Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Rocket Road Trip!

Episode Date: September 27, 2016

Planetary Society Digital Editor Jason Davis returns with the story of the ten-day trek across the South he just completed with two Society colleagues.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Road Trip, 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. My colleagues called it the Rocket road trip. The rocket is the gigantic space launch system, and we'll talk about how it is coming together with the Society's digital editor, Jason Davis. Bill Nye will speak to us from the first day of the International Astronautical Congress in Guadalajara, Mexico, and Bruce Betts will pull down the night sky for your easy viewing enjoyment. As I began work on this week's show, NASA was sharing news from Jupiter's moon Europa. Before we hear about it, from Emily Lakdawalla, here's lead author William Sparks,

an astronomer with the Space Telescope Science Institute, making the big announcement in a September 26 telephone briefing. Today we are presenting new Hubble evidence for water vapor plumes being expelled from the ice surface of Europa. Europa is the second closest Galilean satellite to Jupiter, a classical icy world and a truly compelling astrobiological target in the solar system. observations indicate a global saline liquid water ocean engulfs the moon at the present time, hidden under miles of ice. If there are plumes emerging from Europa, it is significant because it means we may be able to explore that ocean for organic chemicals or even signs of life without having to drill through unknown miles of ice. All right, Emily, that was William Sparks, the lead author of this soon-to-be-published paper. He's with the Space Telescope Science Institute. This is pretty big news, isn't it?

Well, it's incremental news. So there was a detection in 2013 by Hubble of possible plumes at Europa, where they used an ultraviolet instrument and they saw just a few pixels of light in ultraviolet indicating that there might be hydrogen emission from the South Pole. This study is using a slightly different technique. They're looking at Europa against the backdrop of Jupiter. And so they're actually seeing the plumes in absorption, where the plumes absorb light from Jupiter, making a dark feature against Jupiter. And they saw this feature again. But in both cases, it's really at the limit of Hubble's capabilities. So neither one of them

is conclusive evidence for the existence of plumes at Europa. But the fact that you have two different methods, both indicating the same conclusion conclusion makes it a stronger case than it was before. Brittany Schmidt, an old friend of the Planetary Society, was also part of this briefing, and she made comparisons to Enceladus. Can you talk about that? Sure. Enceladus is a place where we're certain there are plumes coming from its south pole. They're really obvious in Cassini images, and Cassini has flown through those plumes coming from its south pole. They're really obvious in Cassini images, and Cassini has flown through those plumes multiple times to sample their composition. If Europa does have plumes, then it would be wonderful to fly a mission as capable or more capable than Cassini through its plumes, and NASA hopes to do that with its future Europa mission.

Whether or not the plumes actually exist, NASA's future Europa mission is going to be exactly the right thing to send to Europa to determine once and for all whether these plumes exist and whether it might be worth sending a follow-up spacecraft that could actually sample Europa's ocean by flying through the plumes. But we can't get ahead of ourselves with that. We've got to find out for sure that they exist first. And I'm sure that Bob Pappalardo and his team at JPL, who are working on that Europa Clipper mission, are following this news very, very carefully. So where do we go from here? Where we go from here is to continue to support NASA's future Europa mission, to get it off the launch pad, get it to Jupiter with all haste, and get those instruments studying this planet-sized moon with its global subsurface ocean, its intriguing surface geology, and maybe, just maybe, that it's spewing its ocean into space where we can actually sample it directly.

Hear, hear. Thank you, Emily. Thank you, Matt. She is our senior editor, the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla. Bill, good to have you back on the show. Where are you this week? I know you're not in town. Well, it depends on which town. I'm in Guadalajara, Mexico, for the International Astronautical Congress. And this is something the Planetary Society participates in every year.

Our communications directrix, Aaron Greeson, and I will be presenting a paper about Whitesail. The plenary sessions are always fascinating. They have all the heads of all the space agencies of the world together, and they talk about their shared objectives in space. And it's an exciting thing, man. And when you're at these conferences or congresses, you really get a sense of how many people in the world are invested in space and how many countries around the world want to participate in the adventure of space exploration. There are practical considerations from all these countries that want to have their navigation systems work for their drivers and weather. They all want to have their satellites communicate their weather forecast. But the other thing is everybody wants to go to Mars.

Everybody's excited about sending people to Mars. Vietnam has a space program. Mexico has a big space program. And so it says we're just part of it. It's exciting to be here. I am going to guess that the big, big thing that people are waiting for this week is this address that will be made by Elon Musk about his plans for Mars. That's tomorrow, yeah. So he's going to announce his plans for Mars, and I presume that he will talk about the fast fire that occurred on the launch pad a few weeks ago, and how much of a setback that is, and I bet you

that they will say it's not a setback, we're back on course, and I read that they believe it was a helium leak that caused this, but that aside, that's a detail, he's got big plans about making humankind a two-planet species, so that if anything goes wrong on Earth, we'll be able to continue on Mars. But for me, I want to find evidence of life. That's my big deal on Mars or Europa or Enceladus. But neither here nor there. It's part of it. While we have all these problems on Earth, while we have these tribal conflicts, while

we have these significant wars going on, nevertheless, humankind is reaching further and deeper into space because it is, in a sense, our destiny to explore. Those are our ancestors who did not explore. We're not really our ancestors. They got out-competed by the ones who did explore. So the International Astronautical Congress is part of that. Bill, I hope we can get your thoughts about the results of the IAC when we talk to you next week.

Thank you, Matt. Looking forward. Have a great time there in Guadalajara, where we've been speaking to him, Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, over a special, not quite up to par Skype connection, but good to be able to talk to him as that big international conference gets underway. to a colleague of Bill's, Jason Davis, about a trip that he and a couple of other colleagues just took across the United States to evaluate the status of human spaceflight. If all goes well, and I mean very, very well, we are two years away from seeing a rocket lift off from the Kennedy Space Center that the world will not have seen the likes of in 45 years, when the last Saturn V was launched. The Space Launch System is now coming together in key NASA facilities across the southern U.S.,

at Boeing, and on the shop floors of hundreds of subcontractors. Earlier this month, three of my Planetary Society colleagues set off on a 10-day journey. At the end of their rocket road trip, they were impressed by the progress made on the SLS, though much work remains. Digital editor Jason Davis covers human spaceflight. I asked him to join us and share his impressions. Jason, welcome back to Planetary Radio and welcome back from the rocket road trip. Sounded like you guys had a great time. Thanks, Matt. Yeah, it was fun, interesting, and quite a 10-day journey.

It was a lot of fun. I'm glad to be back with the family after that long of a time. Yeah, I don't blame you a bit. And it certainly kept you busy. You made a lot of stops on this trip. Yeah, we did four states during this 10-day stretch from September 6th through 16th. Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and finally on down to New Orleans, Louisiana to finish. Let's talk about some of the conclusions. And these are given out in even better detail in your September 21st blog entry at planetary.org,

which is titled, Five Things We Learned From Our Hashtag Rocket Road Trip. I like to think of it as a space odyssey myself. Yeah, we struggled with the name for that. We had a lot of creative names on the table, and finally the team was like, I think we're overthinking this. Let's just go rocket road trip and call it a day. Keep it simple. Keep it simple. All right, let's go through some of these. First of all, maybe your most significant one, because the focus was the Space Launch System, that giant rocket that we talk about so frequently on this show and in the Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. It's happening. That was your number one.

Yeah, it sure is. And it was kind of this buildup over the course of the entire trip until we got down to the Michoud Assembly Facility in New Orleans to finally see pieces of the rocket coming together. Yeah, every place we went, which we started at Kennedy Space Center with the OSIRIS-REx launch, managed to get some looks at the the vehicle assembly building and the launch pad where the Space Launch System will launch. It's the former shuttle pad. And everywhere we went, we saw just tons of things happening. I have not seen it like this since the time that I've been covering human spaceflight, and that's been mostly in the post-shuttle era.

human space flight. And, you know, that's been mostly in the post-shuttle era. So it really is happening, this kind of sustained buzz of activities leading up to what is now kind of a very tight deadline. 2018 is right around the corner for the inaugural launch, and they really have a tight schedule to get there. Just a really big buzz of activity everywhere we went to all these centers. Well, in fact, that razor thin margin to reach that 2018 deadline, that's your number two. Did you get any impression about whether it's going to happen? I know that's difficult, even having spent 10 days examining all of this. It seems like if there is a pinch point, it could be Orion and the service module, which is coming from Europe. The official stance, of course, was that it is on schedule and it is on track and even working towards the earlier September 2018 goal.

It seems like SLS has the highest likelihood of meeting that deadline. It seems like they have everything accounted for. They're very good at this with the shuttle heritage technology, and they seem pretty confident they're going to meet that deadline. It seems like they have everything accounted for. They're very good at this with this shuttle heritage technology, and they seem pretty confident they're going to meet that goal. Orion seems to be the question mark, especially with that European-built piece that they can't quite have their hands on and the visibility into the way maybe they can with SLS. As of now, it's happening, but it is razor thin to come up on that deadline. This touches on something that I think our colleague Casey Dreyer, the Space Policy Director for the Planetary Society, also addressed. Of course, he was on the trip with you with our creative director, Merck Boyan.

And that is sort of this return to the way things used to be done. Apollo, space shuttle, rather than kind of what was done with those ill-fated Ares rockets? Yeah, it's really interesting, and we spent a lot of time debating this, on whether or not the existing infrastructure that NASA has, which really started during the Apollo days, when Wernher von Braun kind of mobilized the southern United States to build the giant Saturn V rocket. We talked a lot about whether or not that's a burden or an asset, and it's kind of both,

because NASA can't just start with a blank sheet of paper. There are benefits to doing that, and there are negatives to doing that. But in any case, they really can't, because for political reasons, they need to use these existing facilities. So they kind of have to follow that same workflow that the Apollo program followed and the shuttle program followed. And that workflow, very high overview, is this. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama designs the vehicle. It gets put together at the Michoud Assembly Facility down in Louisiana, and they test it, engine testing, at Stennis Space Center. And of course, the other two centers that we know very well, Kennedy Space Center launches it, and Johnson

Space Center is mission control, where all the astronauts train, and then which manages the mission. So they are kind of in this same back-to-basics workflow. This would now be the third major program that is using this kind of tried and true workflow. It's not as nimble as some of the new space players like SpaceX and your Blue Origins of the world are trying to put together to do things differently. So it is a bit of a burden in that regard that they kind of have to use these existing facilities. But at the same time, it does help them. Government programs like this are bound to be a little inefficient around the edges. And the fact that NASA has all of these

existing infrastructures, in some cases, is an asset. So it really has been interesting to kind of go through all these places and see it all coming together. Interesting also, of course, that since the Apollo days, all of these facilities you're talking about are, as you said, in the South. But that's a topic for another show or maybe the Space Policy Edition. How about your number three? Yeah. So number three, I said SLS is staggeringly large. And so NASA loves to talk about this. They love to say this is a huge rocket. And we've just kind of been hearing about it since its inception in 2011 that it's going to be this giant rocket one of a kind nothing like it and until we stood there and

saw the hydrogen tank which is the biggest piece of the core stage it's about the size of a shuttle external tank only a little larger standing there in front of that finished hydrogen tank and knowing that's just one piece of the rocket was really awe-inspiring. If you were old enough to see a Saturn V in person and launch in person, or if you know someone that did, or maybe you've seen one of the remaining three Saturn Vs in their museums at Kennedy, Marshall, and Johnson Space Center, it really is just an awe-inspiring experience to stand under one of those rockets and see the scale and know that that thing is going to fly people, and in the Saturn V's case, to the moon. And in the SLS case, out to the moon and then eventually onto Mars if NASA pulls it off. I think it really does have that capability to be a one-of-a-kind launch vehicle that really just inspires people and makes their jaw drop when they see it. The shuttle, of course, was very large as well, but this is just, it's really hard to fathom unless you're standing in front of it and seeing the hardware.

Planetary Society digital editor and human spaceflight correspondent Jason Davis. He'll be back with more from the rocket road trip in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hello, I'm Robert Picardo, Planetary Society board member and now the host of the Society's Planetary Post video newsletter. There's a new edition every month. We've already gone behind the scenes at JPL, partied at Yuri's Night, and visited with CEO Bill Nye. We've also got the month's top headlines from around the solar system. You can sign up at planetary.org forward slash connect. When you do, you'll be among the first to see each new show. I hope you'll join us.

Hi, I'm Kate. And I'm Whitney. We've been building a youth education program here at the Planetary Society. We want to get space science in all classrooms to engage young people around the world in science learning. But Kate, are you a science teacher? No. Are you? Nope. We're going to need help. We want to involve teachers and education experts from the beginning

to make sure that what we produce is useful in your classroom. As a first step, we're building the STEAM team. That's science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics. So teachers, to learn more about how you can help guide this effort, check out planetary.org slash STEAM team. That's planetary.org slash STEAM team, and help us spread the word. Thanks. Bye. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more from my guest and colleague, the Society's digital editor, Jason Davis. Jason, Space Policy Director Casey Dreyer, and Creative Director Merck Boyan,

just returned from their rocket road trip, a 10-day trek across the southern U.S. that took them to the major NASA centers where the Space Launch System, or SLS, is being built. The giant rocket may be launched for the first time in late 2018. Jason and his companions learned a lot on the road. He summarizes the five biggest lessons in his September 21st blog post at Planetary.org. Number three was realizing just how staggeringly huge SLS is, which leads into your number four. Building really big rockets to very precise specifications is really hard. And the person I was interviewing would just look at me and I would say, I guess that wasn't a question. That was just really an observation that I kept making. And that observation was at the end of. And it's so unassuming, this environment where the lighting is kind of weird. You know, you got this mix of like garish fluorescent lights and yellowish halogen lights.

And it doesn't inspire like next generation technologies the way you would when you look at the rocket concept. But that right there is where the rocket gets put together and it really is just uh staggering the tooling that they use to do this and the way that they do it you know you can't just go out and build one of these things without first building all of these giant tools that are rocket sized in this case uh i think um 8.4 meters is the diameter of the old shuttle tank. You have to build all that stuff first before you start putting the rocket together. And it's kind of

staggering to see it. And then it was kind of funny while we were there, Jeff Bezos announced that Blue Origin is going to do this new Glenn rocket system that's going to be their heavy lift vehicle of some sort. And it's almost as big as SLS. And I remember saying to Casey at one point, does Jeff Bezos know what he's getting himself into? Because it really is staggering to stand there on the factory floor and see this giant equipment. Every little logistical detail that you wouldn't think of has to be thought of by these managers on the factory floor, like transport carts, one-of-a-kind transport carts to haul it around and just turn the rocket from one place to

another in the factory. They even had a situation where the existing epoxy floor that they had was building up a charge that they didn't anticipate, like as the transport carts rolled around. And an unsuspecting engineer got this powerful shock of static electricity that kind of knocked him over. And, you know, it's just an example of all the little things it takes on this giant scale to build these rockets. Static. Not good for space electronics either. So it's something important to take into account. And you talk about Blue

Origin. We were just hearing moments ago from Bill Nye that tomorrow we may be hearing about Elon Musk's plans at SpaceX for another big rocket to kind of challenge the SLS. Your number five talks about when you build a big rocket, it takes a lot of people. And that's one of the reasons this program has inertia. This is another thing Casey and rocket, it takes a lot of people. And that's one of the reasons this program has inertia. This is another thing Casey and I mauled over a lot during this trip is whether or not NASA puts that as an area of emphasis, as a selling point, so to speak, for the Space Launch System. Because, you know, a lot of businesses will go out of their ways to say what kind of impact they're having on their local economies. That's just kind of a thing that people do to sell something to politicians.

Hey, we're creating a lot of jobs. NASA, on the other hand, it almost seems like that's not – it's a little dicey when you start selling it as a jobs program. You say, well, it seems like a program to get us to Mars shouldn't be a jobs program, or at least that's the line of thinking that some people have. But it really, it is on some level, creating a lot of jobs and a lot of economic output in these centers. And as you say, that is the reason why it has this inertia, because as we saw in the Horizon Goal series, or we're in the process of talking about when the Obama administration tried to change course, all of these southern centers had powerful representatives in Congress that said, wait a minute, what's our role going to be in this brave new NASA world you're describing? You know, it solved multiple problems or was a compromise, depending on how you look at it, and gave these southern centers something to do. But it really does create a lot of jobs in the process. Alabama alone, 13,000 jobs, 2.4 billion in economic output. Those aren't small potatoes, and that means they're going to have a lot of congressional representatives that go to bat for these programs. Very briefly, you got to talk to a lot of the people who have these jobs.

What's the mood from the people on the floor in those high bays who are putting together this big rocket? I would call it cautious optimism. They're definitely excited and they definitely seem to think this is getting real. We're seeing hardware take shape. But on the other hand, they've been here before. The Ares vehicles made it at least to a test flight before the Constellation program was canceled. So they've seen real hardware start to take shape, and it's kind of a fool-me-once, shame-on-me mentality. So I would call it cautious optimism that this thing's going to happen. And the timing could not be worse in terms of generating a little anxiety because we're about to come up on the presidential election. And if a change is going to be made in the next couple of years is when we would see it.

So there is a little bit of hesitation there to kind of see what happens with the next administration in terms of staying the course or not. You know, optimism, I think, is still the overriding mentality that a lot of these folks have. We've been talking with Jason Davis, the digital editor for the Planetary Society, about his blog entry from September 21st, Five Things We Learned From Our Hashtag Rocket Road Trip. As we mentioned, joining him on that trip was Casey Dreyer, the Space Policy Director for the Society. He had a blog entry on the same topic, Promise, Transition, and Transformation, that you can also find at planetary.org. It was posted on September 19th. I've got one more technical question for you, Jason.

Sure. What's a muffaletta? Yeah, I had to throw that in there. I had to throw some local flavor into our story. Literally. It wouldn't be Southern hospitality in a road trip without throwing something like that in. A muffaletta is essentially this giant Italian-style deli sandwich with all these different kinds of meats and cheeses and oils on it. We were at the Michoud Assembly Facility and went off site for lunch, this very quaint kind of mom-and-pop

restaurant that had all this great local food. I was challenged by Casey to see if I could finish one, and I wasn't able to pull it off. I got almost there. But then we realized that wasn't such a bright idea because we had post-lunch interviews coming up. And when one consumes that much deli meat and cheese during lunch, one tends to be a little bit sluggish. So lesson learned on the Muffaletta, I guess. Yeah, but now I'm hungry for some reason. Jason, thanks so much for this. When will we see the next installment of your Horizon Goal series? Yeah, the goal is to have that out on Monday, this coming

Monday, a week from today. And that'll be part four. And we'll actually incorporate a few cool stories that we picked up on this trip. And still two more segments to go after that. So we're still rolling with Horizon Goal. So Monday, October 3rd, watch for that post at planetary.org from the Planetary Society's digital editor, Jason Davis. Once again, Jason, thanks so much for doing this. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me. We'll be back in a moment, as we always are, with What's Up and Bruce Betts. It is time for Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, to join us for our regular helping of the night sky, because it's time for What's Up.

Welcome back. Thank you. Big news, time for What's Up. Welcome back. Thank you. Big news, huh? Nice from Europa. It is. It is. More Europa spewing gaseous vapors, at least occasionally. Nothing we're going to see from the backyard, I'm afraid.

But what can we see? No, but we'll have some nice facts having to do with Europa, just to be topical. In the night sky, if you're a sunset person, then hang around for a few minutes afterwards and you'll see Venus looking bright low in the west. If you're a sunrise person, hang out a few minutes before sunrise or many minutes before sunrise and try to find Mercury. It will be at its highest this week for a while, and it will be in the pre-dawn east. It is really close to the crescent moon, again, low in the east on the 29th, and also hanging out nearby on the 28th. We move on to this week in space history.

1958, NASA was founded. Hey, that's worth celebrating. It is indeed. And I got another one worth celebrating. 2007, the Dawn spacecraft was launched, still partying now at Ceres. We move on to Random Space Fact. Speaking of Europa, the Earth's moon is slightly bigger than Jupiter's moon Europa, a little more than 11% larger in diameter. Well, how might we visualize that, Matt?

If Earth's moon were the size of a tennis ball, then Europa would be about the size of a racquetball. And on this scale of the Earth, it would be about the size of a basketball. It's a big moon. It is, although it's the smallest of its brethren of Galilean satellites at Jupiter. Ganymede, I think, is the biggest. Ganymede, the largest moon in the solar system. We move on to the trivia contest. I asked you, for a spacecraft not headed to or near the moon, what human mission had the highest apogee or highest point in its orbit from Earth? How'd we do, Matt?

I love this question, and I love that we got lots of answers. I only saw one or two that got it wrong. There were a number of people who initially thought off the top of their heads that it was probably the space shuttle mission STS-31 that put the Hubble Space Telescope up there at a pretty high orbit. But no, as Claude Plymate discovered, that put the Hubble Space Telescope up there at a pretty high orbit. But no, as Claude Plymate discovered, our winner, Curtis Phillips, said it was Gemini 11. That is correct. Curtis, congratulations. Curtis is up in beautiful Sonoma, California. He said that the apoapsis, right, for Gemini 11 was about 850 miles or, get this,

we haven't had a listener-provided unit of measure for a while, 4,491,464.6 wine bottles. Keep in mind that he's from Napa, Sonoma, Mendocino. Ah, okay. He also supports planting vineyards on Mars. It would put new meaning into the phrase red wine. Wine country space facts. Congratulations, Curtis. We look forward to drinking that Valles Marineris vintage someday.

It's especially good down there in the canyon. We're going to send Curtis a bottle of wine. No, much better than that. A Planetary Radio t-shirt, a Planetary Society rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. Dave Fairchild,

not surprising, sent us this week's poem. Eleven's the number of Gemini's flight with Gordon and Conrad aboard. Their apogee fixed in 1966 at 1,369 clicks. So there you have it in kilometers as well. Ethan Van Zamt. I think I got that right. In Santa Monica, California.

A lot of Californians this time around. He said that he noticed in the year and space calendar, we just had the 50th anniversary of this event. It was on September 14th, 1966. Good one there, Ethan. Thank you for letting us know. Finally, Paul McEwen. Finally, Paul McEwen, he read that one of the things that Gemini 11 did when it docked with the Agena target vehicle, it actually sort of spun up and did a kind of artificial gravity test. I guess Neil Armstrong did one by accident.

That's a different mission. With Dave Scott, Thruster got stuck in the firing position when they tried to hook with an Agena. That was bad. But this one, Gemini 11, actually used its Agena target vehicle, used the rocket on that to raise its apogee. That's how it reached the highest apogee of any non-moon traversing spacecraft that carried humans. Also from Claude Plymate, who we started with today, that capsule, which belongs to the National Air and Space Museum, it's currently displayed at the California Science Center in Los Angeles. So you can see that piece of history. We've been there. We play with them. In fact, there's a random space fact video that includes that capsule. Cool. All right. Well, I'll find it.

We'll put the link up at planetary.org slash radio on this week's radio page. Are you ready for another one, Matt? Always. What is the surface gravity on Jupiter's moon Europa in Gs, where 1G is the surface gravity at Earth's surface? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. You have until the 4th to answer this weighty question. That'd be October 4th at 8 a.m. Pacific time.

And if you're chosen by random.org and you've got the correct answer, you might win that prize package of a Planetary Radio t-shirt, a rubber asteroid, and a 200-point itelescope.net account, an account on that international non-profit network of

telescopes that you can use to look at anything in the sky, whether Bruce has talked about it or not. We're done. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about whether it is dangerous to swim with scissors. Thank you. Good night. Oh, mothers are cringing all over the world after that.

He's Bruce Betts. He's the director of science and technology for the Planetary Society. Who cuts it up regularly with us here on What's Up? Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its towering members. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan. Clear skies.