Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - More From the Air and Space Museum

Episode Date: June 25, 2012

Our special live show at the National Air and Space Museum continues with curator David DeVorkin, Space Policy Institute founder John Logsdon, Bill Nye the Science Guy, Planetary Society blogger Emily Lakdawalla and science rapper Funky 49.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Back to the Air and Space Museum, 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. That's the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, if you please, the world's greatest aerospace collection and the most popular museum in the world. As you may have heard last week, we were there in April to record Planetary Radio Live. Our plans came crashing down when our audio recorder crashed, but with luck and some professional data recovery assistance,

we're able to present most of what we recorded in the museum's Moving Beyond Earth gallery. This week, that will include the second half of our conversation with museum curator David Dvorkin, Space Policy Institute founder John Logsdon, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. But we've also got Emily Lakdawalla's special contribution, and later in the program, you'll hear a fragment of our musical performer that evening, science rapper Funky 49. Let's bring the curtain up on the queen of the Planetary Society blog, science and technology coordinator Emily Lakdawalla. Thank you.

Emily, I think what we're about tonight is R-E-S-P-E-C-T. That's right. I'm talking about respect for moons. And the reason that I'm talking about that, we have to go back to Pluto. How many of you out there think that Pluto should still be a planet? Well, I'm here to tell you that if you think that Pluto should be a planet, there's about another 150 things out there that you also think should be planets. And I am not just talking about Pluto's friends in the Kuiper Belt, things like Makemake and

Quawar and Varuna and Sedna and other very interestingly named objects. I'm talking about a lot of things in the solar system that are just as big as those things. In fact, many of them are even larger. They are worlds just as exciting to explore. Things like the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, whose names are Io, Europa. They are worlds just as exciting to explore. Things like the Galilean satellites of Jupiter, whose names are Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. Things like the moons of Saturn, whose names

are Mimas, Enceladus, Tethys, Dione, Rhea, Titan, Hyperion, and Phoebe. Things like the moons of Uranus, which if I can get this one, this is hard, Miranda, Titania, Ariel, Umbriel, and Oberon. No notes, everyone. No notes. And we have to go all the way out to Neptune to get to Triton, which is the weirdest one because it's orbiting Neptune backwards, and we think it might actually be a Kuiper Belt object, as Pluto is now.

All of these things are worlds unto themselves that are just as exciting to explore as any planet, and yet most people don't know their names. And because they don't know their names, they don't think they're worth exploring. And I'm here to tell you that they really are and that they're the most exciting things for us to go to with the next missions, like a mission to Europa to find out what's going on in its oceans. So I hope that you will all say, rah, rah, let's go explore some moons of the solar system. Please give the moons some respect.

Respect the moons. You are crazy for moons. I am crazy. Thanks so much, Emily. That's Emily Lakdawalla, the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and the editor of its very popular blog at planetary.org. Let's give her another hand. We've got much more from our evening at the National Air and Space Museum in April.

Last week we introduced you to David Dvorkin, Senior Curator for the History of Astronomy and the space sciences for the museum, and John Logsdon, distinguished space policy advisor and creator. David is senior curator for the history of astronomy and the space sciences. He wrote a history of the American Astronomical Society and co-authored the Hubble Space Telescope, New Views of the Universe from the National Geographic Society. John Logsdon is professor emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs in the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University. He founded and for over two decades directed the Elliott School Space Policy Institute

and is the author of John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Also joining us on stage in the Moving Beyond Earth Gallery was the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. We'll pick up the conversation with a question for John. John, you've been following space policy essentially from the beginning. How would you characterize this progress that we have made? Has it been steady? Has it been heavily punctuated? Well, far from steady. I mean, John Kennedy now 51 years ago made this remarkable commitment to send Americans to the moon before the decade is out and did a warlike but peaceful mobilization of financial and human resources to achieve it. Since then, we've gone quickly down to a kind of steady, slowly declining, unfortunately, amount of our federal funding that we give to the space program.

So the program has struggled for the better part of 40 years, trying to reach ambitions set by Apollo, but with inadequate resources. So we've been trying to do too much with too little, and we need to reconcile that. Otherwise, it's constant tension, constant stress. How do we strike a balance? Because even within the space community, which includes an awful lot of components, you have different factions saying, no, we're the ones who deserve that extra money. Well, that's really tough, isn't it?

Because everybody has their favorite Mars sample return, Europa, humans to asteroids, humans back to the moon, eventually going to Mars, the Webb telescope. We trust our representatives in the White House and in the Congress to make those decisions, but it's organizations like the Planetary Society that give them the background, the ideas. Thank you. That should be the foundation. After all, they all work for the public. And so we should have a space program that the American public wants and supports.

We should have a space program that the American public wants and supports. David, you have the great good fortune of working at this place, and you see people coming in, people of all ages, and the enthusiasm, the passion that this guy over here, Bill likes to talk about, the passion, beauty, and joy. The PB&J. Yeah, of space. To me, if I saw that, I would want to maybe drag congresspeople over here on a daily basis as well. If it was legal, I'd do it. No, I come down to the, do a lot of floor walking.

I watch how people react to things. And I must say, I have various galleries like Explore the Universe and Space Hall and the V2 exhibit and others. And I just absolutely am enthralled watching people walking slowly, reading the labels, contemplating, thinking, cogitating, wondering what it all means, and then enjoying what it seems like, the overall experience. I get more joy out of that than the books that I write. All of the books that I write help express, I think, some of the experiences that I have here. Ladies and gentlemen, those of you here in the live audience here in the Moving Beyond Earth Gallery at least, we're going to open it up to you now. We're going to see if you have any questions for John Logsdon or David Dvorkin. And so we've got a microphone that we're ready to send out.

We're going to ask you to raise your hand if you have a question, and we will have Adam, our volunteer, come running on over. Here goes Adam right now. He's running. Hi, sir. What is your name? Name's Alex Haggerty, and my question is how you two came to be in your positions as museum directors.

Yeah. David, you go first. How did you get this job? I applied for it. Federal SF-171. 1979. Okay, what made you the right candidate for the job? What led you to this? Well, I have a combination of working knowledge plus academic knowledge of astronomy. And I have had extensive museum experience. I think, Bill, you mentioned or someone mentioned here the Griffith Observatory. And I literally grew up at the Griffith Observatory starting when I was about five. And that was my home

away from home and it became my home all the way through the graduating from UCLA. And I got my first experience at the Griffith as a guide, also as a lecturer, and operating the telescope, and I was hooked, absolutely hooked. John Logsdon, didn't you get your first job in space policy at the age of 3 1⁄2? Not hardly. My first degree was in physics. I wasn't very good at it. I could never do the calculus. I went to New York to work. The first space memory I have is not Sputnik. I'm old enough to remember it. It's not Kennedy saying we should go to the moon.

It's John Glenn parading through the streets of Manhattan, March 1, 1962. And that helped me go back to graduate school in political science, write all my papers on space policy and history topics, and as we say, the rest is history. Literally in this case. We have time for maybe a couple more questions. Hi, sir, what's your name? J.T. Miller.

My question is, you talked about the lack of government funding for our future space travel. Do you feel that privatized space travel like Virgin Galactic is going to lead us to other planets and moons instead of the U.S. government? Great question. This new era that a lot of people are calling new space, John? Eventually, we hope. But Virgin Galactic is just going up and down, suborbital. To get to orbit requires a lot more energy, a lot more speed, acceleration. About nine times the energy. SpaceX. How about SpaceX? Well, SpaceX, it's private money, but it's doing government things. I think the right way to think about the future is a government-industry-private-sector partnership.

I mean, I think it's very interesting that a set of billionaires, people with serious money, are putting some of their money into space, seeing it as both something they like to do, they think it's neat, but also they don't throw money away. It's how they became billionaires. So they're seeing a future in space that may at some point in the future return a profit, be an economic sector, not soon, but hopefully eventually. David, do you want to add something quick? I just have an emotional thought and a memory. I was about six years old when I saw Destination Moon, and it's still in my mind,

and it was very clear to me that it was a corporate tycoon who paid the bills. The military was back there, of course, as I understand it now as a mature movie watcher, but Destination Moon was the one that set the romance and the possibility for me. And I like very much the strong response that corporate America has made. I'd like to see it stronger. There's more to come from David Dvorkin, John Logsdon, and Bill Nye at the National Air and Space Museum. 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. PlanetFest 2012 is Saturday and Sunday, August 4th and 5th at the Pasadena Center in Southern California. I'll be there along with dozens of special guests, spacecraft

displays, a space art show, a Planetary Radio broadcast, great family activities, and the landing on Sunday night. Kids 8 and under are free. All the info is at planetary.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. We've reached the final section of our conversation recorded at the National Air and Space Museum in late April. We were there for Planetary Radio Live as part of the USA Science and Engineering Festival and a stargazing party at the museum sponsored by Celestron. Just before the break, we were talking with museum curator David Dvorkin and Space Policy Institute founder John Logsdon about the new life in commercial space development.

Bill Nye picks up that conversation. The big thing is if these people like SpaceX and Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada Space are able to successfully go to low Earth orbit and you can hire that out, then that will enable the public sector, NASA for example, to go on beyond low Earth orbit to new and exciting destinations. So everything should work together. It's coming right up. These people are, I go to these meetings, these guys are very close, these organizations. We're going to take one more question. It has to be really quick.

Hi, what's your name? Sarah Kratt. I was wondering regarding the furthering of things such as putting life into space, what your thoughts are on tardigrades in space. Oh, we love tardigrades in space. For those of you who don't know what tardigrades are, they're the water bears, and these are very,

very small organisms that live, if I may, between grains of sand. And so they're striking when you see microscopic images of them, like you might have seen on the cover of the Planetary Report. And so we arranged to have these organisms, along with several other microorganisms go on their way to Phobos, the moon of Mars, and want to reassure everybody if everything had gone totally wrong, it just would have missed. It wouldn't have landed on Mars. And the question is, can a living thing make the trip from the Earth to Mars and back and still be alive? Everybody thinks the crazy cold of outer space

would not be a problem for these tiny things. And everybody thinks zero gravity wouldn't be much of a problem. The question is, would radiation hurt them in some way? But that experiment ended up in the Pacific Ocean, so we don't know yet. We'll try again soon. But it is quite a thing. And I'll just tell you an anecdote. I was talking to the planetary protection officer of NASA about whether or not this was a cool thing to do, a worthy thing. And the officer said, you don't need to bother doing that. They'll be fine. They're going to survive that. And that's when I knew it was a good idea. It was just that somebody, they had not thought of trying it. So we'll see. There may be another opportunity sometime.

And you know what? I'm fine with water bears, tardigrades going into space, going close to Mars. But wouldn't you rather have us doing it? Here, here. John, where are we headed? Where would you like to see us headed in the next five to ten years? Well, five to ten years is unfortunately too short a time frame to go anywhere except the International Space Station.

First thing we have to do is restore U.S. access to the station with our own system. I am a lunatic. I think we're not done with the moon. It's our offshore island. It's three days away. That's my choice for the first destination once we start voyaging away from the planet again. David, what are you looking forward to or at least hoping for? Oh, a certain normalcy in low Earth orbit. I'd like to see low Earth orbit as a place where it is not a remarkable thing to reach,

where it seems like it's next door. To plug another commercial entity, I'd like to see Starbucks in low Earth orbit, and then we can go beyond that. I still like that Howard Johnson's on the space station in 2001. That's what 2001, right? Hilton. The Hilton Hotel, but wasn't there a Howard Johnson? There could have been. 28 flavors?

There should have been. And there was Pan Am flying there, too. Baskin-Robbins was probably on the next one around the orbit. But that was the genius of Kubrick, to make space normal. It was a normal operation. Thank you gentlemen. We're out of time for anything but a normal conversation in this absolutely exceptional location. It has been a great joy talking to you. Thank you so much for joining us. David Dvorkin is the National Air and Space Museum

Senior Curator for the History of Astronomy and the Space Sciences. John Logsdon is so many things, but... Old. But he founded and ran for over 20 years the Space Policy Institute right here in town at George Washington University. And Bill, we will hear from you again next week with your regular Planetary Radio commentary. Looking forward. Thank you, Matt.

Bill Nye, the science and planetary guy, is the Planetary Society CEO. Please give them all a big hand. But wait, there's more. We wanted to include some music in our Planetary radio live taping at the Air and Space Museum, so we invited Funky 49 to take the stage. Funky 49, also known as Steve Rush, is a science rapper. Unfortunately, all we have left of Steve's three numbers is the fragment you're about to hear.

It ends at the moment our digital audio recorder lost power. That's a shame, because I think you'd have enjoyed all of Funky 49's particle business. This track is dedicated to Fermilab, in Batavia, Illinois, in the United States. Where the Hicks at? Go back there, Mark Where the Hicks at? Where the Hicks at? Where the Hicks at? Go, go, go Tevatron, OGM smasher Say hello to CERN's party crasher

The new wall of rings LEC here mean This be competitive collaboration Baby, stripping electrons Mega ions, a hydrogen Now pull the proton Give it that speed We need to make real science get achieved

I believe shock protons greatly accelerate it Two telelectrons, they narrate it They just smash and get mated Create smaller bits and just degrade them Wheel of collisions take snapshots To get the right shot, learn a lot Yo, we're mad, rip of events do occur Blast fast data stream is a blur And that's how it ended, when our recorder suddenly lost power. Our apologies to Funky49.

You can hear and see all of particle business online. Yes, you can see it. Steve Rush was given an all-area backstage pass to Fermilab, where he shot the music video for the song. We've got the link at planetary.org slash radio. Our thanks go once again to the Smithsonian Institution and everyone who joined us at the National Air and Space Museum, and especially to the many museum staff members and volunteers who made our visit possible.

We also thank Celestron, the sponsor of the stargazing party that evening, and we once again thank the Data Rescue Center for recovering everything you've just heard. Bruce Betts and What's Up are seconds away. It's time once again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Sitting across from me at Planetary Society HQ is Bruce Betts, the director of projects for this place, who joins us each week to tell us what's up in the night sky. Up in the night sky. We've got in the evening sky the south to southwest in the early evening. And you will see Saturn hanging out still with the bluer Spica, similarly bright star.

And you will also, if you look to the right, see Mars looking reddish. And if you pick up this shortly after it comes out, you can see the moon between Mars and Saturn Spica. Between those two, roughly on the 26th of June. And in the pre-dawn, we've got Jupiter and Venus getting easier to see. Low on the horizon in the pre-dawn east, both looking super bright. Jupiter being the higher one, and it may be tougher to see venus but it is brighter if you get a chance so check those out and in this week in space history it was a a dark time in 1971 the soya's 11 crew died during re-entry that was volkov dobrovolsky

and potzaev and in 1908 a bad day for some some deer in siberia08, a bad day for some deer in Siberia. This is a bad day for Russians all around. All around. The Tunguska impact occurred this week in 1908. Another reminder that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery. Remember, only you can prevent meteor strikes. Well, no, I guess not. Well, we all can get together and save the world. Yes. This is your Earth on meteor strikes. Well, no, I guess not. Well, we all can get together and save the world. Yes. This is your Earth on meteor strikes. This is your planet.

This is your planet on asteroid strikes. Obscure references to 1970 public service announcements. We apologize. Let us move on to Random Space Fact. Is that the all clear? Can we come out of the fallout shelter? You can come out of the fallout shelter now. Let's just date ourselves even more.

All right. So I got a little obsessed. All these things flying into orbit lately. A little obsessed with comparing volumes. So the first part of this, people on my Twitter feed, Random Space Fact, have already seen, which is that China, having three astronauts up there right now in the Tiangong-1 and Shenzhou-9 combined spacecraft. combined spacecraft. That combined spacecraft, those two things,

have a combined pressurized volume only equivalent to about a 14-foot U-Haul truck. That includes Mom's attic, the volume. So that's what they're living in up there. ISS, International Space Station, is about 42 times larger. Then we go to Dragon. The Dragon capsule that flew recently has pressurized volume that's about the same as Apollo, the command module.

Very close, about 10 cubic meters. Although Apollo had less livable space, less usable stuff, more of that pressurized space was crammed with other stuff. So we basically have those two at about 10 cubic meters. Shen Zhao plus Tiangong at about 20 cubic meters.

Skylab, much bigger. Much, much, much, much bigger at 320 cubic meters. And ISS at 837 cubic meters. I told you I got a little obsessed. I had to know. I just had to know. Plenty of room to stretch out, though. Well, in those latter ones.

Yeah, yeah. I was only going to talk about the ISS, but your Skylab was roomy. Lots of room to stretch out. Didn't even need Mom's Attic. This is just a show of obscurity, isn't it? When is it not? That's a good point. All right, trivia question.

We move on. And we talked about planetary nebula, which is a misnomer name because it has nothing to do with planets, the way these things form around stars shaking off shells of gas late in their life. So what person was responsible for this misnomer? How'd we do, Matt? A guy that I just read a good piece of a book about. There was a whole section devoted to him. Now I'm stuck because I can't remember the name of the book. But it was William Herschel, whose sister was at least as impressive as him, but he got all the attention. He's the one who saddled us with this ridiculous, inaccurate, and misleading name. It was Doug Pickle of Calgary, Alberta, who got chosen by Random.org this week, and he said, indeed, it was good Sir William.

And we did hear from a lot of other people. John Gallant said that Herschel ultimately discovered over 2,400 objects that he identified as nebula and caused confusion to millions of people for hundreds of years ever since, including Ben Owens, who said, including me, as he gave us that figure. Yeah, apparently he named it that because he thought it was similar in appearance to the planet that he discovered later called Uranus, as opposed to George, which he wanted to call.

That's true. That's true. That's true, yeah. That was in the book. After the king. That planet was just destined for a bad name, wasn't it? It was not going to escape its destiny. It is your destiny. It's your destiny.

All right, we move on to this week. Here's a nice trivia question for you in the level of trivia. As of June 22, 2012, how many orbits had Messenger completed at Mercury? How many orbits of Mercury, to be clear? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter, and a little hint, it's a nice round number. And you have until Monday, July 2, the 2nd of July at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer. And as promised, we have a terrific prize for this contest. A lot of people looking forward to this. Right-o. Tell us about it, Matt. Celestron First Scope, the anniversary First Scope, only 1,000 of them made.

Thank you so much to our friends at Celestron for providing this. It could be yours if you come up with the right answer and get chosen by random.org. So get your entry in, folks. By the way, I was at JPL this morning. Yay! So of course, I picked up a little gift for you. Cool.

There you go. What do we got? Oh, wow! Here, this is what they sound like. That's right. They're stupendous anti-gravity mints. Thanks. And what's the slogan? There's no way to know.

I'll just give it to you. Okay, good. When you need a lift. I do need a lift. So do you think I need a lift or do you think I have bad breath? I think you should eat them all. Just cover all the bases. Okay.

All right, well, thank you. That's a really cool gift. I love it when you go to JPL. Me too. Alright, everybody go out there look up the night sky and think about roses. Thank you. Good night. A rose by any other smells as sweet. As sweet as Bruce will smell after he's had some of those anti-gravity mints. Mmm, tasty. He's the

Director of Projects for the Planetary Society and he joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the many members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.