Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Nazis in Space? Rod Pyle’s Amazing Stories of the Space Age

Episode Date: February 15, 2017

Rod Pyle reveals bizarre yet fascinating space projects of the past in his new book. Pyle also exposes previously classified information about missions and spacecraft you thought you knew.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Nazis in Space, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond, coming to you on our new weekly release day. Nazis in Space, how's that for a provocative teaser line? We'll go into a more eccentric orbit than usual as we talk with author and space historian Rod Pyle about his latest book that is chock full of stranger-than-fiction stories about the space age. NASA has taken the first tentative step

toward a lander on Jupiter's moon Europa. Bill Nye will tell us why he thinks it's a step in the right direction. And Bruce Betts will reveal the artist behind the only true work of art on the moon when he joins me for What's Up. Emily Lakdawalla remains on sabbatical. Instead, this week I'll take a minute to invite you to planetary.org. We've got a beautiful brand new homepage to show off. Scroll down and you'll find the new

upfront home of Planetary Radio with a player built right in. Directly above our slot are links to our top three space stories and another link that will take you to all of the other great work by our staff and freelance contributors. I just read AJS Rail's latest comprehensive update on Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity, which celebrated 13 Earth years on the red planet a few days ago. Oppy's still going strong as it heads for a Martian gully formed by flowing water at least 3 billion years ago. I caught the boss, Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Science Guy, on the road this week, which explains the lesser-than-usual sound quality. Bill, there was a report just issued by NASA.

It has good news for people who want to go out and look for life on Europa. Yeah, so this is a big deal, Matt. Here's what I love about this proposal. They did a study, and they believe they could land on Europa in 2024, which is a long time from now. But no, it's not. It's coming right up in space terms. And there are only five instruments on it. And that's good instead of 15 instruments or 25 cameras or what have you. And so what it means is you could afford to do it and we could get it done sooner rather than later. And the whole thing, everybody, is Europa is a water world. It has

twice as much seawater as the Earth. If we were able to send a spacecraft there, we might look for signs of life and we might find them. What if there are Europanian fish people swimming around under the ice doing Europanian fish things? And it would change the course of human history. And we would do this for the cost of a typical planetary mission. Over the course of the next seven years, less than $2 billion U.S. dollars. And it could change the world. And I just tell people this all the time. This is what no one else can do.

No other civilization has ever had the opportunity to go looking for life on another world. So let's do it. You know, we're not sending astronauts. It's too far away. This is fantastically far away and it's hostile for us, the interplanetary mission. But for a robot spacecraft, that's what we build them for. It would change the world, Matthew. Thank world, Matthew. Thank you, Bill. I bet you've got an audience of people rooting for this to happen just as you are. And I also want to give you a moment to say something about a big announcement that was made last week. Yes, the Netflix show, which is called Bill Nye Saves the World, not a trivial undertaking, will be launched on April 21st, the eve of Earth Day.

They'll all be released at once, all 13 shows at once. I'm very proud of them. The shows came out really well. And they'll be in 130 countries around the world. And we had a big announcement. I went to New York, New York, the town so nice they named it twice, for a big series of press interviews. And it's exciting. And two of the episodes are about space. One of them is about space exploration writ large and its value to society. And then another one is about the search for life, just like we are talking about on Europa, the moon of Jupiter. It's exciting times, Matt. Sure is. And I look forward to having an extended conversation with you about those episodes about space. It's Bill Nye Saves the

World coming to you in April. And he is the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye, the science guy. Thanks, Bill. Thank you, Matt. I don't think Rod Pyle would mind me calling him a space geek. He gets around. The Southern California-based author and space historian has published 10 books so far, along with pieces for Popular Science, the Huffington Post, and others. Rod has also created documentaries for the History Channel. When he stopped by Planetary Society headquarters the other day, it was just before a meeting at the Jet Propulsion Lab

to talk about a writing project there. His latest, carefully researched book only reads like science fiction. Amazing Stories of the Space Age collects many of the most, well, amazing stories to emerge from humankind's quest for the final frontier. Some are tragic, some are infuriating, some will leave you thankful they never left the drawing board. Many have only come to light in the last few years after being classified for decades. Rod Pyle, this is one of those long overdue conversations. Thank you for joining us finally on Planetary Radio and for coming to headquarters to have this conversation.

My pleasure. It was a short drive. Yeah, I'm glad. Yeah, we still have to give you the rest of the tour. I told you what I thought of this book when I first contacted you. This is the book I've been waiting for since I learned to read. I'm serious. The phrase that kept coming to mind was, wait, they did what? So if that was your purpose, to surprise readers, even people who thought they knew a little bit about space, you sure got me. It was very effective.

Were you surprised by some of the stuff you learned to put in this book? Yeah. This also, the reason I loved your email so much, besides the fact that it was from you, is this was the book that I had been waiting to read since I was a kid. You finally had to write it yourself. 1968, I won the science fair at Marshall Middle School, which is just over here on the other side of Pasadena. And the prize was a gift coupon to Romans. So I went down and got science books, and one of them was The Mars Project by Wernher von Braun from 1953. I couldn't wait to read this thing so I opened it up and there were a few paragraphs of description and then lots of pages full of numbers and

calculations. And it was a little bit of a letdown and I thought that's not the book I want to read about the Mars flight. I guess I'll have to write it. So the way it actually came about was I'd done this as a TV show pitch for the History Channel. I was working with them back in the late 90s, early 2000s. And we got close. It was called Secrets of Space then. Got close a few times. A little problem with the effects budget. So I shelved it. And then a couple years ago, I pulled it out and I thought, I want to redo this as a book proposal. And so Prometheus jumped at it. And it was the most fun I've had doing one of these things in years. That's Prometheus, your publisher. Good on them for allowing you to finally get this into print. There are

so many nice surprises in here. Not all the stories were completely unknown to me, but even the ones that I knew something about, you brought certain insights to it, which were still very impressive. But I want to start with maybe what was the biggest surprise of all for me, and it is also how you started the book. Talk about Nazis in Space. Because you can't miss with a subtitle that includes Nazis in Space. Sounds like a Roger Corman film, you know? Yeah. And I'd come across this story a bunch of times over the years about this crazy German engineer designing a rocket-powered bomber to come over and drop bombs in the U.S. In their hopes, nuclear bombs, but they didn't quite get there.

The guy's name was Eugen Sanger, and he had been designing rocket planes since the early 30s. He was a contemporary of von Braun's. They didn't like each other much, but they were both in the rocket club and doing similar kinds of work. So von Braun had gotten, of course, his contract famously, or I should say directive, to build the V-2 rocket

and help Germany win the war with this wonder weapon. But Germany also wanted to build the America bomber, which the idea behind that was we want an airplane or an aircraft of some kind that can fly from Germany or the coast of Europe over the United States bomb targets and hopefully come home, although that wasn't a critical imperative.

So a couple of propeller planes were designed. Some jets were discussed. And then Sanger, because he was a rocket guy, comes up with, well, let's do a rocket-boosted launch off of a rail system, much like when worlds collide, if you remember that movie. Oh, yes. Yeah, classic. With a big pusher module that stops and the spacecraft continues. And it looked a lot like the Pan Am space clipper, which was also generally the original configuration what the shuttle would look like if Max Vege had had his way.

And it would boost up to a very low orbit and go across the Atlantic Ocean and then bounce off of the stratosphere a couple of times and re-enter before it got to New York to drop its 8,000-pound payload. Could have been a nuclear weapon, could have been a conventional bomb. Just the energy of the impact of a conventional bomb, much less the explosives, would have been a big deal at those speeds. Because, yeah, this thing dips down and then really just was supposed to bounce back up into space.

Right. Dips in long enough to drop its bomb and look over his shoulder and watch Manhattan get vaporized, or at least a chunk of it. And then it would cross the continent of the United States, glide over the Pacific and land in Japanese-held territory, and be strapped onto the deck of an aircraft carrier or possibly one of their hangar-based, hangar-configured submarines, if it was large enough, and take it back to Germany for another use.

And he had a flight rate of, I can't remember exactly, but it was three launches a day or something. And when you look at the numbers, if you look at the study, and I read the one translated by the Army in the 50s, his numbers are kind of all over the map and very ambitious. At one point he talks about thrust from the main engine of this thing somewhere in the range of 20,000 to 200,000 pounds. Very ambitious. At one point he talks about thrust from the main engine of this thing, somewhere in the range of 20,000 to 200,000 pounds.

It's like, that's an awful lot. So probably not. He got it done on paper, and they did model it, and they did some wind tunnel tests. But ultimately even Hitler wasn't crazy enough to sign off on this. Years later, some engineers and mathematicians looked at it and said, you know, given the metallurgy of the time, some of his calculations were a little off, so it would have melted on the way back. But it would have been a glorious ride on the way up. You have beautiful illustrations of this silver bird, right? That's the name they gave it. Silver bird or silver vogel, as they said in German. Yeah, and always in a book like this, of course, you're scrambling for illustrations.

So I did another book last year called Mars Making Contact, and the idea was to have as many original illustrations from these programs as possible, NASA's Mars Exploration Program, which all sounds pretty good as an author because it's great fun to roll around in this stuff and collect things out of the archives and so forth until you realize that by about 1990 they weren't drawing anything anymore it's all on the computer and it's just not as as neat to get a computer print out as it is to go find the original draftsman drawing with the coffee stains and the note scribble on the side and so forth fortunately i was able to get rob manning who i'm sure you've had on your show before. What a great guy. One of my favorite guys. Great guy. Showed me the wall of file cabinets and said, take whatever you want. As long as they approve it, it's yours.

So we were able to go back and get stuff that hadn't been out of there since Pathfinder landed. So that was great fun. But it's hard to find the stuff from the 30s and the 40s for sure. Well, you dug up a pretty fair amount of it, and also from the 50s and the 60s. I'm going to go to another one that surprised me. It was awe-inspiring, truly awe-inspiring, a nuclear-powered Grand Tour, at least of part of the solar system, long before, you know, either the Voyager spacecraft headed out to Jupiter and beyond. This was something that was really being looked at as a real possibility. And it was manned.

This is an atomic rocket called Project Orion. It started as a study in the 40s and then was looked at again in the 50s, all classified. General Atomics picked up on it in 1957, 58, and said, this looks really interesting. Now, this is a nuclear-powered rocket, an atomic rocket, literally powered by atomic bombs, that would have ranged, depending on which plan you're looking at, they'd had a bunch of them, between 10,000 and well over a million tons. So you're basically flying a battleship. And it would have had big heavy hatches and barcaloungers and 100 people in it and food and supplies.

Freeman Dyson got involved, famous physicist. And his motto was Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970, which still gives me chills because it would have been a whole different way of exploring the solar system. system. In essence, it looked like a great big, huge, 80-foot diameter, 50-caliber bullet that spat small atomic bombs out the back, and they would explode and give it thrust. Giant shock absorbers. Giant shock absorbers and a big pusher plate. The big downside was they wanted to launch it off of Earth that way. And Dyson figured it would only be a couple of casualties per launch, much lower than the traffic accident death rate, but still a little bit of an issue with the atomic fallout part. NASA did later in the 70s look at a much

smaller version that would have gone top of the Saturn V and still would have had much superior thrust over the long term to any chemical rocket engine. But at that point, the nuclear discussion was so negatively charged, they couldn't even get it off the drawing boards. Firing a rocket from Earth with hundreds, if not thousands, of nuclear weapons, pushing it out, that was going to make a lot of people nervous no matter what. But to get this out into space, who knows? Might very well have made it to Mars by now if we'd had this kind of technology, wouldn't you say? Yeah, and you're talking about weeks, a number of weeks, not the six to nine months that it takes the chemical or even conventional nuclear propulsion where you're just heating gases and having them go out the back of the engine.

So it would have changed a lot of things. There were talks about an interstellar version that would have been a significant portion of the speed of light. But the politics of it were just all wrong. Still, people looking at it even now, and it's being studied as we speak in various academic and government circles, don't see any major reason it couldn't work. It's a huge matter of scale and, of course, a massive commitment of money. But depending on whose write-up you believe and which engineers you believe, it wouldn't have necessarily ended up costing that much more than Apollo, depending on who you believe. Now, this is one of the things in the book which I take it was not

really classified. But a lot of things were. And one of the ones that I also found fascinating, again, came as a surprise to me. Gemini B, which I'd never heard of, and the Manned Orbiting Laboratory, which I knew as a kid as this much more benign thing that was going up to do wonderful science. Not so much. Did you build the model? You know, I don't think I built that one, but I saw it on the shelves. Ravel had a model of the manned orbiting laboratory,

a great contribution to the peaceful researches of orbital space, and it looked like an upper stage of a Titan rocket, which is in essence what it was, same diameter. It had a crew module in about a third of it in this model version, and then the back two-thirds is just this big empty space. As a kid with a curious ADD riddled mind, I thought, well, what's that for? So it's only been since 2013, 2015 timeframe that they finally declassified this stuff, and that space was going to be filled.

So this is 1965 through 72 timeframe they were going to launch this and operate it. It was going to be filled with a telescope called Dorian, great big thing with a great big mirror that doesn't look up at space. It looks down at Russia so you can see what brand of vodka the generals are toasting with. So it was kind of, you know, it could have been a fairly provocative instrument had it been launched. To make this happen, the Air Force had had all kinds of plans. The Navy had had plans. The Army had had plans for bases on the moon and so forth. Every branch of the military wanted the high ground for their own reasons. So the Air Force had had a number of missions they had proposed. This was their attempt to try and

reintegrate with NASA because NASA, when it was created in 58, got the lion's share of space money and the Air Force was kind of left holding an empty hat. So they said, okay, if we can't beat them, join them. So they were going to purchase a number of Gemini capsules and repurpose them for military use, fly with NASA crews at first, and then fly their own so-called Blue Gemini flights after that, starting in 1965-66. And they had a lot of things that they wanted to do,

mostly reconnaissance. Some talk about slightly more provocative flights, like intercepting Soviet spacecraft and messing around with them. But mostly it was aimed towards this idea of having their own small space station. Now, Mole was a two-man station, would have only been up there for a month to 40 days at a time. There was some talk of having a modular approach to where they might dock two or three of these things together and make a real space station, something like a cross between Skylab and Mir. And they got close. I mean, they kept working on it. They actually did bend some metal. It got further along than most of their projects like Dinosaur. But ultimately, after a test of the Gemini B capsule, it didn't fly.

And you have a diagram in the book from the military of this gigantic, I mean, basically it's like a Hubble Space Telescope inside this space station. But they eventually came to the conclusion that we don't need humans for this, right? Yeah. And you know, the problem is, I mean, humans are the best computers there are with the best system articulation. You talk to people at JPL that are struggling, as you do all the time, to get these rovers to do what they do, and they do a masterful job and they're very, very excited about what they do, but if they just had a person in a suit with a rock hammer, they could do it faster. And the feeling in

the military, and McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, shared this at the time, was men are probably important up there. Of course, it was men in uniform to provide these functions. And robotics weren't very good then. I mean, the Soviet Union was launching, just flinging mission after mission at the planets and having them fail. We were having better success, but still robotics are pretty primitive. So there's a lot of things you wanted people to do. By the mid to late 60s, that was no longer the case. And the Air Force, who really, particularly under General Shriver, wanted men, pilots in space, quote, unquote, but said, you know, machines do this better. They do it cheaper.

Not always as much cheaper as you'd expect when it came to programs in the 60s, but cheaper and more effectively, and they don't complain, and they don't have to be fed, and they don't need to eliminate waste and all that. So the robots won. You mentioned just in passing Dinosaur, which, again, when I was a kid, I couldn't wait. And I'm still kind of sad and a little irritated that that space plane never made it. There must be a lot of people out there that are just turning about this for the first time. Tell us about Dinosaur. That was a late 50s through 1963 program of the Air Force to build a small space shuttle. It was going to launch on top of a Titan

3 that had been modified to carry the extra weight. And it looked like a big black lawn dart on top of a rocket. It was sensational looking. It was much smaller than the shuttle that finally flew. It did have a little payload bay. It would have carried a few thousand pounds, a couple of tons at the most. A crew of one or two, depending on which configuration you're looking at, although maybe they're getting that mixed up with the X-15B. But the idea was they'd have this reusable space plane.

Now, they were capable of flying suborbital flights, the X-15, and that was looked at potentially as an orbital vehicle as well in another weird program. You talk about that in the book, yeah. But the X-20 or Dinosaur was supposed to be the perfection of that for use in space. So it was going to be a heat-resistant airframe, which was made out of metal. All these exotic alloys blended into various sheets that would cover various parts of the space frame. Active cooling systems were considered. And this was really the outgrowth of the Sanger rocket plane, the American model.

The Silverbird that I was talking about earlier. It was that same set of studies and data that had gone through various hands. Bell Aerospace was looking at something called Robo at one point that would have been the same kind of spacecraft design. And it finally landed with the Air Force and they started spending money on it. Hired and trained a bunch of astronauts, built mock-ups, tested stuff in wind tunnels, did all this work on the high temperature alloys they were going to need. There are a couple of things about it that you read that are a little worrisome, Like they needed to cover the windows until after they got through reentry with a metal shield and then it was supposed to pop off so they could see it land

because the windows weren't rated for reentry because it's a nose-down reentry. You're relying an awful lot on those alloys to dispel it. Yeah, yikes. And then it landed on skids instead of wheels, and they had designed these special bristles to go on the rear skids so that they wouldn't melt and all this stuff. I mean, it's brilliant engineering. And like you say, you look at it, you think,

God, I kind of wish they had done that. And I think they had a contract to build four of them. They had a limited number of flights they could do. But unfortunately, their toy got taken away from them because everything was going into Apollo. And then the shuttle came along, and there was no longer a need for that. That's Rod Pyle talking about Dinosaur, the Air Force space plane that almost became the first space shuttle. There's much more from Rod just ahead.

This is Planetary Radio. Where did we come from? Are we alone in the cosmos? These are the questions at the core of our existence. And the secrets of the universe are out there, waiting to be discovered. But to find them, we have to go into space. We have to explore. This endeavor unites us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us. Space exploration truly brings out the best in us.

Encouraging people from all walks of life to work together to achieve a common goal. To know the cosmos and our place within it. This is why the Planetary Society exists. Our mission is to give you the power to advance space science and exploration. With your support, we sponsor innovative space technologies, inspire curious minds, and advocate for our future in space. We are the Planetary Society. Join us. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, back with my guest, space historian and author Rod Pyle. Rod has just written amazing stories of the space age. One of those stories is Dinosaur.

As I finished this week's show, I read that the X-37 may soon return from orbit. The slick robotic space plane has been circling the Earth with its mysterious military payload since May of 2015. Do you ever wonder if some of those guys in the Air Force who fly what we now know as the X-37 ever fondly refer to it as dinosaur? I hadn't thought of that. Probably. I mean, you know, you're joysticking the X-37. At some point it's autonomous. Mostly it's remote.

But I just have to believe if you're in the Air Force, you're a pilot, or somebody who probably wanted to be a pilot, or at least somebody who's fond of the idea of being a pilot, and it has to be a little frustrating to be flying robotically. You don't want to be spam in a can. Yeah, but you want to be in space, right? Right. So, I mean, what better way than to go up in a fast, dynamic mini shuttle that, at least in Dinosaur's case, had some military applications. And there's no conversation of possibly arming it one way or another. And, in fact, the Russians looked into that with Buran when the Soviet Union was still around. Oh, I didn't.

Yeah, they were talking about a nuclear missile launcher in the payload bay and so forth. No kidding. Their one flight wonder, which you have a terrific chapter about. It's such a head scratcher. Years after our shuttle's up and running, they start working on theirs. They borrowed some materials, which were publicly available from us. They stole some other ones, to put it bluntly. And in fact, probably, and I use the word alleged in the chapter, I I think because it's a little hard to get some of this information,

but apparently under Reagan's approval the CIA fed them some misinformation about heat tile formulation and the way it should be actually applied to the airframe which supposedly made its way on to the Buran and they had some problems with that. But they launched it in 1988 and it flew once, completely robotic, no life support systems. So on the one hand, you could say, wow, they're brilliant. They could do a completely robotic, remote-controlled, semi-autonomous flight, which we can do with our shuttle.

On the other hand, maybe they had to, because we aren't sure that it would have actually been able to keep the crew going. But it flew once, landed, seemed to work very well, and then was rolled into storage. And in 2002, the hangar collapsed on it and destroyed it. And it just happened to coincide uncomfortably close to the end of the Soviet Union that that program was canceled. There's been a lot of talk of rebuilding some form of the Energia launch system that was going to launch it. That was the super heavy lift launch system that the Soviets never really could get working right. Well, except for that case.

Yeah. I'm thinking of the other big rocket that they built to send men to the moon. Oh, the N1. The N1. That's where I went wrong. Yeah. The Energia actually obviously did fly because it took Buran up, right? Yeah, and it seemed to have a lot of potential.

But it was like our shuttle. It was a spacecraft that, at least early on, kind of lacked a mission. And it was the most expensive single program they ever did. A lot of people over there were scratching their heads when they saw the U.S. space shuttle because they ran their numbers on it and said, this can't ever be economically viable. They can't have the flight rate they're talking about. Sounds familiar. The things that turned out to be true, right?

Yeah, right, right, right. But they said, there must be something we don't know, so we better build one. It was looked at. There were a lot of concerns that ours had a military basis. And in fact, the Air Force money did come in when the program came up short. There were a lot of payloads that NASA never talked about. Yeah, and the configuration of the payload bay was stretched to accommodate Air Force and military payloads. Configuration of the payload bay was stretched to accommodate Air Force and military payloads.

And the reason it had such a tall rudder on the back and the delta wing configuration it did was to be able to do these cross-range military flights. So they were right. It did have a military use. It just didn't last very long because once Challenger happened, those missions stopped. The thing I always loved about Iran, now as much as they may have borrowed or stolen from us, apologies to our Russian listeners, it had turbojets. So it wasn't necessarily a glider when it came in. That's my understanding. In fact, I even think I saw them in one of the diagrams in your book. Yeah, and that was my understanding when I started the chapter. I was rapidly corrected by a couple of people, particularly a gentleman named Francis French down at the San Diego Aerospace Museum,

who's also a wonderful author. He's done a number of books. I had sent him this book. I just wanted a blurb for the back cover. A couple of weeks went by, and I hadn't heard anything. And I said, are you going to be able to do this? He said, well, yeah. I have to finish reading it.

I said, you don't have to read the whole thing. This is a courtesy. He said, no, no. So I got back notes, page by page. He basically edited the book on his own time for free because he's that kind of guy. Susan Martin of the Mars Society also provided similar service. And one of the things that Francis pointed out was those turbo jets were used for approach and landing tests, but weren't on the final flight unit, which I didn't

know. So it didn't have that once-around capability once it came in for landing. But as it turned out, they didn't need it. And we should say certainly when I talk about them stealing plans, I mean obviously everybody was stealing stuff from everybody. This wasn't anything unique to the Soviet Union. It was just a smart way to get a leg up on what they wanted to do. But when you look at them side by side and you blink you know one eye to the next you think boy these things look similar they're tiny differences mainly it was

the way it was launched it didn't have any engines on the back they just had orbital maneuvering engines for the soviet shuttle all the launch power was in that launch system which was a smart way to do it we had a more arguably advanced design in terms of having the reusable engines but it turned out to be so expensive to turn this thing around that it really didn't pan out in a We had a more arguably advanced design in terms of having the reusable engines, but it turned out to be so expensive to turn this thing around that it really didn't pan out in the long run. I want to ask you in a moment about what were your favorites. Maybe we've already covered some of the topics that were your favorites in this book. But because you brought up weapons in space, Starship Troopers. This was a real shock and it's been a shock to a lot of good space enthusiasts that I've shown this to. The work to develop weapons for use on the moon.

Handguns. This came out of the Rock Island Arsenal, which is the Army's main facility for building everything from large howitzers to sidearms and has been for decades. And it's odd. You look at the cover, which I think there's a photo in the book of the cover, and it looks like somebody scribbled it in an afternoon. It was a study for weapons that could be used in a vacuum. It's called the subtitles, meanderings of a weapons-oriented mind inented Mind in a Vacuum Such as the Moon, which isn't clear if he's talking about having his mind in the vacuum or the weapons. We assume the latter. But one of the concerns was that using conventional weapons that like metals might freeze up in the vacuum in the cold of the moon. Lubricants might not work.

They weren't sure about traditional projectiles, although they should work in a vacuum. One of the big concerns about long weapons was if you fired a rifle at an opponent on the moon at just the right angle, the bullet might circle all the way around and hit your troops in the back. So they were worried about these things. So these are smaller, low-powered handheld weapons. There was about eight of them in the study, I think. Most of them look like little Buck Rogers pistols. Exactly. They shot either pellets or flechettes, and they might use a small powder charge. Some of them had rocket-powered bullets.

Some of them used springs. It was just like the Daisy BB rifle you had as a kid, mainly intended for short-range disabling of the enemy because we all knew we were going to have an Army base on the moon to defend it from the Reds. Totally Buck Rogers. There's the one with the long barrel and even has these neat fins, heat radiating fins. It looks like it's straight out of Flash Gordon. It does. And one of the problems was dissipating heat from the barrel because you don't have air. And another concern was if they use traditional powder, even smokeless powder, you get this cloud

of smoke at the end of your firearm. And because there's no wind or atmosphere to dispel it, it's just going to sit there the same way tears well up in the eyes of the shuttle astronauts or the space station astronauts, and that's a problem. So they really wanted as much as possible to do away with chemical propellants. Absolutely fascinating, as is this entire book. What have I missed? What's at least one of your favorites? Oh, my favorite has got to be Project Horizon. This is a moon base. In the 50s, we're looking

at a Soviet Union that has lots of nuclear weapons and rockets to deliver them over here, and we're starting to flip out. Sputnik was a big wake-up call. The Air Force says, well, we should be doing the defense of space because we fly and we know how to do that. The Navy's saying, no, no, space is more like being in a submarine. We should do it. And the Army's saying, clearly we should do it because it's a high frontier and we're the ones that always grab the top of the hill to shoot down everybody else. So while dropping bombs from orbit was an appealing idea, at least as long as we were doing it to the other guys, seizing the moon became a concern. So the Army and the Air Force both started studies to build a moon base. Air Force is called LUNEX. The Army is by far the

more fanciful of the two. It was called Project Horizon. Von Braun was part of this because he was working for the Army at the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. So this is 1958-59 time frame, quick study. They were looking at building a base on the moon by 1965. Launched on Saturn I rockets and Saturn IIs. 150, give or take, rocket launches. They would have to be launched from Christmas Island down in the Central Pacific because you want something near the equator. Yeah. And the Cape would work, but that's the Air Forces,

and we don't want to talk to them. So we'll do it from Christmas Island. So a little logistics train there. And they were going to launch these modules modules they would have an orbital assembly that would do refueling then they would land these big modules on the moon and then send a crew first they would set a pathfinder crew to decide where to land them then they'd land the modules and they look like space station modules almost from the iss then they would send up a crew of nine who had 15 to 30 days to use the steam shovels

and everything else. I use that term fancifully, but the machines to dig trenches. Oh, and explosives to dig trenches, lower these things with cranes down there, cover them with lunar soil, put them together, figure out how to get all the air seals done and all the cabling and the kitchen and the living quarters and all that. And they were going to have this army base in the moon with 12 to 20 soldiers in it. And they were to be armed because we knew, of course, the bad guys, the Soviets, would build their own moon base, and we needed to be able to defend our moon base from overland attack. So the two weapons of choice was the lunar claymore, which looked just like the U.S. traditional claymore mine,

with the words, this side towards enemy on the front so you don't aim it backwards, which would shoot out 700 BBs to shred spacesuits. And you don't necessarily need to kill your adversary. You just want to puncture their suit. You just got to get his buddies to help him patch it up and get him back to the base. Just like on the battlefield here. You just want to tie down the other troops. So the Claymore would have been very effective.

But my favorite was the Davy Crockett nuclear mortar, which looks like a big mortar on a tripod. Actually, it looks like a bazooka and fires a sub-kiloton nuclear warhead that looks like a large football. They tested this. They deployed this to Europe. Oh, did they? In the 60s. Wow. Because that is straight out of Starship Troopers.

It is. And it only goes about two and a half miles. And if you don't duck down real fast after you fire that thing, and it's not very accurate, it's kind of a general point and shoot and pray kind of thing. It's nukes. It's like horseshoes. You don't have to be right on target. Really big horseshoes. And then you better duck or you're going to get cooked. So there's this footage of the test of this with the bleachers and the old physics guys with their goggles on and you know the siren sounds they all lower their goggles and sit there with

their hands their laps and then there's this foop and the thing's fired and kaboom there's this miniature mushroom cloud wow so there was serious consideration of using this on the moon and then of course a few years later you had all those groovy sidearms that you could take up. So they would have been well protected. They anticipated this entire system, which had to send between 250 and 300 tons, I think, of material to the moon to accomplish this, would be done and up and running by 1965-66 and cost $6 billion.

And as we know, you go look at an Apollo moon rocket, you've got 363 feet of moon rocket, and the last 13 feet come home because of all the energy required to do what you've got to do. It probably would have cost a little more to build a moon base than they thought. But had they pulled it off, or the Air Force pulled off Project Loon-X, which is very similar, we would have had a base on the moon and people up there full time. That would have been pretty cool. So as you consider these things, these fantastic devices that never were in most cases, never became, not all cases, a few of them appeared. And if you ignore the sort of military raining death from the sky angle of grossly so and overestimated the abilities to overcome some of these problems.

really sticks in my mind is Project Orion because, as I said, even now engineers look at this and say, you know, it's just a matter of scale and money. It would work. It's just a question of putting it together and getting it out there. So if you could figure out a way to safely get a bunch of nuclear material off the planet or mine it elsewhere, which would be quite a feat, this could be having us moving around the solar system much faster and much more comfortably, even than Elon Musk's colonial transporter or whatever he's calling it this month, which is a great idea, but it's chemical fuel and it's big and costly and messy. Orion's just fast and efficient, and this idea of these huge 80-foot by 12-foot decks stacked one atop each other with the scientists and engineers and waiters and dishwashers and everything else you need for a long-term voyage like this with virtually

unlimited supplies below because the lifting ability of this thing was just off the charts. That's where I really feel like we missed the future a little bit. I got just one more, and it's to take you back kind of to where we started with Wernher von Braun. Because again, I grew up looking at these beautiful models of this Taurus, this ring-shaped space station. And for all the times that I looked at that and admired it and thought it's going to happen, I never realized how much it had in common with a swimming pool toy. Yes. The wheel, as it came to be known. Other people had sketched something similar out in the 20s, one engineer in particular. But Von Braun's really came to the fore in the early 1950s with the Collier's articles, Collier Magazine, which was like Life Magazine,

How Man Will Reach Space. And then, of course, Walt Disney Company did their wonderful series of Tomorrowland shows in the mid-50s, which later became the wonderful World of Disney. And Von Braun was effectively cleansed for the American public of any of those icky Nazi affiliations he had by becoming what he was, this wonderful, charismatic, brilliant engineer. And one of his ideas was, we need a space station. So it was about 250 feet in diameter, looked like a big bicycle tire, complete with a couple of spokes. And as you alluded to, it had more in common with that than we thought, because I never knew until a few years ago that it was going to be made out of synthetic rubber. And it's very smart. They wanted a circular space station so they could spin it and create artificial

gravity, which is something we're still lusting for in space. And the idea was it's really hard to launch macaroni-shaped sections of the space station made out of metal on rockets. But if you pack them up as inflatables and then blow them up and assemble them up there, it's going to work fine. One of the concerns that came up from the contractors that were studying this later was that an over-exuberant astronaut might trip or fumble something inside and end up punching through the side and taking off in space, and then the space station starts jetting around like an out-of-control balloon. It was unlikely because it would have been thick and pretty heavy-duty.

I suppose there'd be some danger of that. But we're seeing something similar. Yes. Thicker, but something similar with the Bigelow beam module up on the space station now and has designed for the BA330 module. And don't see problems with that. It seems to be working fine. It's interesting.

They deployed that, and it was a pretty big news item. And I haven't seen a lot since. I know that the ISS team have gone in there a couple of times and checked it out, and they're looking at it. It's not very big. But it seems to be holding air fine. There's been no punctures. There's been no major leaks. So it'll be interesting to see what their final analysis is of that unit once they bring it back. Yeah, and of course, Bigelow has plans for much, much bigger ones, and

I bet you that he gives some credit going all the way back to von Braun. And I assume you know that limerick about von Braun? The rockets go up. Who cares where they come down? That's not my department, said Wernher von Braun. Tom Lehrer. That's right. That's exactly right.

Or as von Braun himself said it, I think it was when he was raining B-2s on London, the rocket worked perfectly. It just came down on the wrong planet, which is a little cynical, but he had a point. Yeah, the great Tom Lehrer as well. I would still not know that that was an inflated Taurus space station had I not read this book. It is just thoroughly delightful, and I highly recommend it. Thank you very much, Rod.

Thank you. What's coming next? Well, I'm hoping for a sequel because I wrote enough chapters to do most of the second book. I just couldn't get them in this one because we ran out of space. So I'm looking towards that. Also looking at writing possibly a couple of pieces about Apollo with the anniversary coming up because that's going to be a big moment for everybody.

I think it deserves observation. And I hope Buzz and the others get their way of getting it the landing day as a national holiday because that's long overdue. You bet. You bet. I know one radio podcast audience that would get behind that, I think. Don't you have one other book that's coming out this year? I thought I read something. Yeah, I have a book at this point, the working title is Space 2.0.

It's a book about the new space age. book about the new space age. I've interviewed 35 or 40 people, everything from the International Space Agency administrators to the private entrepreneurs. And it's really just a look at what's happening in the next 10 and 20 years in space. And I'm doing that in cooperation with the National Space Society. And we're hoping for first couple months of 2018. So I get a little more time on that. I also want to thank you for dropping off Blueprints for a Battlestar, Serious Scientific Explanations Behind Sci-Fi's Greatest Inventions. I'm sorry I didn't get to look at it before this conversation, because I'll bet there's another radio interview in this, because, I mean, who wouldn't want to know how the Death Star planet-busting weapon works? Well, I probably wouldn't. Yeah, that's one of the conclusions

that you had to unfortunately draw after looking at all that stuff but it was a really fun assignment to just be able to look at the tech of sci-fi the only rules that we had were it had to be something that was reasonably achievable in the next 10 to 20 years or not so teleportation went out the window because that doesn't seem to be working for us very well. Death Star obviously will probably never be made, but it's awfully fun to talk about what it would take to do it. But some of the other technologies in there, flying cars, cities of the future, AI, that kind of thing, were great fun to explore. And I had a really good time doing that book. I look forward to going through it. And again, thank you for stopping by and sharing amazing stories of the space age,

true tales of Nazis in orbit, soldiers on the moon, orphaned Martian robots, and other fascinating accounts from the annals of space flight. And it is available from Prometheus Books. You can also go to Rod's website at www.pilebooks.com, and we'll put that link up on the show page this week, along with some other entertaining links having to do with your work. Rod Pyle, he is, as you've heard, a very busy space geek, space historian, 10 books so far, and I guess it'll be 11 before the end of the year, including Mars Making Contact and Curiosity about the Mars Science Laboratory rover. We just talked about Blueprint for a Battlestar. You may have seen one or more of his documentaries on the History Channel. The benefits of his visual effects work on Star Trek Deep Space Nine, or read his contributions

to Popular Science or the Huffington Post and other publications. Am I embarrassing you? Yes. But here's the best. You worked for 10 years at the place that helped kindle my love of all things space, the Griffith Observatory here in Southern California. So thanks for that too. Oh, my pleasure. That was a great time. It's a great time to be there. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio.

Bruce Betts is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, and he is on Skype with us once again. So tell us, what's going on up there? We got Venus about as bright as Venus gets, which is super bright, minus 4.8 magnitudes for those playing the magnitude game stunning over there in the west after sunset for a couple hours. And if you look to its upper left, the less than one percent as bright is reddish Mars. Coming up, also bright, but not as bright as Venus, around 10 p.m. is Jupiter rising in the east, and it's near the star Spica, also bright, but not as bright.

Bright, bright, bright, bright, bright, bright. I just wanted to say that a lot. We've got Saturn in the pre-dawn. And if you want a challenge, you can try to check out Vesta, the brightest asteroid that is in Gemini right now. You're going to want to look up a finder chart online. And it is marginally visible from a super dark site with good eyes, but easily visible in binoculars or telescope. I'm going to throw in that Eric O'Day in Medford, Massachusetts, he said,

my family and friends keep texting me to ask what that bright object is in the West shortly after sunset. I tell them to listen to planetary radio. Good. Don't give away the secrets. Make them listen. I agree. All right. On to this week in space history. It was 1962 when John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. And then four years ago was the Chelyabinsk impact, relevant to our Planetary Radio Live coming up.

So Chelyabinsk in Siberia, Russia. Radio Live coming up. So Chelyabinsk in Siberia, Russia, there was a huge airburst impact of a roughly 18 meter diameter asteroid that broke an awful lot of windows, did some damage and injured about a thousand people. I'm glad you mentioned that Planetary Radio Live. Now, a lot of people hearing this, of course, are probably hearing it after the 16th, but with any luck, I'll be featuring all that great stuff that we talked about, all those near-Earth objects with our really terrific guests, Lindley Johnson, Paul Chodas, and

Amy Meinzer, and Amy Meinzer, in addition to, yeah, I know, you're clearing your throat, and the great Bruce Betts, who will also be joining me on the panel. And we're going to be doing the What's Up for next week live on there as well. It'll be cool.

All right, we move on to Random Space Fact. A little robotic, but that's okay. Gilmore Arigato. Mr. Arigato. The diameter of the Hubble Space Telescope primary mirror is bigger than the diameter of the New Horizons spacecraft's radio communication dish. So HST primary mirror, 2.4 meters, New Horizons trying to communicate from billions of kilometers away with a 2.1 meter radio dish. It is amazing and slow, but understandably so.

It's not slow. It's moving quite fast. Yeah. All right. Are we ready for the contest? All right. We're ready for the contest. I asked you who created the fallen astronaut statue that Apollo 15 astronaut Dave Scott left on the moon with a plaque commemorating dead astronauts and cosmonauts. How'd we do, Matt? This obviously intrigued people because we had a near record number of entries for this one. Our winner, I believe, as chosen by random.org, going into the contest for at least a year now, his first win, Mukesh Varsani in Salisbury, United Kingdom, not far from an ancient observatory that most of us know as Stonehenge. He said that that little figure left on the surface of our moon was created by Belgian artist Paul Van,

and here comes the fun part, Huy Donk. Huy Donk? We apologize to any Belgians or others out there who were offended by my no doubt mangling mispronunciation of that name. But is that what you've got? That is indeed what I've got. Paul Van Hooydunk. I have no idea how to pronounce it.

Then congratulations, Mukesh. You will be receiving that Planetary Radio t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account, the nonprofit network of telescopes around the world that, once you have an account, as Mukesh now does, point them anywhere around the universe, and a planetary society, Rubber Asteroid. Took me a moment to get my motor started that time. Davy Van Ness in the Netherlands, not too far from Belgium, said that besides being a great artist, our friend Paul, Paul van Huydonk, is still doing very well. in the Netherlands, not too far from Belgium, said that besides being a great artist,

our friend Paul, Paul van Huydonk, is still doing very well. He's about 90 years old, just got married again, according to Davey. So, yeah, he's going strong, apparently. Brent Wadsworth had this observation. He said, I guess you could say he's exhibiting in the most exclusive art gallery in the solar system. It's true. And my impression is he likes to point out that it's the only art on the moon. He's right, unless you consider that magnificent desolation itself.

We got two, count them, two haiku and a poem. The first one, it's the Poetry Corner here on Planetary Radio. Here's the first haiku from Michael Bamberg in Birmingham, Alabama. Reflection through art, honor those who boldly go, thanks, Paul Van Hoydonk. Then this one from Martin Hajoski in Houston, Texas. Honoring 15 who gave their all, it speaks of our eternal thanks. Nicely done. And finally, from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild, Paul Van Hoydonk was asked to use his artistic skill to craft a sculpture that would go to Luna's Hadley Rill, commemorating those who died, their goal to colonize the world of space and leave to us their message of clear skies

very nice yeah this has this fallen astronaut has quite a story behind it uh that uh people might want to check out of intrigue and secrecy and uh people denying this that and the other thing it's weird we had a couple of people talk about that. And apparently even Richard Nixon played a small part. But anyway, it's all there. We'll put up a link or two on the net and you can check the story out. I think he was the model of the fallen astronaut. No, I'm kidding. Just lie right there, Mr. President.

All right. All right. As of now, what person has spent the most time in space and not been from the Soviet Union, Russia, or the United States? Oh, okay. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. I like it. You've got, and now remember, this is the new deadline because we've pushed everything forward 24 hours. You now have until the 22nd, that would be Wednesday, February 22nd, at 8 a.m. Pacific time to get us this answer and make yourself eligible for that great Planetary Society, Planetary Radio Prize package.

We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about what you're smelling right now. Thank you. And good night. He's Bruce Betts, the director of science and technology for the planetary society. Yep.

That's the smell of sweet success coming from over in his direction because he joins us every week here on what's up. Hey, space trivia contestants. How about we throw in a signed copy of Rod Pyle's Amazing Stories of the Space Age? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its Never Down to Earth members. Danielle Gunn is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser.

I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies!