Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Rocketplanes, Space Yachts and New Space Geeks at SpaceUp!

Episode Date: February 13, 2012

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Space Geeks. Join me at the Space Up Unconference this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We'll travel on down to San Diego this week. That's where ex-Core Aerospace Engineer Jeff Lichardello and Space Tourism President John Spencer were hanging out with their fellow geeks. We'll get Emily Lacaulis' review of that unconference in a moment. Bill Nye was also out of town. He dropped in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the second White House Science Fair. Bill also saw the unveiling of a new electric car right where SpaceX is building new rockets. Wow, everyone's out and

about this week. I visited Bruce Betts at the end of his first Intro to Astronomy lecture, available for free online. We treated Bruce's live students to our What's Up segment. Up first is the Planetary Society's Science and Technology Coordinator. Welcome back, Emily. I look forward to getting your thoughts about the SpaceUp unconference we went to last week. But first, tell us about this blog entry. You're looking in on the work of some more amateur astronomers. Periodically, it's enjoyable to go look at the outer planets and see what's changed on them.

You know, we know that Saturn had this great big storm and Jupiter had its missing belt for a while. And it's not the professional astronomers who keep their eyes on what's going on in the changing skies of the outer planets, it's amateurs. And there's actually a website devoted to it's called the Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory, where amateurs can upload their images taken of all these planets. And I just posted two, one from Jupiter and one from Saturn that shows you what's going on at those planets right now. And Jupiter's red spot is not looking so red, I have to say. It's almost gone white. It's pretty pale.

Yeah. And you also point out that there is just amazing cloud activity next to the red, to the formerly red spot. That's right. And it's looked like that in the past, and it's calmed down again. If you look back at Cassini and Voyager images and New Horizons, you'll see that Cassini saw it very turbulent, just like it is now, but New Horizons, when they flew past, saw it actually very calm.

So that area changes a lot as well. Well, they are amazing images. They would be even if these weren't taken by amateurs, but they were. Look at the February 10 blog entry by Emily if you want to check these out. We've got some other things for you to take a look at and to listen to as well. I want to get your thoughts, like I said, about Space Up last week. I had a great time.

I did too. It was quite fun. There was a whole bunch of unabashed geeks basically getting together for a weekend, including it was quite nice. Several of the women who were attending were knitting away and I had my needle-pointed spacecraft with me so we were all kind of kibitzing in a corner about that. But I think probably my favorite presentation was by

four really very young engineers from XCOR talking about their progress with Lynx and what that spacecraft is going to be able to do. They said that they were hoping to fly but not promising by the end of this year, and I'll really be looking forward to that. And one of those guys, Jeff Licciardello, I hope I pronounced his name correctly, is on with us in just a moment or two here. So we will get a direct update. You have a little video story that sort of captures what the Unconference was all about. That's right. I had a little chat with Chris Radcliffe about what he's done. Of course, this is the third annual SpaceUp Unconference in San Diego. But I also had a chance to do a T-5 talk, which is really quite a scary format,

but people seem to enjoy it. And I hope you can come to the blog to see the video. You did a great job. And both of these will be blog entries for Monday, February 13. Take a look. I've got the one with Emily's video story, her little stand-up interview

about the SpaceUp Unconference. But don't miss the T-5 either. Emily, as always, her little stand-up interview about the Space Up Unconference, but don't miss the T-5 either. Emily, as always, thanks very much. And may I remind the crowd that I'm live on a Google Plus Space Hangout every Thursday at 18 o'clock, UTC. No, you're not allowed. She's the Science and Technology Coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine,

and, as you've just heard, that hangout as well. Up next is Bill Nye, the science guy. Bill, I take it we're going to talk about a couple of things you were involved with last week. I'm not sure. Was the White House marginally more exciting than the new car? It's more exciting. It was fantastic, everybody. So the White House had its second, maybe second annual White House Science

Fair. So they had students from 40 different science competitions at the White House with their projects. And they demonstrated them. And you may have seen the famous thing where the president enjoyed shooting marshmallows. But there were 39 other amazing ideas, water purification, other amazing ideas, water purification, proteins on cancer cells, transportation systems of the future. And so these kids, these students are going to be the people who are going to, dare I say it, Matt, change the world. And I very much appreciate that the White House or whoever it is in the executive branch is taking this seriously because, as you know, I strongly believe that science and technology is how you innovate for the future. It's the young people coming up who are scientifically

literate that are going to change the world. And a nice shout out to you and Neil Tyson. Ah, yes. Planetary Society board members were well represented. The President of the United States introduced us in front of the whole crowd. It was very nice. And the President also went off script and encouraged all the press members, the media there, to really promote this. Because he, as far as I can tell, he has this long-term view that science and technology are going to bring the U.S. economy back and then help the economy of the world. So that's good. U.S. economy back and then help the economy of the world. So that's good. The other thing I did this week, Matt, I went to the unveiling of the Tesla Model X. This is to compete with a typical crossover vehicle, SUV kind of vehicle, holds a huge amount of luggage. And Elon Musk's there, the man himself. He also runs SpaceX, the rocket company, and he says we have to make cars,

electric cars, that are better than gas-powered cars. And he says we have to make rockets that are better than the competitive rockets that have been around, like the Atlas V, let's say, is the fifth generation. He's got to make them better than that. That's quite an outlook. That's quite a way of doing things. Well, I'm very hopeful that he's successful. Me too. Bill, we're out of time. Thanks so much. Thank you, Matt.

I got to fly, Bill Nye, the planetary guy. And he's the CEO of the Planetary Society with an enthusiastic dog next door, apparently. Yeah, he's outside on the sidewalk. He loves the show, Matt. Always loves what he always says. We'll take the support wherever we can get it. Throw him a bone. We're moving on now to the third annual San Diego Space App.

We'll visit with a couple of people there in just a few moments. I'm Anasa Tauragiri, student, rocket fanatic. I'm going to show up for Valkor, aerospace engineer, and the attendees at the third annual San Diego Space Upon Conference are introducing themselves. They ranged from toddlers to at least one gentleman in his late 80s. Joining this motley crew of mostly 20-something space geeks were Emily Lakdawalla and yours truly. It really was a great gathering. Again, you can hear and see Emily's quick conversation with SpaceUp founder and coordinator Chris Radcliffe on the Planetary Society YouTube page. Chris was also one of our guests three weeks ago here on Planetary Radio.

One of the attendees I met at last year's Space Up was back with several XCOR colleagues. Jeff Lichardello is a test engineer at the company's facility in California's Mojave Desert. Jeff, it's good to see you here again. It's good to see you too. Thanks, Matt. What brought you back? Jeff, it's good to see you here again. It's good to see you too. Thanks, Matt. What brought you back?

Well, mostly because SpaceUp is such a great place to get together and speak with other people in the industry, both who work in the industry and just fans of space in general. And I never come to a SpaceUp without walking away learning a lot of new things. Is this also, it's just a place to recharge? Although, you know, working where you work, I would think you don't really need much of a recharge. Well, I don't know. Sometimes by the end of the week, I could use a little bit of a break. Things are pretty busy at XCOR nowadays.

But it always is great to come down here and see a bunch of friends who I don't get to see quite as often and catch up with my other connections within the industry. Now, the good news is the company sent you down. I guess, are you on company time right now? I suppose you could say that XCOR is actually one of the sponsors of SpaceUp San Diego 2012. Part of that sponsorship, they get a couple people tickets for free. So here I am. And you're here in force. I mean, you guys have a nice display over there and a beautiful model. Tell me about that.

Oh, yes. Those models we just got fairly recently, they're 1-6 scale models of Lynx, our suborbital vehicle. It's really nice to see them ourselves because right now, Lynx is in the construction phase, but seeing a physical article of the entire thing put together really makes it feel a lot more real to me and to others. construction phase, but seeing a physical article of the entire thing put together really makes it feel a lot more real to me and to others.

Now, the last conversation we had on the show about Lynx was with an astronomer who's getting ready to take a telescope up. I mean, that's a little bit farther down the line. How far are we now from you guys being able to take people like me up if I write a big enough check? Well, I can't say too much, otherwise I might get myself in trouble, but what we're planning on doing is we want to get air under the gear by the end of this year. So we want to get our first flight off the ground, test flight,

by the end of 2012. Commercial operations will commence sometime after that, once our flight test program has been completed. But I believe right now, publicly, we're shooting for 2014 sometime for commercial operations. What's the sense here as you walk around and talk with all these other engineers? Is it one big, happy brother and sisterhood, or is there a little sense of competition sometimes? Oh, there's a little competition, but I would say the atmosphere here is mostly friendly. There's young guys here from a couple of the companies that are competitors to export but when when one of our company companies in new space does well everyone benefits

so uh... yeah we might have competing platforms but in at the end of the day we all want to succeed and us someone else's success will help you learn so there's something that unites pretty much everybody here something of of the sense that I get from why you're here as well. Well, I feel like the new space industry is at a tipping point. It feels like there's a lot more energy. We have a lot more legitimacy and attention in the public media. media and NASA with CCDev is learning to embrace the commercial sector as well to use smaller

companies or commercial companies in general as a means of putting people in space. And I'm here because I think it's important and I work for a company that thinks it's important to go to space and everyone else here shares the same dream. So we're not too far from the sessions getting underway here. Have you got any picked out? Well, I know the one I put up there is just going to be a general question and answer session on XCOR's links. Fill everyone in on the vehicle, what she's supposed to do, our progress. And there's a couple other really neat topics on the board.

One of them that I'm very interested in is can old space survive in new space? I've got a good friend, Eric, who works for Boeing, and he comes from an established, you know, Boeing's an established aerospace company. They've been around for quite some time. I've heard of them. Yeah. That's going to be a good conversation because we're going to figure out how can an older company,

a larger company like Boeing, adapt to a changing market environment and remain relevant when we've got all these young upstart new companies trying to cut in on their turf, so to speak. And doing pretty well. So it would appear, anyway. Did you see the other one up there? Are flying saucers real? I'm hoping that's a joke. I'd like to see what that talks about. I do know that back in the day, the Air Force or someone experimented with saucer-shaped

lifting bodies, because aerodynamically, they actually give you quite a bit. But, you know, we don't have flying saucers in use today, so apparently it's a little harder than it might seem. Then again, that's what I would expect you to say if XCOR had a project, a black project somewhere in the back. Nah. I can't confirm nor deny any such allegations. Thanks so much for taking a couple minutes with us once again here

and have a great time at SpaceUp. Thanks, Matt. I hope you have a good time, too. That was Jeff Licciardello, a test engineer at XCOR Aerospace, where they are building the Lynx suborbital space plane. After the break, we'll talk to another of the space geeks attending the third annual San Diego SpaceUp Unconference. Space Tourism Society President John Spencer will share his vision that includes space yachts in orbit. This is Planetary Radio.

I'm Robert Picardo. I traveled across the galaxy as the doctor in Star Trek Voyager. Then I joined the Planetary Society to become part of the real adventure of space exploration. The Society fights for missions that unveil the secrets of the solar system. It searches for other intelligences in the universe, and it built the first solar sail. It also shares the wonder through this radio show, its website, and other exciting projects that reach around the globe. I'm proud to be part of this greatest of all voyages, and I hope you'll consider joining us.

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. Our nearly 100,000 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. I'm Matt Kaplan, ready with another conversation I recorded at San Diego's SpaceUp Unconference a couple of Saturdays ago. The crew from XCOR was just outside making its presentation

when I sat down with John Spencer. As you'll hear, John has been boosting companies like XCOR and the so-called New Space community for many years. Yet the vision shared by this space architect looks to a future that has put much more of humanity in low Earth orbit, so long as they can afford it. John is also the founder and president of the Space Tourism Society, based in Los Angeles. John, nice surprise to see you here for the third Space Up On Conference in San Diego.

I sat in on some of your session. You had a good crowd there. Yeah, it worked out pretty good. I guess it was about 25 people, and it's the first time I've ever done a meeting presentation like that by drawing some images up on a whiteboard. I usually have this fairly elaborate color presentation and then passing around images from the notebook, but it worked out pretty well. I got a lot of good questions

and was able to really kind of get deep into why we're doing a lot of this stuff. Good feedback on that. You have been fighting this good fight for a long time now. What have you seen develop? Do you think we're moving closer to a state of things that you think would be closer to what we should achieve in this country and around the world? Absolutely. I mean, I literally got involved in this country and around the world. Absolutely. I mean, I literally got involved in this in the late 70s,

and that's a long time ago when I was in architecture school. In the last, say, 12 years or so, it's extraordinary what's been going on. Remember in April of 2001, Dennis Tito flew as the first private space citizen. We just hosted last April the 10-year anniversary, and seven other people have now flown as private space tourists, one fellow twice. But all these new companies, you know, seven, eight years ago, there weren't the SpaceXes, you know, there weren't all these different companies. Now there's more companies coming online almost every month, and Paul Allen has just reemerged back into the space industry in a very big way

with his straddle launch concept and a billion dollars in financing. Pretty serious players are looking at this. I'm one of those sources where new companies and people to the space industry usually find it through space tourism society or I'm one of the early people talking to them, which works out nice because I have kind of a broad, bigger picture of everything going on. They can kind of guide them to certain other groups or companies, and that works out very nicely. But I'm amazed at the acceleration that's happening.

And remember, we're still in a terrible economy. Imagine when the economy improves and SpaceX is successful and more companies are moving forward. So there's a genuine, powerful, sustainable renaissance happening at private space enterprise and tourism, and it's just going to accelerate. Did I hear you say something about estimates of $6 trillion in what, like a pent-up disposable income, I guess? Well, it's a little different definition of that. There's a lot of major corporations, even governments, that have been banking money because they don't want to put it into risk areas right now. But it's over $6 trillion sitting around that's not being utilized wisely for building more value. As the American

economy moves forward, and assuming Europe gets its act together and China's bubble doesn't burst, hopefully, that money's going to start going out in massive forms. And that's going to accelerate a variety of new industries. New industries are information, energy, biomass. I mean, there's all kinds of stuff going on that are sustainable and important industries for a long-term future. You are, as usual, thinking pretty far down the line. You had this little drawing you did on the whiteboard there of what did you call it, the Destiny class space yacht? Yeah, I've been for about 10 years developing designs and ideas around what I call an orbital superyacht. Just basically imagine an ocean-going superyacht, these mega yachts for the rich and the famous,

and redesigning that for the environment of zero gravity and orbit. And you eventually have orbital superyachting. And that is going to happen for sure. And it's an extraordinarily exciting design frontier to explore as a designer. But it's basically creating all kinds of questions of areas we need to work on. How do you serve a five-star meal in space? How do you clean up afterwards? How do you do it over and over again?

Literally things such as hairstyle, what's the media, what's the music? It's all those things that create the tapestry around the luxurious, beautiful space experience. And people understand the yachts. Now, I've talked to a number of our very wealthy guys about this who own yachts, and they get it right away. So, it's all pride and prestige and social standing. No one pays to go on an ocean-going superyacht. It's a pride and prestige and social standing. No one pays to go on an ocean-going super yacht. It's a reward or a prestigious trip, whatever. Same thing will happen for a real orbital super yacht.

How far off? I mean, would you care to speculate about where we might be in 10, 15 years from now? That's only about as long as it's been since, as you said, the first space tourist. I'm guesstimating right now about 15 years from from now, we'll have our first orbital superyacht. Hopefully I'll be the designer for it. But what's been happening because of these outside large industries, the hospitality industry, entertainment industry, finance community, media communities, who have not yet really embraced space, but beginning to do so. They're doing due diligence.

And they want to get involved because they see it more and more as a brand building, awareness building, stock valuation building theme. Future, technology, pride, different, unique. When they engage, they bring actually limitless resources, not only in terms of capital, but in terms of executive talent, in terms of political influence. That will accelerate the use of space for private enterprise and space tourism. So I keep shortening the estimates of when I think the orbital superyachts will be assembled and operated in space. Remember, Bob Bigel already has two test modules for his hotel in orbit, or his habitable facility, he's calling it now. So when the economy improves and some of these trillions of dollars start floating into new,

emerging, exciting, brand-building industries, where the value isn't cash flow, it's media attention and brand value, you're going to see an extraordinary acceleration of these things happening. And in the meantime, you seem to be spending a lot of time bringing people who are not traditionally part of this space community, the people who are here at an event like this, into sort of sharing the excitement. Absolutely. One of the core things we do at the Space Tourism Society, the reason I started it back

in the mid-90s, was to have a forum that is space but is in new industries, such as tourism, hospitality industry. We've modeled the industry after the cruise lines, for example. And because of that, we're this kind of friendly, welcoming front door to the hospitality, entertainment industries, where we're not so technically oriented. We're basically experience-oriented, which is what they're oriented towards. The technology is simply a tool to create new forms of experiences in new locations and in new ways and stuff.

The sports industry is also going to be a powerful player in the evolution and growth of the private space enterprise industry because it's totally media-oriented. And as media orientations go, you need new, exciting, different things. That's why extreme sports. This whole Red Bull skydive to break the record. Eventually suborbital skydiving. Eventually orbital skydiving.

What I propose are orbital races around the Earth. Basically lunar races around the moon. Manned rover races. Those are things that are very wild. But I've got to tell you, next year will be the 30-year anniversary of when I started promoting space tourism. That was still Cold War era, you know, a whole bit. So proposing things that are 10, 20 years in the future that are realistic and could happen for a variety of reasons is exciting, and you work towards that. And eventually, 20 years later, you're doing it. Well, guess what?

20 years after I started getting into space tourism, Dennis flew. I would have said the 10-year anniversary. So these things do happen. And people like visionary, fun, exciting, cool things. And America should be doing this. We're the idea country, right? Space Tourism Society President John Spencer at the 2012 San Diego SpaceUp Unconference. You can learn about upcoming SpaceUps and how to plan your own at spaceup.org. What's Up is next. Time once again for What's Up on Planetary Radio. I am joined by the Planetary Society's Director of Projects, Bruce Betts, but not anywhere we have ever done this before. Please tell people where we are. We are on live TV and live over the Internet as we record this

at California State University, Dominguez Hills, at the end of my first Physics 195 introduction to astronomy and solar system class. And a great lecture it was, a nice tour of the solar system, and much more to come. We talked about this a couple of weeks ago on the show. If you want to learn more, folks, they can go to, what is it, dhtv.edu? I forget now. They'll go ahead and put the link up on there. I bet they will.

This is visual. From planetary.org slash radio, we'll link to all the appropriate places where you can see the archives, where you can check out the live shows, which are Wednesdays at 3 p.m. Pacific time, 3 to 4.30. This radio with pictures, I think it's going to catch on. Really? Yeah. So tell us about the night sky. Next thing, there'll be movies that are talking.

In the night sky, once again, we've got, and now, all the new students, go out there in the evening sky and check out Jupiter and Venus, two super bright planets in the evening sky. You've got Venus over in the west, low on the horizon, brightest star-like object up there. You've got Jupiter or Juniper, preferably not. I'm allergic to that. But Jupiter, if you look up high above that, you'll see another super bright star-like object. That is Jupiter. And Mars is coming up on opposition,

where it will be on the opposite side of the Earth from the sun. So it's basically its closest point. That's March 3rd. So Mars also looking like a very bright star, reddish, and it comes up around 8 o'clock in the evening over in the east. You can see it up high in the southeast later on in the evening. We have Saturn coming up around 11 p.m. or so in the east looking yellower. So a whole cornucopia of planets, a whole festivity to look at. You are so lucky to have a teleprompter here. That's just great.

I want that for every one of my shows. There's no teleprompter. He's doing this just off the top of his head. Okay. All right. We move on to, and I'll try to do the reverb. Random space fact! I'll sweeten that a little bit in post. Oh, thank you. I appreciate it. Well, for the TV audience. Now, this one, we don't have time, but I even brought my caliper micrometer to test this exactly.

No, look, we have two minutes. But we're going to do the, generically. I've approximated. If the sun were the size of Matt's head, I've always wanted to say that. He loves these. Jupiter would be the size of this 23 millimeter ball and be about 128 meters away approximately. You sure it wouldn't be smaller than that? Because my head is, well, okay. No, this is the actual size, not the perceived figurative size.

And the Earth would be about the size of a sesame seed. Too small to worry about. I have the Earth caught between my teeth right now. Please don't pick it out. Let's go on to the trivia contest and do a quick finishing up here. We asked you, what is the approximate current orbital period around Venus of the European Space Agency spacecraft,

Venus Express? How'd we do, Matt? Very well. Lots of great responses. Fewer humorous ones this time around. Because we're running out of time, I'll make it fast. Olivier Lassaux, past winner,

hails from Honolulu. Aloha, Olivier. You've won. He said it's just about 24 hours. 24 hours. Yes, it is, and there's good reasons for that. It makes it easy to communicate with Earth when you're going about and doing a 24-hour orbit. And it's very elliptical. It goes down very low, close to the planet, and then very far away. We did have one other person, William Stewart, who figured out what a geostationary satellite,

how far out it would have to be if it was over Venus, one and a half million kilometers. That's a long ways. You'd have to have a really big dish on your house to get direct TV down there. That's a really cool random space fact. So, Olivier, we're going to send you out a Planetary Radio T-shirt. Thanks for entering. We move on to the next trivia contest. Really cool random space fact. So, Olivier, we're going to send you out a Planetary Radio t-shirt. All right.

Thanks for entering. We move on to the next trivia contest. Straightforward in asking, not straightforward necessarily in answering. Maybe. What spacecraft, plural, have flown by Jupiter? What spacecraft have flown by Jupiter? Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to enter.

That is a bigger number than a lot of people think. You have until the 20th. That would be Monday, February 20 at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us your answer. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky and think about Physics 195, Introduction to Astronomy and the Solar System at Cal State Dominguez Hills. Thank you and good night. Will there be a quiz? There will be for the students taking this for credit. Thank you, and good night. Will there be a quiz? There will be for the students taking this for credit. Thank you, everyone, for joining us for the class.

We've enjoyed having you. Tune in back next week, and students taken for credit, go online, check out Blackboard. He's Dr. Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He also joins us every week here on What's Up. Alan Stern is my guest next week. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.