Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Mae Jemison of the 100 Year Starship Initiative

Episode Date: July 9, 2012

Retired astronaut Dr. Mae Jemison leads the 100 Year Starship Initiative. You’ll hear Mat’s conversation with her about this ambitious project in a SETIcon II fireside chat.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

May Jemison and the 100-year Starship Initiative, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We're about to take you to SETICON for my conversation with Dr. Mae Jemison. The former astronaut now heads the project that looks toward humanity's first interstellar voyage. We've also got Bill Nye, and Bruce Betts will help me give away that Celestron telescope. But we begin with the Planetary Society's science and technology coordinator, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, we're going to look back over, well, probably a little bit longer of a period here than we normally do because you've been working on this series, now complete, about the entry, descent, and landing of the Curiosity rover.

You found a lot to tell in this story. Well, of course, there is a lot to tell. And I felt that it was really necessary to put this series together because there's so much, A, misinformation and B, fear on the internet about the landing of Curiosity. And I'm not going to lie to you, it's a challenging thing to land on Mars, and it's a complicated way of landing a big machine on Mars. But I do want to promise everybody that the engineers have really thought every step of this process through. And there are really smart people. I know a lot of them personally. And so that I know that, you know, nothing that I can think about that can possibly improve this process at all. Really, they have

thought it through. Even that very last bit that seems to scare so many people called the sky crane maneuver, which is where the heavy rover, the 900-kilogram rover, gets lowered to the ground on these three nylon tethers, plus a bridle that connects it with the electrical supply. And it just touches down ever so gently on the ground. And then that bridle is cut, and the whole jet pack flies off to crash elsewhere. And is that the scariest part, as far as you're concerned? Oh, absolutely not. For me, the scariest part as far as you're concerned? Oh, absolutely not. For me, the scariest part, and this is totally irrational, but the scariest part is the moment when the rover and its jetpack sever their connection to the back shell and parachute. And this is a process

that has occurred on every single landing on Mars in the past. You know, the parachute has to slow it down from supersonic to subsonic speeds in the atmosphere. And then before you can land the thing, you have to cut the parachute loose. But you can't just fire up your rockets the second you cut your parachute loose, because then you might crash yourself back into your backshell and parachute, and that would be really bad. So there is one second of free fall between the time that they separate the backshell and the time that they turn on their rockets or throttle up their rockets. And that is going to be the longest second that I can possibly imagine.

It actually starts accelerating toward the ground again. It gets another 20 meters per second of speed, which is pretty fast. For me, that's the most heart-stopping moment in the whole process. I am willing at this point to trust in all those EDL engineers and that lovely man, Rob Manning, and wish them the best.

We should also point out that in an upcoming couple of episodes of Planetary Radio Live, you'll be able to see Emily give us a little tour of the instruments on Curiosity, the cameras and other instruments not far off. Emily, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. She is the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next, another guy we talk to every week, the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye. Bill, lots of big news this week. Some of it you made yourself not long ago, but let's start with this big announcement out of CERN, the big particle announcement in Europe.

Yes, yes, the discovery or the proof of the existence of the Higgs boson. This was a particle that would allow the exchange of mass between particles that make up protons and neutrons in the early universe and even today. And so this verifies this extraordinary mathematical model people have been working with, well, I guess since 1964 when Peter Higgs proposed the existence of this thing. So it may lead to some extraordinary discovery. This is a new bit of physics. It may lead to the next laser, the next global positioning system, the next internet. You don't know where it's going to go, but by verifying this part of this model, it's going to direct physicists

to pursue a definite path. That's exciting. And this was announced on the 4th of July. Do you think Europe was maybe rubbing American faces in this a little bit? Maybe. The United States was going to build the

superconducting supercollider, atom smasher, particle accelerator. I guess it was canceled in 1993. So there's about 10 years there where physicists were very excited about this thing. And it had three times or more than that, three times the energy of the particle accelerator in Switzerland. So this discovery or this verification of this Higgs boson energy may have been made 10 years ago, 15 years ago. It would have been made in the United States, and it would have changed the flavor of it. That's a physics pun. Nevertheless, people in the world got together and made this discovery or verified this energy, and

let's all work together for a better tomorrow. But that is an interesting, interesting little way of doing things, I must say. Speaking of better tomorrows, you were a bit of a controversial figure on television and elsewhere in the last few days. Oh, yes. Well, whenever whenever I or anybody speaks about climate change, there's controversy. Tremendously hot temperatures back east all all over North America, very, very hot. These are consistent with climate change models. And by the way, the climate change models really go all the way back to Carl Sagan when he was working on nuclear winter, where a nuclear war would create conditions similar to that of an asteroid impact. It's an extraordinary thing that we're all going to have to deal with. But some people, how else to put it, don't want to deal with it. It's going to be a long haul. But yes,

I was on television talking about the Higgs boson, the temperatures, and it's all science. And we need to have more scientists and especially engineers for a better tomorrow for all humankind. They can also, they should check out your promo with Bob Picardo, our friend Bob Picardo, which is a laugh riot. Who edited that, Matt? That was yours truly, yes. I hope it's as funny

as you think it is. It is, trust me. Bill, we gotta go. Thanks, Matt. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society. He'll be back next week. I'll be back in a moment with Mae Jemison in my conversation with her at SETIcon.

I spent Saturday, June 23rd at SETIcon 2 in Northern California. The SETI Institute had asked me to moderate three fireside chats at this incandescent gathering of great scientists, creators, and fans of science. One of these chats was with the first woman of color in space. Dr. Mae Jemison now leads the 100-year Starship Initiative with the modest mission of preparing the way for our first voyage to another star. I can't imagine a person who is better qualified for this effort that will consider much more than the required science and technology. May is a medical doctor, a dancer, a teacher, an engineer, and a retired astronaut.

The initiative has begun with a half-million-dollar grant from DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. $500,000, that's a nice amount of money for a startup. You know, a lot of startups really would like to have that amount of money, but it's not really that much money. But what you get, I think, are sort of, you get DARPA's imprimatur that they think you can do this, which is really very invigorating and very

sobering. And I have to say that I'm working with a team of incredible people that bring to bear lots of different talents and that we have to blend together. So as I'm looking at this, I mentioned that the three main team members were the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, which is an organization I've had since 1996. It's named after my mother, who taught in the Chicago Public Schools for 25 years, and my technology consulting company. We sort of came together and were primed for this, leading this. Icarus Interstellar, which is a group of astronomers, astrophysicists, engineers, and others who have been looking at creating a design for an interstellar probe using fusion energy

and a foundation for enterprise development, which is an organization that looks at governance of technology and innovation companies. So you can sort of see that there is this blend, this mix of looking at how do we work through large problems, through grand problems. Getting this was both invigorating, yay, we got it, and it's also sobering. It's sobering because it says, well, people, DARPA, right, that's pretty cool. DARPA believes in you enough that they want you to try to create this non-governmental organization that can help to, let's say, shepherd the development of the technologies, the capacities, the knowledge base to make this a reality if someone chooses to build a mission to another star. to build a mission to another star. Sobering for you, maybe, and I'm not going to pretend to be in the least bit objective or neutral about this because I am in awe of the fact that this has been taken on. And kudos to you and to DARPA for deciding to put some money

into something which is so far beyond our current grasp, which I find enormously exciting. But, of course, it falls to you to find the rest of the money that you're going to need to make this work. And that's a big part of it, right, the fundraising? It's a big part of it. But I want to go back and make sure that we understand there are a number of teams that were interested in this, of teams that were interested in this and we want to make sure that we include them in our whole process because no one organization can make anything like this happen. And in fact, no one nation can make this happen. It's going to be that collective capacity to generate a global aspiration that will eventually get us those capabilities. So I want to make sure that it's clear that we've been the ones entrusted

to sort of get everything going. Yes, we have to go out and find money. I don't want to say anything more than that, and we're going to try to find money. The good news is that right now space is in the news, right? People are sort of saying the government has a role. We want the government to continue in many ways because the fact that people are out there looking at the shuttle as a discovery that was being transported in Washington, D.C.,

stopping things and saying, wow, I didn't know the shuttle was going to be ending, are in New York City. New York City, people are stopping out on the the street out up on the top of rooftops and looking at the enterprise Flight model test model coming to New York City. It says that there's an ability to captivate folks You know, we are looking for those grand challenges as a nation and really I think as humans right now. We want to be able to say that the advances that we made in terms of our attitudes toward

one another, that this regression that we're seeing now that it's getting a little bit more violent, we need something else to use our adrenaline for, I like to think. Humans need an adrenaline rush. We need something else. And I think 100-year starship is our interstellar flight. Our space exploration is one of those things that we can do. I agree with you. And I think that 100-year starship is one extra piece of evidence

that we seem to be entering back into an era of optimism, of taking on big ideas, big goals. And I think of, on the commercial side, the folks who are putting together a company to mine asteroids. We were talking about that with Tom Jones, the company called Planetary Resources. People like Elon Musk, and even the folks who want to make money

taking rich passengers up into a suborbital space. It seems to me to be a special time of the kind of optimism that Andre Bermanis was trying to say was expressed in much of Star Trek, which you have a connection to, of course. And maybe it's not an accident that so many of the people doing these things now were watching Star Trek when they were much younger. Yeah, I think that, you know, when I look at Star Trek, it was one of our hopeful futures. It said that we had managed to get through World War III,

which was very much looming in everyone's mind in the 1960s. We managed to get through World War III. We managed to figure out race and ethnicity. We had gone a long ways toward gender, even though the women were running around in those little short mini skirts and stuff like that where you can see their underwear. But it was the first time we had a television program where we had a woman technical person, Lieutenant O'Hara, who was in the episode every time. So it said that we were able to move beyond certain things. And the other thing that was very interesting about Star Trek,

and I was an original episode fan, is that it allowed us to look at social issues from a different perspective. So now we could look at issues of race and ethnicity and difference, but we don't have to look at them right here in 1960. We could look at them in another future with another planet where a person was black on this side and white on this side, and the other one was black on this side and white on this side, and they thought, oh my God, we are so different. And the crew of the Enterprise is like, what is wrong with you people? You're nuts, right?

Those perspectives, having the opportunity to think about those things, makes a difference. More of my conversation with Mae Jemison about the 100-year starship is just ahead. This is Planetary Radio. Bill Nye the Science Guy here. The next Mars rover, Curiosity, is about to land on Mars. You can join the celebration. Ol' Nye the Science Guy here. The next Mars rover, Curiosity, is about to land on Mars. You can join the celebration. Planet Fest 2012 is Saturday and Sunday, August 4th and 5th at the Pasadena Center in California.

I'll be there with dozens of special guests, spacecraft displays, a space art show, great activities for kids, Planetary Radio Live, and the landing on Sunday night. Kids 8 and under are free. You can learn more at planetfest.org. It's a planet fest. I'll see you there. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website.

Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too, giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, and I'm grateful to the SETI Institute for allowing us to bring you a portion of my SETIcon2 conversation with Mae Jemison, leader of the 100-Year Starship Initiative.

Before the break, Mae was talking about the optimism of Star Trek. Doesn't your project, 100-Year Starship, sort of exude that same kind of optimism, even just in the fact that it says 100 years. It says, this is something that our species should be looking at, and it may take us a century, but we're going to be here to do it. We're not going to wipe ourselves out. Fingers crossed.

I guess it has that kind of optimism, or some people are saying, well, we have a plan B, right? We have some place to go, even though. It's an escape plan. We have an escape plan, and then So we have some place to go, even though. It's an escape plan. We have an escape plan. And then you almost say, well, you know, if we can't figure out how not to wipe ourselves out, maybe we shouldn't be escaping. I don't know. It's sort of like the piece that metastasizes away.

I don't know. But I think, yeah, I'll go with yours. I'll go with yours if there's some optimism there. We should probably also make clear what the 100-Year Starship Project is not. It's not necessarily to say, this is how we're going to reach the stars, at least not at this point, right? Well, 100-Year Starship, our idea about this, and it's the name of the title of our proposal again was, An Inclusive Audacious Journey Transforms Life Here on Earth and Beyond.

The big part of that is that the journey is 100 years from now. It's 50 years from now. It's five years from now. It's right now. Because as you start on the task in saying that we can undertake something like this and we can accomplish it, it starts to transform us right away. We will go to the moon before the close of the decade. It starts to transform us. We start to think of ourselves differently.

And we have the opportunity to apply the technologies along the way that we develop. 100-Year Starship for us, we're creating a nonprofit foundation, 100-Year Starship Foundation, that has underneath it a research institute, the way that will help to promote various different types of technologies, help status things, understand pieces, and sometimes do the research as well, because you have to figure out the way to do this, right? We don't know exactly how to do this, so you start with sort of a whiteboard. You have to say, here's some things we know how to happen. We know that the technology is sufficient.

What do I mean by that? We know enough physics to know that the potential for creating the energy sources is there. We think we know enough about astrophysics and what other parts of the universe that the laws of physics are the same, at least in the near parts of the universe that we're going to go to, that we can do this.

We have enough data gathering capacity and we know that we're on this rapid arc in terms of our ability to handle and gather data and to parse data and to understand and analyze things. We have some fundamental understanding about life. Some of the long poles, though, is our ability to understand about ecosystems and how different parts of ecosystems are interconnected. We have a lot to learn there.

We have a lot to learn. A lot of the issue in whether we can do this has to do more with commitment and willingness rather than technological complications. Don't get me wrong, the technological challenges are huge. But we can approach them, and we probably can get a long ways to solve them. But we never will if we're not committed to doing it. So yes, we're opening up. We actually

have a public symposium that will take place in September in Houston, the 13th through the 16th. Go to 100YSS.org. thank you for allowing me to do that and at it we will actually have technical tracks where time distance solutions what are some of the issues you have to go really fast when you go really fast

you have to figure out how to slow down you have to figure out how to navigate you have to figure out what happens to materials if they take a long time and they're exposed to space we're looking at life science issues not just humans and how're exposed to space. We're looking at life science issues, not just humans and how we adapt to weightlessness and how we survive, but agriculture, animal life.

How do you use weightlessness as a platform? We are looking at becoming an interstellar civilization. What does that actually mean? What are the economics of this? How do you pay for it? What are the philosophical implications or ramifications do you pay for it? What are the philosophical implications or ramifications of it? Lots of different things. We are looking at destinations and habitats. Where do you go? What can,

what do you do when you get there? We're gonna have classes. Solar System 101, Ethics 101. I want to draw really pretty space pictures. Tracks for teachers, so we'll have a lot of different things going on. But I want to go back to something you said and address this question. So right now, people see space exploration as just for rocket scientists and billionaires. So what we have to do is change the equation so that the solution that everybody sees themselves involved. So everybody doesn't necessarily physically want to go, even though I find that really hard to believe. But everybody doesn't physically want to go, but they want to be involved with understanding and participating from the perspective of, I allowed my ideas to be there, that I looked at how this affected me,

that I was able to understand what are these things that I'm seeing above me and how they interact with my life. So our task is, yes, to get people involved through many different ways, through, you know, whether it's social media, whether it's actually physically taking part in different things, volunteering. So we're real new. We're just starting up. But you can, again, be a part of it.

So stay tuned. What's that link again? 1-0-0-Y-S-S dot O-R-G. 100-year starship. 100-year starship dot O-R-G. We'll do it again one more time before we finish. Your project, let's say, is successful beyond, perhaps not your wildest dreams,

but beyond the wildest dreams of a lot of people. And there's a starship ready to go in 15 years. Do you want to be part of the crew? I'm on. I'm on. Prerogative as the lead of the project, I get to go. Please join me in thanking Dr. Meg Jemison for joining us. Thank you. Bruce Betts is on the Skype line. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society. And once upon a time, he used to hang out up on top of Mount Palomar doing astronomical research with what was the biggest telescope in the world.

And, Bruce, I just thought it was really cool. There was a story in the news last week about a new project that the Hale telescope is on. You must be pleased to know that the old girl still has some good science left in her. Oh, always pleased that the old girl, as you call her, is still cranking away. It's an amazing instrument. And it's neat that every few years they come up with new exotic ways to get more performance out of it. And now they've got a very clever adaptive optics setup they've got, and they've also, as part of it, asked me not to ever go up there when they're observing because they're afraid it'll be cloudy if I do. All right, well, we don't have adaptive optics, but please tell us what to look for in the night sky. Well, when you look up in the night sky in the evening, you can check out over in the west, the southwest, you'll see Saturn and Spica, similarly bright, but Saturn being yellowish and Spica, the star being bluish. And over to the right is reddish Mars, so it's a cornucopia of color.

In the pre-dawn, there's groovy stuff going on over in the east shortly before dawn. You've got super bright Jupiter, even brighter Venus below Jupiter, and very close to Venus doing old dance with Aldebaran, the brightest star in Taurus. And if you follow the line of Venus through Jupiter going up, you will also find the Pleiades, so the seven sisters star cluster. We move on to this week in space history. It was this week in 1965 that Mariner 4 completed the first successful flyby ever of Mars. And then just four years ago, MESSENGER did its first Mercury flyby. Come back a little bit later in the show and find out what it's doing these days. Indeed. Now, it just happens that

I have a special celebrity random space fact, as promised for this week. So may I add that one to the mix? Oh, please do. Here it is. This is Dr. May Jemison, and this is your random space fact. Wow, that's really cool. I thought so. Messenger, as it was doing these trajectory corrections, getting into the right orbit to orbit Mercury, as it was approaching that, it actually used solar sailing principles, something near and dear to the Planetary Society's heart, to use the pressure of sunlight to make slight alterations in its trajectories. In the trivia contest, I asked you, as of June 22, 2012, how many orbits had MESSENGER completed around Mercury? How'd we do, Matt?

Wow. We got a very nice response, as you might imagine, because of our very cool prize. This is the week that we give away the Celestron Anniversary First Scope, one of those just a thousand made of this model by Celestron to celebrate their anniversary as a company, making these great scopes for amateurs and professionals. It's a first-time winner, Elias Lostrom from Greece. Elias said that it's been about a thousand orbits, in fact, more or less exactly a thousand orbits that Messenger has made around Mercury. Is he correct?

That is correct. Elias, you just won yourself a Celestron anniversary for a scope. I do want to mention, boy, we had a lot of people who were just pleading for this scope. A couple of entertaining ones. Cindy Thompson said it's the three M's, messenger, Mercury and M, as in one thousand in Roman numerals, which I thought was pretty clever. That's clever. And Jamie Cox, who said, wow, a thousand orbits. Sounds like a lot, but hey, it's a small planet. Yeah. All right. Well, anyway, Elias, we're going to send you that telescope, as I said. And we're going to give away this week another of those new Fischer space pens.

And I said it's engraved with either the Planetary Radio or the Planetary Society last week. Turns out it's engraved with both. So how can somebody win one of those, Bruce? It's time once again to play Where in the Solar System? And I've played with our names in the solar system. And I thought it was about time to play with Bill Nye's name. Did not find anything named Nye, but there is something named Nylee. N-Y-E-L-E. It's a crater, and you need to tell us where in the solar system is that crater located. What body is it located on? The crater Nylee.

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter. And I just bet you've got until Monday, July 16, at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about mirrors that make your face look really, really big. Thank you, and good night.

Would that be the adaptive optics on the Hale Telescope? No, but it's the same principle. No, but it is optics. Yeah, we have one in the bathroom here. He's Bill Nye, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. Yeah. Oh, God.

Did I say Bill Nye? Yes. That's nighly true. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He'll join us again next week for What's Up. Let's change the world. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society

and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.