Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Seeking the Killer Space App with Space Tango

Episode Date: November 27, 2019

Organizations are using the microgravity environment of the International Space Station to develop unique new products. One of them is Kentucky-based Space Tango. We’ll meet its chairman and co-founder and the woman who manages its Tangolab. Also, a NASA rep who works with these pioneers. Time magazine has named the Planetary Society’s LightSail its aerospace invention of the year! Society CEO Bill Nye is grateful to all who have been part of the project. Bruce Betts provides a solar sail update at the top of this week’s What’s Up, and wishes Mat a happy 17th anniversary of Planetary Radio. Learn more and go inside Space Tango at: https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/1127-2019-space-tango.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hemp in space? How about beer? That's this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of a human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Kentucky-based Space Tango is actually conducting international space station research on far more than the catchy items in my opening line. We'll talk with co-founder Chris Kimmel and others about the burgeoning effort to find the killer app or product for production at zero-g. Happy anniversary to us! Bruce Betts will help me celebrate 17 years of planetary radio in this week's What's Up. He'll also give us a LightSail

2 update. LightSail is also why we'll be joined by Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye the Planetary Guy right after we check in with The Downlink, the Planetary Society's weekly collection of the top headlines in space exploration, presented by our editorial director Jason Davis. The InSight lander on Mars keeps plugging or pounding away. With help from the craft's robotic arm, the long-troubled mole heat probe is once again hammering itself below the surface of the red planet. Boeing has put its CST-100 Starliner spacecraft on top of an Atlas V rocket. With luck, it will make its first voyage to the ISS in December, sans human crew. I'll also note that SpaceX hopes to fly a test of the Crew Dragon capsule's escape system next month. Meanwhile, a prototype of that company's

Starship blew its top a few days ago. SpaceX says the mishap shouldn't delay development of the huge vehicle. Lastly, scientists have for the first time directly detected water vapor above Europa using the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. The findings support prior research indicating that there may be transient plumes erupting from the moon's subsurface ocean, though other explanations are also possible. Go Europa Clipper! For more on these and other stories, including great links, visit planetary.org slash downlink. Now to Bill Nye, who is celebrating recognition

of the Planetary Society's light sail solar sail project by the leading news magazine in the U.S. Bill, not that we needed Time Magazine to acknowledge our pride or the success of LightSail, too, but it doesn't hurt, does it? No, no, it's pretty cool. So Time Magazine's Inventions of the Year, we are the aerospace invention of the year. It's really a heck of a thing, you know, and it's of the year, of a year. This thing, depending on when you start counting, is, you know, 42 years in the making. And so it's really gratifying, you know. And for those members who are listening or people who are not yet members, you know, we flew Cosmos 1 in 2005, but it ended up in the ocean.

we flew Cosmos 1 in 2005, but it ended up in the ocean. And then we had an opportunity four years to go to fly LightSail 1. And we just took it because you just don't know when you're going to get an opportunity to get on a NASA flight and a lane of educational launch of nanosatellites opportunity. So we took that. But LightSail 2, we were able to get to a high enough altitude, 720 kilometers, where we could prove that the thing works. It's just really gratifying, Matt. It's just cool as heck. You mentioned our members, but other people as well. I hear the number 50,000 people contributed to the LightSail program. Most of them were more recent, LightSail 2, when we had Kickstarter awareness and so on. So thank you all. Really, Matt, another extraordinary aspect of it is I mentioned Kickstarter. That was one way we raised money. But the main way is just through membership in the Planetary Society.

We did it for $7 million over, depends how you count, over the last 12 years or what have you. If you were going to do that at a regular space agency like NASA or ESA or CNES, the French space agency, people estimate about 20 times as much, $140, $150 million to do this project, to fly two solar sails in Earth orbit. And the reason we did it so much more cheaply is we took risks and we also do not have continuous coverage around the world. We don't have the deep space network. We just have Hawaii, San Luis Obispo, California, Purdue in Indiana and Georgia Tech in Georgia in the US. And so it's very cool. We pulled it off. And I'm very proud. I'm proud to be a member who stood behind

this, who stands behind this. And I'm proud to be part of the organization, if not a direct part of the team that put it up there. Yeah, I'm not a direct part of the team either, Matt. Once in a while, I'd say, okay, write a check. No, so the problems that these guys and gals overcame is really, really exciting. And plus, the whole thing is so romantic. If you're keeping track, it goes back to Johann Kepler in 1607, looking at what we now call Comet Halley, Halley's Comet, before Edmund Halley ever saw it, he noticed this comet in the night sky, and he noticed that the tail, noticed very carefully, that the tail always pointed away from the sun. And Kepler, not really having any knowledge of photons or modern physics of light,

he just reasoned that there's something about the sun that's creating this tail or these tails, the ion tail and the dust tail. Then 400 years later, we were able to exploit that feature of sunlight to fly. It's just exciting. And so we hope, as is the goal at the Planetary Society, this democratizes spaceflight, as is the goal at the Planetary Society, this democratizes spaceflight, that other organizations, universities will use solar sails to go to other destinations in the solar system. Or perhaps beyond. Ooh. Yeah, it really is the only technology anybody's thought of right now that could take you to another star system. And that is you'd build a solar sail similar in shape to light sail two, and you give

it a push with a laser or a group of lasers, either on earth or on the far side of the moon has been discussed, where you'd have solar panels to make electricity to crank huge lasers and give this thing a push. And so the existing drawings or plans or artists' concepts of interstellar flight always have a square sail very similar to light sail. You know, you converge on the same answer. Do you want booms, things to hold the sail rigid, or would you rely on just the spin of a sail, just the centripetal, centrifugal action of something on the corners

or the circumference of the sail, perimeter of the sail? And right now, everybody's thinking is booms are good. Booms are efficient. I would say that LightSail has had a good part in helping to convince people that those booms are a good way to go. A worthy way to go. So everybody, if you haven't done it, go to our control panel, mission control rather, on our website, planetary.org. And you'll find when you can go looking for it in the night sky, the evening sky, the morning sky.

It's really something. It's just a dot. It's just a pinprick of light, but it's our dot of light, people, built by citizens around the world who just thought that this was a worthy technology to pursue. And there are a couple missions that a future light sail style spacecraft is ideal for. that a future light sail style spacecraft is ideal for. Climate monitoring from above the poles, and the search for asteroids, and especially monitoring solar weather. So there'd be a coronamass ejection event on the sun, and this stream of particles is hurtling toward our planet that would damage, excessively damage, create excessive damage to our satellites, to our space assets. And with a solar sail station keeping with the Earth at an inferior orbit,

say around the orbit of Venus, 0.7 astronomical units from the sun, you could get a head start. You could get three, three and a half, four hours warning against the stream of charged particles. In 2012, there's a very serious event that missed the Earth by about two weeks. It slashed through Earth's orbit two weeks behind us. So this is a real practical use of this technology along with the romance. And I will say with a wink of my eye as we close here, And I will say with a wink of my eye as we close here, more news approaching, more honors approaching. Oh, yes. Yes. Your eyes are a wink.

That's cool. But you guys in Time Magazine, come on. It's like person of the year, except it's our spacecraft with 99 other cool inventions. Carry on, Matt. Thank you, Bill. We will. Let's keep them flying. Thanks for the leadership. That's Bill Nye. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society, which stands behind and under LightSail 2, which could be sailing on the light of the sun over your head

right now. Another SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule will head for the International Space Station in early December. It will carry a metric ton of science experiments to that national laboratory. One of them will contain barley seeds provided by none other than Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser and many other beers. The fascinating story behind this and other efforts is what brought me in early October to the Kentucky headquarters of Space Tango. My host was the company's co-founder and chairman, Chris Kimmel. Chris, it's pretty fun to be here at the home of Space Tango in Lexington, Kentucky. What is happening here? I see a whole bunch of workbenches. Well, fundamentally, everybody's preparing for the next launch.

Space Tango, of course, is really a research, design, and manufacturing company that just doesn't do work on the planet Earth. So everybody is busy preparing for a series of missions and experiments that will go up on the next launch, which I believe is going to be in late October. We generally launch now about six times a year, so it's always very active. A lot of interesting things going on, and what you're basically around is all the engineering capabilities as well as some of the biotechnology. You know the line from Captain James Kirk? He said, yeah, I'm from Iowa. I just work up there. That's basically it, yeah. You know, I tell people

when I give talks, I often say that, or if I'm talking about some of the biomedical things that we do that are really interesting, I sometimes say, you know, what if the next big, have you ever thought about if the next big biomedical breakthrough isn't on the planet Earth? Just to give them a sense of, yeah, it's space, it's exotic, but on the other hand, it's really just another physics environment. And we, along with others, are now able to exploit that physics environment, use that physics environment for trying to answer different kinds of questions and look for different kinds of solutions. You're the chairman, but you're also one of the co-founders. Why did you want to create a company like this? I would like to say that, oh, it all started when I was five years old, but it didn't.

I think a lot of people, my interest in my career have been very circuitous. At one point, I was president of the Kentucky Science and Technology Corporation, and that's where the genesis for this kind of organization started to percolate. And we created, the first organization we created was something called Kentucky Space, which was an independent non-profit subsidiary. And actually, we started thinking we were going to build small satellites, CubeSats, which is where we started. We started with HALTed balloons, then we moved to suborbital into orbital. Actually, Twyman Clemens, who's now the CEO of Space Tango, was actually hired as a student to work at Kentucky Space. So he's been there since the, he's the other co-founder and has been there since the beginning. It kind of evolved. And as we started to go into the CubeSat arena and then had an opportunity to build something

for Space Station, it was just one of those things where I think our curiosity and the opportunity kind of converged. And the opportunity kind of converged, and we realized that low Earth orbit and microgravity may be a revolutionary new pathway for all sorts of new discoveries with materials, and particularly in the biomedical area, for applications on Earth, in addition to space medicine, which is how do we keep people alive in space, which is obviously a big issue too. But really our focus has been more on how do we utilize microgravity to benefit people on Earth. Kentucky bourbon, thoroughbreds, nothing against this town. It's a lovely town. But Lexington, Kentucky is not the first place most people think of in terms of developing or exploring space. And yet you've been able to build this company here. I mean, it seems to say

something about the progress that we've made in space development, space utilization. Well, I think clearly over the, particularly the past 10 years, five, 10 years, you know, the space industry, commercial space research has really opened up. I think a couple of things have been driving that that made it more difficult for places like Lexington or people here and other places to get involved. One was the access to space. I think since actually I think at the time it was controversial, but I think NASA's decision to scrub the shuttle and then move to a different vehicle and encourage the private sector to get involved really opened things up. It was very difficult for anyone to compete with the shuttle because of the cost and et cetera. I think that opened things up.

The other thing I think that's really been as revolutionary is just the relentless and continued miniaturization and develop of new technologies. Everything that we do here, most everything, is very small very robust very technical and that ability to develop very very small technologies and be able to partner with a NASA or an orbital or SpaceX or some of the other vehicle launch vehicle companies to put things it's really something that was not available ten years ago and because of that I mean we have a lot of people here in Lexington like everywhere else in the country in in the world, that have great ideas and are very smart.

I think a lot of the things that maybe kept us from creating synergy here in the past wasn't the lack of ideas or wasn't a lack of people. It was just lack of the infrastructure and ability to do that. You needed big stuff. You needed to have launch capability or be near a NASA facility. And I think that's all changed. And that's opened a lot of opportunity up for places like this. What is the infrastructure? I mean, what have all these developments allowed you to create on the International Space Station so that you can basically host this work? I think it's a lot of things.

Our engineers probably have a better, deeper sense of some of the specifics. Our engineers probably have a better, deeper sense of some of the specifics, but clearly we now know that when you move into microgravity, all biological and physical systems are scrambled. And that scrambling process opens up a whole new opportunity, one, to understand how things operate not only in microgravity, but if they act differently there. Sometimes it tells us something about the system, how it operates on Earth,

that we may not have seen on Earth. Just very briefly, we did an experiment a year or two ago with Tufts University dealing with planarian flatworms, which are a major focus for regenerative medicine. Those of you who didn't sleep through high school sciences, I did, know that when you cut them in threes, they regenerate heads, tails, and the midsection grows a head and a tail. So they were very interested in one big, you know, focus is understanding the mechanism. So we put, you know, we put 15 in space and kept 15 other and cut them. And when we came back, they saw some really interesting differences. And one of the most intriguing differences they saw is that one of the midsections had grown two heads. And I believe their offspring had two heads. So that's one of those things where you go, gosh, how did that happen? And we don't

know. A lot of times people will ask us when we're doing experiments, what do you think you're going to see when you send something? We plan experiments, for example, plants that are the basis for chemo drugs, looking for chemistry changes or any kind of alterations. We've done things with stem cells, brain organoids, and people often ask, what do you think you're going to see? And the answer most of the time is, we don't know. This is very much a frontier, and that's why we're going to space. But that microgravity environment, because of its very nature, is opening up and allowing us and others into a different room to look for different kinds of solutions that really we haven't been able to do in the past.

Of course, that brain organoid work we're also talking about because of the folks at UCSD that you're working with. But I'm curious about some of these other experiments that have been sent up. What's this thing about hemp? Well, we're a curious company. People understand that one of the aspects of Space Tango is that we don't see ourselves simply as a service company or a transactional company. I mean, that's a lot of what we do right now. But we also see ourselves as an idea company. We see ourselves as a company also pushing the envelope with our own ideas or ideas in partnership with others to try to figure out new ways and new things, new ideas. We became very interested last year in looking at some of the potential biomedical applications, primarily of things like cannabinoids and CBD and things of that nature,

and did a lot of research on CBD and, of course, hemp being the non-psychoactive cousin of THC, and discovered or uncovered in our mind, we thought are some very interesting opportunities to look at the properties of cannabinoids in a zero-G environment. For example, there's over, I think, approximately 130 cannabinoids actually, and we really could only access, with any degree of accuracy and volume, just a couple, mainly THC and CBD, I think, CBA or CBA, there's a few others. But so one of the things we're really interested in is do we see, which we have seen in the past with other plants, perhaps epigenetic changes in space that might turn on some of those

genes that might allow us to see or turn on or activate other kinds of cannabinoids, etc. Do we see differences in the plants and the chemistry and the genes? And so our really interest is looking at cannabinoids, looking at the hemp plant in that environment as a possible, understand as a possible pathway to enhancing the biomedical potential and health and wellness potential of CBD and other cannabinoids and other chemistries that are part of the hemp plant. So it's 95 degrees here today in Lexington. Maybe, therefore, I'm not that sorry that we're not going to make it out to a field just out of town. You showed me some pictures, and maybe we'll post one of those on the show page, where you were doing a

little bit of cultivation. Yeah, Base Tango is a small company, which is great. And when you're in a small company, you have to do a lot of things. And when we brought the hemp seeds back, one of the things we did, we planted them in a greenhouse, and then we grew them out in a greenhouse and evaluated them at certain intervals. And then we were going to put them in the field and then grow them out in the field and then harvest them from the field at a particular interval and then do genetic and chemistry analysis and see what might evolve from that point. And as luck would have it, last week I got a call on Tuesday from one of our, Rob Gabbard, who works with us and said, hey, we've got to get 60 plants out in the field by Friday.

And I said, well, who's we? And he said, well, I guess it's you and me since the engineers are busy preparing for the next flight and we don't have you know people out there so I put on my jeans and work shirt and Rob and I went out and dug and planted 60 holes and planted out 60 of the hemp plants that had been in the green in the greenhouse that had both the control group and the plants that had been derived from seed that had been in space. And I will say, like a lot of places in this country, it hasn't rained here in about two months, so the ground was rock hard.

But that's what we had to do, and that's like a small company. You do what you have to do. There's no such thing in a small company as that's not a good use of my time. Such other duties as may be assigned. That's right. I'm curious about the relationship with NASA because obviously the space agency had to enable these things to happen on the ISS. How does that work for you? NASA has been an amazing partner with Kentucky Space and Space Tango from the very beginning,

as they have with a lot of other emerging space companies. We fortunately have something called a Space Act Agreement with NASA that basically gives us access to the station, gives us launch opportunities in partnership with NASA and some of the launch companies. And so they're very much an ongoing, full-time, really, partner of what we do. And without NASA and some of their new innovative policies, we certainly wouldn't be able to be achieving what we do. And those Space Act Agre agreements and other kinds of collaborations that we have with NASA are absolutely essential, not only to, I think, space tango's future, but really the commercialization of space in general. It sure seems like all of this is still

happening at a pretty embryonic level. Do you see enormous potential? Do you expect to see, well, I'll call it the killer app, but it might be a killer product, or do you think that microgravity is going to pay off, basically, not just in terms of a profit for you and your partners, you know, every time we've been able to get a hold of or capture a physics environment, a new physics environment, harness it, whether it be electromagnetism or the vacuum, it has led to a couple of things. to exponential growth in new ideas and applications and significant capital creation. And really what we're talking about here is the fact that we are now at the beginning of being able to harness the physics environment of microgravity in a real way. You know, on Earth, you can't mimic it on Earth. You know, drop towers, you know, the Vomit Comet, you get a few minutes, but you really don't get any kind of prolonged exposure like we do now. And yes, we're on the cusp of that.

But just like other physics environments, we fully expect and anticipate that this, too, we'll look back upon in the years ahead and realize that this was a monumental breakthrough that has led to all sorts of new understandings and improvement in people's lives. We like pioneers on this show, Chris. Thank you. Exciting stuff. Best of success. Thank you. That's Chris Kimmel. By the way, we'll learn more about those so-called brain organoids Chris mentioned in an upcoming

episode of Planetary Radio. Stick around. We're about to meet the woman who manages all of the amazing research taken on by Space Tango and its clients. I know you're a fan of space because you're listening to Planetary Radio right now. But if you want to take that extra step to be not just a fan, but an advocate, I hope you'll join me, Casey Dreyer, the chief advocate here at the Planetary Society, at our annual Day of Action this February 9th and 10th in Washington, D.C.

That's when members from across the in Washington, D.C. That's when members from across the country come to D.C. and meet with members of Congress face-to-face and advocate for space. To learn more, go to planetary.org slash dayofaction. Back to Space Tango. My name is Gentry Barnett, and I am the Tango Lab Program Manager at Space Tango. And do a lot of the biomedical stuff here, I hear. I am a biomedical engineer by trade, yes. And so I oversee all the payloads in this role. For each mission, we'll select a couple of payloads for that mission, depending on payload readiness and some of the logistics they need for each flight.

So that kind of determines what payloads go on a mission. Yes, and then I will oversee all those, the development, the engineering, and making sure those get to space. So as our listeners know, I'm a gearhead. At least that's what my boss, the science guy, says. This is kind of heavenly. And tell me about this amazing collection of circuit boards and tubes and a bag of seeds. What's going on here? So this is actually a payload that's going up on our next mission. This is a payload with Anheuser-Busch. What they're looking at, the seeds you're looking at, are barley seeds. And they're really exploring with this payload the malting process, which consists of three different phases,

steeping, germination, and kilning. Normally, obviously, they do this in a much larger environment. They make a lot of beer. Yes, they do. So we went out to their facilities in Fort Collins, Colorado, to learn this process. So what we do as Space Tango with the engineers is we really miniaturize that process into something slightly bigger than a shoebox, which we call a cube lab. And this is a self-contained environment that we automate from

our offices in Lexington. They come to you, Anaheiser-Bruch says, we would like to do something about malting part of the beer, make process of making beer in space, in microgravity, you figure out how to make that work on the ISS. Yes, that's exactly what we do. As an engineer in this specific company, we have to have a very quick learning process. So yes, we went out there, we went over the process that they normally do. And then we have to miniaturize that. We have to learn each component of that. And then we'll set up what you're seeing in front of you this is the payload sprawled out in more of a benchtop prototype fashion so that we can see every functional piece of how this is working and follow along at

every step of the way and what you'll see in the bag over here is actually the end of the steeping process the seeds have actually developed these acrospires which is tiny growth at the end of one end of the seed and that's exactly what we were looking for. So then tomorrow what we'll go into the germination phase and then the kilning where we'll actually dry these seeds out and the end result will be malt that we'll send to them and they'll do a chemical profile and compare that the different chemical profile and the the taste profile that results from this malt and then obviously we'll do the same thing for the resultant malt that comes back

from the space station. So this will all go into I assume some kind of a rack mount unit and be self-contained I mean will astronauts have to tend this or will it pretty much take care of itself? No, once we put the tops on our cube labs, they become a self-contained environment. So really the only crew interaction that we have is moving it from the rocket that takes it up, so either from the Dragnet or the Cygnus module. We'll take that out and install it into our Tango lab facilities on the space station that are in Express Rec. And from that point forward, they will be fully automated. We control that from our op station here in Lexington upstairs.

Is this experiment that has already been completed, at least the first phase of it, with so-called brain organoids that we're also talking about today, is it essentially similar to this, where they came to you from UCSD and you had to figure out how to make it go into space? Yes, absolutely. So with the UCSD project, the brain organoids, they're studying how the brain develops in a microgravity environment under these different kinds of stresses that aren't normally seen on Earth, obviously. What we have to do as space tangango is we have to take the environment

that they have in their labs at UCSD, how they normally keep these cells alive, and do that in a much smaller, automated, fully sealed environment. So we work directly one-on-one with that team to understand their different requirements, to explain our different requirements, and really come together to develop this very unique mini lab system that's put in our cube lab. From beer to brains, with all kinds of other stuff in between, seems like a pretty fun job. Absolutely, it is a lot of fun. What's unique about everybody that works here, and really all of our customers, is we're willing to discover, and we're willing to open the doors to whatever we may find, whatever we may not find. We're always looking for another answer. We're always asking a different question. That drive for innovation, the drive for something new, just

asking the question of what could happen. That's really what makes this job so interesting and I think what brings a lot of our customers to our doors. Have you seen enough that you have confidence, as Chris Kimmel does, in the potential of microgravity for developing manufacturing products that will be unlike any we can create on Earth? 100%, yes. There's really endless potential here. Again, it's just having that willingness to ask these questions. Every question you ask may not have this profound answer that you were expecting. But these unique, I guess, side questions that you could also ask along the way

tend to bring results that you weren't expecting. And those are the ones that we need to explore, both as a company with Space Tango, with our customers, and really as a humanity. Absolutely exciting stuff. Thanks so much. Absolutely. Thank you. Gentry Barnett is Space Tango's Tango Lab Program Manager. As luck would have it, Mike Reed was visiting Space Tango while I was there. Mike manages NASA's Commercial Space Utilization Office for the International Space Station Program.

That makes him a key liaison for companies like Space Tango that are conducting research and development on the ISS. Mike, we're in Lexington. We've talked with people from Space Tango. We've seen some of the amazing stuff that they are up to. But they're just one of several companies, right, that are getting these terrific opportunities on the International Space Station. That's correct. We have probably 10 at last count, small businesses, most of them, that are doing business in space. They have contracts with us so we can buy services from them and other government agencies can buy services. But they're out marketing and they're out selling their services on the space station and they're out marketing, and they're out selling their services on the space station, and they're now a stakeholder for us in space, and that's important to us. Some of this stuff is because the ISS is a national lab, something we've talked about on this show before.

But there are other ways, other kinds of status that people can have. Yeah, I mean, we rolled out a whole commercialization strategy back in June at the NASDAQ, and it's multi-elements. One of them is companies doing business on the space station, just like Space Tango. They have their own hardware. We don't own it. They own it. We buy services. They sell to us.

They sell to other government agencies, and they sell to commercial sector. But there's also going to be private astronaut missions to the space station. There's going to be a solicitation for a commercial element that could be a privately run module that's attached to the space station. So there's many different things we're doing to try to broaden the commercial presence in low Earth orbit. And some of that, like attaching something to the ISS. Now, the Bigelow room that's up there right now, that inflatable, which we've talked, we've gone to Bigelow Aerospace and talked to them about that.

That was under contract to NASA. But you're talking about that kind of space? Yeah, that's a perfect example of a Pathfinder. That was NASA technology that was mostly developed but wasn't finished. Robert Bigelow came in and wanted to license it. And under contract with us, he built it out. came in and wanted to license it. And under contract with us, he built it out. The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module, BEAM we call it, has been attached to ISS for several years now. And a year or two ago, we brought it in as a full-blown element in our operational

status on ISS. We use it for stowage so that we can have more stowage in our racks for the critical payloads and things we're operating. So it's very much integrated into the daily life of ISS. So it's kind of a closet now, right? It's more than that. It was important. The volume is very limited, as you can imagine, in the ISS. And so being able to move some of the things that you need to get to sporadically but not regularly,

being able to move them into the beam, that was very important to us because it allows us to use our rack space that houses some of our critical science. It allowed us to put things there that we use much more regularly. And so it's an important element now on the ISS. I've talked about finding the killer app or the killer product in this case, that thing that we're going to discover that maybe can only happen in microgravity, but is going to be profitable for somebody down here on Earth. Not just money for the people who develop it, but maybe improving life down here as well.

Is that the ultimate goal? The ultimate goal for NASA is to be one of many customers in space. Right now, we're really the only paying customer in space. We are always going to have a need for space, for crew training, for our fundamental and applied research, and for our advanced systems development. If we're the only customer, that means when space station's gone, whatever comes next, we're going to be paying all the overhead. That's not tenable. So part of our commercial strategy was to enable scalable demand, which is more in-space manufacturing. Some of the things that Space Tango has an interest in.

So that if it proves out that there's actually benefit of doing this in microgravity, then you will need a next-generation module because Space Station only has so much volume. And if they need it, it will happen. If somebody wants to build it and there's no need, it might happen, but it's not going to have as good a chance of being successful. So we're really looking at developing the demand for low Earth orbit. Some of the things we're looking at are like the scalable, sustainable manufacturing, orbit. Some of the things we're looking at are like the scalable, sustainable manufacturing,

bioengineering, tissue generation, personalized medicine, exotic fibers, exotic optical fibers, things like that that are actually better because they're in microgravity. It's still being proven out, and we're willing to make some investments in that, and that's what we're doing. I think I said to Chris Kimmel earlier today that it is really still at an embryonic stage. We've got a long ways to go. Yeah, and some things are further along than others. Some of the regenerative medicine stuff is probably further out than maybe some of the things like some of the optical fibers that we've done two or three different flight demonstrations on and have several more with several different companies doing it different ways. So we're kind of trying to cover the waterfront, if you will. And for the government, this is a unique position. We're trying to enable an economy in a place that it doesn't exist.

And I say enable because we can't create. That's up to the private sector. We can create an environment where the private sector sees opportunities. We can sure keep it from happening. We'd be keep it from happening. We'd be very good with that with our bureaucracy, but we're actually trying to enable this to happen so that we benefit in the long run too because now we're not the only customer, and others that can prove profitability can pay their own way. I was at Space Tango for a good part of the morning,

and you were in there in a meeting with them for hours going through stuff. That's part of your job? Yeah, that's the best part of my job is helping small companies see opportunities, hear their interest, put the pieces together for them, help them connect the dots, let them tell us what they need from us and point out opportunities in the government where this might be a source of funding or that might be a source of funding or, hey, we have an interest in that and, you know, we might be able to help out. But that's actually one of the best parts of the job is most of these companies that we have our agreements with are small. Sometimes I feel like a father confessor with them because I live so closely with the trials and tribulations that they're going through as startups. And seeing them succeed is critical to what we do.

And so helping them see the bigger picture, which we're a bureaucracy. It's hard to talk to us. But if I can be the face of that bureaucracy with them, then that's the better for both parties. Do you ever think about the historic or historical significance, the historic perspective of this? Because in a sense, we're opening up a new world, a new frontier. People started to come to America. They didn't find the gold that they thought was going to be here, but the investment eventually paid off, not without a lot of pain,

but it seems like we're on the verge of doing that again. A metaphor I like to use is the comparison to the development of the Transcontinental Railroad back in the 1870s. We had a need to unite the east and the west coast. We had this glorious country, but it was not connected. After the Civil War, the government didn't have the resources to make that happen, but they did have the full faith and credit of the government. So the railroad was developed by private consortia coming from the east, coming from the west. The government guaranteed the bonds to be paid private consortia coming from the east, coming from the west. The government guaranteed the bonds to be paid off at some point in the future when we were able,

but it also gave away resources, and that resource was land. We had vast quantities of land. And so the railroad consortia took the guarantees and the resources that we gave and built that railroad. Then the government became the first customer. We moved troops and we moved mail. And then all of a sudden people started going and settling. And so what we're doing now is not dissimilar. We are enabling something we need, which is new capabilities,

new commercial participation in space, and we're giving away resources. It's up mass, it's crew time, it's the onboard accommodations of the space station. And as soon as those accommodations are developed, we become a customer, just like we are Space Tango. I bet you wish you could look down the line 30 or 40 years and see what all of this groundbreaking stuff has led to. You know, if we're successful, we're going to have the provisions we need in space. We're going to continue to do what we do. We will go on and do the exploration mission, but we'll prove out the technologies in low-Earth orbit.

We're never going to use next-generation life support system in deep space for the first time. It doesn't work that way. They need years of operation in low-Earth orbit. If we're not successful, I don't have a picture of that because it's ugly. Because that means we're still the only customer. We're back into the government-contractor relationship. It's not tenable in my view. So I'm optimistic. I believe what we're doing now in focusing on the demand is something we've never done. and I believe that's the most critical part of what we're doing. If the demand is there, my business background tells me that

the supply will be generated. What's that quote? I think it's attributed to different people but I usually mention Benjamin Franklin when he was asked after demonstrating something about electricity to a woman. She said, but what good is it, Dr. Franklin? And he said, what good is a newborn babe? Yeah, that's good. I've not heard that one, but I think, I don't want to go down the path of if we build it, they will come. Because that's kind of that.

And we've done a lot of that. And it just hasn't proven out. But if we can pivot and now help develop that demand side, the supply side will come. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. I enjoyed it. That's Mike Reed of NASA. I'll be back in moments with Bruce Betts and this week's What's Up. The Planetary Society is building the ultimate list of life goals for space fans, and we need your help.

Hi, I'm Kate Howells, Community Engagement Leader for the Society. What's on your list? The must-see objects in the night sky, the most awe-inspiring destinations, the experiences of a lifetime. Tell us about them at planetary.org slash space goals. We'll share them with your space soulmates around the world. That's planetary.org slash space goals.

Thanks. Time for What's up on planetary radio. It is time therefore to talk once again with the chief scientist for the planetary society. That's Bruce Betts. He is also the project manager. I have that right. I think right for light sail.

So we heard program manager, program manager. I do it all the time. I can never keep them straight. There's project and there's program. Congratulations to you as the program manager. We already heard from Bill, of course, about these kudos, this great honor from Time Magazine at the top of the show. I figure you must be happy about that as well. Oh yeah. It's wonderful after all the work that so many people have put in over so many years when we get a nice accolade like that from Time Magazine. It feels

good. What's up? What's the status of that big light-catching sail in the sky? It's still in orbit. We're still working with it, communicating with it every day. Continue to try to refine solar sailing as long as we still can. Eventually, atmospheric drag will drag us down enough that we won't be able to, but we're still getting effective sailing, and we've been trying some different tricks in terms of desaturating the wheel in different ways and different timing and all sorts of details like that, working the inevitable glitches, because imagine your computer, imagine your computer in space. So, um, uh, so there are joyful glitches, but, uh, overall the spacecraft is healthy.

It's communicating. Uh, we, we work out glitches when we find them and we're continuing to, uh, do solar sailing. I'll keep looking to you now and then for those status updates. And go light sail, as we hear from lots and lots of listeners who write into the show. Thank you, people saying go light sail. Let's go night sky. Godspeed, night sky. In the evening sky, we've got the showy planets, Jupiter and Venus,

the two brightest objects up there, except for the moon and the night sky, natural objects. Venus being the brighter one, which has now just moved above Jupiter. This is all happening low in the west soon after sunset. Venus will be hanging with us for a few months and lighting up the evening west and Jupiter will only be with us a little bit longer as it gets gradually lower in the west. And to the upper left of Venus, you can find Saturn, dimmer but still looking like a bright star. In the morning sky, we've got Mars into its upper, looking reddish, and to its upper right is Spica looking bluish. And if you're checking

it out in the next few days, you can still catch Mercury to the lower left of Mars looking even brighter than Mars, but it'll be very low to the eastern horizon before dawn. Got a Geminids meteor shower. Traditionally the best of the year coming up peaking December 13th and 14th. However, of the year coming up, peaking December 13th and 14th. However, it's been canceled this year. No, no. It hasn't, but a full moon at the peak will limit the number of meteors visible. Space rocks on strike. Hoping we can resolve a labor dispute with rocks slamming into the Earth's atmosphere. All right, we move on to this week in space history. And I am ashamed and embarrassed that, as you know, Matt, yesterday, in other words, in last week's This Week in Space History, I should have mentioned the most

important space anniversary of all, 2002. Planetary Radio and Matt Kaplan recorded its first episode. 17 years. Congratulations. Happy anniversary. Great job. I've enjoyed every one of the billion episodes that we've done. I think it's going on 900. I forget now whether it's 800 or 900. Shouldn't be hard to figure out, should it? Me too. You're forgiven and thank you for being a part of every one of them. We're going to keep it up. I hope you'll stick around. I'm sticking around. I'm loving it. All right. Speaking of loving it, we move on to random space

fact. 17th anniversary RSF. For this this one I pulled something truly random and mildly meaningless but kind of not as seen from Earth the star Pollux is the brightest star in the night sky confirmed to have an exoplanet orbiting it

I had no idea, Castor must be very jealous very jealous there's, very jealous. There's your anniversary random space fact. Good one. Let's move on to the trivia contest. I asked you what spacecraft observed a planetary transit from the surface of another planet. So on one planet, looking at a planet moving across in front of the sun, how do we do,

Matt? The key word was planetary. We heard from a few people, some who I think might have been confused, some who just wanted to point this out, that Spirit and Opportunity would be the first, if you hadn't used that word, planetary, because they watched Transits of the Sun by Deimos and Phobos. But you did say planetary. And so our winner is Corey Hannon, who says it was Spirit and Opportunity's big sister, Curiosity, who watched a transit of Mercury? That is indeed true. You can find it online. That is indeed true. You can find it online. It's not as easy to see as Phobos and Deimos, but indeed from Mars, the Curiosity rovers camera, the mass cam system're going to send him the first.

We got another one to give away, another set to give away next week. But he's getting that Eugene Tribe light sail necklace and earring set, which you can find in the Planetary Society store at chopshopstore.com. All kinds of other great stuff there, including the pretty good looking model for the Planetary Radio t-shirt. Not bad after 17 years. Now, what am I saying? It's like the best picture ever taken of me, I think. So I don't know how much, probably broke Photoshop creating it, but I'm proud of that. I didn't notice. Oh, my God. You look like Brad Pitt. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah. Our Brad Pitt looks like me.

Yeah, I'm not actually looking at the picture. I just... No. Well, you're in for a treat. We got from Elizabeth in New Albany, Indiana. Can you reassure her? She says she's hoping Curiosity was wearing the proper eye protection. Yes, indeed. It wearing the proper eye protection. Yes, indeed,

it has the proper eye protection. They put a so-called neutral density filter in front of it. They actually flew it intending to take these types of pictures. So they have a filter they put in front of it. Don't worry, Curiosity's eyes are safe. From Nathan in Vancouver, Washington. Apparently, none of our robot pals have observed an Earth tranted from the surface of Mars. The next one's due in 2084. Given how long our rover seemed to last up there, maybe Curiosity will catch it? Be there. And finally, this from Asen in Richmond Hill, Ontario. We need to send many more spacecraft to the surface of other celestial bodies to enjoy more planetary transits. Oh, wait, I've come to the right place.

The Planetary Society is working toward that goal. Thank you, everyone at the Society. Thank you, Asen. All right. I've pulled up the picture, Matt. You are a stunning example of stunningness. Yeah. Keep going. No, that's all right. That's plenty. You got something for next time? What are those antennas behind you? I got those from my Uncle Martin. Wow. Just extra obscurity for anniversaries.

Ray Walston. I miss Ray Walston so much. Well, sure. Trivia contest. This is serious. What is the largest known, as of now, what is the largest known object in our solar system that has not been visited by a spacecraft? Here are my notes and caveats.

Flybys count as visits, and we are not counting the sun. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and get us your entry. Got to go at night. You have until the 4th. That would be Wednesday, December 4th. We're into the last month of the year with this. At 8 a.m. Pacific time. To get us your answer, you might win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt.

After all, we've talked about it enough this episode. So why not get one? And I'm sure you'll look better in it than I do. That's it. We're done. I have one other comment. The 17th anniversary, officially from the gods of holidays,

Hallmark, wine or spirits. So I'm going to leave it up to you to celebrate in my stead. 18th anniversary, I'm already looking ahead, is appliances. I did not make that up. That's great. Okay, I need a new toaster.

All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think what you would give Matt for 18th anniversary of appliances. Thank you, and good night. I'll drink to that. He's the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts, who joins us every week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its high-flying members. Will you consider helping us celebrate our anniversary by leaving a review in iTunes, Apple Podcasts? Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan at Astra.