Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Ray Bradbury Returns!

Episode Date: October 24, 2005

The beloved author, poet and visionary is back to talk about his inspirations, the romance of space exploration, and much more. Q&A on the biggest object in the Kuiper Belt, and a new space trivia contest on What's Up.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ray Bradbury returns to Planetary Radio. Hi, everyone. Welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan. He's back, the author of Fahrenheit 451, of The Illustrated Man, of Something Wicked This Way Comes, of The Martian Chronicles, and so many other

classic stories, joins us for a conversation about the romance of space exploration and much more. And as if that wasn't enough, we've got Emily Lakdawalla exploring beyond Pluto, and Bruce Betts with an update on that mysterious Pioneer anomaly. Of course, Bruce will also offer up another space trivia contest in this week's edition of What's Up.

Let's get to the news. What's better than pictures from Mars? How about live pictures from Mars? Arizona State University has published a new website with a scrolling panel that continuously displays images returning from the Mars Odyssey orbiter. The site has many other cool features, including an interactive map of the red planet that lets you zoom in on the surface. More details and a link are at planetary.org. The Hubble Space Telescope has peered outward to nearly the edge of the expanding universe, so what's a measly quarter of a million miles? Who knew it could

even focus that close? Hubble's ultraviolet camera is returning unprecedented images of our own moon in a search for minerals that just might be very useful someday soon. They carried Gemini astronauts into space, and they've boosted hundreds of less important payloads into orbit. Now, like the Saturn series, they're just a blast from the past. With 3,000 people watching last week, the very last Titan rocket took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. We can't tell you what it was carrying because the National Reconnaissance Office won't tell us. But a spy satellite is a good guess.

The Titans are being replaced by cheaper vehicles like the Atlas V and Delta IV. We told you that Emily is way out there this week. Here she is. I'll be right back with Ray Bradbury. Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, What are the largest Kuiper Belt objects

and are they all similar or different? More than a thousand Kuiper Belt objects have been discovered. These small icy bodies orbit beyond Neptune in the far reaches of the solar system. Their sizes are not known at all well,

but there are definitely a few standouts. There are 11 known bodies that are roughly 1,000 to 3,000 kilometers across. Pluto and its moon Charon are the best known of these. Their surfaces are smooth and relatively bright because they're covered with methane frost. The largest body in the Kuiper Belt is the recently discovered 2003 UB313, and it has a frosty methane surface like Pluto's. There is methane on the probable third largest body in the Kuiper Belt, 2005 FY9, but instead of frost, it appears to be covered

with pebble-sized grains of methane. What other kinds of objects are out there? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. We were celebrating Ray Bradbury's 83rd birthday the last time he visited Planetary Radio. Mars had come closer to Earth than it had in tens of thousands of years. Now, two years later, Mars has once again come to call on one of its first explorers. We called Ray at his longtime home in Southern California. You're going to hear an annoying high-pitched tone now and then.

It's coming from the headset Ray wears so that he won't have to hold the telephone. We've left in Ray's comment about this less-than-broadcast-quality element of our conversation because, well, because it's pure Bradbury. Ray, welcome back to Planetary Radio, and congratulations on being awarded the Thomas O'Pain Memorial Award for the advancement of human exploration of Mars. I can't think of anybody who is more deserving. As far as I know, the only person who beat you to Mars is Edgar Rice Burroughs.

That's right, he sure did. And he influenced me so that when I was 12 years old, I went out on my front lawn, put my hands up and said, Mars, take me home. And it took me home and I never came back. You've gotten so many awards. When we had Arthur C. Clark on this show, he said he had lost track of the awards he had received and those which had been given in his name. Is that true for you, too? Well, awards are very nice, but what I really like is when people come up to me after a lecture and say,

I love you, and that's more important to me. Awards are very nice, but personal things, where people look you right in the face and say, geez, I love your books and I love you. Well, I love your books and I love you and I'm joined by millions of people. And you've always returned that love. I have been amazed at how open you have been and how generous you have always been, returning that love and attention to those who have appreciated your work and have appreciated your dreams.

Well, it's very easy because, you see, I was very poor. I was raised in a poor family, and I couldn't afford books. So I grew up in the library, and I learned that a library is a center for love. You fall in love with your favorite authors, and they accompany you through life. People like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Jules Verne and H.G. Wells are good companions. And when I was 19 years old, I met Robert Heinlein, who became one of the leading figures in science fiction. And he became my friend and teacher, and he told my first story for me. So you see, all I'm doing is returning the love that I got in the first place.

I'm going to pause for just a moment because I'm getting a little bit of feedback. Are you using a speakerphone at your end? No, I've got an earphone. I've got the stupid ear equipment, so it makes troubles at times. Well, if it continues to whine, we'll just ask the audience to bear with us. Just tell them I'm a robot. You sing the body electric? You're damn right, yes.

I did not know that you had such an early relationship with the dean of science fiction, another one of the greats that you are usually included with. I mean, Asimov, Clark, you, and Heinlein, I think. Well, they got started long before me, so I didn't sell anything really very much until I was in my late 20s. And Mars was a part of that from pretty early on, wasn't it, Martian Chronicles? Oh, I was writing it without knowing it. I wrote a series of short stories which appeared in science fiction magazines, but I didn't realize I was writing a novel at the time.

And I went to New York when I was 29 years old and I had lunch with one of the editors at Doubleday and he said, do you have a novel to sell to us? I said, no, I'm a short story writer. And he said, well, what about all those Martian stories you've been writing and publishing

and thrilling wonder stories at other places? What if you tied them all together? Wouldn't they make a book called The Martian Chronicles? So I didn't write The Martian Chronicles. It wrote me without telling me. And all of a sudden I woke up and the book was finished. Have you found that to be true for a lot of your works?

They sort of demanded to be written? Yeah, all my books wrote themselves. The Dandelion Wine wrote itself without telling me, and I woke up one day, and all these short stories and essays fell together and made Dandelion Wine. You know,

we've talked a number of times over the last 30 years. I don't think I've ever told you about one, maybe the most wonderful experience I ever had with one of your books. It was Something Wicked This Way Comes, which for some reason neither my wife or I had read, and we read it to each other as we were getting to know each other, and that may have helped to set us on the road to marriage.

What an amazing experience that was, sharing that book. Well, if anything goes wrong with your marriage later, you can blame me. No, we'll find some other excuse. Okay. Well, let's come back to Mars, which you've returned to a number of times since the Martian Chronicles. And really, I'd love to work some of your other early science fiction into this as well. The books that many people are less familiar with, like R is for Rocket and S is for Space,

and one of my personal favorites, Golden Apples of the Sun, which I hope people will go down to their libraries and pull off the shelf and read along with Martian Chronicles and your other classics. You know, it's got a lot of my best stories. The lead story there, The Foghorn, about a sea monster that falls in love with a lighthouse and a foghorn. And I gave a copy of that book to John Houston back in 1951. And he read that short story, The Foghorn,

and gave me the job of writing Moby Dick as a screenplay for the screen. So that book is at the center of my life. That was one of the great adventures of your life, wasn't it, being on that shoot of Moby Dick with Houston and Gregory Peck and the others? Well, no, I didn't go on the shoot. I wrote the screenplay ahead of time, and then I got the hell out of there. I don't know why. I left to make the film because I don't want to be around directors and actors when they're making a film.

I prefer to write the screenplay and put it in their hands and then run like hell. Well, what about, I wonder if we can draw any parallels between that and the stories that you've written that have inspired so many scientists, so many engineers, so many lay people like myself, to feel very viscerally the romance of exploring our solar system and beyond. Well, I think it's very important at this time that I'm getting this award to explain some of the reasons why they're giving it to me in the first place. Number one, we should never have left the moon. We should have stayed there. We came back home. We invested our money in the shuttle, and the shuttle is only 200 miles above the Earth.

It photographed the Earth. It was worthwhile. That's fine. But there's no romance to the shuttle. There's romance in going to the moon and staying there and building a base, and then sometime in the next few years, going on to Mars. There's the romance for our minds, and we've got to investigate that romance all over again. So what do you think of the just-announced plans by NASA to fulfill the vision for space exploration, moon, Mars, and beyond?

Well, I haven't read enough of them, but what little I've seen doesn't sound like enough money and enough real imaginative investment. There are not enough people in Congress that give a damn about space travel. And it's been years since we've had anyone there that cared about it. We'll have more from Ray Bradbury on Planetary Radio right after this. This is Buzz Aldrin. We'll have more from Ray Bradbury on Planetary Radio right after this. We're tracking near-Earth asteroids and comets. We sponsor the search for life on other worlds. And we're building the first-ever solar sail.

We didn't just build it. We attempted to put that first solar sail in orbit. And we're going to try again. You can read about all our exciting projects and get the latest space exploration news in-depth at the Society's exciting and informative website, planetary.org. You can also preview our full-color magazine, The Planetary Report. It's just one of our many member benefits. Want to learn more?

Call us at 1-877-PLANETS. That's toll-free, 1-877-752-6387. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Ray Bradbury is our guest this week on Planetary Radio. Our conversation turned a bit more personal in its last few minutes, beginning with Ray's feelings about the thousands of scientists, engineers, and astronauts who were inspired to pursue their careers by his works of fiction.

That has to be especially gratifying to you. It's quite wonderful. The night we land on the moon is one of the greatest nights his works of fiction. That has to be especially gratifying to you. It's quite wonderful. The night we land on the moon is one of the greatest nights in the history of the world. So we've got to do that night all over again, except do it better. Can I get you to tell that story? I think it was for Apollo 11, and weren't you in Britain on a television talk show asked for commentary about this momentous human achievement? Oh, yeah.

Well, I was on the David Frost show. And the night we landed on the moon, ten minutes after we landed on the moon, David Frost introduced a great American talent. I thought it was me, but instead it was Engelbert Hopperdink. And I walked off the show. I was so angry with him that he didn't have someone important. He had me there, but he didn't introduce me. I didn't have a chance to tell why space travel was important.

So I walked off the show, and I got a cab, and I went across London, and I did a show with Walter Cronkite about on Telstar, telling the reasons why space travel was important. And I walked back to my hotel during the night. I cried all the way. I was so happy. And in the morning, I saw a little tabloid newspaper out in front of my hotel, and the headline read, Neil Armstrong walks at 6 a.m., Bradbury walks at midnight. So I'm very proud of that, that I got the hell off the David Frost show

because he was a very stupid man. show because he was a very stupid man. As we begin to lay out real plans to get not just robots but humans to Mars, as has been detailed recently in NASA's plans for the crew exploration vehicle, at least the beginnings, are we fulfilling our destiny in this? You're damn right we are. We're going to go to Mars. We're going to stay there. We're going to go to Mars, we're going to stay there, we're going to live there,

then we're going to move out into the universe. Tell us what you've been up to. We haven't talked to you for a little more than two years. The last time was at your birthday party at the Planetary Society, which I don't think it was a coincidence that it was the closest pass of Earth to Mars in tens of thousands.

Yeah, the next day. Right. What have you been up to since then? I know you've been busy. I've written ten plays, and I'm putting four new ones on at a theater here in L.A. at Halloween, and my new film's come out recently,

The Sound of Thunder, and the critics didn't much care for it, so it's gone now. It was in 800 theaters, but it's now gone. But it's a damn good film. It'll be back, The Sound of Thunder, and I love the film, but I'm sorry the critics didn't like it. So we should wait to get a look at it on DVD or on tape, huh? It'll be on DVD, and I'll be there up front blowing a trumpet

in his honor. Doesn't sound like you're slowing down. No, not for a moment, goddammit. You know, I have to give you a personal report. At that birthday party two years ago, after I recorded you for the radio show, I asked you for a favor.

My daughter's high school was about to do a number of stories taken from The Illustrated Man on stage. And I thought, oh, wouldn't it be great if Ray would say hello? And I put the microphone in front of you, and you proceeded to do about a ten-minute welcome to them and asked for a report as soon as the production was done. And I can tell you it went extremely well. Oh, that's great. welcome to them and asked for a report as soon as the production was done, and I can tell you it went extremely well. Oh, that's great. Well, and thanks to you. And, boy, were they thrilled to have the author, the playwright himself,

welcome their audience each night. Oh, that's wonderful. I'm so pleased. I love telling you stories like that. I got one other, the oddest place that we ever ran into each other, in the men's room at Grauman's Chinese Theater. And sometime after that, when I mentioned it, you said, there's something interesting about the men's room there, and it's why the mirrors are so low.

That's right, because Sid Grauman was only five feet tall. So he had all the mirrors at a level where he could see himself. The people who are taller than five feet have to bend down in order to look into the mirrors. Well, it was a pleasure to run into you there as it has been everywhere else.

And we certainly look forward to seeing you at this banquet marking the 25th anniversary of the Planetary Society, and at which you will receive the Thomas O'Pain Memorial Award for the Advancement of Human Exploration of Mars and I don't know if you have

anything to add to that Ray but I hope people will come and we're going to have a wonderful time and we're going to blow the place apart what should we be watching for next from the typewriter of Ray Bradbury? I've got three new books in the bookstore right now, so people can put down, stop looking at their TV or listening to the radio,

and go to the bookstore. I've got three new books there right now. Well, Ray, will you come back on the show sometime and talk to us about those and other works that continue to emanate from that lovely mind of yours? I sure will. I'd be glad to come back. It's been wonderful talking to you. And you told me that the Russians are coming next.

They're coming this afternoon to do a broadcast with me to Moscow, and they're actually going to pay me for it because they've been stealing my books for years. And at long last, they're going to give me some rubles. Well, we'll have a nice trophy for you even if we can't pay you, but we sure appreciate it coming back on Planetary Radio. Well, thank you. God bless and take care now. Thank you so much, Ray.

Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A. Many large Kuiper Belt objects are similar to Pluto, but others are very different. to Pluto, but others are very different. One of the oddest large Kuiper belt objects is 2003 EL61, which rotates so fast that it has become the shape of a rugby ball. It also has a moon. In fact, a pretty large proportion, more than one percent, of observed Kuiper belt objects are actually binaries. The largest Kuiper belt objects tend to have bright, frosty surfaces, but the smaller the

object, the darker its surface appears to be. The thousand-kilometer-size objects Quawar, Ixion, and Varuna are all rather dark, suggesting that they're covered with the dirty material that is found on the surfaces of comets. Finally, there is Sedna, an object that may not properly be a member of the Kuiper belt at all. About the size of Pluto's moon Charon, Sedna travels so far away from the Sun that, unlike the Kuiper Belt objects, it doesn't ever feel the gravitational pull of Neptune. Sedna may represent just one of an entirely new class of outer solar system objects lying out there in the darkness waiting to be discovered. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. It's time to welcome Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. That must mean it's time for What's Up, our weekly look at the night sky and all kinds of other fun stuff. Welcome, Bruce. Thank you very much. You have fun stuff for us, good stuff this week? Always, always, Matt.

You should know that. Actually, I do. It was just a glib announcerly thing to say. I'm sorry. Well, okay. Hey, weren't you one of the brothers, glib? You were the one that... You didn't know?

You can't tell from the clothes? Well, the polyester and the platform shoes should have tipped me off. Well, that and I'm short, so. But at least you're staying alive. Yeah. All right. Let's move on to, hey, I don't know, maybe what's in the night sky. Why not?

People are actually listening for instead of references to 1970s disco. Yeah, we've got Mars. Cannot say it enough. Go look at Mars right now, preferably with a telescope if you've got it, but it doesn't matter if you don't because it is gorgeous. It is rising shortly after sunset in the east. It will be up all night. It is brighter than any star in the night sky, and it is a beautiful orangish-reddish color. I saw it. It looked beautiful orangish-reddish hanging very close to the moon. I was on a plane and had a great view over a deck of clouds lit by a nearly full moon,

and there was Mars hanging just below it. Oh, it was just stunning. That sounds gorgeous. Now, you do realize Mars wasn't actually just next to the moon, right? Oh, well, duh. Don't worry. Mars is a lot farther away. Well, duh.

Don't worry. Mars is a lot farther away. There was Mars with minimal angular separation from the only satellite of our dear planet Earth. I love it when he talks about that. It turns you on, doesn't it? It does. It does. This and a brother, Glib. Glib.

Excuse me. Okay. Don't forget, we also have Venus low in the evening sky in the west, looking even brighter than Mars. It's the brightest object up there except the moon. And you also have Saturn rising around midnight and up in the pre-dawn sky, looking quite lovely, especially through a telescope. On to this week in space history, his 30th anniversary of the Soviet Venera 10 probe successfully launching.

It took an orbiter and a lander to Venus, and the lander survived on the surface for 65 minutes. It's sister craft, Venera 9, also successful on the surface of Venus. No mean feat. No. Nasty place. Not that nasty, nasty place. On to human space update.

As many of you probably know, the two Chinese astronauts, Fei Zhonglong and Ni Haisheng, on the second Chinese human spaceflight successfully landed in Mongolia, quite safely. It's a little-known fact. I like Mongolia. Strange that it turns out the original natives that lived there, like, I don't know, 5,000 years ago, they weren't really the originals, but they pronounced it that way. So that's in deference to them.

Okay, maybe not. On to random space facts! Oh, a cry of anguish. More a cry for help, really. But a really cool random space fact. Just got this from Slava Turyshev of the Pioneer Anomaly Project, the Planetary Society's funding. He's up at JPL. And we were getting an update from him, and he pointed out this thing,

which I should have figured out before, that Voyager 1 and Pioneer 10, these two farthest things from the Earth that humans have sent out there, are over 24 hours round-trip light-time from the Earth. Voyager 1 is like over 26. One implication, and this is the part that i got from slava is that you actually the when you transmit a signal from a big radio dish on earth you actually can uh go do the rest of your life come back a day later to the same antenna and use that same antenna to receive the signal oh that's how far away how cool cool is that? These are. That's very cool. In fact, they're going to try it in March 2006 to communicate one last time with Pioneer 10 that we haven't heard from for a few years.

The geometry is going to work out right, and they're going to give it a shot and use just that technique. Wonderful. Good luck. On to the trivia contest. We asked you about the VLA, the Very Large Array. Speaking of radio dishes, there are 27 radio dishes, the Very Large Array. Speaking of radio dishes, there are 27 radio dishes at the Very Large Array in New Mexico used for radio astronomy. I asked you how big in diameter is each of those dishes. How did we do, Matt? Lots of entries. Most of them gave it to us

both in metric and English units, but our winner, randomly chosen this week, chose to do it only in English units. Our winner is Nilmini Diabru Rajapaksa, which no doubt I mangled badly. But Nilmini, congratulations. What does it matter that I mangled your name? You're getting a Planetary Radio t-shirt. That makes up for a lot of things. And it's coming. It will go to you all the way over there in what, Colombo?

Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka, that beautiful tropical nation on the equator, a longtime home of a past guest on this program, Arthur C. Clarke. Very, very nice. On to the next trivia contest. Oh, by the way, that's 25 meters for those playing the metric game. Thank you. Each of those dishes.

On to the next trivia contest. For those of you out there who desire to win your Planetary Radio T-shirt to help you compensate for Matt mangling your name, answer this question. What planets in our solar system share parts of their names with elements, significant parts of their names with elements? So pull out your periodic table, pull out your planet list, and have fun. That's fascinating.

Yeah, that'll be a good one. Oh, and isn't it great? Isn't it glorious that you now have to actually limit it to only planets in our solar system? Yeah, it is a different life in the last decade or so. We now have over 150 extra solar planets, but by naming convention, they all have really boring names, lots of numbers and letters, and probably would be very strange to name an element after them. It's like people nowadays, you know, instead of saying, what do you want, a boy or a girl?

They say, what are you having? A boy or a girl. Yeah, it's just like that. Yeah, just like that. Anyway, everybody remember we've got a contest going on here, the Venus Express Art Contest. This is for children and for adults to compete. Go to our website, planetary.org. Find out how to enter and win a trip to Germany to mission operations for Venus Express getting into Venus orbit next April.

That's exciting. But, I mean, you know, if you don't want to go all the way to Germany, win a t-shirt. Get your entry in for this coming week's trivia contest by Halloween, Monday, October 31st, 2 p.m. Pacific time. Boo. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you. Anyway, if you get it in by 2 p.m. on Monday the 31st, we'll make sure that your entry is part of the contest that Bruce has just introduced to us. And now you can say goodbye. Goodbye, everybody. Go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about pumpkins. Thank you, and good night.

And we will. We will. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week for What's Up here on Planetary Radio. Our show is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. Have a great week and a happy Halloween. Thank you.