Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Movers and Shakers at SpaceCom Expo

Episode Date: November 24, 2015

We join 1,600 space entrepreneurs and visionaries in Houston, and talk with Boeing, XCOR, Johnson Space Center Director Ellen Ochoa and more.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A glimpse of the future at the Spacecom Expo, 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, back from Houston, Texas, and the first ever Spacecom Expo, where 1,600 professional spacers gathered to make deals and talk about the development of that final frontier. We'll meet several of them. SpaceX was at the Expo. Bill Nye will explain why all their people were smiling. Later, Bruce Betts and I will tempt you with our Black Friday whiz-bang prize package for the new space trivia contest.

Here is the Planetary Society's Senior Editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Black Friday whiz-bang prize package for the new space trivia contest. Here is the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdawalla. Lots to talk about today. Emily, let's begin with this new blog post, new as we speak, November 23rd. We'll link to it, of course. Mastcam-Z has passed its preliminary design review, and you were there when it happened. I was there. So this is a process that every single part of every single spacecraft has to go through. It's just really mind-boggling how much discussion there has to be of every tiny

detail of any piece of any spacecraft in order to make it okay to launch it and send it on to another planet. The Planetary Society are education and public outreach partners on the camera team for the next Mars rover mission. So we were there in order to participate in the planning for this next camera. We're going to be helping with some contests and some other fun things involving the camera and its calibration target. But we have to really be involved from the beginning. And part of my role as an education public outreach person on the mission is to tell the story about how you go from an idea in the heads of scientists and engineers to a camera actually taking photos on the surface of Mars. And finally, remind us of why Mastcam-Z is quite different from what we have on Curiosity right now. The sad thing is it's not all that different from what we had originally planned to have on Curiosity.

But for very complicated reasons, Curiosity did not wind up with a zoom camera on the surface of Mars. Instead, it has this pair of color cameras that have different focal lengths so that one's more zoomed in

than the other. They're hoping not to have to do that with Mars 2020 and send a single pair of cameras that both have zoom capabilities so they can get stereo color images from both close to the rover and zooming in far away. So much more will be reported on this between now and the 2020 launch. And of course, after that, when this camera has hopefully survived its seven minutes of terror and made it down to the surface. One other post that's already up. Tell us about this piece put together by a colleague at the Wall Street Journal.

Yeah, you know, it's not a complicated thing that John Keegan did. He just took all of the images that Cassini took during its entire Saturn mission and assembled them into a movie, just showing them one after the other. This flipbook takes four hours to watch, and it's just mesmerizing. It is hypnotic. Exactly. I went through it and paused here and there. And people, you need to see this. And, of course, that also will be linked to from planetary.org slash radio.

It's in Emily's blog. And you've got a new one that will be appearing shortly after people begin to hear this conversation. Yep. My annual book review blog post will be coming up on Tuesday, so stay tuned for that. All right, and we will talk about that in more detail next week. Emily, thanks so much. And by the way,

congratulations on your beautiful photo in the New York Times. Not so much for space stuff, though it's related, but because you're a Lego fanatic. Indeed, and I always have been, and it's kind of hilarious that I landed on the front page of the business section of the Times for that.

All right. Well, we will link to that as well from planetary.org slash radio. Thank you so much, Emily. Thank you, Matt. Our senior editor, the planetary and Lego evangelist, Emily Laktawalla. She's also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Back with her again next week. But now it's time to talk to the CEO, Bill Nye. Bill, welcome back. We look now to the commercial crew effort by NASA because there was big news last week. Yes, both Boeing and SpaceX

are going to fly year after next, 2017. Very exciting. So this, I got to tell you, this commercial crew idea has been around for years and years, and people have been very critical of NASA for not getting this done faster and canceling the space shuttle was the end of the world as we know it and so on. But this has finally come around where we have two contractors that NASA feels are going to be able to pull it off. So it's the future. You know, there's an old joke. Alan Bean, I think, was walking on the moon, and he said, you know, it's charming to think that we got here on equipment hardware built by the lowest bidder.

These are successful low bidders. And so this should achieve this thing we've been trying to get, everybody in the space community has been trying to get for years and years, and that is to lower the cost of getting to low Earth orbit. So this is big news. I mean, these are contracts. This means we are achieving long-term goals, and we will lower the cost to low Earth orbit. And it's not just humans. I mean, it's getting cheaper to send payloads up there, too, even little CubeSats, like a certain light sail. Yes, yes, light sail. So there's a big

CubeSat effort everywhere, but we are still part of, we're still on the manifest for the Falcon Heavy, which if you were into it, you could call it the Falcon 27. It has 27 engines. It's a different way of doing it. Instead of four or two huge engines, it has 27 of a reliable, proven design. And so it seems like it ought to work. We'll see. Space is getting closer. Yeah, well said.

Thank you, Bill. I think we're done. Thank you, Matt. Let's change the worlds. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. We go next to the Spacecom Expo, where this theme, space getting closer and cheaper, dominated the day. I hadn't been to Texas in years. I arrived in Houston the day before the grand opening of Spacecom Expo,

the new Space Commerce Conference and Exhibition. Over the next three days, I joined men and women from nearly every big U.S. aerospace contractor and many smaller companies, including a sizable group from the UK and other nations. Nearly all of them were excited about the final frontier, not just as something to explore, but as a place to do business. NASA was also well represented with an opening keynote from its administrator and much more. Spacecom Executive Director James Causey was one of the first people I spoke to. Did you just finish acting as a tour guide to the NASA Administrator?

We did. We had a wonderful opportunity to take Charlie Bolden around the floor on kind of an exclusive tour. He spent a lot of time at the NASA booth and seemed to be really enjoying it, but he also spent some time with several of our other exhibitors, and we had a very, very good time. We're starting a little bit of a race right now. We also spent some time with several of our other exhibitors and we had a very, very good time. We're starting a little bit of a race right now. It's a race to find out how really to create these business models that will work in suborbital

and low Earth orbit. And we're bringing a lot of people together. That's what space comes all about. But the people that are going to really be doing this long term are not only the existing companies within the aerospace field, but also looking at entrepreneurs, small business, and medium-sized business that start to see opportunity in these markets, and then that will start to create the sustainable market long term.

It's why, in fact, as part of the SpaceCom program, we've actually built into our third day a real discussion around business models, funding, and how those funds could be realized for small and intermediate-sized businesses. So there's no question that you will be back with this next year? We've already booked the space, November 15, 16, and 17 for 2016. It'll be absolutely spectacular next year. We've already booked the space November 15, 16, and 17 for 2016. It'll be absolutely spectacular next year. Spacecom Expo Executive Director James Causey. XCOR Aerospace has come a long way since I first found it more than 10 years ago, preparing to test a tiny rocket engine in the Mojave Desert. The company's Space Expeditions Division is now preparing

for the first powered flights of its Lynx suborbital spacecraft. Jeff Grayson is the company's chief technology officer and former chair. In his SpaceCom presentation, Jeff said most of the public suffers from a basic misunderstanding. I asked him to explain. Jeff Grayson, Chief Technology Officer, SpaceX. When we talk particularly about human spaceflight, in a sense, all the human spaceflight that has ever happened is an exploratory or demonstration activity. But ultimately, for a commercial industry, humans in space become, in economic terms, labor.

They're up there because they'll have a job to do. There have been experiments where people have done things like tried to find out how much money they can make when they're up there. And the answer turns out to be a lot, just not currently as much as it costs to get them up there. So there's going to come a point where the ticket price for getting a human being up to an orbiting space asset gets to be down to a few million dollars as opposed to the tens of millions of dollars it is today. And when you're at that point, flying somebody up to space becomes a way to make money, not just for the launch provider, but for the person who's going up there to do the job. It's like flying somebody to an offshore aero platform. And when that happens, quite suddenly, I think we're going

to find that there's an enormous volume of people who are going up to space, not just because they're rich people, not because they want to see the view, although those will all be wonderful things they'll still get to do, but because it's their job. You also mentioned looking forward to the time when people are living up there and don't think of Earth as home, which has been a dream for so many years, but it sounds like you see that coming into real view. I do, but let's be clear that I was talking about the need to start to develop the legal and regulatory structures for that, And that's not a rapid process. It cannot be tomorrow, and we still need to start thinking about those things.

The commercial space bill that just passed Congress starts that conversation because for the first time it engages in U.S. law something that people have thought about as customary but never really documented for a while, which is that, okay, maybe you can't own the moon, but if you dig something up out of the moon and turn it into something, do you own that? And the stance in the law that is awaiting now the president's signature is that, yes, you do. But ultimately ultimately we're going to need people to be able to own their homes we're going to need people to be able to direct their own activities without necessarily needing to go back and ask for some new license from some earthbound entity every time they want to try and

think of something new if they invent things they're going to need to have titled intellectual property because a lot of new things are going to be invented, new ways for them to live in space, just like when we settled the West. I don't know how many new inventions for barbed wire and coal-burning stoves there were, but there were a lot. We just heard George Whitesides say space is hot. Now, we also know space is hard, but would you agree that there's a new enthusiasm both in

industry and the public? I think when people talk about space being hot right now what they're seeing is that sources of investment traditional venture capital types of investment are moving into the space arena in a big way and that's really a new phenomenon. But the reason that's happening is because for the first time you can start a space business without having to necessarily start with huge amounts of money or plan to work on it for decades before you see return on investment. That's mostly happening because of the small satellite arena. But it's not because they're small. It's because you can do it at a startup company scale,

because you don't have to invent the satellite-making technology. You don't have to invent the launch vehicles. You don't have to invent the ground infrastructure. Those things are out there now. They can be purchased for a price that your investors can know what the price is. So you can put a business case together for a company that you think in two or three years we can be making money or not. And venture capitalists don't mind companies that might or might not make money, but they mind very much companies that you won't

know for 10 years. So a long ways to go still, but nevertheless an exciting time to be in the business you're in. Absolutely correct. Jeff Grayson of XCOR. When we return, we'll hear from the director of the Johnson Space Center, a Boeing VP, and more. This is Planetary Radio. Hi, I'm Andy Weir, author of The Martian.

Do you know how my character, Mark Watney, will make it to Mars someday? He'll get there because people like you and me, and organizations like the Planetary Society, never stopped fighting to advance space exploration and science. The challenges have rarely been greater than they are right now. You can learn what the Society is doing and how you can help at planetary.org. Mark and I will thank you for taking steps to ensure humanity's bright future across the solar system and beyond. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here. I'd like to introduce you to Merck Boyan. Hello.

He's been making all those fabulous videos which hundreds of thousands of you have been watching. That's right. We're going to put all the videos in one place, Merck. Is that right? Planetary TV. So I can watch them on my television? No. So wait a minute. Planetary TV is not on TV? That's the best thing about it. They're all going to be online. You can watch them anytime you want.

Where do I watch Planetary TV then, Mark? Well, you can watch it all at planetary.org slash TV. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan with a few of the conversations I had at the first SpaceCom Expo in Houston, Texas. John Elbin is Vice President and General Manager of the Boeing Company's Space Exploration Division. Boeing is the prime contractor for the Space Launch System, or SLS, the giant rocket that may one day carry humans far beyond Earth orbit. The design of the SLS is nearly complete.

We had the critical design review, so that's going really well. We're starting the manufacturing of the qual test vehicle down at Michoud Assembly Facility just outside New Orleans. And so it's really progressing well. Engines are working pretty well, too. We had the Aerojet Rocketdyne test fired, one of the upgraded engines engines a couple months ago, and that test went really well.

Orbital ATK is responsible for the solid rocket boosters, and there was a testing of a qual vehicle for that a couple months ago as well. So all the components of the rocket are really going well, and it's coming together. It was nice to hear you talk about the deep space potential for planetary science missions of this big rocket. Specifically, you talked about Europa. What is the advantage? So in addition to launching Orion, which is the primary mission of SLS,

it can also carry planetary probes to planets in the solar system much faster than expendable launch vehicles that we have today, for example. The Europa mission, if it were to launch on an EELV class vehicle, would take about seven years to get to Europa. If we launch that on an SLS because of the increased delta V, we can get there in about two years. So that five-year difference is a big deal to the program relative to the cost it can save and also to the scientists.

They can get their data back five years sooner. Yeah, and five fewer years to spend in space with that delicate machine as well. Get it out there to where it's supposed to be doing the science. Absolutely. You know, get out there and do the mission, and that transit time also has some risk to it, so you shorten all that. So overall, it's a real benefit to the program to be able to do that. I know that I, and I bet a lot of our audience as well, really doesn't have a full concept of

just how huge this rocket is, especially the later versions of it. You had a great example. You talked about the shroud that will be sitting on top of it. Yeah, ultimately, we'll be able to put a 10-meter shroud on top of the SLS. And to give you a sense of the size of that, imagine three school buses, two of them kind of wheel-to-wheel, and then a third one on top of it inside that shroud. I mean, it's a gigantic shroud. The space station, its logistics philosophy was to bring avionics boxes back to the ground and repair them using the shuttle initially as logistics and now commercial resupply. When we go deep into space, we won't have that luxury. So we need to be able

to repair things at the small level. For example, a component on a circuit card inside of a box rather than the whole box. And we need to be able to somehow manufacture those things in space if we can. There's been a lot of discussion of 3D printing to do that kind of work. If we're able to perfect that, that will certainly help with the logistics that will be required when we go to Mars. I want to close with a question that came from the moderator about how people are going to make money in space, other than the ways that are already being done, like Earth observation and so on.

You had a very interesting answer for where your dreams are. Yeah, so what I said was my dream would be someday that an energy company would come into my office and say, hey, we've perfected a fusion reactor, and we need all the helium-3 you can bring back from the moon. Go get it. You know, that would be a fascinating challenge for me to go do that. Or perhaps somebody finds a material that can be manufactured only in low Earth orbit and they'd like a space station, small one, put in just dedicated to manufacturing that material.

That kind of commerce will really cause this to take off and commercial space will become an incredible industry. Boeing Space Exploration Division Leader John Elbin. NASA occupied center court in the SpaceCom exhibit hall. The agency's Johnson Space Center is right outside Houston, of course. Its director, Ellen Ochoa, was one of many former astronauts at the conference. The veteran of four shuttle missions took questions at an informal press conference held in the booth. I asked her about her center's role in getting humans beyond low Earth orbit.

Any of you saw or saw online Charlie Bolden's talk yesterday, he really talked about three phases that we're doing in exploration that will prepare us for Mars. The first one is the Earth Reliant, so activities that we do in low Earth orbit but that help prepare us for exploration. And obviously the International Space Station is a big part of that because not only is it focused on applications that can be used on Earth, but we use it as a testbed ourselves to understand how systems could operate, could be more reliable and maintainable,

smaller volume that we can take on long-duration missions. So that's part of how we use ISS, as well as understanding the that's part of how we use ISS, as well as understanding the human health part of it. And then, of course, we're developing the Orion program. We have the Orion program manager here, Mark Kirisich, and that's a beyond-Low-Earth-Orbit spacecraft to get crews beyond Low-Earth-Orbit, and even more importantly, from my point of view

as a former crew member, get them safely back from the much higher velocities, much more stringent heating environment designed to keep four people alive for about 21 days so you can think about doing missions in the lunar vicinity initially and then hopefully a little bit later with some sort of habitation module much longer missions and so in the 2020s what we'd like to do is to develop and demonstrate all those capabilities that we need to eventually go to Mars. But what we really want to do is develop a sustainable program. So it's not just an out and back and you're done. It's really more about pioneering space. 21 would-be spaceports around the world were represented at Spacecom Expo.

So were oil companies, health care, research firms, maritime experts, and quite a few non-profits. Destination Imagination had a colorful booth. I talked with Wendy Neiman, the organization's associate director for industry development. Wendy, your title may have explained it, but I'm going to ask this question anyway. Why are you guys here at this industry conference? You're surrounded by engineers and CEOs, and you're here to work with kids to do STEM, right? We are. Working with kids in STEM is the future workforce for the corporations

which we're surrounded with here at SpaceCom. So we are the gateway, so to speak, to help instill the skills that students will need to be able to take us to Mars, take us into deep exploration, explore the oceans, find new ways for the transportation and energy industries to solve some of today's most pressing problems. There were many familiar faces at the SpaceCom Expo. One of the youngest belonged to Chris Biddy. I first met Chris when he was still a student

working to create the Planetary Society's light sail spacecraft. Now he's CEO and founder of silicon-based Aquila Space, a startup that plans to put a constellation of 30 Corvus CubeSats in orbit, where they will monitor agriculture across the globe. It's a great example of the revolution that is underway a few hundred kilometers above our heads. We've heard, we've been told at this meeting, thousands of these small satellites, nanosats, CubeSats, being launched. Yeah, yeah, there's a lot on the way. There's so many things you can do with these small satellites now,

and there's so many different data sets to provide and to create value from. So it's just, yeah, it's amazing. It's really exciting to be in this industry at this time. So fess up. Any success that you're going to have at Aquila is entirely due to your LightSail experience. Absolutely, yeah, you know, I was thinking about this the other day that, you know, I was so fortunate to be able to work on LightSail. It taught me a lot and actually it was the foundation of a lot of my experience in small sats. It's a different way of thinking, and it really helped me grow as an engineer working on that program.

So absolutely, it's a huge part of it, absolutely. And the Planetary Society was very lucky to have you. Best of luck with this new venture. Thank you, really appreciate it. Chris Biddy of Aquila Space. You'll hear much more from the SpaceCom Expo in the coming weeks, along with side trips trips including Ad Astra, the company that dreams of building the rocket engines that got the Martians Mark Watney to Mars,

and a visit to the Moonrock Collection at the Johnson Space Center. For now, prepare yourself for a Texas-sized encounter with Bruce Betts on the Skype line once again. We've actually been talking for quite a while before you guys are hearing us and having a wonderful time about things we can't share with you. It's really pretty funny. It's all fun and games things we can't share with you. It's really pretty funny. It's all fun and games when we can't share it. The audience loves to hear those

stories. A clean joke that's still in such poor taste that we really can't tell it, so sorry about that. By the way, Matt told it, not me. Maybe someday on our new private non-space What's Not Up in Space podcast that we really should start doing.-space What's Not Up in Space podcast that we really should start doing. If you'd like to hear Bruce and me not talk about space but talk about other stuff, you can write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

What's up? We've still got that pre-dawn east lineup of planets. So check out Venus down low, super bright. And then Mars, reddish, next in the line. Jupiter, also very bright, higher up. And they are, of course, roughly in a line because the planets in the solar system orbit roughly in a plane. Kind of cool, huh? The rain in the plane stays mainly. No, I got that right. You go ahead. I'll figure it out. Okay, you work on that. This week in space history, in 2011, it's been four years since the Curiosity Mars rover, Mars Science Laboratory was launched. Rovin, rovin, rovin. Keep those rovers rovin. Right.

We move on to random, random space fact, random, random space fact. We move on to random, random space fact, random, random space fact. I need a whip. I'll have to drop a little whip sound effect in there. No space shuttle orbiter spent a full year in space, if you add up all their missions. But Discovery, with 39 flights, spent just hours less than 365 days in space. Wow. Oh, man. It's too bad they didn't make, like, two more orbits just for fun. That tends to be how NASA plans their missions.

All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And speaking of space shuttles, what was the only space shuttle that had an in-flight main engine failure and reached orbit on its two remaining engines. How did we do, Matt? I think I know the answer because I had a whole bunch of listeners tell me. Thank you for your entries. Here is the one that Random.org picked out for us.

It's from Eric Rieger, I believe a longtime listener in Centennial, Colorado. Eric said it was Challenger with STS-51F that had to do this thing called abort to orbit. Is he correct? And if so, what does all that mean? That is correct. ATO, abort to orbit. That means they're a little known random space fact. A lot of astronaut training for launches is on all sorts of failure modes that never, those failure modes never occurred where they can do different aborts, whether it be turn around and land back at Kennedy Space Center or land in Spain where the rain falls mainly on the plane. That's what I was trying to get earlier. Yeah. Okay, go ahead. If they have enough power engines left, they can abort to orbit.

So still make it to orbit. and that's the safest mode. So in this case, about three and a half minutes into the flight, one of the main engines was shut down. Turns out because of poor sensor readings. But the sensors automatically shut down that engine and left them two engines high enough up that they could abort to orbit. They actually started getting sensor reading issues on another engine and overrode those so it wouldn't automatically shut down. And so they reached orbit, but just a little bit lower orbit than had been planned. Well, Eric, congratulations.

You have won not just a Planetary Radio t-shirt, but Bill Nye's customized greeting on your voicemail system. By the way, we heard from Eric and a bunch of other people that this was also the shuttle mission where the Kohler Wars made it into space because they took Pepsi and Coke with them into orbit. The winner was Tang because they didn't like the carbonation that you got in microgravity. Coke and Pepsi both denied that that had anything to do with the main engine shutdown. That's good. We also heard... I think the engine just burped. David Rossiter, he probably had one of the more interesting angles on the launch of this shuttle mission.

He's a pilot, and so he was at the end of the runway at the airport in Orlando waiting to take off, and he was able to see it right out the cockpit window. Finally, Patrick Clark from Evergreen, Colorado, who said that STS-51F traveled 5,284,350 kilometers, and that that equals, you ready, 176,145,593 new planetary society headquarters. Well, now I think I have a much better intuitive feel for it. For how big headquarters is, right. That's a little creepy, actually. Was this satellite reconnaissance?

Anyway, Patrick added, I started college life as a music major, was doing well. When I saw the pics of Ciri's spots, I fell in love with planetary science. Matt, Bruce, Bill, and Emily, you have all inspired me to now get a degree in geology and a PhD in planetary science. Wow. Cool. Congratulations, Patrick, and best of luck with that change. Speaking of aborts that worked out for the crew, what was the only case in which a launch escape system was fired with a crew aboard while the rocket was still on the pad? Wow.

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest to enter. Do I need to add that you have until the 1st, December 1st, Tuesday at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer. Your prizes will be... How's this for a package? We're giving thanks. Or maybe it's our Black Friday package. how's this for a package? We're giving thanks, or maybe it's our Black Friday package.

You'll get not just a Planetary Radio t-shirt, but also the desk and wall calendars, the year in space calendars. You can see them at yearinspace.com. From the year in space folks, our friend Steve Critty. And why not? We'll throw in that 200-point account from itelescope.net. This is the first threefer I think we've ever offered. You're just getting crazy.

That's actually four. That's four. It's a good week. You are thankful, aren't you? I'm very thankful. Thank you very much. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about carbonation in space. Thank you, and good night.

I don't know. I think I'd have to go for that really flat beer. That's Bruce Betts. He's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its thankful members. Daniel Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle created the theme music. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.