., the Beltway looks at all of these tremendous successes? Interesting way to put it. I think Mars is taken for granted in a certain level because of just the enormous success that we've had. And we've internalized in a certain sense, this expectation that, oh, NASA is just there. A lot of people, I think, forget that it takes time and money, maybe more saliently, to make these missions, to design them, to launch them, and then to get them there in the first place. We're currently experiencing this renaissance of

our understanding of the red planet, largely because of investments that were made more than a decade ago. The current Mars exploration program, Opportunity, Wind Spirit was going Spirit, Odyssey, MRO, and even Maven and Curiosity really, were all basically designed and planned back in the early 2000s. And that's the vast majority of the US fleet. There's not that much more coming along. We are working, obviously, on the Mars 2020 rover, but we've been really focused on ground missions and we have not committed to and probably will not commit to a new orbiter mission for an indeterminate future. The fundamental problem is that we've been so successful sometimes at a

place, you forget that that requires constant engagement, constant support. And then you have other parts of the solar system, namely the, I would say, the ocean worlds, you know, battling for public attention, congressional attention, funding, and all these other discoveries you can make. So, you know, Mars, I think, is just widely respected. People really like the missions that they see, but there's a little bit of this fatigue in taking it for granted. Jason Davis, it's your turn. What's the top of your greatest hits list for 2017? This is kind of one that I thought flew under the radar a little bit, and it's still a little under the radar, and that's NASA's announcement of the Deep Space Gateway. So this is a small space station, just a few modules that would be in orbit around

the moon and be used as the proving ground for all of NASA's activities in lunar orbit as they slowly start branching out into the rest of the solar system. And of course, this was initially meant when it was conceived and meant to be more of a waypoint on the way to Mars. And now with the Trump administration directing NASA to actually participate in some fashion in landing on the moon, it's difficult to see exactly what role this will play. And it looks like we'll be around the moon for a little bit longer than NASA originally intended. But anyway, the reason this is such a big deal to me was that throughout the entire Obama administration, once the Mars goal was announced and once the goal was again, as we've said so many times over NASA's history, to go to Mars, to send humans to Mars, they faced a lot of criticism that there really wasn't any plan. And that was fair criticism. There was not exactly like a fleshed out timeline that said, you know, here in the next 20 years, here's exactly what we're going to do to get people on Mars.

Naturally, NASA took a lot of heat for that. And it was really a difficult situation for some of the leadership. They're kind of stuck in this rock and a hard place. If they announce a definitive plan, people are going to want to know how much it costs. And then once you lay a cost number down there, you open up the program to criticism. So they were kind of playing the long game for a long time and being intentionally vague about some of the ways that we'd get out to Mars, starting with these kind of proving ground flights in lunar orbit. But then during a NASA Advisory Council meeting, Bill Gerstenmaier, the Associate Administrator for NASA's Human Spaceflight Program, he lays out, they've got this plan for a deep space gateway. And it's still pretty abstract, to be totally fair. A lot of the details are not there.

For NASA level planning, it seemed to me at the time to be fairly fair. A lot of the details are not there. For NASA level planning, it seemed to me at the time to be fairly ambitious to actually put themselves out there and say, this is what we want to do. There's still a lot of questions around this. It may get canceled and it hasn't actually got a budget line item. It's very much unclear how this will play out going forward. But just the fact that they put that out there, to me, was a big step that they hadn't taken before. Yeah, the Deep Space Gateway, I'm glad you brought this up, Jason, because this is a part of NASA planning. I think it's really interesting that you noted that they brought it up, but it hasn't quite fully gelled. It adds a step that is notably can be

applied to a mission to Mars or a return to the lunar surface. So I think NASA is getting better, at least on the human side of programmatically developing a plan that is flexible. This is always like this idea of the flexible path, but more in the sense of flexible path of the changing political winds. Deep space gateway, sure, that's leading the world back to the moon. NASA, we're great. We're happy to do this, Mr. President. Going Space Gateway, sure, that's leading the world back to the moon. NASA, we're great. We're happy to do this, Mr. President. Going to Mars, sure, Mr. President or Mrs. President, we're happy to take the Lunar Gateway and send people to Mars from that. It's the same thing. Let's just do it. This idea of trying to build a stable program that can last over administrations,

regardless of what the ultimate goal for the direction of the human spaceflight program is, is a really critical thing. Because notably, this Deep Space Gateway relies on and really, I think, depends on the space launch system being in service to launch chunks of it toward the moon, right? And so you're building the reason for the space launch system, which is going to survive anyway, as it goes forward into this next administration. And they need something to develop. They have all these companies competing to say, you know, we can use old space station parts or we can use our inflatable modules or whatever. And NASA, I think, was just trying to find a way to fit its existing plans and programs into whatever shifting directions that we have out

there. It's kind of NASA's always in this position where these decisions that they make seem sometimes like they don't make sense. And they can be maddening in a way you say, why are they doing this one particular thing. But on the other hand, a lot of times it's driven by the political situation behind it. So you can totally understand why they're making the decisions they make. And I think that's just the reality of NASA's human spaceflight program these days is just kind of being stuck in this impossible position sometimes. Yeah, because they can't announce a program without having it be effectively approved all the way up the food chain, right? So the fact that they're even talking about a deep space gateway,

this publicly means that it's been approved in a wide number of ways, you know, through the Office of Management and Budget, probably up to some White House level. They really announced this without having a NASA administrator to represent this. So there's something that there must be some sort of wide agreement, at least on some level, to be talking about this. Jason, moving on, we may only be a few weeks from the first sports car in space. Yes. I know they're strong. Where do we begin, Jason? I was like, wow, where do we start with that one? A triumph for science. I'm cheating because that's looking forward to 2018. Before we jump into the sports car in space, I'll just talk about SpaceX in general in

2017. And I think the big news for them in 2017 was that they launched 18 successful missions. And I think I have that count right. I had to look it up again before we talked here. This is just kind of unheard of. I mean, they've really kind of found their footing and moved into this fully operational mode that they've been talking about for all these years, where they're just going to be launching missions rapidly, landing all the boosters successfully, and just really getting kind of into the zone of the bread and butter of their operation, the way they've envisioned it, to finally fund the rest of their business, essentially fund their ambitions through the more boring stuff, which is placing, you know, commercial payloads and whatnot into orbit. And this year, they also had their first flight proven booster, they call it the reused booster fly, they got two launch pads operational again, you know, they were down a launch pad after the 2016 explosion that damaged

Pad 40. So they got Pad 39A, the old shuttle pad flying again, then they got Pad 40 back up and running again. They just recently flew a Dragon capsule that had already been used before to the International Space Station. So this was a big year for them, undoubtedly. And as you mentioned, they're going to maybe have an even bigger year starting at the beginning of 2018. They're doing so incredibly well. I'm reminded of the not quite immortal Han Solo, his immortal words, don't get cocky, kid. It's an interesting question because I used to feel the same way. Like I wasn't, I was never sure exactly what their internal strategy was. When they first announced, when Elon Musk first announced,

they were going to launch this car into space. I said, that's it. I have to learn more about what goes on in his brain and what goes on in the company's brain. So I got the 2015 biography. It's a semi-authorized biography by Ashley Vance of Elon Musk and read through it. It's really fascinating. And I would highly recommend it to anybody that wants to get inside Elon Musk's brain a little bit better. And he makes these decisions that seem rash and that seem very aggressive. And their PR strategy seems to be just him tweeting. And, you know, you can't really tell what's going on internally. He has a plan internally. Like I said, everything seems to be going towards their eventual goal of getting to Mars. But it's hard

to say whether or not anyone actually is making sure that, you know, everything launches successfully and they don't have another disaster. It seems like they've got everything under control, but it's really opaque and we don't know what's going on behind the scenes for a lot of this. Casey, as we look at SpaceX's successes in 2017, is there more confidence in the government and very importantly, in the military, that this is a company that they can rely on to get their stuff up into orbit? Yeah, I'd say yes, absolutely. I think they still need to demonstrate a longer term success rate for their flights. I mean, the last failure was in 2016, right, Jason? It's kind of hard to believe, yeah, that it was only that long ago.

Right. So, I mean, they've had 18 successful launches this year. That's, you know, it's honestly an amazing number. That's more than most nations launch. That goes a long way, but, you know, they're competing against ULA that has had, what now, like 118 in a row successful launches. Ariane rocket has never failed. There's a reason why governments spend a lot on launch capability for their really high, very expensive security assets, because it doesn't matter how much it costs, because they don't want them to fail ever. And to get that extra 0.01% reliability rate, you're spending a significant increased amount of money to ensure that. So SpaceX has got just time to put in, but I think they've demonstrated it. I'm

honestly just astonished to see how well they did this year. And when Shotwell has claimed that next year they want to increase that flight rate by 50%, which is launching almost every week and a half. So we'll see if they pull that off. That'd be astonishing. Jason, in the interest of equal time, anything to say about all of SpaceX's competition out there? At least, you know, the traditional companies have been mentioned a little bit. ULA just came up. But what about places like Blue Origin? Yeah, the rest of the commercial players of SpaceX's ilk or similar to them were a little quieter this year. Blue Origin was regrouping to get ready for the debut of their new capsule, which they just launched at the end of this year, their new Shepard, the crew capsule

version with the big windows. So that was a successful test flight. But other than that, they didn't really have any big public news this year. And Dream Chaser, the little miniature space shuttle that everyone's kind of enamored with, myself included. It's hard not to like that thing. It went on a glide flight this year. So they've all been testing, but not a lot of public milestones the way SpaceX has. And that's from Sierra Nevada Corporation, of course. I'd say with Blue Origin, you also had, they're really staying in the competition with their engine, the BE-4 for the next ULA rocket, right, for the Vulcan.

And they're really giving Aerojet Rocketdyne a run for their money. So that, I mean, I think that is this maybe more subtle, somewhat remarkable statement of the capability of this growing private space industrial workforce that we have in the U.S. workforce that we have in the U.S. Emily, before we leave this, I want to at least get a word in for other nations which are aggressively pursuing new advanced launch vehicles. And I know you follow what's happening in India, though I don't know how much you look at the rockets that they're developing. I know you follow pretty closely the missions there. Are you impressed with what India is accomplishing? Well, I think impressed is the wrong question. I mean, India has an incredibly proven track record. Not only do they routinely launch lots and lots of spacecraft, they routinely launch lots and lots of spacecraft on a single rocket. They have a new one coming online that will have even more power, and they're planning to launch

next year one of their next lunar missions, Shandrayaan-2, on their larger version of the geosynchronous launch vehicle. So, you know, India is definitely a power in the Earth orbiting space industry, and they're working at becoming so in more distant space. China had a setback in the failure of its Long March 5 rocket, which is unfortunately looking like it's going to delay their robotic lunar sample return mission. So they're pressing forward with that. Hopefully we'll see a demonstration of a successful long March 5 rocket launch this year. Jason, I think you've got one more on your list. I'd be remiss not to mention SLS. Over the past year, they considered briefly adding crew to the

first flight. It seemed like that was met as universally a bad idea, but an interesting thought experiment nonetheless. You wanted to launch in this decade, was the question. So we had that. They quickly scrapped that idea and stayed on course for the first robotic flight test around the moon. And then we got the news that not much of a surprise here, but the program was delayed again. So now we're looking at not 2018 for a launch, but probably 2019, very late in the year, possibly at that for the first flight of SLS. We could fill a whole podcast talking about SLS, I'm sure if you got Casey going and me going. No, let's talk about this.

I would like to dwell on this for a second. Sorry, because this is important. I mean, this is the biggest single program in NASA right now. But I mean, I guess, yeah, I think like in terms of just single amount of annual expenditure, two billion a year on this rocket. That doesn't even count. The mobile launch tower is funded out of ground systems, which is a separate account. The rocket, it's not even necessarily that they had manufacturing issues with the rocket itself.

I remember we went, Jason and I went last year in 2016 and looked at pieces that they said were flight ready, which ultimately were not because they were rushing ahead with these things. And so they have to remanufacture a bunch of pieces. Jason, I just want you to talk about what's really core of the delay here. That's so hard to pin down. It seems to me just a cascade of small problems. I think that's what I ultimately wrote in the last article I did about this. Like you said, the manufacturing delay and then the tornado that hit at Michoud, although maybe that was a tornado of convenience

for them in some way, because they could tack a couple months onto the schedule and say that the tornado disrupted things a little bit. Yeah, there was the issue with that. There was the issue with the ground systems delaying things. There's still Orion that you have to factor into all this with the service module that still isn't finished and shipped back to the US for testing yet. And once it gets here, it has to go through testing up the Glenn Research Center before heading down to KSC. So in some ways, I don't think it's surprising that there have been so many problems. Although honestly, I would have expected it to fly before now. But if you historically look back at other NASA programs like Constellation that had similarly a bunch

of small problems that ended up amounting to one big delay over time. The space shuttle was the same way. I wouldn't say anyone didn't expect this. Falcon Heavy, even the same way, originally supposed to launch in 2013. But for NASA, it even looks worse because they just, like you said, spend so much money on this based on kind of the slower, more bureaucratic way that NASA has to do business. It's just kind of a waterfall of problems that have built up over time. And we're going to see the consequences of this throughout the next decade. That's what I think one of the most important stories, I'll just highlight, I think that you wrote this here,

was the consequences to the Europa Clipper mission based on the fact that at this point the tower to launch the block 1b version of the sls which you need that extra upper stage kick to go to direct to jupiter won't be ready in time to support a 2022 or was it even a 2023 launch window for the clipper like it's it becomes veryuous. And that would be your first launch of the Block 1B. So the very first launch of the rocket, you'd stick a $2.5 billion science mission on top of. You start to pile up.

And then when do you fit in the launches for your deep space gateway into this if you can only launch at most once a year? Yeah, yeah. I'm curious, Emily, how do you feel about Europa Clipper hopping onto the first high powered upper stage of SLS and getting a ride towards Europa? I don't feel good about Europa launching on SLS. I think if I'm anybody in the Europa mission, I'm designing it to be launching on a smaller rocket. And if I get that ride, I'm really happy.

And I know that I'll get there a few years earlier, but you just can't count on it at this point. Except that it is written into law that it must ride on the SLS. So that is an interesting design parameter. Saying that makes you sound so naive. I'm just saying what US law says. I'm just tossing that out there. I don't know. I'd actually be interested if that is the only mission that has ever been, by law, told to ride on one rocket after

or another. Who goes to jail if the Clipper's on a different rocket? The congressional marshal comes in and kicks down the door and drags out the deputy administrator, I think, as a lesson to the rest of them. Matt, it's interesting that question I asked when I was writing that story Casey talked about. I

asked our policy team, yeah, what happens if they just ignored that? And I think it was Jason Callahan who said, well, they could just pull all of the funding for the program. But I have a hard time seeing exactly how that would happen. It is an interesting question, though, like what happens if you don't follow the law? Yeah, not the strongest enforcement mechanism. Sounds like we're into policy questions. So, Casey, since that's your bailiwick, would you finish off 2017 for us? Yeah, well, my my top stories really all kind of you can sum down into that we had a transition of power in the administration and Congress, honestly, in the United States in 2017. So Donald Trump became president on January 20. He brought with him, you know, a whole new White House and theoretically would have appointed

a bunch of new people into positions of power at NASA. But that's what actually one of my top things is that we do not have a new NASA administrator. They didn't even nominate their NASA administrator until September. They've had a confirmation hearing. There has been no vote, which is pretty astonishing. This is way past the previous record of an acting administrator temporarily leading the agency. You know, if they do end up voting on the current nominee, it probably won't be until pretty much a year after Charlie Bolton left. So that's pretty amazing. And so NASA has been in this weird transition where they are fine to continue their existing programs, kind of talk

about what they've been doing, but they don't have the political leadership that is empowered to represent, theoretically, the White House's priorities in space. We just actually got a nominee for the chief financial officer, no hearing on him yet. So we have this vacuum of power at the top of NASA. The other big issues were we have a space council now, National Space space council that has filled some of that leadership gap, where we have Vice President Mike Pence leads this council of top cabinet members in the White House, mixed with top industry people. And then Scott Pace, everyone's favorite director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. We've talked about this a lot on our podcast

for the Space Policy Edition. And they've been busy going about literally making new policy. They released Space Directive Number One, which told NASA to redirect its efforts of sending humans to lead the way back to the moon. That was a big step, though, as we've kind of insinuated here. There's no real details on how they will do that yet. There's no real details on how they will do that yet. You've had this kind of strange mix of NASA being a visual priority of the administration. They've had something like three, is that right, Jason, signing ceremonies with President Trump, signing some memorandum or another about NASA, creating the Space Council, creating the directive. They had the first Space Council meeting.

Honestly, they like it. At least Pence seems to really like the space program. And that's great. But we haven't seen a commensurate implementation yet at a deeper operational level through the lack of an administrator. So it's just unheard of for, as far as I can remember, an administration to be this involved publicly with NASA doing all these public things. And yet, as you point out, no NASA administrator, very unclear how the things are going to play out. It's hard to tell. I wonder if NASA is overall pleased with that, if things are going about as good as it could be going, at least they're not making huge budget cuts or what the general feeling is on whether that's good for them or not. Casey, the obvious question here is why? Why has it become so difficult to pick the new NASA administrator? there are a couple things. One is that the Trump administration is just historically very slow in nominating people to serve in the federal government. So that's not just unique to NASA with a lot of federal agencies have taken a long time to get confirmations. A lot are still empty. Again, we a lot of just people just haven't been nominated. We don't I don't know exactly why that

is. It's a mix of finding people who serve with the right backgrounds and people who have, you know, no conflicts of interest. There's a variety of paperwork that goes on there. Just it's not a priority, I think is fair to say for a lot of these agencies. And then you have an increasingly vitriolic partisanship in Congress. Jim Bridenstine, who's been nominated now, who has said some very Tea Party-esque political statements in the past. So the entire Democratic coalition in the Senate is voting against him, which is very rare to have an asset administrator have such a partisan trigger in the Senate. So you've had 48 senators vote against him. Marco Rubio, who we said bad things about

back in the primaries of the last presidential election, is not too keen to support him. He's been a little coy with how whether he will or not. And so you're getting down to a pretty slim margin in the Senate. And they just wanted to avoid that. So you know, and also the people in the Senate, they can control when they vote when they hold hearings. So they're slow walking him. It's a mess. So we'll see how it goes. I think the deputy is going to be an important nomination whenever that happens. They had originally had a deputy to nominate who pulled out due to financial conflicts. So it's, I'd like to hear Jason's opinion on this. I think generally people are pretty happy with Robert Lightfoot in the acting administrator role. He's doing a pretty good job for what they need him to do right now.

I have not heard any big criticisms of him. And I think they could have just nominated him to continue onward and done pretty well with that decision. But, you know, that wouldn't have been a more politically motivated decision like someone like Jim Brine's side would be. But yeah, I think Lightfoot, all things considered, seems to be pretty well liked and keeping the ship afloat while they're in this transitional phase. My Planetary Society colleagues Casey Dreyer, Jason Davis, and Emily Lakdawalla. We'll finish off 2017 and move to the new year in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. 2018. The Senate, however, has proposed to cut both. You can make your voice heard right now. We've made it easy to learn more if you go to planetary.org slash petition 2017. Thank you.

You can share your passion for space exploration by giving someone a gift membership to the Planetary Society this holiday season or any time of year. Your friend or loved one would join us as we nurture new and exciting science, advocate for space, and educate the world. The gift of space starts at planetary.org forward slash give space. That's planetary.org forward slash give space. Because, come on, it's space. Welcome back to Planetary Radio.

I'm Matt Kaplan, taking you back to this first-ever four-way conversation with three of my Planetary Society colleagues. You've heard them many times before, and you probably read their work at planetary.org, or you should. Jason Davis is our digital editor and embedded light sail project reporter. Casey Dreyer is the director of space policy. We'll pick up the conversation with senior editor Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, some of your best friends are scientists, I hear. What is your sense in the science community regarding developments in space policy? What's coming out of Washington? Well, I think more scientists are kind of academically focused on their own affairs.

And I think a lot of them are just kind of keeping their heads down right now. There's a lot of fear of raising profile because there are a lot of federal agencies that are getting very deeply cut, seeing a lot of changes. And so they're just, I think, in general, kind of keeping their heads tucked into their little caves and hoping things will just keep puttering along as they are. Which is not generally the best way to generate political stability. Yeah, it's true. That's an interesting thing, too. We should mention what hasn't happened yet with regards to NASA.

That was kind of my other thing. I wrote about this in the latest issue of the Planetary Report. During the presidential campaign in 2016, the Trump administration released its only op-ed about space policy that they did. It was just one. And it was written by this guy named Robert Walker, and Peter Navarro is the other one. And they said NASA should not do earth science and earth science should be removed, excised completely. And we need to send humans throughout the entire solar system. Understandably, a lot of people were very worried about what was going to happen to earth science at NASA. And it's been a perennial issue in highly partisan

attacks against earth science because of its relation to climate change which has unfortunately become political as opposed to just scientific and we didn't see earth science undermined at a fundamental level they came out with their first budget for the 2018 fiscal year and it proposed cutting earth science but by five percent so that's actually a very you know it's not good no one wants to cut earth science but in terms of compared to excising it completely, I was very surprised, pleasantly so. You saw NASA's overall budget did the best in terms of its other federal agencies by only getting cut 1%, at least the proposal was. And ultimately, Congress looks ready to not let that happen. If nothing else, it may add money to NASA when it's all said and done here. And we may actually see earth science be completely preserved based on what the Senate does here in the final budget. So we saw a lot of potential disruption with this new administration coming

in, but we have not seen that implemented at least in this first year. And so I think that's important what didn't happen. Yeah, really the only major change, as you pointed out, the Space Policy Directive 1, which, by the way, I would like to meet the person that came up with that name. I don't know whether it was just a last minute idea. Like, what do we call it? Space Policy Directive 1. That makes sense. Or there was, you know, something, some more thought put around it than that. Anyway, all that did, it was just change one paragraph of the Obama era space policy and to essentially cancel the asteroid redirect mission and add lunar landings in there.

And on a short term basis that nothing has changed, that there really hasn't been any major shakeup. We'll have to see what happens when the next budget comes out. But, you know, the first year of the Trump administration really hasn't made any major changes to the human spaceflight program. And you said not even lunar landing. That doesn't even say lunar landings. It just says a return of humans to the moon. It leaves it relatively ambiguous. Emily? You know, I think there's another thing going on in the scientific community, which is realizing that political activism these days, there are several different issues that scientists who want to be political advocates are grappling with all at the same time. And right now, I think other issues are taking people's attention more than just their livelihoods in space. Those are issues of, you know, sexism and racism that scientists look around and see that recognizing really just how white and male a community it is. They're grappling

with all of these sexual harassment allegations. And so people who are active are focusing, I think, a lot on the social aspects of science, more than the political funding aspects of the science. And we also had, of course, the March for Science this year, which was a really interesting demonstration. And Emily, you make a really good point. And I think there's lots of people, I think, beginning to wake up to a lot of fundamental issues. The thing that's always kind of frustrated me with the scientific community, particularly with more of our specific area of politics and policy, is that it's easy to become used to the fact that you get grant funding and these structures exist that you can then tap into to have a livelihood. But I think we're starting to see that we can no longer take these for granted. And there's a lot

of things to no longer take for granted. And some of them are good, like the built-in sexism and racism into these internal structures. We no longer have to take those for granted and people are rightfully starting to change those. And then you have the flip side of that where you have funding structures, political support, and I would say a bipartisan agreement that fundamental research and development is good for the country. I think we're starting to lose that assumption a little bit. And I think a really good encapsulation of this whole idea was at the very end of the year here that we just went through this tax reform bill or tax cut bill, whatever you want to call it, initially in the House version proposed to hammer graduate students

really bad in order to pay for really large tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. They're going to tax the tuition waivers for graduate students. That is an insane idea, but they thought they could get away with it because they didn't think graduate students were politically organized. They didn't think that they would push back. They didn't think that they would be sympathetic on a political scene, in a public scene. It was a really close call that we didn't fundamentally damage the entire workflow or

workforce flow into the future STEM fields that this country so desperately needs by making it financially impossible for wide swaths of the population to not participate in it. That happens because graduate students are so busy doing science that they're not staying politically engaged. And so they were seen as easy pickings. And this is ultimately what happens when scientists keep their heads down. They are perceived to be easy pickings. And that's that old saying in DC, if you're not at the table, you're on the menu.

And that was so clear with the graduate student stuff. And ultimately, I think with March for Science and other things that we're seeing, I'm more hopeful that scientists are going to be more broadly aware and have to, you know, it's too bad that they have to do all this in addition to all their work for science. But being politically aware and at least participatory to a certain degree is going to be increasingly important in order to preserve this level of scientific funding I think we have in this country. It's really interesting that there is change that can still happen.

It's a good reminder that when change happens, it doesn't just passively happen. People have to stand up and do something about it. And that's true in all political spectrums. And I think it's a really positive reminder. You can still have change for good things. There's a lot of power still in how quickly community expectations can change ultimately through sometimes painful but important processes like this. So I think that can you can even stretch that out larger to politically where we are going forward, where we have, you know, a lot of unresolved partisan issues, not to mention a budget that NASA is going to be dealing with. We have a lot of unresolved political issues that

we may have changes coming down the line, I guess we can talk about that going to the future. For 2017, just looking back, it was an important year of transition, if nothing else. And so there was lots of interesting things being set up for the future. If only there was an organization that gave regular folks, that gave people a voice regarding space science and planetary science. That's a good idea. Washington. Someone should start one of those. Yeah.

All right. I'm going to declare 2017 officially closed, although, as I said at the outset, all of these topics that we've been talking about, you can go back into the archives at planetary.org, listen to Planetary Radio, Listen to the Space Policy Edition. And, of course, read the terrific blog post by our three guests today. We're going to move on now to the year that is just getting underway, 2018. And, Emily, let's start with you again. What is your look forward to the coming year?

Well, the first big news is there's a whole lot of launches happening in 2018. There are three headed toward the moon, part of two missions. I already mentioned Chandrayaan-2, which is India's orbiter, lander, and rover, all launching in March. And then China is planning to launch Chang'e-4, which is the engineering copy of Chang'e-3, the highly successful lander and rover. What's different about Chang'e 4 is that they're going to be landing it on the lunar far side, which is a first. In order to make that happen, they have to launch a relay satellite first. The relay satellite will take up a position in a gravitational balance point on the far side of the moon from Earth, where it'll be able to

see Earth and the far side of the surface of the moon at the same time, so that when Chang'e 4 lands and deploys its little rover, the relay satellite will be able to communicate with Earth and hopefully take some really cool pictures. Actually, you know what? Maybe they don't have a camera now that I think about it. It's just a rather small relay satellite. I don't know. We'll see. The Chinese are famous for putting cameras all over their spacecraft. So, I mean, at least it's going to have a deployment camera or something.

It should be able to take something. Let's see. Let's hope. So that's three separate launches to the moon. There's also going to be another launch to Mars, the long-awaited NASA InSight lander, which was delayed for two years because of a problem with its seismometer instrument, is going to be launching in May and landing on November 26th. So it's a launch and a landing in the same year. It's landing in a deliberately chosen to be the most boring possible site on Mars. It's a geophysical lander. So this mission is kind of like Juno, really, where the science is interesting. It's focused on the interior of the planet. Cameras are definitely not the point. It does have a camera, and the camera will show us an unbroken flat landscape, if all goes well. I'm not really sure what to expect from it

this year, other than a dramatic landing and then the slow gathering of data from the InSight lander. There's going to be a launch of the BepiColombo mission to Mercury, which is a joint ESA and JAXA mission. It's actually two spacecraft. And like Messenger before it, it has a very long cruise with multiple flybys of Venus and Mercury before it finally settles into orbit. And then this isn't technically a planetary mission, but I'm just super excited about the Parker Solar Probe, which is going to launch this year, and was going to actually fly right through the solar corona when it does science. It has Venus flybys. I don't really know that much about the spacecraft

or what science it may be able to do, if anything, at Venus, but it'll sure be an event when it flies by Venus, and I'll be keeping on top of that. And I can tell you one thing about it, because we talked about it on the show. Because it has this huge solar shield to protect the spacecraft and its instruments from what else? The sun. They will actually be doing solar sailing. They'll be maneuvering, as have a few other spacecraft, by positioning that sail and using it to control their attitude, which I think is a pretty nice, another proof of concept for solar sailing, which we will be hearing in moments from Jason about LightSail 2. The next big thing this year is going to be two different spacecraft approaching two different near-Earth asteroids

to do two different sample return missions from those asteroids. One of them is NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission, which is approaching the asteroid Bennu. The other one is Hayabusa 2, which is approaching asteroid Ryugu. And they'll be approaching at roughly the same time, beginning sort of the early part of this year, March-ish, June-ish, they should start getting dot-like photos of their future targets. It's August and September that they'll really begin doing approaches. We'll get our first sights of these near-Earth objects. And every time we've ever seen near-Earth asteroids up close, every single one has been unique.

So I really look forward to seeing how Bennu and Ryugu are quite different from each other in any place that we've ever visited before. To cap off the year, New Horizons will finally be approaching its Kuiper Belt target, 2014 MU69, which is a small object, probably about 30 kilometers across. It may well be a duck-shaped kind of binary object like the asteroid, sorry, the comet Triumov-Gerasimenko was, or it could be a close binary. And recent evidence suggests it may have a moon. So it may actually be approaching multiple bodies at the end of this year. The flyby encounter happens right on the New Year's Eve holiday for us

in the US. It's early in the morning of January 1st for Europe and Asia. Yeah, I know. Spacecraft love destroying holidays. You know, the InSight landing is happening the day after the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday here. So holidays are a pain if you're into space. But it will be cool. It will be exciting. It's actually a bigger problem for me that my husband's birthday is on January 1. So that's going to ruin his birthday. But I'm looking forward to it. Meanwhile, there's like 20 other spacecraft active across the solar system, Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter at the Moon, Akatsuki at Venus. As I said, seven spacecraft at Mars. You have Juno at Jupiter, Voyagers off in deep space. It's really, really active out there. There's a lot of science going on.

Emily, do you go through a lot of this in your recent blog post, your annual WhatsApp blog post? I absolutely do, and much more. Can you tell us if there are any milestones in 2018 for the 2020 rover, the next rover that we look forward to setting out on Mars? They're assembling the rover right now at JPL. So it'll be interesting to go check out the viewing gallery at JPL and see all of the different parts for the spacecraft, its cruise stage, its descent stage, start to come together. Oh, let's do better than that. Let's see if they'll let us in in bunny suits again like we did once before with the boss, Bill Nye. If you don't have anything else to add, Jason, we will go on to what you're looking forward to in 2018.

The big event, I should say the big events potentially is that we might start seeing NASA astronauts flying from American soil again, which has not happened since the end of the shuttle program. Both SpaceX and Boeing have potential crewed flights coming up in 2018. They're crewed demo flights. It's looking right now like SpaceX is the most likely company of the two to meet their deadline. They want to do a demo flight of their new spacecraft in April, followed up by a crewed flight later in the year that would visit the ISS. I think it's hard to overstate how big of a deal this will be, especially for a lot of the politicians that have a very sore spot about outsourcing our crewed activities to Russian spacecraft. So that's going to be a big deal to actually see

astronauts down in Florida again after a seven-year gap. Jason, are they going to launch NASA astronauts in that first test flight? Because I know certifying these for NASA astronaut safety is one of the kind of perennial issues that has been identified by the advisory council. Could SpaceX get around that by launching their own people and not having to meet those exact specifications in order to demonstrate a test flight? Good question. I'm not sure about that. But I do know that the original plan was to have one NASA astronaut and one company employed astronaut go on the demo flight. But that is an interesting question,

if they could get around some of those safety requirements by launching their own crew instead of a NASA astronaut. So moving on to other big events down in Florida, as we mentioned earlier, the Falcon Heavy demo flight, the first flight of SpaceX's mythical, it actually does exist. We've seen pictures of it, the Falcon Heavy rocket. This will be the biggest rocket that anyone has successfully flown, if it flies successfully, since the Saturn V. SpaceX has been promising this since 2013. And finally, it's here. Over the holidays, they were rolling it out to the pad and standing it up vertically for some pad fit checks. So if all goes well, they will launch it in January.

Although, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if that slipped a little bit into February or something like that. Elon Musk has given extremely low expectations for this flight. Pretty much all but saying there's a large chance it'll blow up. As we mentioned earlier, and I'd love to get the two of you to weigh in on this. What do we think of Elon Musk launching his SpaceX or his Tesla Roadster on this demo flight, providing it doesn't hit Mars or something like that? I'd love to hear what you guys think. Every time I so much as make a statement of fact about whatever Elon Musk plans to launch on this rocket on Twitter, I just get hounded in by mentions by people who think I'm being overly critical. So I think I'm just going to keep quiet. So go ahead and be critical, Emily.

No, I'm just kidding. See, I have a much smaller Twitter following than Emily's, so I can be critical about it. I think it beats sending a wheel of cheese. Frankly, I think it's a wonderful, romantic PR move. Yeah. And someone pointed out, and I'd really be interested to know this, if Tesla was able to write off some of the flight cost as a marketing event. And I think I could see that being impossible. He said it was his personal car. Is that actually true? That is correct. Yeah, his personal car.

He can take that as a tax write-off. So I talk about this a little bit in our Space Policy Edition podcast this month, and I'm mixed between it's super cool and weird and a perfect example of what it means to have a truly private space company that is run by the whims of one person. But also the flip side of that being is that this is a perfect anecdote for the future history of this current gilded age that we live in, where a billionaire launches his own luxury car on top of his own rocket into space because he has, you know, what else is he going to do? This weird undercurrent, and there's a book I read this year called The Long Space Age, which

looks at the past history of American, particularly private space investment, going back to observatories in the 18th and 19th centuries. There's a point that the author makes about how you see a large explosion of or a large increase in private funding of space exploration when you have periods of high economic inequality. You can really start to think about what it means to see companies like SpaceX, or particularly Blue Origin, which is purely at the largesse of a single powerful billionaire, and what it really says about the society that we're living in. I start to go down that rabbit hole as well. But fundamentally, I get a kick out of it. But there's also this darker side to it that I think we should all at least be aware of. You have a great conversation with the author of that book, The Long Space Age, Alex McDonald. It's the December 1st edition of the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio.

Thanks for the plug. Yeah. Emily? recently has to do with the fact that the American Girl doll company just unveiled that their doll of the year for 2018 is a girl named Luciana Vega, who is a Latina who wants to be an astronaut when she grows up. And it's been done in partnership with NASA. She has like a little NASA ISS spacesuit, EVA spacesuit and everything. It's really amazing. Somebody suggested that they should put a copy of Luciana in the driver's seat of Elon Musk's car when they launched it into space. And I kind of liked that one. I love it. She wants to be the first person on Mars. That's part of her backstory,

as reported just today. To continue for a moment more with the Falcon Heavy, by the time our listeners hear this program, Jason, it's quite possible that the Falcon Heavy will either have successfully or not successfully completed a static test firing. Yeah, that'll be another big event, of course, leading up to the launch itself is that they're going to stand the rocket up on the pad and fire all 27 engines at the same time. There's one aspect to this that hasn't been talked about. I've seen criticism of it in a few corners, but I think it's a legitimate point to make that while this is all SpaceX is doing, if the rocket fails or succeeds, it doesn't matter. It's their

risk. That's not entirely accurate since it's launching from 39A. This is the same pad where crews are supposed to board the Crew Dragon capsule that'll be on top of the Falcon 9 eventually. You know, Elon Musk has hinted like, hey, there's a chance, you know, I hope it gets far enough away from the pad before it blows up so it doesn't damage the pad. Well, what if this thing were to blow up on the pad and cause significant damage to the infrastructure there, that could be a very real threat to NASA's commercial crew program. I think that's an important thing to raise and think about as they're doing this, that there is a little bit of risk in it for NASA. And you can bet that when that thing launches, or even when it's doing its

static test fire, there's going to be some clenched teeth at NASA headquarters watching that and hoping that it all goes well. Yeah, my teeth are clenching already just having heard that. Jason, let's go on to what is going to be, without any doubt, the most important, exciting and significant mission of 2018. Changing the world. Yes, yes. Light sail too. 2018. Changing the world. Yes, yes. LightSail 2. So tied into this whole Falcon Heavy demo news is that if it goes successfully, either the second or the third Falcon Heavy will have LightSail 2 aborted as a secondary payload. We've kind of not talked about LightSail a lot because it's been largely ready to fly for several months and sitting in storage. But if all goes well, that mission will take place hopefully mid-year, early to mid-year 2018, depending on what SpaceX's schedule ends up being.

So yes, very exciting for all the people that supported this mission at the Planetary Society. And where is LightSail 2 right now? It is at Cal Poly, sitting in a storage cabinet in their clean room, all locked away neatly. Can you call it like a space cabinet or something more exciting than a storage cabinet? It's like vacuum sealed in a space ultimate future space storage secure facility or something like that. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. It's certainly not an Ikea cabinet or something like that. Yes. Yeah. It's certainly not an Ikea cabinet or something like that. No, having been, I

have been in that clean room a couple times to watch flight sale tests. It does have glass windows on this cabinet and you look in and you see all this flight hardware and it's just one of those things that just being close to it kind of makes me nervous because I'm like I don't know how many millions of dollars are invested in this little cabinet here. But

yeah, yeah, it's one of those deals. Just watch your footing. Casey, it's up to you to wrap us up. What are you looking forward to in the coming year? Well, you always love to finish a show strong by talking about budgets. So I will talk about that. There are two big things that I think are going to be really important. So we talked about the Deep Space Gateway. We talked about all the activity of the National Space Council that's been going on. But where the rubber hits the road is where, are they going to ask for money to do any of these things? And what are they going to ask for? Is it a realistic amount? Are they going to raid other programs and NASA to pay for it? We will see this, at least the hints of this, in the 2019 budget request, which comes out theoretically early February. And that will reflect some of these priorities we see.

So what does it mean for NASA to lead humans back to the moon? Well, let's see what they put in the budget to allow them to do it or maybe more accurately not do it. So that will give us a lot of insight into how serious this administration really is about pursuing some of these big efforts in space. The other thing I'm going to be looking forward to, which could really throw things off, is the 2018 midterm congressional elections that are going to be happening here in the US in November. And there's a significant chance at this point that the Democratic Party could recapture one of the houses of Congress. And if that happens, everything grinds to a halt. I mean, if you think it's difficult now for the legislation to get passed, this will be a very contentious government if it's divided like this. And there's a good possibility we could lose strong supporters of space if there's a really a wave election in the Democratic favor. Democrats are supportive of space as well. divided government like this, things like space generally will fall by the wayside. And so you may have a good space policy, you may have good intentions and a request, a budget request,

but it may all be consumed in political fighting for unrelated issues. So that'll be very consequential what happens in the midterm elections in terms of the future of NASA's space exploration. Not much we can really do about that. We except work with the people who get elected. And that's one of the things that we'll be doing this year is making friends with lots and lots of people in DC. Emily, there is at least one book that will be appearing in 2018 that I know Jason, Casey and I are looking forward to.

And I bet you're looking forward to it most of all. That I am. I'm very excited to finally see this thing in print. I'm finally publishing to finally see this thing in print. I'm finally publishing my first book on curiosity called The Design and Engineering of Curiosity out from Springer Praxis in, I think it's going to be early March. I'm just waiting for the page proofs now. I'll have one last chance to read the whole thing one more time, make sure there aren't any typos. Of course, you know I'm going to see some as soon as I see it in print. But yeah, it's available. I'm excited. I've had so much help

from so many people on the mission to getting all the facts in this book as right as I possibly can. And the happiest piece of feedback I think I received was from project scientist Ashwin Vasavada, who said, if curiosity had a glove compartment, this book would be in it. That's great. Wow. Jason, Casey, do you have anything in your personal or professional personal lives that you're looking forward to in 2018? I want to read Emily's book. Thanks, Casey. I don't know if I can sign a copy. I think I can hook you guys up.

You know a person. I want to sign a copy or two to give away on this radio show. Maybe more than one. One thing that I look forward to is talking to all of you many more times individually in 2018. But what do you say we do this again and that we don't wait a year to do it? I mean, this has just been really fun. And again, I'm sorry it took us so long to figure out that this would be a good idea. Would you be up for doing it again? Yeah, I think I could.

Jason's done. No, I don't think so. Trust Jason. I'm so down on 2018. I don't think I can. No, it's fun. I love talking to you guys. This is great. It is an honor to have all of you as colleagues. And I do look forward to those conversations in what promises to be, as the Chinese say, an interesting year, hopefully a very good one for space exploration. Emily Lakdawalla, Senior Editor for the Planetary Society. Jason Davis, Digital Editor for the Planetary Society. And incidentally, our Embedded Reporter with the LightSail 2 project, a LightSail project, I should say, and Casey Dreyer, our director of space policy,

running our advocacy and space policy team, representing all of us who want to see good things happen with space in Washington, D.C. Again, thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, guys. Thanks. Thanks for having us. We're going to go on now to a quick conversation, looking back at 2017 and ahead, with Bruce Betts as we also present our weekly What's Up. Yeah. Hey, why wasn't Bruce here?

He gets his own section, huh? He's antisocial like that. Yeah. Yeah. It is time for What's Up with Bruce Betts. He is the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, who has things to tell us about the night sky. But apparently he does have a couple of things to cover that maybe weren't fully addressed by our earlier guests on today's show. Welcome back. Thank you.

And thank goodness I'm not with all those other social people. Okay. Now everyone knows I'm sick. I got so sick the day after I recorded those folks. And so now I'm trying to put on a good face and be a pro with a 102.4 fever. That's showbiz. The show must go on. I'm sorry to hear that. And we all hope you feel better very soon. I have at least an hour before the delirium comes back and the hallucinations. So go ahead, tell us. I mean, you want to talk about 2017? Sure.

And I know your previous guests talked about, uh, most everything I think of. So I thought I'd just highlight a couple of things that were different or meaningful to me. I'm sure there was talk of lots of talk of Cassini. And of course, after a 20 year mission, the end of Cassini was profound to me. Speaking of profound was that whole total solar eclipse thing, which was my first total solar eclipse. Pretty amazing and pretty exciting for a lot of people who observed that in North America. And none of the other folks included that. It certainly was a highlight for everybody who saw it. Yep.

And there was partial eclipse, of course, for a much larger area. And then, of course, in Planetary Society land, and my role is LightSail Program Manager, buttoning up LightSail 2, finishing going through its last iterations of improvements and testing upon testing, and then sealing it up and storing it up. Quite the relief. Can you tell us about the cabinet in which it is stored right now? Because you haven't heard this. Jason Davis made a reference to it as just sort of a run-of-the-mill cabinet. And Casey said, can't we come up with a more dramatic or exciting romantic name for it?

You know, like the hermetically sealed space cabinet or something. And Jason said, well, you know, it's not from Ikea, at least. No offense, Ikea. Engineers are nothing if not practical. It's fully functional to the requirements of storage of the spacecraft and in a bit of a clean room. But I did want to mention one more area in 2017, if you don't mind, or even if you do. Of course. And that's planetary defense.

Planetary Society had lots of involvement with trying to protect the world from asteroid impact. And so certainly a highlight for me was the Planetary Defense Conference in Tokyo earlier this year. Oh, sorry, earlier last year that brought together experts in the field and was co-sponsored by the Planetary Society. And then all of our new videos, our new video series having to do with an introduction of planetary defense. One of the persons we support in Argentina, Max Rocha, discovered additional geophysical evidence for a 250-kilometer crater off the Falkland Islands of many tens or hundreds of millions of years of age. For reference, the one that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs was 200 kilometers. So, big nasty. Lots of good stuff.

Okay, what are you looking forward to in 2018? All right. Well, 2018, just to finish that topic, we'll be announcing very shortly our new Shoemaker-Neo grant winners. Mostly really advanced amateur astronomers who help do follow-up and characterization of near-Earth asteroids. We, of course, we think, have the launch of LightSail 2 when the Falcon Heavy gets going down the road, and I'm guessing you talked about that. And then also in Planetary Society land, we'll be collaborating on a follow-up project with Honeybee Robotics. We did PlanetVac, which was a planetary vacuum to sample planetary surfaces. Well, now it's going to fly on a hover rocket, a Masten rocket called the

Zodiac, and we'll have Planet Vag Zodiac. We'll get you more details on that later. And then the one other thing I wasn't sure you'd talked about, which is beyond this solar system's planet exploration, but that's the launch of the TESS spacecraft, the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, that will be looking for and discovering lots and lots of exoplanets, planets around other stars. Excellent. Thank you. Then what's up in the night sky? Night sky, it's the pre-dawn is where it's happening. We've got really bright Jupiter in the pre-dawn east, and to its upper right for a few more days is Mars, but they're going to do some close moving around each other. And so particularly on the 6th and 7th, the mornings of the 6th and 7th, pre-dawn east, you'll see reddish Mars and much brighter Jupiter

hanging out near each other. And down far to their lower left will be Mercury. And then, and then, the Moon will join the party on the 11th and 12th. We move on to this week in space history. It was 2004. Spirit landed on Mars and started roving around. We talked not that much about Spirit, but quite a bit about Opportunity. Just bare possibility that it might outlive Curiosity.

I wouldn't put money on that, but wouldn't that be something? It's amazing, amazing, amazing. It, of course, landed just three weeks or so later after Spirit, and opportunity is still going. And we had a party 14 years ago for all this. Wild about Mars. All right, you ready? I'm ready. First of 2018, random space fact! Yay! I think the ball just came down in Times Square. I think it just hit me in the head.

You're going to like this one, Matt. If you could drive around even the innermost ring of Saturn at 100 kilometers per hour, so 62 miles per hour, without stopping. So you're driving around the inner ring. It would take you about half an Earth year to get all the way around. If you drove around the F ring, just outside the main rings, it would take about one Earth year. Actually, I'm surprised it wouldn't be even longer.

There you go. You just have insights or delirium, one or the other. Maybe in an hour, I will be making that drive. Let's go on to the contest. I asked you what two orbiters are part of the next Mercury mission, BepiColombo, which launches this year, 2018. How'd we do, Matt? I think we have a first-time winner. Ross Pinkerton in New York, New York said, time winner, Ross Pinkerton in New York, New York said it's the Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the Mercury

Magnetospheric Orbiter. Wow, sounds cool, he says, and then adds, keep up the good work. Is he correct? He is indeed correct. Ross, you are one lucky guy. You are going to receive that half scale paper model of LightSail 2 and a

200 point itelescope.net account on that worldwide network of telescopes. And you can donate that account if you so choose or use it yourself to poke around the night sky anywhere on Earth. But it's that half-scale paper model of LightSail 2 that really got a lot of people excited. Craig Balog, the mission is named after Professor Giuseppe Colombo, a mathematician and engineer who was the first to see that an unsuspected resonance is responsible for Mercury's habit of rotating on its axis three times for every two revolutions it makes around the sun, which is something you've talked about in the past. It is indeed, and not what was expected. Here's something from Solomon Jones. I love that name, in Pewaukee, Wisconsin.

He says, speaking of random space facts, due to MMO's elongated elliptical orbit, MPO will be able to complete four orbits for every one MMO completes. Ooh, that's good. That's very good. I sent you a great picture from Daniel Cazard. Remember you were talking about squids in space? Well, sure. Well, he is... Who wouldn't be? Daniel sent us another one of his terrific illustrations.

Maybe we'll be able to post this. But it's the caption on this photo that I really love. Note, better squids on Mercury than Mercury in calamari. Yes, I enjoyed that very much. Profound. Finally, from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild in Shawnee, Kansas. In the world of acronyms, the space command is tops. Finding shortened ways to speak, it never, ever stops. So ESA teamed with

JAXA, and they'll send an MPO off to planet Mercury, along with MMO. Nice. Yes, indeed. MPO, primarily ESA, and MMO, primarily JAXA, the Japanese space agency. I guess we're ready to go on. I guess we're ready to go on. Who chose the names of the Galilean moons of Jupiter? So who chose Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto? Those names, go to planetary.org slash radio contest. All I know is that it wasn't Galileo, so I'll give you that. There you go, giving away stuff. You have until Wednesday the 10th.

That would be Wednesday, January 10th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And we're going to go back to giving the winner this time around a lovely Planetary Society t-shirt and, of course, a 200-point itelescope.net account. We're done. All right. Everybody go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about all the fun you're going to have in 2018.

Thank you, and good night. Feel better, Matt. Thank you. Just as soon as I get over this crud. That's Bruce Batts. He's the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society. Looking forward to having a good time with him over the coming year. He 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 hopeful members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Have you rated or reviewed us? I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.