Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Planetary Radio Live!

Episode Date: May 3, 2010

PlanRad goes before a live audience to talk rockets with Bill Nye, Jeff Richichi of SpaceX, and JPL pioneer James Burke.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to a special edition of Planetary Radio. Wow, did we ever have a great time on Friday, April 30, at Planetary Radio Live. What you're about to hear are just excerpts from that evening. You can hear much more, including some terrific stories, at planetary.org slash radio. That's planetary.org slash radio. Here we go. Here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, space geeks and extraterrestrials of every description, this is Planetary Radio Live.

Here's your host, the Planetary Society's Matt Kaplan. Hi everyone and welcome. That, by the way, is my daughter, Laura Kaplan, on the guitar. A moment ago, my brother James, the jet pilot. Let's hear it for flagrant nepotism. Thank you. Like I said, welcome to our first ever Planetary Radio with a real live audience. We are thrilled to have all of you here. I really want to start by thanking our host today,

my favorite radio station, KPCC, flagship of Southern California Public Radio. We are in SCPR's beautiful Crawford Family Forum. It's part of the spectacular new Moen Broadcast Center, which is really the nicest public radio facility that I have ever seen, and they really have been terrific to us today. Those of you who know the show know that we turn to Emily Lakdawalla. Emily is the keeper of the Planetary Society blog.

She's the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine for our astronomers out there in the audience. Emily, welcome. Thanks, Matt. Glad to be here. Good to have you up on stage. Right. Let's get right into it. Highlights of the blog last week. I guess it's really we're looking back, but we're looking forward. It's the best of what to look forward to this month of May 2010.

That's right. Once a month, I sort of take stock of what's going on in the solar system. And this month, I added three spacecraft to my roundup. There's one that's just about to launch from Japan called Akatsuki, otherwise known as the Venus Climate Orbiter. It's going to join Venus Express and orbit at Venus in December. Up with that is going the IKAROS, the Interplanetary Kitecraft Accelerated by Radiation from the Sun. Easy for you to say. I think. Which is a solar sail mission being launched by Japan. Also added into my roundup is Hayabusa. That's the Japanese spacecraft that rendezvoused with an asteroid called Itokawa. May possibly have grabbed a sample. We don't know yet, but it's returning

its sample to the Woomera Prohibited Area in Australia in June, and it's rapidly closing in on its rendezvous with Earth. It's now only 18 million kilometers away. And finally, into my roundup came in Rosetta. Rosetta is a comet-chasing mission. It's going to rendezvous with a comet in 2014. On the way, it's encountered Earth a couple times and Mars and another asteroid, and it's just about to fly by the biggest asteroid that's ever been visited by a space mission called Lutetia in July. And so now it's starting its optical navigation campaign. It's going to look for the faint dot of that asteroid against the background of stars, and we're going to start seeing some photos of a kind of asteroid that we've never visited before. So it's really an exciting couple of months coming up this summer.

Emily Lakawala, everyone, the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society. You know, we usually talk about what happens in space, not how to get there. This is going to be exciting, and it happened because of a recent visit that a number of Planetary Society staff made to a company called SpaceX. And while we were there, we were getting a tour, and all of a sudden, this guy joined the tour. And that was Jeff Rakiki. He's sitting next to me now. Jeff is responsible for structural analysis and design at SpaceX. He's the guy who ensures that SpaceX design and analysis team, their team is one of the world's finest, and that their launch vehicle structures, that those structures establish new benchmarks of reliability and low cost.

Jeff, thank you for joining us on Planetary Radio. It's great to be here, Matt. Great. All right. You've gotten around before you came to SpaceX. What's more fun to build, B-2 bombers, Indy race cars, or really big rockets? Oh, that's a hard choice there because all of them are fun. They're all fast. I've been able to sit inside a B-2. I've been able to sit inside an Indy car. Hopefully here, if we do everything right here at SpaceX, I'll be able to sit inside that, heading our way on up into orbit.

What's the current status? Right now, our current vehicle, which we're going to be launching here very soon, is down at the Cape, ready to go. We've got a few little issues. We're working with the range, but it's going to be very soon we're going to be launching. So, you know, best thing to do is just pay attention to our website. We usually announce just a few days before we're getting ready to launch, and we always have a live broadcast for everybody, webcast, so you can kind of watch it live. We learned when we visited the facility that SpaceX builds most of this rocket, you build it right there in this plant.

That's correct. Not far from where we are, fairly close to LAX Airport here in town. That's out of the ordinary. Why did you guys, what's the percentage, first of all, that you guys actually fabricate? Wow, I'm not sure if I can give you an exact number. I wouldn't be surprised if I'd say 85, almost 95, maybe not 95, 90 percent of our parts. But why? For a couple of reasons.

One, Elon Musk, he's the owner of the company. His major goal is to lower the cost of access to space. A lot of times if you start farming things out, everybody's got to take their little piece of the pie and make a profit on it. They got to pay for the overhead for their factory and everything like this. This way, when we bring it into house, several things happen. One, we can keep the cost low. Second, we become experts on how to do this. We can kind of move it up and down the priority queue as needed. And it's much easier to make a change to something to integrate it into your design. It just, it works so much better to make a change to something to integrate it into your design it just it works so much better to get as we kind of call them core competencies on building different components that's the main reason why we do a lot of the stuff ourselves talk about how

in some ways delicate it is yeah like for different little areas for those of you who are here you can see the uh the white part that says says SpaceX on it working its way up. That's our tanks. We have over 600,000 pounds of propellant inside that. Now, of course, everybody knows you've got to make a rocket nice and light. The analogy which I like to kind of give as far as how thin and light they are, if I got a beer can, okay, and scaled it up to 12 feet in diameter, the same diameter as our Falcon 9, and kept the same diameter to thickness ratio. First of all, there'd be a lot of beer.

But second, and yeah, that's how you keep engineers happy. But now if I did that and I made that beer can just up to 12 feet and kept that same thickness to diameter ratio, that beer can would be twice as thick as what our tanks are. So they're amazingly thin. Let's bring in one of the people who helped write the book that you guys have been relying on, and that is Jim Burke. Jim is a former U.S. naval aviator. He graduated from Caltech, well, what, several times, Jim, but I guess for the last time in 47, or was it 49? 49. 49. He went almost straight from there to more than half a century career at the Jet Propulsion Lab, which is not far from where we're speaking today. He has taught at the International Space

University for over 20 years. Jim's main professional interest is in the exploration and settlement of the moon, and that's something he's had a lot to do with for a long time, back at least to the Ranger program, which he used to run. You were there as things were getting underway, 1950s, 1960s, as JPL was a pioneer in this area, and I said something outside before we started taping today. I said that we really didn't know what we were doing back then, and you corrected me. I insist that we did know what we were doing insofar as some of the things that we had already done.

We launched a lot of missiles at White Sands. The Air Force had launched them out of Vandenberg and so on. Cape Canaveral, now the Kennedy Space Center, was the place where the first high-sounding rocket went in 1949, just about the time I joined JPL. But now in the context of what you've just been hearing, it occurred to me to say something interesting about the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile, which was the first stage of the rocket that we used to launch our Rangers in the 1960s. And John Glenn for that matter.

A lot of other, yeah, of course. So the Atlas tank was made out of stainless steel, and it was so thin that it would not stand on its own without internal pressure. Well, we were in such a big hurry that when trouble arrived at an Atlas that we had on Pad 12 at Cape, the right thing to do would have been to ship it back to San Diego, put our spacecraft in storage and spend a couple of months and then get back in business. No.

A young British guy named John Tribe said, I think we can fix it here. They pulled the center engine off, leaving an 18-inch hole in the bottom of it, built a structure inside, scaffolding, climbed up in there about 40 or 50 feet. Put people inside. Inside, shipping a bottle. And, of course, there were fumes in there and everything, so they had to do it in a safe fashion, but they did. Got it all fixed up, x-rayed everything, pulled out all the scaffolding, put the engine back on, did all the right preparatory tests, and launched.

And our Atlas went off having had that happen to it. Now comes the kicker. They had to do the same thing on Pad 14, and guess whose Atlas that was? John Glenn. Yeah. that was John Glenn. Yeah. So that's an example of how

risky we were prepared to be back in those days. And obviously we had failures. We had to learn over the intervening decades that you need to be awfully careful if you want to do lunar and planetary exploration.

But we got through it through the decades, learned a lot. Jeff, does any of that stuff sound familiar? Yeah, as far as being able to do this, one of the things I was thinking when we kept talking about beer cans, something tells me that idea came up over a few beer cans, you know, on something like that. But, yeah, I mean, there are things where, you know, for us, the schedule pressure isn't so much that we have to worry about the Soviets or anything like this.

It's more of a financial thing is the fact that since SpaceX is kind of doing a lot of this on her own nickel, we can't afford to just throw money at stuff. We can't afford to spend forever trying to get things. So we do have to come up with fixes to get things to work. And without a doubt, it has to be done. It's got to work. It's got to be reliable. We don't want to have any more SpaceX reef improvement programs, you know, where you go and drop one in the ocean. You know, it needs to work.

Gentlemen, we're going to take a break. When we come back, we'll be joined by Bill Nye, the science guy. My guests at the moment are Jeff Rekiki, the director of structural design for SpaceX, and Jim Burke, longtime JPL pioneer for the American space program. Please stay with us. We'll be right back with more Planetary Radio Live. Hey, hey, Bill Nye the Science Guy here. I hope you're enjoying Planetary Radio. We put a lot of work into this show and all our other great Planetary Society projects. I've been a member since the disco era.

Now I'm the Society's Vice President. And you may well ask, why do we go to all this trouble? Simple. We believe in the PB&J, the passion, beauty, and joy of space exploration. You probably do, too, or you wouldn't be listening. Of course, you can do more than just listen. You can become part of the action, helping us fly solar sails,

discover new planets, and search for extraterrestrial intelligence and life elsewhere in the universe. Here's how to find out more. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio

t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine. That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live, everyone. We are in the

Crawford Family Forum at the headquarters of Southern California Public Radio here in Pasadena, everyone. We are in the Crawford Family Forum at the headquarters of Southern California Public Radio here in Pasadena, California. And we're going to continue our conversation with Jeff Rakiki, the Director of Structural Design for SpaceX, which has the Falcon 9 rocket awaiting launch right now at the Kennedy Space Center down in Florida, and James Burke, a true pioneer, a 52-year career, I think, at the Jet Propulsion Lab. But we are also joined by, dare I say it, a man who needs no introduction, Bill Nye, the science guy.

Thank you. Thank you. And for those of you who are new to the show, you can hear Bill every week, amazingly enough, on Planetary Radio, because he does his little two-minute commentary about whatever topic strikes his fancy that week. Bill, everybody knows you as the happy-go-lucky devil-may-care science guy, but you were once a humorless mechanical engineer. I still am a mechanical engineer.

The quality of the humor still in question. Yeah, I worked on 747 flight controls, nose wheel steering, ailerons, rudder. And I will say, just listening to both of these stories about fuel tanks that are like balloons, they're so fragile, you have to keep them pressurized. The things that have changed in my brief time in airplanes is that airplanes, even the ones that are iconic for us are World War II airplanes. Those airplanes and modern airplanes are made of aluminum. That's the first thing. But the stuff that's really improved, there's other materials now, plastics, graphite, fiber, and stuff like that, but it's the fit. Able to get things together so much more accurately, at least at a reasonable price,

than you used to be able to do, so that actually lowers the weight because you don't have to have thicker parts where things are joined and makes things much. So don't worry. Airplanes are thinner than ever. How reassuring. You've got another advantage that Jim did not have in the 50s and 60s, and that is you've got these newfangled devices called computers, and you can model some of this?

Yes, we can model it, and the best part is we can also screw up so many times faster now than they used to. No, but the one thing that does make life much, much easier for us is the ability to do CAD work, computer-aided design, where we design things and essentially build the rocket on the computer. Then we go through and do finite element analysis. We actually go through and apply loads to it. We apply temperatures to it and see what it does. We can predict how much is it going to deflect, what's the stresses in it.

And so now when we go out and actually do our testing, we can go and we put little strain gauges on there and thermocouples and all these little things to measure the stresses and the temperatures and pressure transducers. And then we go back and use all of that information from testing to make sure that our models are correct. Jim, how much do you wish you'd had some of these tools? We had computers. They were women. You're laughing. I've seen pictures of those rooms of women with calculators. I'm very glad to hear laughter and clapping out in the room,

but I want you to take this seriously. The women who did the computations on which our performance efforts were based back in those days and made it come out right, they were very early pioneers in another way. And we began having some women scientists and women engineers, but the pioneering women at JPL were the computers. A good friend of mine, Sam DiMaggio, has got this fantastic saying. He goes, when you launch a rocket, over a thousand things can happen, only one of which is good.

Yeah, we used to make a lot of jokes about partial credit in engineering school. And my mother worked on the Enigma code. My mother was a computer. She did computations trying to break this World War II code from the Nazis, and she was recruited because she was good at math and science. She was one of those people. This would be back east. And finite element analysis is fantastic. For those of you unfamiliar with it, there's a set of equations that relates one end of a square thing to another end,

and you have enough square things or triangle things, and you can really figure out the stresses before you leave, except once in a while. And that's why we have TESS. We had an Atlas failure of such a nature that it didn't do anything other than cause the spacecraft telemetry to turn on. The Ranger gave out a few bits of information on its way up through the atmosphere. We worked on that failure for months and months. The engineers all gathered around, studied everything, looked at all the data. Finally, an astrophysicist came in and said, I wonder if it could have been a plasma phenomenon. And by golly, it was. That when the Atlas engines

stage off, there's a hot cloud of ionized gas that goes up momentarily up the sides of the Atlas. And that shorted out our telemetry, turned us on at the wrong moment when our transmitters just burned up. Of all things, an astrophysicist wanders into a room full of engineers and solves their problem. How important are those aha moments that just come out of somebody's intuition, Jeff? You know, it's really pretty important. A lot of times you'll get, you know, the different brainstorming sessions. And we got a pretty good rule at SpaceX in the fact that, you know, the best idea wins. One of the sobering things about life is everyone you meet knows something you don't. Correct.

And this is especially true of machinists. Yes. Actually, when we're brainstorming the ideas, as soon as we kind of get it kind of roughed out, the first thing we do is go out and talk to a lot of the factory folks. We do try to get all of our folks working as a team. It's a team effort out there. Jeff, I said we'd come back to the Dragon capsule. Okay.

Which is what you guys are building right now under contract to NASA to get stuff, you know, freeze-dried ice cream and Tang up to the International Space Station, right? But it's got a porthole. Ah, the reason why we have a porthole in it is we've got to make sure that the cargo sees outside.

Well, the cargo, someday, should be people. Now, a lot of times people do ask us, they say, wait, if you're just bringing cargo up, why do you have windows in this? Well, the long-term plan is to bring people up. And you say, well, why don't you put them in later on when you're starting to put people in? Well, guess what? When the vehicles come back, those windows are going to get a little toasty. Okay?

And so actually the windows are part of our thermal protection system. And so we would much rather find out now with our test flights, when we've got nothing in them except instrumentation, that if we have any issues with these windows, I'd much rather find out now than late in the game and then suddenly get behind the ball. So, you know, I've got to say, guys, we've been talking a lot about the technology of rocket building, which is nothing but fun. Maybe, you know, for us young men, like, okay, spiritually. But I just want to point out that we're at a really exciting time. And this is another time in

history where the public interest in space exploration is very, very high. But it's not clear that we're going to go forward to new and exciting places. Now, the President of the United States just made a big announcement. But every day I get a half dozen emails or more from people who think this is just not really sure this will be the way to go, letting a private company go to low Earth orbit. But it's an exciting time. I mean, this is a time where people are going to use existing technology, technology we're confident in, as you were talking about,

and then to go to places where we're pretty sure we know how to go, low Earth orbit, the International Space Station. And then we're going to use NASA, the treasure of this wealthy country, with international partners to try to go out into deep space and then eventually to asteroids and to Mars. It's a very exciting time. I just don't want us to lose, if I may, sight of that. Passion, beauty, and joy, right?

That's it. We are out of time for this segment. Thank you. This has really been delightful. Our guests have been Jeff Rikiki, the Director of Structural Design for SpaceX, Jim Burke, been Jeff Rekiki, the Director of Structural Design for SpaceX, Jim Burke, pioneer, 52-year career at JPL, the Jet Propulsion Lab, and 20 years and counting at the International Space University,

and Bill Nye, the science guy, who you can hear again next week with his regular commentary on Planetary Radio, the un-live, or un-dead? Un-live portion, the un-live version of this show. Gentlemen, thank you so much. Can we thank them, please? And we'll be right back with my bud, Dr. Bruce Betts, with What's Up? And we're going to give away some T-shirts. Welcome back to Planetary Radio Live. We are down to the homestretch here, and that means it's time to join my bud, Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who is here to tell us about the night sky and do some other silly stuff. It's been fun. Nice job, Planetary Radio Undead.

I like that. We've got to stick with that. That's what we should have called it, Plan Red Undead. It's the whole vampire theme, you know? It's so hot right now. It's really hip. Tell us about the night sky. All right. Well, if you're a vampire, you can go out there safely in the night and look over there to the west in the early evening. Make sure you don't hit the rays of the sunlight and you'll see Venus looking like an extremely bright star-like object and then follow up in the sky and you will see high in the west, Mars looking kind of dim and reddish these days and then keep going.

Follow it in a line, as happens with that whole planetary disk we have, and you'll find Saturn, which is very high in the early evening, even over a little in the east or west, depending on the time you look. And it's looking kind of yellowish. And if you look at it through a small telescope, the rings are nearly edge- on these days, so kind of tricky to see. And in the pre-dawn, not that I ever see that, but for those who do see the pre-dawn, we've got Jupiter looking extremely bright, dominating the eastern part of the sky.

Speaking of vampires, why is it that when vampires go out under a full moon, reflected sunlight, do they just kind of feel under the weather? I think so. I think actually, though, the spectral absorption characteristics having to do with the Christiansen frequency of the lunar soils actually yield a safe light for vampires. This is what I thought. These questions, you pop up.

Thank goodness I know the answers. People think we write this stuff. No, they don't. What else you got? All right, on to this week in space history. And a couple things thematic to some of the things we've talked about. We had in 1967, Lunar Orbiter 4 was launched. Going back a little farther, 1961,

Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Yeah. And more recently, 2003, Hayabusa was launched, which Emily mentioned, coming back in June, hitting the Australian outback. Okay. The next thing that Bruce always does, which is random space fact. You guys are going to be amazed. You have to react to the wonderful echo that he manages to insert into his voice without need of mechanical assistance. Are you ready? Can we get their help? Why don't you do it? You do it first.

You do it first. Ready? Okay, go. Random space fact. Random space fact! Random space fact! Random space fact! All right, one more time, simpler. That sucked. Ready. All right.

Wait, wait, let me give them some of the signatures. Random space fact! Random space fact! Nice. Nice. That was good. Space shuttle, talking rockets. Space shuttle is about the height of the Statue of Liberty. But at launch, it is three times heavier. Ooh.

Three times heavier than the Statue of Liberty? Indeed. Unless you filled the Statue of Liberty with liquid oxygen. Which has only happened three times. All right. We're into the trivia thing. But before we do this, we forgot to say who won last week's contest. And I will say right now, it was Tim Meeker in Delwood, Missouri.

He's already got his shirt, so we took care of that. But all of you who've been calling in, writing in, and saying, who won? Well, it wasn't you, unless you're Tim Meeker. All right, so now on to the current question. Always making the listeners happy. What was the first Trojan asteroid discovered? And as a reminder, Trojan asteroids are asteroids that orbit either 60 degrees ahead of Jupiter in Jupiter's orbit or 60 degrees behind, which turns out to be a stable Lagrangian point. They hang out in those areas.

What was the first one discovered? How did we do, Matt? Oh, we did well. We got a lot of responses. I don't know why this was so popular. Maybe because it was so easy to find in the Wikipedia or something. But here's our winner, chosen randomly by Random.org, as we do every week. First-time winner, Suzanne Frazier. Suzanne Frazier of Cincinnati, Ohio, where we do not run on WKRP. But, Suzanne, we're going to get a Planetary Radio T-shirt out to you. And she said, indeed, 588 Achilles. Indeed, Achilles. Not a Trojan.

No, but the naming convention, because you brought this up, is Trojan asteroids are named participants in the Trojan War. And if you're going to pick someone in the Trojan War to start with, Achilles is a pretty good one. Okay. He was no heel. That was a better reaction than I thought I'd get. That was such a bad joke. Okay, we're going to go on to the new trivia contest for people at home.

And here it is. So don't shout out the answer live in the audience. What was the first American spacecraft launched after the official formation of NASA? First American spacecraft launched after NACA became NASA. Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter, and get us those answers by? By the 10th. That would be May 10 at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's when we need your answer, and you may indeed win a Planetary Radio t-shirt. All right, everybody, go out there, look out for the night sky, and think about pickles. Thank you, and good night.

Ooh, I need dinner. Ladies and gentlemen, Bruce Fetz, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. We are out of time. Boy, are we out of time. Next week, we're going to get another Saturn update from Cassini Project scientist Linda Spilker.

Please help me once again thank our host, KPCC, Southern California Public Radio. The Crawford Family Forum producer is John Cohn. Planetary Radio Live was recorded by Mike Stokesbury. Our floor manager has been Thayne Tierney. I'm Matt Kaplan. Say goodnight, Laura. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California

and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation. Keep looking up! Thank you.