Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Rusty Schweickart and More from the International Space Development Conference

Episode Date: May 15, 2006

More from ISDC, including Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweickart on asteroid deflection, Elon Musk of SpaceX, and X Prize Foundation's Peter Diamandis.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Thank you. I'm Matt Kaplan. And Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweikert returns to give us an update on his attempt to save the planet from big rocks that want to kill us. Emily is back with a great Q&A, and we'll wrap up as we always do with Bruce Betts and a new trivia contest of galactic proportions. The ISDC even creeps into our headline coverage this week. NASA and the XPRIZE Foundation chose the event to announce the latest of the space agency's centennial challenges. Can you design and build and demonstrate a lunar module? The effort could get you a couple of million dollars. NASA Deputy Administrator Sean Adeo came to the conference to help announce the open competition, which will be administered by the XPRIZE Foundation,

under the direction of space pioneer Peter Diamandis. I'm excited to see, in fact, what the entrepreneurial community will create at this. We hope to have a significant number of contenders and vehicles flying this October. And it's my pleasure at this point to officially open up the Lunar Lander Challenge for registration. Will Pomerantz in our office who heads this is will at XPRIZE.org. If you're interested in competing, please contact him. And we're looking forward to having some really spectacular announcements in the next month or so on announcing who's competing and our partners in rolling this

forward. So thank you very much, everybody. X Prize Foundation founder and chairman Peter Diamandis announcing the Lunar Lander Centennial Challenge at the International Space Development Conference. We'll put the link to NASA's Centennial Challenge website at planetary.org slash radio. Believe it or not, there's other space news this week, like Venus Express settling into its final orbit. We've also learned that NASA will be working with India on that country's robotic mission to the moon. Details are at planetary.org. How long will we have to wait till the New Horizons spacecraft starts sending us the good stuff from Pluto? Emily has the answer. I'll be right back with more from the ISDC.

Hi, I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. I'm Emily Lakdawalla with questions and answers. A listener asked, When will New Horizons start sending higher-resolution images of Pluto than the ones we can get from Earth telescopes? The word resolution can be tricky. Technically, resolution refers to how small a feature that a camera could resolve or separate from another feature. Most of the time, because of the way that camera optics work,

the pixels in a digital image are actually smaller than the smallest object that the camera can resolve. With that warning in mind, the simplest way to compare two modern digital cameras is to compare the sizes of their pixels. Our best space cameras are still the ones on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope, which produce images with pixels that are 46 milli-arcseconds

across. However, adaptive optics-equipped telescopes like Keck 2 are getting quite close to this resolution, and the near future might see ground-based telescopes surpassing Hubble. Cameras on planetary spacecraft don't see nearly so sharply. The highest-resolution camera on New Horizons, the Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager, or LORRI, has an angular resolution a little over 20 times coarser than Hubble's. What that means is that LORRI and New Horizons must be about 20 times closer to Pluto than Earth is in order to get better pictures than Hubble can. When will this happen? Stay tuned to Planetary Radio to find out. to find out.

How do you pick highlights from a four-day conference that attracted so many space exploration and development leaders? Well, a few individuals stand out. Elon Musk delivered one of the keynote presentations. You may know him

as the creator of PayPal, the incredibly popular online payment system. But he hopes you'll come to know him as the creator of PayPal, the incredibly popular online payment system, but he hopes you'll come to know him as one of the entrepreneurs who will make access to space affordable. As chairman and CEO of Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, he and his engineers are developing the Falcon family of relatively inexpensive launch vehicles. He brought several videos to the International Space Development Conference in Los Angeles, one of which graphically documented the failure of a Falcon

shortly after its launch from a small Pacific island. Musk reflected on the challenges of his new business. So anyway, the rocket business is a tough business. But, you know, there's no rocket company out there or rocket organization of any kind that has had a perfect track record. So, you know, it's kind of like baseball. Nobody bats 1,000. And I think the ones that make it through to the finish line and beyond are the ones that have perseverance, that stick to it, figure out what the problems are, solve them, and end up with rockets that are the mainstay of launch today.

And SpaceX intends to be one of those organizations. But we'll restart later. The reason I started SpaceX was to help make humanity a space-faring civilization. Now, in the course of doing that, you have to make the organization financially viable. Otherwise, it's not really going to be around for the long term. So I think the goals of helping make humanity a space-bearing civilization and building a strong and viable company are actually very much coincident. The strategy for SpaceX, it's a three-part strategy.

Part one is establish a lead position in the world satellite launch market. That gives us a beachhead of cash flow and allows us to test out the technology, make sure it works before we put anyone on board. Step two is provide people-to-orbit services to the government and private sector. SpaceX is one of the lead candidates for the NASA COTS program, Commercial Orbital Transportation Services. So we hope to be servicing the space station, providing cargo and people transport to the space station within the next five years.

That's our goal. Both to NASA space station and conceivably to a private space station like that of Robert Bigelow. And then step three, provide people to moon Mars. So actually transport people to the moon, transport people to Mars, both for government and the private sector. Each one of those steps is pretty significant, but that's the basic goal, and we'll get as far in that direction as we can. The approach of SpaceX is sort of a Silicon Valley approach, fairly flat hierarchy, fairly Spartan operation.

It's a very engineering-driven organization. We have one person in our finance group. We have one lawyer. Good, I won. And, you know, so we have what I call also a high signal-to-noise ratio, where engineering is signal and management is noise. And then the overarching principle is to try to keep things as simple as possible. So we don't have any bells and whistles that we don't need.

We don't do technology for technology's sake. If we don't feel that there's a very pragmatic reason for implementing a technology, we don't do it. SpaceX Chairman and CEO Elon Musk. Apollo astronaut and deflector of asteroids Rusty Schweikert is up next. Stay with us. This is Buzz Aldrin. When I walked on the moon, I knew it was just the beginning of humankind's great adventure in the solar system. That's why I'm a member of the Planetary Society, the world's largest space interest group.

The Planetary Society is helping to explore Mars. 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. Welcome back to Planetary Radio, where we're continuing our coverage of the recent International Space Development Conference. It's been quite a while since we last talked to Apollo astronaut Rusty Schweikert. I caught him in the exhibit area shortly before he delivered a very well-received luncheon address.

What brings you to ISTC? Well, a couple things. Number one, you know, the events here are always very interesting for anyone interested in space development because this runs all the way from the official NASA, ESA, JAXA government programs all the way through to private initiatives and even things that are fairly far out and wacky. But you get the total spectrum of what people are doing and thinking about space development. And that's one reason. The other is that I was asked to speak, which I'm doing tomorrow at noontime. So that's the second reason. What's your topic? Well, what I'm talking about is the work I've been doing for the past four years, which is essentially work related to protecting the Earth from impact by near-Earth asteroids. I'm actually heading up two different organizations,

non-profit organizations who are working on that issue. One is our B612 Foundation, where we are developing and have developed and are promoting gravitational tractor and other concepts for deflecting asteroids once we know something has to be done. And the other work I'm doing is through the Association of Space Explorers, the professional organization of astronauts and cosmonauts, and we're tackling the international decision-making process that has to occur in order to deflect an asteroid. We've addressed the United Nations on that earlier this year,

and we're developing a prototype treaty that will specify what the nature of decisions that have to be made. You shocked me because you knew the exact date of the last time you were on the show, and we talked about the B612 Foundation. It's been about a year and a half. What has happened in that time? Well, the reason I remember the date was because I think it was the day after we talked here, you know, on your program. I visited with John Cassani at JPL, who was heading up the analysis of alternatives for the first mission in the Prometheus program.

That is, how was Prometheus going to be first demonstrated? That was the nuclear electric propulsion system that NASA was developing. So we wanted to get our B612 proposal to actually deflect an asteroid or change the orbit of an asteroid using the NEP technology that was part of it. Nuclear electrical propulsion? Nuclear electric propulsion, right. So I met with John that day, and we actually did go from then until the program was canceled in May, and we went from one of 20-some candidates to one in four, and the decision was

about to be made at NASA headquarters when Mike Griffin reluctantly had to cancel the entire Prometheus program. So we went from nowhere to almost heaven and then back to nowhere. Must have been not a pleasant experience, but, I mean, you're still here. You even had very nice drawings, renderings of a Prometheus spacecraft doing its job with one of these near-Earth objects. Yes. We wrote an article for Scientific American back in 2003. In fact, one of the space artists who's here did an artist's rendering of a Prometheus-looking spacecraft

essentially docked with an asteroid and pushing it consistent with our initial concept, I mean, one of our first concepts that we developed. Actually, we developed another concept subsequently, and that was published in Nature magazine in 2005, November of 2005, last year. Ed Liu and Stan Love, who are two current astronauts, we call it the gravity tractor. It's a very, very elegant and simple idea, It's a very, very elegant and simple idea, but unfortunately it seems like magic to most people who are not really familiar with gravitational forces in space.

But what you do is essentially fly a spacecraft up to an asteroid that you want to change its orbit, and what you do is hover in front of the asteroid or behind it, depending on whether you want to pull it forward or backward, and you just stay there. And you simply hover using ion engines, say a half a radius of the asteroid above the surface, and gradually that very, very low gravitational force will pull the asteroid and change its orbit. No contact. No contact.

No contact. The beautiful thing about it is that you don't have to dock with the asteroid. You don't have to know anything about its surface composition or its chemistry or what the interior composition is. You don't care if it's rotating or how it's rotating or how fast it's rotating. All of the things that complicate almost every other deflection concept go away because you never actually touch the asteroid. You literally gently pull it with a gravitational tow rope.

It doesn't take that much deflection to maybe save the planet. That is exactly right, albeit in only certain cases. When the challenge, and unfortunately we don't know the statistics of what cohort of asteroids fall into the can-do category and which portion fall into the can't-do category. What we do know is that of the two asteroids, near-Earth asteroids, which are of greatest interest at the moment, one being Apophis that's been around since the end of 2004,

and actually the other one also since the end of 2004 is 2004 VD-17, both of those asteroids, which have higher than a 1 in 10,000 probability of hitting the Earth, are amenable to the gravity tractor concept. So we can deflect either of those two. But, of course, it's not the ones you know about now. It's the ones we're going to find out about in the next 10 to 15 years that are going to be really challenging because we're going to know 100 times more near-Earth asteroids, well, of all kinds, whether the total population or the population of those about which we're worried. Everything is going to multiply by a

factor of about 100. So that is going to be a challenge, whether what portion of those 100 that look like they might be heading for an impact are going to be amenable to techniques which can use existing technology. That big improvement in our knowing what's out there and might be dangerous, two orders of magnitude. A lot of this has just happened in the last few years. My impression is not only are we finding more, but that there seems to be more international awareness thanks to the work of folks like you and others around the world.

Well, the real driver in this fact, the Congress of the United States in December of last year In fact, the Congress of the United States in December of last year passed, for the first time in five years, a NASA authorization bill. And language in that NASA authorization bill now sets a goal. It's a revised goal for 140-meter objects and above rather than the one-kilometer diameter objects and above that we've been working on. And we have to discover 90% or NASA has to discover 90% of all the objects 140 meters and larger in the next 15 years. So by 2020, we should have knowledge of 90% of, let me say, most of the asteroids that would threaten us, but not all. So we know that if NASA is able to, and there's no particular reason why they shouldn't be,

except for money, should be able to discover, meet that goal, should be able to discover, meet that goal, that means that we're going to have 100 times as many asteroids in our database as we do now. We've got 4,000 now, so that means 400,000 total asteroids in the database. We're almost out of time, Rusty. I also thought of you earlier today when I heard Buzz Aldrin say, talking about going to Mars, why are we going to Mars? We should go to the moons of Mars. It would be so much easier. I thought of you earlier today when I heard Buzz Aldrin say, talking about going to Mars, why are we going to Mars? We should go to the moons of Mars. It would be so much easier.

I thought of you. Well, I think Buzz is right. Certainly, first, it would be great to go to the moons of Mars for a lot of different reasons. Number one, it's a great place to observe Mars and really figure out in some detail, you know, just where you want to sit down and what you want to do. detail, you know, just where you want to sit down and what you want to do. But secondly, the moons of Mars themselves are probably captured bodies and more than likely asteroids. And so it is a way in which we can literally get some experience operating on asteroids.

So that's a very useful thing to do, including some evaluation of, you know, potential asteroidal resources that we might be able to access. So it's a very interesting suggestion. Who was it, that famous quote from somebody, I'm sure you'll remember, the dinosaurs died because they didn't have space travel. Yeah, you know, it's interesting because if the dinosaurs got wiped out because they were really incapable of knowing about this potential threat or doing anything about it, we're not in that class. We know about the threat. We're able to do something about it. The big question is, will we do something about it?

it and the interesting aspect of that is that the decision making process which is going to control whether or not we actually do something is fundamentally international and one of the questions is has humankind matured to the point where we're literally able to work closely together using our common humanity and common concern and respect for life and one another or are we going to break down into a bunch of individual nations with self-interest and saying well you know we're not going to go along with this deflection or whatever so it's a it's kind of a graduation test you know do we make it as citizens of the cosmos or do we end up here wiped out like the dinosaurs because we couldn't get our act together?

Sounds like a great reason for us to work on this, even if we don't find a Neo with our name on it for a long, long time. I hope we don't, but we do have to work on it now just in case. Thanks very much, Rusty. Look forward to your talk tomorrow. Rusty Schweikert, Apollo 9 astronaut, speaking at the International Space Development Conference. Bruce Batts and this week's What's Up, right after a return visit from Emily. I'm Emily Lakdawalla, back with Q&A.

Hubble's images of Pluto will be the best we've got until New Horizons is a little more than 20 times closer to Pluto than Earth is, or about 200 million kilometers from the planet. This won't happen until late January 2015, just five or six months before New Horizons' closest approach. That's exactly when the New Horizons science team plans to ramp up its observations, beginning to capture the precious Pluto data with long-range images from the LORRI instrument. At that point, Pluto will still be only a tiny speck in LORRI's field of view. In fact, New Horizons will be able to snap single Laurie frames that include Pluto,

Charon, and both of the newly discovered moons until early July 2015, only 11 days before its closest approach to Pluto. Got a question about the universe? Send it to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. And now here's Matt with more Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Here he is, fresh from the ISDC, Bruce Fetz, one of the co-chairs of the International Space Development Conference and the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society.

You fully recovered? No. Oh, no? No, definitely not. I'm still walking around like a zombie. I know, that's usually how I walk around. Too much food. There was so much food.

Okay, that phrase doesn't even make sense to me. how I walk around. Too much food. There was so much food. Okay. That phrase doesn't even make sense to me. It does because I went to three luncheons and two, no, I went to four luncheons and three big dinners and it was just one after another. There were a lot of fat space enthusiasts walking out of that conference after four days. Matt, you weren't supposed to actually eat at the dinners and luncheons. I wasn't? All right, we'll bill you.

And why was I there? You were there to record things. Oh, I thought it was for the free food. No. All right. You were there to talk to people like Rusty Schweikart. I will tell us what's new. Excuse me, what's up?

Oh, anyway. You know, it's hard to be professional sometimes. Okay, up in the night sky, we've got Jupiter looking quite bright and lovely, hanging out in the east, low in the east after sunset, looking like a really bright star. In the west, you will see looking dim but spiffy, orange-ish looking Mars, and it will be pretty close to yellowish, slightly yellowish looking Saturn. And Saturn is always a great thing to look at through a telescope, so try to do that.

Also Jupiter and its fun Galilean satellites, little moons out there. And in the pre-dawn sky, you've got Venus dominating as the really, really bright looking star-like object hanging out over there in the east, and you can still catch Jupiter over in the west by pre-dawn. Random space fact! Pluto and its moon, Charon, Charon, however you want to pronounce it, they are both tidally locked to each other. They are synchronously locked, but not like the moon around the Earth, where the moon always faces one side to the earth,

and the earth is still spinning unrelated. They actually both are locked to each other, so they always face the same side towards the other body. So if you were on the opposite side of Pluto, you wouldn't even know you had a big moon. Oh, my goodness. If you were on the other side, you'd just see it in the sky constantly. Uh-huh. So it just hangs in one spot in the sky no matter where you are on Pluto. Just hangs.

That's creepy. Well, that's why we call them creepy space facts. Maybe it's really just a big synchronous communication satellite for the Plutonians. So how are you doing, Matt? Have you recovered from the conference? Obviously not. Let's go on to our trivia question, shall we? We asked you who discovered Neptune.

How'd we do? This proved to be a far more interesting question than I expected because people discovered, a lot of people said, gee, I'm glad you asked because it was really kind of a very dramatic story, as it turned out. Without going into all the details, although some people sent us a tremendous amount of detail, Rick Rubio was chosen as this week's winner. Rick of Omaha, Nebraska, I bet he listens to us on KIOS, the public radio station there. He said,

Neptune's position was mathematically predicted by John C. Adams and separately by urbane J.J. Le Verrier, who sent the position to the Urania Observatory in Berlin, where it was visually found close to the predicted position by Johann Gottfried Gall and his assistant, Heinrich Louis d'Arrest. Nice. A triumph of orbital dynamics. Yeah. And what, I didn't even give the date, did I?

On September 23rd, 1846. And a lot of people wrote to say that they had read that Galileo saw Neptune in his telescope, but thought it was a star. Didn't realize it was another, you know, wanderer. That Galileo, he wasn't very bright. No, really? He didn't come up with much, did he? No, that's why we don't remember him today.

No, no, we don't. All right, let's move on. We move to the galaxy for our trivia question. Basically, what's our address in the galaxy? What arm, sometimes known as a spur, because it's kind of part of an arm, in the Milky Way is our solar system in? Where do we live? It's sometimes called the boring local spur or local arm. I want the other name for the arm of the spiral galaxy Milky Way that we live in.

So alpha quadrant is not a qualified answer? No. Okay. That would be the pretend quadrant we live in. The Plutonians use it, though. That's because Star Trek is a big hit there. It is. It's huge.

Go to planetary.org slash radio. Find out how to send your email with your answer to us and try to win a glorious prize. A Planetary Radio t-shirt. Or a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Or a Planetary Radio t-shirt. And you've got until the 22nd of May at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get those entries to us. Thank you so much, all of you who enter. We get lots, and we want all of you to win. But we can only pick one.

But if anyone wants to give us a whole bunch of money, then everyone can win. That's right. Okay, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about fluffy cotton balls. Thank you, and good night. Fluffy cotton balls. I have no comeback to fluffy cotton balls. If you have a comeback to fluffy cotton balls,

write to us at planetaryradio at planetary.org. You may not get a shirt, but you'll make me very happy. I win. He has no comeback! Success! He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. He joins us every week here for What's Up. We hope you've enjoyed our coverage of the International Space Development Conference over the last couple of weeks. Let us know what you think at planetaryradio at planetary.org.

Back to our regular format next time as we speak to Kevin Baines of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who is working on more missions than I even want to think about. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. Have a great week, everyone. Thank you.