Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Lou Friedman on the Roadmap to Space

Episode Date: November 17, 2008

Planetary Society Exec. Director Lou Friedman on the new plan for human exploration of space.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hi there, podcast fans. It's another secret message from your host, Matt Kaplan. A couple of announcements. One, you're going to hear it at the end of the show today as well, but we might as well tell you up front. We're done. The sixth anniversary contest. You can stop sending new slogans for the show. The deadline has been passed, if you've heard this. That is, the deadline is Monday the 17th at 2 p.m., and you're almost certainly hearing this after that. So thank you very much, those of you who sent in stuff. You've given Bruce and me a very tough job because we've got a lot of great slogans to review. Second, you're going to hear reference to the press conference that the Roadmap to Space was introduced at in Washington, D.C. at the National Press Club.

We are going to post that press conference. The audio quality is not the greatest, but it's understandable. We're going to put it up, though, in the members area of the Planetary Society website. There's a button at the top there for members to click. It simply says, For Members. And we hope that won't offend too many people, but that is where you'll be able to find that if you are a member of the Society. That's about it.

We're going to present you now with this week's edition of Planetary Radio. Thanks for listening. Lou Friedman unfolds the roadmap to 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 of the Planetary Society. We continue our consideration of space policy in a time of change as we visit with the Executive Director of the Planetary Society. Dr. Friedman and associates just introduced a bold new plan for space exploration that also looks back at our own troubled planet.

He'll introduce us to the roadmap in a couple of minutes. Ever wonder how we know the claims nations make about space accomplishments are true? Ever wonder how we know the claims nations make about space accomplishments are true? Emily Lakdawalla will set your mind at ease in her latest Q&A installment, followed by our weekly confab with Bruce Betts about what's up in our night sky. The big story of the week is astronomical in both nature and import. Bill Nye will be here in a minute or so to share his excitement about the first ever images of exo or extrasolar planets, worlds circling other stars. There's a detailed story at planetary.org.

Space Shuttle Endeavour lifted off on Friday the 14th, headed, where else? To the International Space Station, with everything needed to increase the population up there from three to six. Everything, that is, except the three additional residents. They'll come later. Yet another close call for one of the Mars Exploration rovers. Spirit almost didn't make it through a dust storm last week. We're glad to report that the plucky little robot woke up after its power level reached a dangerously low level

almost five years into its 90-day mission. Do we live in amazing times or what? Here's Bill. Hey, Bill Nye, the planetary guy here. This week, one of the most exciting times in my life. That's right. People have found planets orbiting other stars, not just by observing the wobble of the star. You know, I've interviewed people who've done that.

Deborah Fisher and Jeff Marcy. They've seen the wobble of the star. You know, I've interviewed people who've done that, Deborah Fisher and Jeff Marcy. They've seen the wobble of stars. But these astronomers, guys like Paul Callas and Ben Zuckerman, they've observed planets using the light bouncing off of the planets, not just the wobble of the star's motion. Using a coronagraph, an instrument that blocks out the light coming from the star, you can observe light bouncing off of objects near the star. Well, this star Formohaut, okay, has this big ring around it. And the ring isn't centered. It's offset a little bit.

And these astronomers reasoned that perhaps that offset is caused by the gravity of other planets that are orbiting the same star. And sure enough, by blocking out the light, astronomers have seen light bouncing off a planet orbiting the star formal out. Not only that, the same week in Science Express, other astronomers using the Gemini telescope and the Keck telescope, which are on the ground, not the Hubble orbiting up in space, but they observed three planets orbiting a star called HR 8799. HR used to stand for Harvard Revised, Guy's Survey Catalog. And so they've seen four planets in one week orbiting other stars. Now, you know, when I was young, we were told quite reasonably that we'd never observe a planet on another star, especially not with light, because the star is so bright,

it would overwhelm any light bouncing off a nearby planet. But using these remarkable complementary optical techniques, it's, if I may, everybody, it's calculus. You can cut out the light from the star and see the stuff nearby. Maybe planets are commonplace. Maybe there are more planets than you can imagine. And so maybe there are more Earth-like planets than we can imagine. And then maybe there are other entities out there on those planets wondering the same enormous thoughts that

we are wondering this week, early in the 21st century. It's an exciting time, my friends. Thanks for listening to Planetary Radio. Go to the planetary.org website and you can see the picture yourself. Look down there in the lower right. It's exciting, but for now I've got to fly. Bill Nye the Planetary Guy. On November 13, a very distinguished group visited the National Press Club in Washington to present a bold and sweeping proposal for the exploration of space. The official title of this plan is Beyond the Moon,

a new roadmap for human space exploration in the 21st century. But its friends simply call it the Roadmap to Space. The roadmap calls for the United States to work with international partners to create a space program that is both sustainable and inspiring. It contains many recommendations, including a focus on Mars as the driving goal of human spaceflight and deferring a moon landing until the elements of an interplanetary transportation system are largely in place and paid for. Cornell professor Jim Bell is mainly known for his work on

robotic missions, but the new president of the Planetary Society believes that human missions are also essential. And a natural potential first step in this direction would be to visit a near Earth asteroid, for example. Many of these objects, small asteroids that come close to the Earth, many of them are easier to get to energetically than the moon. Round-trip missions could take conceivably about as long as the one-way trip to Mars, to a mission like that. So there would be the ability to demonstrate long-duration interplanetary flight capability and to essentially rehearse for a Mars mission.

Joining Jim Bell for the briefing were Stanford University professor Scott Hubbard, formerly of NASA, Hayden Planetarium director and former Planetary Society president Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Buzz Aldrin. And leading the group was the Society's executive director, Lou Friedman. Lou joined me just hours after returning to Pasadena. Lou, welcome back from D.C., and thanks for joining us on Planetary Radio to tell us a little bit about the roadmap. Well, I'm glad to be back, Matt, although it's an interesting time to be in Washington, D.C., because transition is just that. It's change, and change is happening, as everyone who is alive today, I think, is well aware.

We presented our Roadmap to Space. It's called Beyond the Moon. And I think it's both a combination of a visionary with some very constructive suggestions about human space exploration, but at the same time responsive to what's going on in the world, this whole subject of change and transition. The two big changes, of course, that we're all acutely aware of is the global economic crisis. This is going to have profound effects on government spending,

on the willingness to do new ventures, to spend money to continue to advance exploration and science and technology. Some of it will be very encouraging. We need to do more of that. Some of it will be very discouraging because of the constraints that exist in the real world of budgets and politics. And the other, of course, big change is we're having a new administration come in, and they have a new outlook. It's very much an international outlook, and one of the

chief recommendations of our roadmap is to take a more international outlook in human space exploration. How did this new plan come to be? Well, last February, you may recall, the Planetary Society joined with the Stanford University Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics in conducting a workshop of 50 experts. It got a lot of attention, and we really looked at the whole aspect of space exploration with very diverse point of views. Not everybody agreed with almost anything, but a consensus view was that the real purpose of human space exploration

was international positioning by the United States, was the support it gives to our geopolitical standing and to our international position in the world. It's been used many times for international cooperation initiatives, including, for example, engaging the Russian aerospace industry and the space station as a post-Soviet means of establishing more cooperation. And, of course, the very Apollo race to the moon was a peaceful competition for the international benefits in the United States.

So I think that that recognition led a lot to our recommendations. The other aspect that came out of the Stanford workshop was the need to balance science and exploration and robotic and human spaceflight, make them work together. The other thing we did after the Stanford workshop is we conducted a series of town halls. And we did three in the United States and one in Great Britain. And there's no one view that emerges from these town halls. But we made a special effort to not just talk to ourselves and not even just to talk to members of the Planetary Society, but to involve the public. And you get a lot of differing points of view in that,

but you do emerge with some themes. One was the great pride that not just Americans, but the whole world feels in space exploration as a great accomplishment. It brings out the best in us. It brings out the best in motivating a future generation. And the other theme was there is a hunger for international cooperation. In fact, next week on this radio program, we're going to be talking about the Indian space program, about Chandrayaan-1, and the enormous pride and enthusiasm in that country, which for most of its population is still third world, which for most of its population is still third world, for this first venture that they're making beyond low Earth orbit.

This really does seem to be the kind of thing, I mean it's almost cliche, but the kind of thing that could bring the world together. Well, there is a lot going on at the moon, of course. We have the Indian orbiter, which you just mentioned. We have a Chinese orbiter up there. We have a Chinese program, which is moving to landings and sample return in the future. We have the Japanese mission. If you haven't seen the Kaguya high-definition movies of the Earth and the moon from the Kaguya spacecraft, you're really missing out on something.

The moon is becoming a stepping stone for a lot of countries and a lot of national ambitions. And that's one of the motivations in our roadmap, is recognizing that. Recognize the United States has already been to the moon first. We don't have to just repeat what we did. We should join and help the rest of the world in taking their steps, and we should look beyond the moon. And that's the chief recommendation of our report, is don't just look at the moon. We've done that. Look beyond the moon, and that's the chief recommendation of our report, is don't just look at the moon. We've done that.

Look beyond the moon. Make the lunar objective an international objective. Work with other countries, engage other countries in international cooperative activities that can be used for the greater benefit of the United States, and at the same time, start stepping out into interplanetary space. Do the first mission beyond the moon. Do the first mission out of the Earth's gravity well. Do the first mission to interplanetary space.

Keep going further and faster and higher. Make each step an accomplishment on the way to Mars. You'll get the public much more excited. You'll do some interesting things that you've never done before, like six-month and nine-month missions of astronauts in space, like stepping on a near-Earth object, exploring what it's made of. Is it a rubble pile? Is it solid? There's a lot of interesting things to do as we step out into the solar system. And just repeating something that we've done 40 years ago is not enough to make an exciting program. And that's, of course, what the Planetary Society is about, is involving the public.

And at the same time, it isn't making the progress we want to see happen in human exploration beyond Mars. That's Lou Friedman of the Planetary Society. He'll tell us more about the roadmap to space in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, more about the roadmap to space in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era. Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration.

You probably do, too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails, discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio.

The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. We are exploring the roadmap to space. Our guide is Lou Friedman, executive director of the Planetary Society, who led the team that presented the roadmap plan in Washington last week. The plan may have lofty goals, but it recognizes Earth-bound limitations. There's one other factor that's really important, and that's this budget factor. We can't ignore the global economic crisis.

One of the advantages of what we recommend is that deferring the human landing on the moon actually saves costs in the program. We won't have to spend money on the expensive, reliable landing system that will be required while we develop our interplanetary transportation capability. So we defer those costs to later and build up our interplanetary transportation capability now has a two-pronged advantage, lower costs in the beginning years and greater accomplishments toward Mars. Of course, we're going to refer people to the Planetary Society website, planetary.org, where they can read much more about the roadmap. But are there other major points, recommendations within the roadmap that you'd like to talk about in the time we have left? Yes. I mentioned the interplanetary steps. I mentioned the deferral of the human landing on the moon.

Another big one is this international cooperation. It doesn't help just getting to Mars. It helps in the all-important problem of monitoring the Earth. Global climate change is going to be extremely important as something we have to do from space, monitor it from space, learn how to mitigate against it by making space observations. When you build up international cooperation partnerships, you're able to put many more resources into this, obviously, global problem at the same time as building up much more data

that will help you cope with this serious issue. It's sort of a twin motivation here. One is the international cooperation so that we can make greater accomplishments, and the other, an international cooperation so we can deal with this fundamental and important problem of global climate change. Do you get a sense, as I have recently, that, yes, it's a time of change, it's an extremely difficult time economically, but that the roadmap may have come at the right time?

Well, I do think that, Matt. I quite agree with you. There's a sense of optimism even with all of these problems that we're talking about. I worry about that, frankly. In fact, if I was the incoming president of Barack Obama, I would be saying every day to people, hey, I'm only a person. I'm not going to solve every problem immediately. He is saying that. Yes, I think that's necessary.

We do have a lot of optimism. I'm very pleased about it. I'm very proud of our country, and I'm very proud for the world that we can feel this kind of thing. At the same time, there's no magic bullets here, and some of the disagreements that will continue to go on politically are really quite important discussions, and there's going to be no magic solutions, and if we expect that, we could be setting our expectations too high. It's going to be hard. Space is hard.

Space is hard, but maybe it's easier than solving earthly problems. I remember a line from Bruce Murray, which is, we can't look to space for a solution of all our earthly problems, and I think that's quite correct, But what I think is the opportunity now, and something we did suggest in the roadmap, is that space can be a contributor, be part and parcel of both our optimism for the future and also for contributing to make a positive future. Planetary Society members already have a piece of this roadmap.

But what else can they and other people do if they do the research and they like what they see in the roadmap? How can they help to put us on the path that the roadmap lays out? Well, first of all, we're collecting signatures right now on our website. We're going to be initiating another public involvement program to support the roadmap and get people involved. It's going to be a long process. You know, just getting this out doesn't make it happen.

What's going to make it happen is convincing a lot of people in not just Washington but around the world and other space-faring countries, and convincing the U.S. Congress, who we expect to testify next year. We'll be asking people to write letters, sign petitions, join things on our website, and most of all, get other people to join the Planetary Society so that we become not a modest public interest movement, but a great public interest movement. Okay, I've got one more I've got to throw at you from left field. Your thoughts about the first images of planets beyond our solar system.

Well, I'm glad you asked that question. You worried me when you said about throwing it from left field. I thought I was going to have to come up with another baseball analogy. That's very exciting. And discoveries of other worlds is exactly what the Planetary Society is about. And now to actually see planets out there. It's one thing to infer existence. It's one thing to make theoretical arguments that it's logical they're out there.

But to see them reminds us both of the sense of space exploration, that it actually, we convey this to our senses, and we're going to learn something. Someday there will be a whole field called comparative solar systemology or something like that that will allow us to understand much more about what's going on in our universe and how we came to be. As Carl Sagan once said, we're searching for ourselves out there, not literally, but what we're like, what we came from, and this is just adding to that data. So it's a very exciting time to see this discovery. We predicted a few years ago that it would happen, but we thought it might happen to take decades. And here it is taking years. And so I'm looking forward to the next decade and seeing how this evolves.

Thanks, Lou. Lou Friedman is the executive director of the Planetary Society, one of the founders of the society, and he is just back from Washington, D.C., where he and a distinguished team made the first official presentation of the Roadmap to Space at the National Press Club. We're going to be back with Bruce Betts for this week's edition of What's Up, right after we visit with Emily. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, Is there an independent third-party source that monitors spacecraft like Chandrayaan? Or do we have to take government agencies' word for what they're doing in space? It's healthy for citizens to be skeptical of their governments.

And it's true that only government agencies have the enormous radio antennas needed to communicate with and track spacecraft. There's no third-party watcher. The good news is that there are now many different governments with such antennas. There's NASA's Deep Space Network in California, Spain, and Australia. ESA has its own deep space antennas in Spain and Australia. India built its own for Chandrayaan-1, and China and Russia have their own as well. When a spacecraft sends a signal to Earth, any radio antenna belonging to any country that's pointed in the right direction can at least pick up the carrier signal, which allows them to pinpoint the spacecraft's location and speed in the sky. Because Newtonian mechanics is in strict control of the motion of spacecraft, it'd be impossible

for one government to fake a signal making an Earth-orbiting satellite appear to be broadcasting from the Moon. Governments have to be in close cooperation for one to easily be able to decode the data carried within a spacecraft's radio signal. But it's actually quite common for the deep space communications networks of all these different countries to cooperate to support planetary missions, particularly during critical moments, such as when a spacecraft enters orbit. For example, the NASA Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia, has been working with India for years to prepare to support that

nation's first mission to the moon, and is now in regular contact with Chandrayaan-1. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Sitting at the other end of the Skype connection is Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, because this is What's Up, our weekly look at the night sky and more stuff that's going on. Welcome, Bruce. Thank you very much. So, it's been a kind of nasty week for looking at the stars, or really much of anything here in Southern California,

because of our brush fires. Not too many stars to be seen of anything here in Southern California because of our brush fires. Not too many stars to be seen. Maybe better in your area? Not really, no. Not by today. It's our own star, the sun, is kind of a, you know, nice smoky red. But other than that, I don't think we'll be seeing any stars tonight. Oh, well. Well, what would we see if we were in a nice place? Well, if we were looking, we actually have a really good chance because there are two really bright objects in the early evening, Jupiter and Venus. Venus being the brighter of the two, both brighter than any star in the sky other than the sun. And the really cool thing they're doing over the next couple weeks is they're getting closer and closer in the sky, and you can watch

them. They get closest on November 30th, but then there's a really cool looking thing going on December 1st. That evening, you will see the moon there with Venus and Jupiter all snuggling close together over there in the west after sunset. I only wish I could see them. Well, you will be. We've got a couple weeks for that. Also, in the pre-dawn sky, you can check out Saturn. It's actually rising at one or two in the morning now in the east. It's high in the southeast by an hour or so before dawn. And also, we've got the tail end of the Leonid's meteor shower. Not its spectacular 33-year peak, which was a few years ago, but you might get 40 meters per hour if you have a dark sky and and no smoke and that's uh that's what the sky is looking like let's go on to random space fact and i think the smoke's getting to you yeah so the farthest humans ever from earth were the apollo 13 crew when they passed around the far side of the moon having such the good time they were 248,000 655 miles or about 400,000 kilometers from Earth

and if you take the non-lunar crews that did not head to the moon a bit of a different answer the highest there was 854 miles, or 1,374 kilometers, and that was the crew of Gemini 11, which reached a higher apogee than anyone else did. Thank you. That was very interesting about the Gemini folks. I didn't realize that. Happy to be here for you. Let's go on to our trivia contest. We asked you what three space flyers, astronauts, cosmonauts, taikonauts, whatever you want to call them,

people who flew in space, who has had the most EVA time or extravehicular activity where they hang out outside a spacecraft? How'd we do, Matt? We got a lot of entries. I think a lot of people excited, I guess, about the sixth anniversary contest,

but maybe also about the chance to get a free one-year membership in the Planetary Society or an extension of their membership if they're already a member. Our winner, it's been about a year and a half since he came out on top of the space trivia contest, John Leese, John Leese of Moorpark, California, neighbor almost of the Planetary Society. And you go ahead. You've got better experience with Russian. Tell us who holds that record for EVA time. All right.

Well, the top three that we asked for, Solovyov with over 80 hours of EVA time, 16 separate EVAs for this man. Incredible. Next on the list, Lopez Alegria from the U.S. with about 68 hours, 10 EVAs, and then from the U.S., Ross with 58 hours in nine EVAs. So spending a lot of time hanging outside the spacecraft. As usual, we got all kinds of other interesting information from other listeners. Ilya Schwartz, a regular listener, let us know, Peggy Whitson is the top woman for EVA time, six spacewalks, 39

hours and 46 minutes. I hate them all. I hate their guts. I really do. I have to admit it. I'm sorry to let it out. I wasn't going to, but I would settle for five minutes. Wow. Such darkness. I know, but I feel better now. William Stewart, this is pretty

cool. William also had the right answer, but he realized that Anatoly Solovyev is an anagram of lay on lots of EVA with a Y left over and of spelled OV. And William has far too much time on his hands. Wow. Yeah, has far too much time on his hands. Wow. Yeah, I actually had realized that, but I didn't think people would find it interesting. Yeah, right. Yeah.

All right, let's give you another trivia contest. And what are they competing for this time, Matt? A Planetary Radio t-shirt? Yeah, still a t-shirt, and this will be the very last winner of the weekly contest to also get the one-year membership in the Planetary Society. Pretty cool. Of course, remember you can always check that out at planetary.org slash radio and you got a whole other way to get a Planetary Radio t-shirt by

following the instructions there. Thank you. Here's your trivia contest. What was the first spacecraft flyby of an asteroid? First spacecraft flyby of an asteroid. First, spacecraft flyby of an asteroid. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And when do they need to get that in by, Matt? By the 24th, the 24th of November, that Monday at 2 p.m. Pacific time. And I guess we should also let people know that the deadline is passed for the sixth anniversary contest. We got, oh my God, we must have hundreds of slogans because many people sent in more than one.

So it's next week, in fact, on next week's program that we will announce three winners, really, of our contest. Grand prize being the Celestron SkyScout Personal Planetarium from Oceanside Photo and Telescope at optcorp.com. Oceanside Photo and Telescope at optcorp.com. Second place, that neat package of commemorative covers from spaceflory.com, spaceflory.com. Our friend Florian Knoller. And all three winners, our third place winner, winning Space Station Sim at spacestationsim.com from Vision Video Games. Build and operate your own. But next week, we'll have those announcements. Good prizes.

I'm excited to go through these slogans with you. It should be fun and challenging. I hope you feel that way after you've read the first couple of hundred. Yeah, me too. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about what your personal logo would look like. Thank you, and good night. Bruce Betts, need I say, is the Director of Projects for the Planetary

Society and he does join us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week.