Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Lou Friedman on China's Rising Star in Space

Episode Date: December 5, 2005

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China's rising star in space, this week on Planetary Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. Planetary Society Executive Director and Co-Founder Lou Friedman I'm Matt Kaplan. hemispheres. Bruce Betts will make his regular visit, armed with night sky tips for owners of telescopes large and small, and even for those of us who just like to look up in wonder with our eyes alone. And here's something for your ears alone, our quick review of space headlines. Thar she blows. Have you seen the fountains of Enceladus? the Cassini spacecraft took advantage of an alignment with Saturn's icy moon and the sun to catch the ghostly plumes geysering out of the south polar region.

Take a look for yourself at planetary.org. The tidings from Hayabusa are not nearly so effervescent. The Japanese probe successfully collected a few grams of asteroid Itokawa just last week. Controllers now report serious problems, including a leaky attitude control jet. The Japanese space agency lost touch with the little spacecraft for an entire day, but then managed to re-establish contact. It's unclear whether Hayabusa will be able to make the planned return trip to Earth. Hayabusa will be able to make the planned return trip to Earth.

Again, more details are at planetary.org. Finally, congrats to XCOR. The company's Easy Rocket got in the record books last weekend with a point-to-point flight from the Mojave, California, spaceport, also home of Spaceship One, to a nearby desert town. It even carried a couple of bags of mail. Next come the rocket-powered barnstormers and wingwalkers, right? Emily's up next. She'll explain why we're not getting the view of Saturn's rings

that has been featured in science fiction movies for several years. I'll be right back with Lou Friedman. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Can Cassini take pictures of Saturn's rings that show individual rock fragments? Saturn's rings are mostly made up of particles that are between a centimeter and a meter in diameter, but some chunks are much larger, up to 10 or 100 meters across. In theory, Cassini's cameras can image objects that are 100 meters across or smaller. The scale of Cassini's camera images is limited only by its ability to get close enough to a

target to see the fine detail. To capture an image that resolves a ring particle 100 meters in diameter, Cassini would have to approach within roughly 5,000 kilometers of the densest A and B rings. So far in the mission, Cassini has approached much closer than this to Saturn's moons. However, Cassini will never travel so close to Saturn's main rings. In fact, the closest views it will ever get of the main rings have already been captured, from a distance of about 40,000 kilometers. Why won't they take Cassini closer to the rings?

Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. Barely a month has passed since the return of China's second manned spacecraft from orbit. This time it contained not one, but two Tychonauts. The Japanese Space Agency has set its sights on the moon and beyond in an ambitious program of solar system exploration. The Planetary Society has always had great interest in the space programs of nations around the world, so it's not surprising that the Society's Executive Director, Lou Friedman, got an invitation to meet with leaders of the Middle

Kingdom's effort. I sat down with him a few days after his return. Lou, welcome back to the show. Glad to be here, Matt. Why were you in China? Well, China is a major space-faring nation. They, of course, have gotten a lot of attention by sending humans to orbit. They've had now two successful flights with what at least the American press are calling taikonauts. I'm not actually sure, since I don't read Chinese myself, whether they are calling themselves taikonauts or not. Really? Yeah.

My colleagues that I actually met over there more often than not talked about astronauts, but I don't know if they were doing that for my benefit or whether that's what they really say when they're talking among themselves. But China is, of course, becoming the third nation to have a human spaceflight program, and they have a launch capability for that. They have a launch capability for lots of missions, as it turns out, and they're becoming increasingly active both domestically and on the world scene for missions. What's got us excited and interested, I think, is the fact that they have a lunar program.

And if you're going to explore the moon and go out to the planets, clearly that's something the Planetary Society is interested in. I met, I was there at the invitation of a group called the Committee on Deep Space Exploration of the Chinese Society of Astronautics. So deep space exploration, that was my first question to these people, where does deep space begin? And that provoked a nice discussion around the dinner that we were having. But it actually begins beyond the moon. In their mind, they were sort of focused on that idea, which I think is very interesting for a country that has not yet even gone to the moon. So they're clearly thinking of the long-range space program.

Their lunar program, which is called Chang'e, C-H-A-N-G apostrophe capital E. But if you do a Google search on it, you've got to be careful because you keep getting the word change, which comes up with two billion entries. So you have to get a little more particular than that. And I don't have the good Chinese pronunciation, of course, but the nearest I can get to it is Chang'e. It's a three-phase lunar program they've described.

Orbiter beginning in 2007, followed by a lander, which would be, if all goes well, within five years or so after that. The lander could and probably will have a small rover with it. And then the third stage would be a lunar sample return. Now, you probably know that no nation has done an automated lunar sample return except the Soviet Union way back in the early 70s. So if they do that, that would be a major accomplishment. You were over there talking to a lot of officials in the program. I mean, not just with this deep space group, but got to talk to other people within the Chinese space

program. Yes, I spoke to a group at the Lunar Exploration Program Center, which is really just basically a program office in the Chinese space agency. So they're government people. in the Chinese Space Agency, so they're government people. And then I spoke also to their large industry that builds a lot of their satellites. It's called the Chinese Academy of Space Technology. And I thought it was a professional group, but it really is a – it's very much like JPL and NASA Center or a combination of a NASA Center and industry. And they are government-funded, but they are not a part of the government themselves. And they have about 8,000 people.

Wow. The department I met with was the people who were working on the lunar program and on the deep space mission planning. It was very impressive. A lot of young people, very involved, very active, not wallflowers at all, but very much involved in their program and interested in the planetary society and our thoughts about solar system exploration. You ask them why they're doing an automated lunar sample

return. And it's my joke that I made to them was, why on earth do you need to go to the moon to get moon rocks? It's much cheaper to go to Houston. It's much cheaper to go to Moscow. They have plenty of moon rocks there. Sure will loan you some. And, you know, I'm sure you could even buy a few if you can't own them. You could at least rent them. And it's clear that from some scientific point of view, I'm probably right. But nations don't go to the moon for scientific reasons. They go for geopolitical reasons. And China wants to be a space power.

And the moon is a step outward from Earth that you take to do that. And so they, of course, want to conduct a scientific mission, which is appropriate and good. And that would be the mission that they're going to do on the way outward. Of course, it's a boost to all of their technology in space. So these young people, the thousands of them that you saw at this academy, which I assume it's a campus like JPL? Well, very much so. It's a brand-new facility, and they have a stunning exhibit hall. I mean, it's modern, full of terrific video and computer graphics and light displays. Plus they have the real capsule of the Shenzhou capsule that took the astronaut to orbit.

They have the real reentry capsule in the exhibit hall. They have a video playing that shows a lunar base. It's clearly meant for impressing visitors, and it impressed me, I've got to say. It's a whole new complex. It's right across the street, literally, from the Astronaut Training Center. This is in Beijing? It's in Beijing. It's actually on the outskirts of Beijing, but it's in Beijing. The Astronaut Training Center, I don't know if most listeners know, but the whole man program or human space

flight program is really under the military. It's not under the Chinese space agency. And basically that's because that's where pilots come from is the military. And so the astronaut training center belongs to the military too. But there it is right across the street from the Chinese Academy of Space Technology, which means that there's a certain degree of space attention which is being unified even between the human and the robotic program. So describing this Chang'e program, the three-phase program, that would take you out probably to 2015 or 2016 if all goes well. And if there's setbacks, of course, that program could be stretched out.

If it starts going swimmingly well, there might be multiple landers and multiple rovers in that time period. We'll hear more of Lou Friedman's report on the Chinese space program right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group. The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets.

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It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more? Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio, where our guest is Dr. Louis Friedman, Executive Director and Co-Founder of the Planetary Society. Lou recently returned from China, where he got a firsthand look at that country's impressive and very ambitious space program.

I asked Lou about reports that have reached the U.S. about Chinese plans for getting more people off our planet. The human spaceflight program is going to take longer, of course, to get humans beyond Earth orbit. And the kind of capabilities they're building up are very reminiscent of what us and the Soviet Union went through in the 60s in building up our capability. First you have a one-man capsule, then you have a two-man capsule, then you begin to do rendezvous. You'll do extravehicular activity. You'll have to build up larger launch vehicles to launch more mass or do more assembly in orbit if you're going to take astronauts beyond Earth orbit. And I think the timetable for human spaceflight, which gets a lot of attention sometimes in the space interest community here in the U.S., which kind of talks like maybe they're going to do it in just a few years. I think it's more out there toward the end of the next decade. That is, if it happened before 2020, I think they would be thrilled.

Well, in fact, that's the date just a few days ago. There was a story from, I guess, the equivalent to the deputy administrator of NASA who was saying that, yeah, we'd like to have put people on the moon, Chinese astronauts or taikonauts, by 2020. And talk about a space station, too. I think it's always been a position of the Planetary Society that human programs should have a destination. It shouldn't just be conducted to send humans up in space to do nothing. And it's not for science because science could be done much more economically without the humans up there.

And so if you're going to do a human spaceflight program, a destination of exploration clearly is in mind, and you've got to walk before you can run, which means you've got to go to the moon before you can go anywhere. So the Chinese sending humans to the moon is more or less an obvious goal. The timetable on it is, I think, just basically will be determined as they can do it. They're not in a space race, as were the United States and the Soviet Union in the 60s, so they don't need a Kennedy-like statement, which is, we shall do it before the end of

the decade. Come and see if you can match us Russians. They don't need that statement. If suddenly Japan gets interested in doing a human spaceflight program or India, maybe that'll change. But I don't see that happening. I think that basically the Chinese will – and they are a developing country. They're not a – they're in many ways a rich country, but at the same time they're a developing country. And they're not going to, I think, get involved in an overspending of resources on this.

But if this is true, I wonder if they aren't actually, from a political sense, in a better place than we were in the 60s when it was obviously mostly being driven by the race with the Soviets. If they have this long-term commitment, but it's for other reasons other than we just want to show that we're major players on the global stage. Or is that a big part of it? Well, I think that's a big part of it. I mean, I don't really think there's a better reason, frankly.

Why else do you send humans to the moon? It's basically to show that you are a major player in technology and you're going to be part of the vanguard of advancing technology on Earth for the future. And so I think in that sense, that is their major reason for doing it. But if they continue to make steady progress between the automated missions and their ever increasing capability of astronauts in orbit, they will certainly be that player. But did you see any sense or get any sense of an entrepreneurial spirit, which has been noted elsewhere in Chinese society?

I mean, that they need to do this because there's going to be money, yen, yuan to make out there. I haven't met anybody who thinks they're going to make money on the moon. But then again, I don't travel in those kinds of circles. I've talked to a couple of them. I'm not sure about the Chinese entrepreneurs being motivated in that light. There is definitely commercial interest, high commercial interest in China in using that space program to make money. They have a rocket they would like to sell to many customers.

They are trying to develop a space industry. For the most part now, they don't, you know, you would not go to China to have your satellite built. There are other places in U.S. and Russia and Europe and Japan where you would go if you really want to commercially get a satellite built. But on the other hand, they are trying to develop that capability, and they do see the benefit of commercial space in that regard. They may even want to develop a commercial use for a space station. And there's talk in China now about maybe they will have a Soyuz-type space station

or a Mir-type space station in their future, which they could use commercially if there is any commercial uses to be made like that. So I think all of that's possible. I don't see the moon program being driven by any of that commercial talk. We just have a minute or two left. Talk about your impressions of not only these young people at this academy and, you know, their enthusiasm, how driven they are, but of Chinese society. I know you spent a good deal of your off hours walking around the streets of Beijing.

Well, it's kind of funny. You have to be careful now. I get a look of it. It's like getting a look of America by going to New York, by going to Manhattan, which I love to do. And it's vital and it's exciting and everything like that. But that's not, I can't say that's the typical American, right? And the same thing is true in China, of course. Beijing is a very vital, active city.

It's a little too polluted, I must say. They've got to work on, they have a smog issue there in a big way. But everywhere, I took a walk one night. In fact, I met Franklin Chang Diaz, our advisor, who was one of the NASA astronauts who's flown the shuttle more times than anybody else. He tied the record for most shuttle flights. He was in China doing some business at the same time. And I left his hotel at about 11.30 or back to midnight. I walked back to my hotel.

Every street had construction going on it at that hour of the night. They are building and building and building, and the Olympics dominates everything. That 2000, I think, is going to be nothing but vitality and excitement and building and new ideas and new construction going on between now and 2008. And whether the economy holds up and whether all the political forces that are ripping China through China in so many ways, whether it's democracy and human rights and the really big issues of society, how that all plays out, it'll hold together, I think, to 2008. But what's its impact going to be in those areas?

That's really exciting to think about. It's like witnessing those changes in the Soviet Union to Russia, and who knows which way it'll go, but it's really, I'm very gratified for the opportunity to be part of it now. And I guess we'll be keeping our eye on China, the Middle Kingdom, and its push out into space to join the other nations that have a major presence there. Lou, we're out of time. Thanks very much for coming back to Planetary Radio. We'll talk to you again soon. Yeah, I want to talk about this some more and put it in the context of all international lunar missions, which there's a lot of. So let's plan another one, Matt. We'll do that. Lou Friedman is the executive director of the Planetary Society,

telling us about his just-completed experience visiting China and talking to the folks who are making that nation a space-faring one. We'll be right back. I'll be right back with Bruce Betts and this week's edition of What's Up? After this, return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Cassini's cameras will never return images that resolve 100-meter particles in Saturn's A and B rings. The problem is one of safety. In order to be close to the rings, Cassini's orbital path must take it through the ring plane. Ring plane crossings happen at speeds of many kilometers per second. At such

speeds, a collision with even a millimeter-sized particle could fatally damage the spacecraft. So Cassini's orbit crosses the ring plane only in regions where the particles in the ring plane are extremely tiny. This restriction keeps Cassini too far from the A and B rings ever to take images of their individual particles. However, Cassini scientists have other ways to figure out the sizes of ring particles than by photographing them. Radio signals broadcast through the rings to Earth are scattered in different ways by particles of different sizes. Through radio techniques, Cassini scientists have already formed a highly detailed picture

of how particle sizes vary within Saturn's rings. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is here for this week's edition of What's Up? He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. What do you got for us? How's the night sky? It's pretty.

Kind of chilly some places in the northern hemisphere, but it's pretty. You mean just chillier than usual? I've heard Europe is colder than usual this year, that the gulf currents are changing and Europe is going to freeze over. Yeah, that's what I was referring to. Yeah, or not. But there's lots of cool, cool, cool, get it? Cool stuff in the night sky.

Mars still can't stop talking about it. I'm sorry. It's starting to fade, but it's orangish and up there in the evening sky after sunset now. And you can see Venus still looking bright just after sunset in the west. Venus is riveting. It is riveting. My eyes go straight to it it is so bright now it is hard not to it is so much brighter than everything else yeah you know

once the sun goes down saturn coming up later not not competing in the brightness realm but if you've got that small telescope and can look up or a big one and see some rings it's always very, very cool coming up. You guys at the Keck, okay, listen up. Yeah. Dude, Saturn. It's cool, man. Take a look at it in the evening. Matt and Bruce said. Yeah.

Sitting around looking at their computer screens, listening to Planetary Radio, going, hey, what do we look at tonight? That's how it works. Anyway, it's coming up in the east around 9 or so in the evening. East, northeast. We'll be up high later in the evening. Jupiter in the pre-dawn sky looking very, very bright in the east, southeast, but very low. And those gemini meteor showers challenged by the full moon but peaking on the 14th of December. On to this week in space history. 10th anniversary of Galileo

Jupiter orbit insertion. So in the Galileo, spacecraft entered orbit at Jupiter, becoming our first spacecraft ever to orbit a giant planet. Also deploying a probe to go into the Jovian atmosphere. The whole mission incredibly successful.

Learned all sorts of good stuff. On to Rattle Spacecraft! mission, incredibly successful, learned all sorts of good stuff. On to Rattlespace Park! You know, Matt, you've inspired me. You enjoyed those whole, like, size and scale things so much. I do, yeah. I'm trying to introduce more. The breadbox-type metaphors. Yeah, okay, I got no breadbox for you.

This is just a comparison of scales. That isn't exactly a breadbox. No, it's the scale of the Earth-Moon system. Oh, okay. So, you know, 250,000 miles for those playing in miles. Yeah, good candidate. Did you ever think about the fact that it would really easily fit within the diameter of the sun? No.

The entire Earth-Moon system takes up only about a third to a quarter of the diameter of the sun. That sun is big, did I mention? Yeah, actually, yeah. And what gets me is that there are those stars that I guess are as much bigger than our sun as our sun is bigger than our little place, our little planet. It's true. The sun is only an average kind of star in pretty much all qualities. Yeah, Earth-Moon system, 384,000 kilometers,

and the diameter of the sun, 1.4 million kilometers. You know, I never thought of it in those terms. That's great. That's what I'm here for, Matt. So we're lucky, very lucky, that the Earth is not at the center of the sun. We are. It turns out, finally, we have a reason to be thankful for that. Let's move on to the trivia contest.

We asked you, how many NASA flight directors have there been for human spaceflight missions in the entire history of the NASA human spaceflight program? Christopher Kraft, my all-time favorite mission guy. Oh, that's a different contest. Pick your favorite flight director. Yeah. Yes, we got a variety of answers. But most people had it right. William Kovacs had it right. William Kovacs, who lives in Mays Landing, New Jersey, I think he's a previous winner. And he said there have been 58 flight directors, men and women. I didn't even stop to think that a few of them have been women. Yes, indeed you do.

And I just find it interesting, far fewer than the number of astronauts that we've had that's measured in a few, not many, hundred. So, yeah, interesting. Well, congratulations. Yeah, William, you're going to get that extra-large planetary radio T-shirt. We're going to put it in the mail to you soon. I hear you're getting mail from your old school teachers. Oh, yeah.

There's a guy with the same name as one of my old school teachers, which I won't mention, but I'd love to hear if it's my sixth-grade teacher from Eshelman Elementary. So if you're out there, you know who you are, Mr. Blank. All right. Let's go on to the next contest so you can get more great mail from your past teachers. What is the world's lightest solid, least dense solid? It turns out it has quite the planetary application as well as other applications, but it's been used in various spacecraft applications.

What is the world's least dense solid? Send that to us via planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to send us your entry and when. My mind is racing because the obvious answer is probably not the right answer. And I'm not going to go any further because it would give hints. But the key word being solid. Fantastic. Solid, yes. Well, I don't know. Those who follow Planetary, the obvious answer is the right answer. Those who don't, which, of course, are the people not listening to this show, I think this would be completely not obvious. Well, the deadline this time around is the 12th of December, 2 p.m., Monday, Pacific time.

And if you get it in by then, we'll make sure that your entry is among those from which we pick the winner of the next Planetary Radio T-shirt. That is if you have the correct answer. Hey, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about who was Isosceles. Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He's here every week for What's Up.

I'm sorry, was that too angular for you, Matt? No, it was too obtuse. Oh, that's an acute statement. We'll be back next week with a variety of topics, including some recent remarks by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and the outlook for space tourism. Tune in before you buy a ticket. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, where we welcome a new member to our radio family,

WEFT 90.1 FM Community Radio for East Central Illinois. And you're welcome to write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Thanks for listening, and have a great week. Thank you.