Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition #4: Near Earth Asteroids—Why we go, how we find them, and maybe mine them

Episode Date: September 2, 2016

In honor of OSIRIS-REx—NASA’s newest asteroid mission—we explore the policy and history of near-Earth Objects: why NASA explores them, how the government plans to find and defending the planet, and the how policy can keep up with ambitious plans to mine asteroids.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, Space Policy fans. This is the Space Policy edition of Planetary Radio, coming to you once again from the Planetary Society, this special monthly podcast about all things having to do with space policy and advocacy that so many of you seem to be enjoying, and we are very grateful for that. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host and producer of Planetary Radio, joined once again by my colleagues. That's Jason Callahan, the Society's Space Policy Advisor, working out of D.C. full-time. And next to him on my Skype screen, you will have to use your imagination, is Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy.

Gentlemen, welcome back. Hey, Matt. Hey, guys, how are you? I am just doing great. It's exciting to be talking to you once again. We're going to do something a little bit different this time. There's sort of an overarching umbrella topic that we will reveal in a moment, but there are several subtopics within this very important issue, which is one that I really take to heart. It's one that I just,

the Planetary Society cannot be more, cannot be involved enough in the subject of asteroids and exploring them and near-Earth objects. And as I put it on this week's regular show, things that go bump in the night if you're not watching carefully. I hope you guys are as excited as I am. Oh, yeah. I mean, also, I mean, this is kind of in honor of this episode of OSIRIS-REx, the newest planetary science mission from NASA that is, as we record this, about to launch in a week. And so we thought we'd talk all about asteroids and all the kind of the policy of deflection, mitigation, how the U.S. and other international partners deal with that, and also the future of asteroids, right?

Not just exploring them, but maybe mining them for resources. And then also, you know, we have this kind of interesting change in how we've thought of asteroids. And Jason has some really interesting just kind of history of this that we're going to look at of NASA's relationship to asteroids and near-Earth objects, comets. I'll lump in with there as well. Yeah, absolutely. I think when you talk about near-Earth objects, you're talking about anything that comes near the Earth, right? So it's not just asteroids. It's also comets. But these things also exist throughout the solar

system. It's interesting to see the different types of missions required to get to different destinations. And OSIRIS-REx is really interesting in that regard, in that the asteroid that it's going to is actually not that close to the Earth. So we'll talk a little bit about what challenges that presents as opposed to something that is actually close to the Earth. I mean, it'll eventually be close to the Earth, right? I mean, I think we have a flyby coming by in a couple decades and periodically beyond that let's actually should we just talk maybe a little bit about osiris-rex and and how that came to be and then we can kind of go from

there into this bigger issue of planetary defense right absolutely and i will send either of you a dollar or both of you if you can spell out the acronym. Origins Spectral Resource Explorer. Oh, I was so close. All those words are in it. And Regolith Explorer, I think. I think you had me at O. We're going to get a nasty note from Dante Loretta, the PI.

Yeah, you should know this more than us. I only know three-letter acronyms. I don't go beyond that. Or TLAs, as they're known in DC. Yeah, TLAs, exactly. I'm all with that. I'm down with that. Casey, you want to talk about this mission? I'll talk about it a little bit, and I'll throw it over to Jason.

As we've gone through this series, we've talked about different types and sizes of planetary science missions, right? You got your big strategic flagship missions like Mars 2020, the Curiosity rover, Voyager, Viking, the big multi-billion dollar missions. You have your tiny missions, quote unquote tiny, right? Of NASA parlance, your sub half a billion dollar missions, discovery class is what pocket money. Yeah. Pocket money. Yeah. I mean, you know, this is a $4 trillion government that we have. Right. So, you know, it's like a fractional percentage. Then you have this relatively new type of planetary science mission. Right. At the first class, first of its class was was New Horizons. Right. That flew by Pluto. The second one, actually, we just talked about last time. Juno. Right. It was a New Frontiers class mission, a medium-sized mission, just got to Jupiter. And the third mission of this series of missions, of this type of mission, is about to launch as we record this and will have hopefully, cross our fingers, successfully launched by September 8th, I suppose. These are medium-sized missions, right? These are cost capped at roughly a billion

dollars if you include the launch vehicle cost. They are led by an individual, a principal investigator, Dante Loretta, as you mentioned earlier. And they're like the international, they're Oceans 11, right, of the planetary mission world. Like this individual person, they assemble their team of scientists and engineers. They find an industry partner that would build this thing, and they propose to NASA within this funding line that is made available every 10 years or so at the moment.

NASA goes through a rigorous selection process. They compete with other missions. I think this one, do you remember which one this one beat out in terms of its closest competition? They usually select a couple, and they do some additional studies, and I'm blanking on which one they

speed up. So am I, and we did a show about this, so apologies to those folks. Just having to guess, just because the perennial runner-up has been the lunar sample return from the South Pole, the South Aitken Basin, probably, let's say.

Which is being considered again. Yes, right. It's a new frontier, rightitken Basin, probably, let's say. Yeah, which is being considered again. Yes, right. New Frontier, right? Absolutely. Anyway, yes, this is a medium-sized mission, only a billion dollars, but these missions have worked pretty well. Is it fair to say, Jason, can you correct me on this if I'm wrong, New Frontiers, excuse me, New Horizons, Juno, and Osiris-Rex,

the three missions in this line, have all come in at budget or under budget. That's correct. Yeah, no, the cost and schedule performance on these missions has really been extraordinary. They've done a great job. Yeah, amazing, right? And so really, these are kind of these mid-sized missions that can do a little bit more. And this is OSIRIS-REx, of course, the exciting

thing is that it's going to not just go to an asteroid, it's going to go to an asteroid and come back, right? It's going to leave us a little course, the exciting thing is that it's going to not just go to an asteroid, it's going to go to an asteroid and come back, right? It's going to leave us a little sample, as I say, that the most amount of planetary sample returned to the Earth since Apollo, which could be anywhere from 60 grams to 2 kilograms. The next step of New Frontiers as a program line, so we're all very excited, but also for asteroids.

And so this is where I want to throw it over to Jason a little bit, because I don't know if all of you have been paying attention, but there's been quite a few missions to asteroids and comets happening lately. That hasn't always been the case. Yeah, that's absolutely true, that NASA's history with asteroid exploration has been very interesting. The first proposed mission to go to an asteroid or a comet was actually back in the mid 80s, the last time that Halley's Comet came close to the earth or came back around the sun anyways. Halley's Comet comes back into our neighborhood about once every 75 years. The last time was in 1986. And NASA was looking at sending a mission out to Halley's Comet to study it, as were most of the other spacefaring nations on the planet.

Interestingly, this happened during a time that NASA was also investing a lot of money in the space shuttle. They had just confirmed the Hubble Space Telescope and the Galileo mission to Jupiter. And as a result, there wasn't enough money in the budget to actually do a Halley's Comet mission. So NASA did not build a new mission to go to Halley's Comet, though the European Space Agency, the Russian Space Agency, and the Japanese Space Agency all built multiple craft to go. They were all very successful, which was really interesting. One of those proposals to an American proposal to send a mission to Halley's Comet was largely headed by the founding executive director of the Planetary Society, Lou Friedman, when he was at JPL and the great advocate for solar sailing. He had these very ambitious plans to

send a solar sail to the comet. Never happened. No, absolutely. And another founding member of the Planetary Society, Bruce Murray, who was the head of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a number of years, was a huge proponent of a mission to Halley's Comet. And even he was not able to push it through the NASA bureaucracy. Yeah, and they really pushed. I mean, this is like JPL really pushing for this mission. NASA, this is probably to say the lowest point in history of the planetary science program is when they were trying to make this mission happen was in the early 80s. Yeah. So the 1980s in planetary science are often referred to as the lost decade of planetary

science. In the entire decade of the 1980s, we launched a grand total of two planetary science missions, and that was Galileo and Magellan. And both of those were at the end of the decade. So you basically had 10 years without a single launch, and the budgets were much lower than and said, we need a group to advocate for planetary science. And we're here today because of that. Yeah. So thanks to those three guys, right? Yeah. Well, and what's interesting too is that it wasn't just the fact that it was a comet. It was the fact that it was Halley's Comet, right? It was the most famous comet in human history. And NASA just kind of, yeah, what are you going to do? And I think you ended up getting Giotto was the most famous comet in human history. And NASA just kind of, yeah, what are you going to do? And I think you ended up getting Giotto was the ESA spacecraft that went.

And then I forget there was a Russian spacecraft. There were actually two. It was Vega 1 and 2, I think. Yeah, that's where all the pictures we have today. And so interesting just kind of change in the self-perception of what NASA's, in a sense, responsibility is or leadership role is in terms of planetary science has really changed. And also, I just put a little side point. I look this up.

I'll get angry emails about this if I'm wrong. So please send it to me. But I think the first NASA spacecraft to ever visit an asteroid was Galileo on the way to Jupiter. It flew by a couple of them, actually, Gaspra and Ida and Dactyl. Is that correct, Jason? Those are the first- Past an asteroid, I think that's correct. There was actually a very interesting little episode having to do with Halley's Comet. NASA had a spacecraft already in space called the ISEE,

the International Sun Earth Explorer 3, that they repurposed and sent past a comet six months before any of the other agencies were able to get a comet or get a spacecraft, a Halley's Comet, basically so NASA could say that they got to a comet first. Yeah, it wasn't intended to go past the comet. So the data that they got, you know, the instruments were not ideal for going past the comet. So the data they got was less than optimal. But you're definitely correct about Galileo, Casey, that it did pass those asteroids. instruments were not ideal for going past the comet. So the data they got was less than optimal. But you're definitely correct about Galileo, Casey, that it did pass those asteroids. You know, not terribly close, but it did return some pretty good science. And so, but this is, so Jason brought this up to me the other day, though, as we were talking about this episode. So we had this, what, the first 60s, 70s, 80s, the first three decades of planetary science, you did not

have NASA selecting missions to actually go to asteroids, right? Or really, or comets or any near-Earth objects beyond the moon, I suppose. And I actually had a question for you, Jason, because since then, we've had quite a few. Why don't you give us a quick summary of what's happened since, and then I'll pose you my question that I asked. Sure, sure. In the early 90s, NASA started the small mission program called Discovery. And these are the missions that Casey referred to earlier that are budgeted at under half a billion dollars, and they're competed missions. And that line has turned out to be very, very beneficial to the asteroid and comet communities in space science.

And out of basically 10 discovery programs that we've had, not including InSight, which hasn't launched yet, not including Kepler, which has been moved to the astrophysics line, we've had 10 missions launch. Of those, five of them have been to asteroids or comets. Two have been to Mars, two have been to the moon, and one was a solar wind explorer. So this has sort of become the asteroid and comet line for exploration in NASA, which is really interesting and very different. And it was opened up by this competitive program that was started in the 90s. And I think a part of that is because asteroids, because they can fly by us and because they tend to be small and they have no atmosphere, right, to land.

If you want to, I mean, I guess Eros near landed on one, I guess, technically, eventually. But you also have, they're small, the gravity wells aren't big, there's no atmosphere. And so they're just more accessible, right? And they're relatively close to the sun. So when you're capped at a relatively low cost, you know, you can't decide this is always the problem with this mission line. It's really hard to get out far, right, to Saturn or Jupiter or anything that takes a long time to get there. And so just based on the amount of, in a sense, the accessibility, this is why Mars tends to get so many missions too,

I think, right? Yeah, is that it's closer than the outer planet so it doesn't cost as much to get there and it doesn't take as much time. Yeah. Yeah. So my question was, my question to you, Jason, was I was wondering this shift, right? This wasn't until the 90s when this program started that you really started to see NASA sending missions to asteroids.

And since Discovery is a mission line that is actually, it's proposed by scientists rather than kind of decided by the strategic planning committee with inside NASA that would otherwise choose the flagships. Do you think that's reflective of when NASA thinks of a big flagship expensive mission? It does not want to go to an asteroid because of the it's just that they don't think it would have the same public relations impact or the same kind of bang for your buck? Why do you think that is? Or is that a connection there that the science is driving the missions to asteroids versus the strategic planning of NASA not ever selecting an asteroid mission before? That's a really good question. I think there are actually a number of factors driving that. I think in the early days of NASA, we didn't know very much about asteroids. So planning a mission to one, I mean, we didn't

even really know where most of them were. And so planning a mission to get to one was really difficult. And we'll talk about the detection of asteroids here in a little bit with the planetary defense stuff. But we really, you didn't know where to send them in the early days, but you could find a planet pretty easily. As time went on, NASA certainly leaned towards the larger missions. You saw this all the way through the 70s, that the missions just basically got bigger and bigger and bigger. It's one of the reasons that the community started asking NASA for a small missions program. As the missions got bigger, they were spacing them out further and further as well because you just didn't have enough money to pay for multiple big missions. As far as the science goes, what's really

interesting to me is that these missions to asteroids and comets also sort of coincides with the increasing reliance by NASA and the government on the National Academies for their decadal surveys. So you're starting to see the science community have more and more and more of a voice in what the potential destinations are, what the interesting scientific questions are that NASA should be asking. And as a result, asteroids and comets have gotten a lot more attention, I think. And the big picture there, right, with asteroids and comets is that they, I think that the standard science thing is they're these time capsules back to the earliest parts of the solar system formation, right? These are leftover rubble, a lot of earliest parts of the solar system formation, right?

These are leftover rubble, a lot of them, from when the solar system came to be. This is with Bennu, right? It's an old carbonaceous chondrite asteroid. That is absolutely what Dante Loretta likes to talk about, that this is taking us back to where things started, because it is expected to be relatively pristine, looking back at the formation of the solar system, why it's so important to go there.

Of course, the other reason Dante would say it's important to go is because we need to learn about these near-Earth objects that threaten our planet. Oh, that's our segue. Yes, that is the segue. Before we segue,

I want to say just one more thing about mission-like. I just love how these missions come together. To Jason's point about how these are developing more and more, the next round of small discovery missions are currently being considered. They selected five for further study. And I believe two of those are missions to asteroids, potential missions to asteroids. We have one that would go to an iron psyche, I think, right, which would go to a core

of an asteroid, a metallic asteroid. And another one would go and explore Trojan asteroids out by the orbit of Jupiter. And so much to exactly what we're talking about, we have a strong potential for further missions to these asteroids. To this point, OSIRIS-REx has been sort of the exception to the rule, right? It's not a discovery mission. This is in the New Frontiers line. So it's a larger class mission going to an asteroid. The Trojan asteroid mission that you mentioned, and I think there was one other, are also being proposed at a larger budget level

for the next New Frontiers announcement of opportunity as well. So it's an interesting question. Are we reaching the point in science of asteroids and comets? You know, we've basically picked all the low-hanging fruit, and now we need larger, more powerful instruments to answer the questions that we have about these bodies. It may be that Discovery has been the home to the asteroid and comet community for a long time, but now maybe they're moving into the New Frontiers line, and maybe at some point they'll end up with a flagship mission. Yeah, and I guess we'll look for that the next time we go through a decadal survey process happening here in the next couple years.

Lots of great science to be learned from these objects that share the solar system with us. But, of course, some of them pose a threat to our planet. Let's talk about these near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets, the ones that we've realized we need to watch out for. Planetary defense, right? A very optimistic way to approach the problem of being slammed with a giant Earth-killing asteroid or comet. And this is really fascinating to me. So, you know, I didn't know a ton about this before we really started prepping for this episode i mean beyond i mean the society has a lot of work in it but the the specific advocacy we do tends not to focus on this as much and so it was fascinating going into this and something that i realized and let's just start it with with this kind of fact that actually kind of goes in with

our last discussion about nasa's increasing focus on on asteroids through its missions in the 90s, was that we really didn't have a sustained, focused effort to search for potentially threatening asteroids to the Earth until really the 1990s, the late 1990s. There was a few smaller surveys back earlier. But I mean, the government didn't really start focusing on this till like 98, I believe, was the first one written into law by Congress. And that was very surprising to me. This is a really new or very recent phenomenon that we're looking at here. For a phenomenon that actually has killed entire lines of species in the past. You know, we have no real dinosaurs, excepting birds, I guess, because of an asteroid collision with the

Earth. This is a once in every, I don't remember what the statistics. Depends how big it is. Yeah. 100 million years, I think, for an Earth killer. You know, it's like a power law plot. You can kind of look at the amount of things that hit you. But again, yeah, this idea that this is really recent.

Even at the beginning of the space age age it took us 30 years to really figure this out and i guess we didn't even know it was a chick-a-lub is that how you say it the one that killed the the impact you got it right very well done yeah thank you that was really what was that really confirmed in the 80s you know and that was really the final kind of a straw in terms of the amount of scientific evidence preponderance of evidence for that theory. And I think then it took a while for that to matriculate through your various policy layers. And, you know, a variety of studies started happening in the early 90s. And then you had this, let's actually look at the congressional history of this. 98, you had this thing called the Space Guard Survey that Congress demanded,

or I guess they don't really demand, they write until you have to, put into legislation that NASA had to discover, basically, they're looking for the Earth killer asteroids. They had to find 90% of kilometer or larger diameter asteroids by the year 2010. And comparatively, the funding for this program was really low, wasn't it? Oh my gosh, yeah, minuscule. We're talking $4 million a year. And that was actually after, I don't know what it was actually before 2003. That's 2003 through 2009. NASA spent all

of $4 million a year basically paying for some telescope time to look for these Earth killer asteroids. And this was at a time when NASA's budget was actually in relatively good shape. Yeah, which is just, again, just kind of shy. This goes back to the whole strange psychology around planetary defense and asteroids, right? I saw someone refer to it as the zero times infinity problem, right? It's like a very low probability, but when it inevitably happens, it is a rather large impact, so to speak. The issue here, right right is how do you how do you properly prepare for something like that i mean these are basically step functions of disaster right in terms of plotting over time i was reading a study by the national academies

they they worked out some actuarial tables like oh it's roughly the equivalent of 91 deaths per year if you average out over tens of millions of years with the amount of it, which puts it at way less than people falling off of ladders, right? Somebody was really bored one afternoon. Yeah. There were some great actuarial people who were kind of making this point at the last Planetary Defense Conference, which is something we can talk about later, but at least potential city killer events roughly every hundred years. I mean, that's pretty bad. I mean, it would take a while to get over the loss of Paris or New York or Moscow. Or middle of the Pacific, right? I mean, that's the problem. We just never know when these

will happen. And it's so variable, the impact of where they hit. Yeah. And let's not forget, this is a real world issue. I mean, meteorite hit Russia, not what? Chelyabinsk, right? Yeah, and fortunately no one was hurt, but it actually did property damage, right? Oh, no, no, no. Actually, there were a lot of people hurt. Excuse me, I meant no one was killed, but yes, yes. 1,100 people were hurt.

Mostly because they ran to the window to look at the pretty fireball, and then the glass broke when the shockwave hit. But tremendous amount of damage considering they got off lucky because it did explode fairly high up. Really what we're talking about when we're talking about planetary defense right now is just looking for any potential threats. I mean, that's really what we're focused on, we as being NASA and the nation and international partners, right? That is the primary amount of money. And so from 2000, as we talked about, we had this charge by Congress to find all these planet killers.

Fortunately, none were coming our way. I think they found about a thousand of them. And they have these statistics they can run. They found at this point about 95% of all of those potential threatening kilometer or larger asteroids that they think are out there. Pretty good. And we're good, right? None of them are coming our way. Then in 2005, we had new legislation in the NASA Authorization Act.

So we've talked about authorization versus appropriation in the past, right? Appropriation funds things, gives money year to year. Authorization, broader policy goals notably does not give money though they recommend it in 2005 nasa was directed to find 90 of all regionally destructive asteroids those are defined roughly as 140 meters or larger there are way more of those yeah and they'll definitely put a crimp in your day. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, these aren't even city killer, right? These are regional disasters. After they put this in the law, in the authorization bill, they provided the other part of Congress, the appropriators gave exactly zero more dollars with which to find these.

Yeah. So they added the capabilities that they wanted NASA to pursue, but they didn't give them any resources to do so. This is kind of your classic division between authorizers and appropriators, right? You can, when we talk about Congress tells NASA to do whatever, you know, it's a very broad term. You can have different parts of Congress telling NASA to do completely different things. And of course the administration. And so we had $4 million. I mean, they just didn't increase it. And so they were slowly looking for these. But these are much, much, much harder to find, right? There's an order of magnitude smaller. There's many order of magnitudes, more of them to find. They were just not making great progress.

So that was basically the story at NASA for a number of years. And then oddly enough, it was directions in the human spaceflight program that sort of changed the definition of resources for the asteroid detection program. In 2011, the White House cancels the Constellation Program. Just to correct you, this is 2010 talking about the 2011 budget. So this is all happening in 2000. Oh, gotcha. Right, right. Okay. So it's all basically the same timeframe. As the president is canceling the constellation program and human spaceflight, Congress is also directing NASA to look for asteroids or continue to look for asteroids. The president in redefining the direction of the human spaceflight program, sort of offhandedly in a speech mentions that we're going to send astronauts to an asteroid sometime in the 2020s. Unfortunately, at the time, we didn't know what

asteroid astronauts would be able to go to. So this became a real problem for NASA. They had to find an asteroid if they were going to send an astronaut to it. And suddenly the funding for asteroid detection started to step up in a pretty dramatic fashion. It quintupled, roughly quintupled. It went from 4 million-ish a year to about 20 million. It was a nice confluence of events, because this was, you had in 2010, you also had a National Academy's report come out looking at the state of asteroid detection. And it basically said, this goal that Congress set back in 2005, no chance in hell we're going to make this. That goal is to find 90% of these smaller asteroids

by 2020. That was not happening. So you had the power of a report mixed in with a more practical, immediate need of a part of NASA that tends to get far more political attention than finding asteroids, right? Just for planetary defense, it became imperative for the future of the administration's vision for human spaceflight. Well, you better find some asteroids you can send people to. Which really says a lot about our priorities, right? That an asteroid could come and kill us all, and that's not really a big deal. But we need some place to send an astronaut to.

Then let's start spending some money on that quickly. Right. Well, I mean, and this is the whole funny thing about this field, honestly, is this idea of priority. So and just real quickly, we'll say that didn't stop there in 2014 when they or 2013, we had another confluence of events, we had the Chelyabinsk impact, we had the announcement of the asteroid redirect mission which was the way to kind of reach the president hit the president's goals of visiting an asteroid without actually sending astronauts to go visit an asteroid in asteroids original orbit and so you needed to find these small asteroids you could potentially move into lunar space guess what happened you doubled the near-Earth object observation program budget,

so it went from $20 to $40 million in another year. So you got another jump in funding because of this confluence of Chelyabinsk and more immediate needs of the human spaceflight program. $4 million a year to $40 million a year. And that's actual money at NASA, right? That's a small mission annual budget right there. That's a discovery mission budget every year. Done up by a factor of 10 in just a matter of years. Still, you will not reach this goal of finding all of these regional killer asteroids, regionally destructive asteroids by 2020. You can look at the statistics. They have actually some really nice plots on JPL's Near Earth Observation Program Office website. But we found about,

I think, I'm trying to remember exactly off the top of my head, around 15 or so percent of all these asteroids at a rate that is definitely not going to reach our goal by 2020. And there's the problem is, again, they're small, you need a lot of telescope time. But also you have things like the sun gets in the way you have to I mean really the answer is you have to have a dedicated space telescope then we're talking about what's the right term uh realer money more real money walking around money yeah yeah walking around money because then you have to compete with other priorities in the agency and this is an interesting consequence here look at this we're back to the discovery program so i should have said said, I said two, I think three, because NEOCAM is one of the possible discovery missions that is being

studied right now. That is a dedicated space-based telescope that would search for asteroids right around the orbit of Venus. They would find within four years, they would find 60% of all of these regionally killer asteroids. And that's a mission out of JPL, our friend at the Society, Amy Meinzer. But of course, it's just in competition right now, the NEOCAM Explorer. I want to mention there are some very effective, far more effective than what was being done years ago, the automated whole sky surveys like the Catalina Sky Survey, which are doing a terrific job. And there are still a lot of very talented, I always say so-called amateur astronomers, who have devoted their lives, or at least the dark hours of their

lives, to not just finding, but now increasingly characterizing these asteroids. Because it's not enough just to find them, you've got to observe them over time to determine their orbit, and then figure out what they're made of. Because, you know, one that's made entirely out of nickel and iron is probably going to do a worse job on your town than one made out of carbonaceous material. So there is progress. But as you've said, there's a long ways to go. Part of the difficulty in this is that, you know, NASA's science program asks scientific

questions. And this isn't really an overly compelling scientific question when put against some of the other priorities at the agency. So from a science standpoint, you've got other things that you want to go look at. But from a safety standpoint, this is clearly a much bigger issue than whether or not there's life on Mars. So here's a question. Why isn't the, let's say, Air Force or Homeland

Security or some sort of national security agency ponying up the money for something like this? This would be a great place for a segue into our last little discussion topic here. But you're talking about space situational awareness, which is something that the Air Force is very interested in for the safety of their satellites, for Earth-observing satellites, for weather satellites. Industry is interested in this for communications purposes. We don't have a good space situational awareness system at the moment. As a matter of fact, the Air Force shut down the space fence a couple of years ago in anticipation of replacing it with another system. And that system is not yet in operation. Our ability to detect things even in low earth orbit is not very good at the moment,

comparatively. When we were doing some research for this show, I started looking at some of the companies that are interested in asteroid mining. And one of the things that I sort of noticed as I was tooling around on their websites, not many of them are actually doing any asteroid mining at the moment because they're trying to find the asteroids that they would go and mine. So what they're really doing is in a sort of privatized sense, they're doing this initial space situational awareness and asteroid detection work. So it's sort of bubbling up in the private sector, which I found really fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. That ARCID series of CubeSats from Planetary Resources.

But just in the last few weeks, their competitor, Deep Space Industries, has announced that they really want to go to an asteroid and do some sample return, all as a private mission. It goes back to some of the conversations we've had about commercial space opening up because of the ability to do this kind of stuff so cheaply nowadays. I want to finish up one more thing on the planetary defense, and then let's move wholesale on to the planetary resource and mining stuff, because that is a really fun topic to talk about. So far, we've mainly talked about the detection part, that we need to find these asteroids. This is a great example of what Jason and I talk about a lot to members of the Planetary Society, but also to policymakers and people at NASA. Look at the advantage of when you align your program goals with broader goals of either

the agency that you're in or national priorities, right? You saw these big jumps in your funding for NEO searches when you were able to tie it to the human spaceflight program and broader administration goals. That's just one point to think about. Again, you're looking for these things. Great. We're finding them. We're characterizing them. We have a whole slew of amateur, as you said, amateur astronomers adding to this, refining the orbits. But then what do you do if something is actually coming your way? And so there's a small portion of this 40, actually now $50 million a year. There's a small portion of this money that goes to deflection analysis.

Classically, you look at these, what, I think there's four types. You have the old nuclear weapon, you know, Armageddon style, try to blow it up. The Bruce Willis technique. Yeah, the Willis technique, I believe, after its creator. yeah yeah the willis technique i believe that after its creator um you have the uh kind of you ablate heat up or or paint or something on like bright side on one side of the asteroid to get solar pressure to try to push it out of the way gravity track the paintball technique right paintball technique you got your tractor your gravity tractor where you put some big mass next to it and and just by the mutual attraction of gravity, you change the orbit slightly

so it won't hit Earth. And then you have the old slam, a heavy thing into it to move it away that's not explosive, your kinetic impactor, which we've actually done. This has actually been tested by- Deep Impact. As a discovery mission, yes, Deep Impact, back in the 2000s. And the Planetary Society got somewhat involved with this by funding some early research on what is still known as laser bees, which is flying out a fleet of little spacecraft, who knows, maybe CubeSats, with solar-powered lasers that would fire at one side of an asteroid. matter that it's rotating because they could always fire at it from one angle and ablate that material and just the outgassing would divert the asteroid, change its trajectory if you got there

soon enough to keep it from slamming into our planet. There are great variations on all of these. Hey, I want to mention before you go back into it, the Shoemaker-Neo program that I should have mentioned when I talked about amateur astronomers who are part of this effort, because there will be a whole new cycle of Shoemaker-Neo grants opening up in the next two or three months, I believe. So people can check that out at planetary.org. But it has had some really great accomplishments with the amateurs that it has funded, enabling them to do their job or to do a better job of finding and characterizing these objects.

Good plug, Matt. I appreciate that plug. Thanks for keeping us honest. Bruce Betts is going to thank me as well. Yes. Yeah, right. He slipped you a 20 for that reference. But you said something, actually, I really want to focus on here.

You said, if there is time right all of these scenarios to deflect an asteroid require a certain amount of time uh in advance to prepare right the more time you have the better right the smaller uh course change you have to make but also i mean we're talking about time just to get to an asteroid right depending on how far away it is you're talking about at least a year if you have a a spacecraft ready to go. Two years for OSIRIS-REx to reach Bennu. Two years, you're getting, yeah, and with an Earth flyby. So NASA does plan for this. And there's actually, it's a pretty high level task force within the federal government that's led by the Office of Science and Technology Policy in the White House and you have nasa is involved in this fema the

federal emergency management administration uh homeland security there's this big multi-agency task force and here i have it written down here so everyone can just remember this and you'll be a space policy pro pureg is the name planetary Planetary Impact Emergency Response Working Group. Flows right off the tongue. That's an active part. This is part of the recommendations that came from that National Academies report. Again, the power of a report from 2010. And they sit around and they, well, they don't just sit around.

They get together and they try to think about, game out these scenarios. What do we do should an asteroid be discovered to be coming our way? And the answer, for the most part, is to what they call very euphemistically the civil defense method, which is build something over your head and try not to die strategy. It's just like,

crap, it's going to hit us, and that just happens. And we try to survive it and basically manage the public's reaction to it, try to save lives, prepare for a big disaster. That is basically the answer that we have with our current amount of funding and technology that we put into this situation. I love that.

$50 million a year for detection and our mitigation strategy is duck and cover. Yeah, it's a duck and cover. Well, it worked in the 50s and 60s. Yeah, we're just fine. And there's a little thing. We Well, it worked in the 50s and 60s. Yeah, we were just fine. And there's a little thing I just, we'll link to this in the show notes. There's a kind of discussion. It's kind of fascinating.

I mean, they get together and game out scenarios and, you know, a lot of it, but they have a bunch of scenarios put together. And there's a little nugget of information, and I wish I could find this. But you know that the national warning system, you know, that emergency alert system that you hear tested on the radio every now and then? The EAN. I'm a radio guy. The Emergency Alert Network or EAS. They changed it to Emergency Alert System. Yeah. They have.

I've learned FEMA has pre-written a script for that system on the event of an asteroid barreling right at Earth. And with like to fill in certain details of it. I really want to know what that script sounds like because it's been written. They prepared for this. It's kind of amazing. So the government does prepare for this stuff, right? This is part of their homeland security disaster management. It's definitely not the top amount of time that they take up, but this is something that they do. That's really, I think, just acknowledges the amount, amount basically with the amount of risk we're willing to accept which is what are

we really going to do well if we find something we'll throw a bunch of money probably at it but until then we'll just prepare to be in a disaster and that's what you do when you have these like one in a million year events. You count on a crash program to save you in the event that something happens. Yeah, that's really interesting. I want to mention Lindley Johnson, who now has the Planetary Defense Coordination Office within NASA. He talked about this new office in our February 2nd show from earlier this year. Lindley, of course, can be counted on to attend the Planetary Defense Conference

every other year somewhere around the world. That's something the Planetary Society has been deeply involved with, and I've covered the last couple of times. Bill Nye was there two programs ago. The last one in Italy, they repeated a sort of tabletop exercise, a simulation on the last day of the conference. And it is absolutely fascinating because you have scientists who have devoted their lives to studying these objects, and you've got people from FEMA and other social services

around the world who are presented with this scenario. We have detected this rock. It appears to be coming our way, and it looks like we've got maybe, oh, let's say 10 years. And then as the scenario develops, you get more and more information until finally you learn, as we did in the last exercise, that this big rock is going to take out Dhaka, Bangladesh, the capital of Bangladesh. Tens of millions of people living in that city. And you get into the policy conflicts between nations and cultures as to what can be done about this and what maybe nothing should be done because there is actually some thinking that no matter what public officials do, it could make the matter worse,

at least for some of the people who are under threat. Do you send up a deflector? Okay, do we then deflect it from DACA to, oh, Beijing? Chinese might not be thrilled. It is absolutely fascinating to see the policy and political ramifications of trying to deal with this entirely separate from the technical and scientific challenges. Matt, that's such a great point because a lot, so much of what we talk about, I think when people talk about asteroid, particularly deflection or mitigating a threat, you just assume that there's going to be a coordinated world response, probably led by the United States to take care of it. But that is no guarantee, right? Like, what if there is a huge amount of disagreement between

the Chinese and American nations in terms of the best way to deflect something? And they both send missions out, right? I mean, who's going to stop them? This is a really fascinating problem. Or, yeah, as you said, you deflect it to a different city, or you deflect it the wrong way, or it fails, or do you have backups? It's a world problem on a scale. I mean, I think in the report from the National Academies, it said maybe this is kind of similar to a World War II-style threat or world mobilization to a threat. But notably, that didn't turn out too well for a lot of people. And talking about the military aspects, too, that brings up yet another specter on all of this, which is basically any of these active mitigation techniques that we're talking about

could easily be weaponized. So if the U.S. is going to take the lead in this and they have technology that they could use, well, they probably don't want the chinese or the indians or the russians to know how to build these systems which adds a whole new bureaucratic layer to something that needs to be done very very quickly right yeah if it wasn't for itar we could have saved the world right exactly itar i know i was thinking about that same thing like well what about the nuclear weapons ban you know in space it's like well they'd probably still send a nuclear weapon to divert the asteroid and deal with the ramifications later but there's one more thing I want to bring up with this in terms of practical issues that really threaten this and then we can move on to asteroid mining we have this huge political issue that would have to be worked out and there is some work being done with this at how do you say it Jason at the UN Is some work being done with this? How do you say it, Jason, at the UN?

Copuos. Committee on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. Thank you. Thank you. I couldn't come up with the on. It's an advisory council at the UN. It was originally put together for the International Geophysical Year back in 1957. And this is the body within the United Nations through which all space efforts or space treaties, space agreements are activated through. So Capu starts in 1957. Then in the late 60s, you had a series of treaties that are known

collectively as the Outer Space Treaties that were signed by most of the nations on the Earth and are the basis for space law to this day. Oh, and we're going to so talk about the outer space. Oh, you bet. What a great segue we're headed into here. Oh, but OK, one more thing. Let me just say one more thing, because I thought this was really this is something that I just took out of reading about this in terms of defense. Right.

And we're really serious about asteroid defense, which we are clearly not, because we were we would right now have on the shelf at some clean room somewhere, a kinetic impactor spacecraft just ready to go, right? We would have already built it. We would have already tested it and designed it. We should probably have a couple, right? So we don't have to blow five to 10 years frantically figuring out how to build one for the first time as an asteroid is barreling down at us right i mean if we were truly serious about having our dotted i's and

cross t's in terms of our planetary defense we would at least have something ready to go and i think because that's the real problem here is that not only do you have to burn time building it and and getting out there but you also you have to earn time building it and getting out there, but you also then have to think about the launch mass, right? If you need to send something really heavy for a gravity tractor or for an impactor,

you are going to be limited by the size of the rocket, right? And your rocket equation stuff. And you can't just make it arbitrarily huge. And if it's a big asteroid, you need a big amount of mass to to slam into it on the tyranny of the rocket equation right yes and so so this is one of this is kind of a roundabout way of going to this is an interesting consequence if

we're also trying to be serious and and i'm just going to give this one to the uh space launch system the sls uh team as a a reason for them to pitch themselves you should probably have a heavy lift launch vehicle that works that that is ready to go so you can launch the largest amount of mass to deflect an asteroid should you need that you don't want to assemble that in space you need to get that moving you need to get it moving fast you need to put a big old hunk of metal on that to slam into an asteroid you will need a heavy lift launch vehicle. So there you go, the SLS team, I guess Falcon Heavy or the BFG rocket, whatever they want to make it, BFR, excuse me, the BFR. You know, that's another consequence, right? You can only, and that's something that the report looked at, like you can only launch

a few thousand kilograms on a Delta IV Heavy that would go and intercept an asteroid in its native orbit. So you need a big rocket for this let me leave a leave you with this as we head out of planetary defense most of the experts at the planetary defense conference including the guys at jpl who know what they're doing think that a nuke is going to be the way to go not to break up the asteroid but to explode it uh on the right side of it and deflect it, thereby avoiding the need for a tremendous amount of mass. But again, you got to get out there early. There was all that talk you were beginning to say about treaties in space and deciding

how the resources in space ought to be used or how they can be exploited for the good of humankind or for profit. And I'd say that that takes us into our next topic. Yeah. The Outer Space Treaty, the first of the Outer Space Treaties, covered property rights in outer space. And it basically said that no nation can claim sovereignty over bodies in the interstellar medium.

The idea that you could go to the moon and plant a flag and claim that the moon was yours, basically the entire planet agreed that we weren't going to do that. The good news about the Outer Space Treaty is that you had almost every nation on Earth sign it. The bad news is that there's really no enforcement mechanism. It's left to each individual signee to determine how they are going to adhere to their international obligations. Each government sets up their own regulations over their federal space program and also over the private market that exists in any given country. Any individual company has to operate under these regulations that are put in place so that the United States or that China or that Russia

can adhere to their international agreement in the Space Treaty. So that sort of sets the stage for all of these groups coming up, these new private space enterprises that are looking at mining asteroids or using other property in space or using other resources in space and claiming them as property for profit. It's a really tenuous arrangement as it stands. I wrote down Article Two of the Outer Space Treaty that that is the pertinent section here. Right. So we can look at this. It says for celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use of occupation or by any other means. Right. It's very clear that it really is intending to talk about national appropriation.

And so people think about, well, does that apply to an individual? Does it apply to a company? This is why you have legal scholars who specialize in space law, because this gets very complicated very quickly. And it's also been, there's been an interesting development just in the last year, where you have the passage of the Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act by the U.S. Congress, which specifies that, yes, individual United States citizens can engage in the commercial exploration and commercial recovery of space resources, free from harmful interference in accordance with the international obligations of the United States. So you have the Congress basically saying, sure, individuals, yeah, go for it. And then they acted just so they clarified at the beginning, just so you know,

the United States engaged in the commercial recovery of an asteroid resource. We're still the United States is still in accordance with the Outer Space Treaty. So they just kind of state that it is not a problem and you can go for it. But again, I think a lot of the thing is, as I said, what's the enforcement mechanism, right? And that's where the interesting consequence is. If you claim an asteroid, you're an organization, you go out there, your planetary resources, and you say, this is my asteroid. Who's going to stop anyone else landing on that asteroid too? That's the enforcement. And this is the interesting consequence of that. Like, does your country put trade sanctions on another country that landed on it? Does that then imply that you're making a national claim? Everything kind of goes up to this national Leviathan that's going to enforce your claim. Or you have like space cowboys or something and you're and you're like actively destroying other people making land on your claim.

claim. Right. Which actually goes against other provisions in the space treaty. So the other avenue that you could pursue would be in the courts, but then it becomes a question of whose courts, right? Which legal system do you sue for your, your property rights? And how does the court then enforce their judgment? If it's a Chinese company that lands on planetary resources, asteroid and planetary resources sues them in the United States. Well, maybe the Chinese don't care about that. Right. Interesting. I was talking to this field geologist not too long ago who specializes in diamonds. And he used to work for De Beers and went off on his own and formed smaller companies to scout out and discover new diamond resources in Central Africa and places that haven't been

explored yet. And he would tell me that whenever they would strike diamond, basically, and they would find diamonds, word would get out in days, no matter how deep into the bush that they were, how far from any cities they were, people would hear about it and start showing up in days to take the diamonds to. That could happen when you have a strike at rich on an asteroid. They're able to exercise force, I guess. And he was a little vague about what how they dissuaded people from coming back. But they were able to exercise some sort of show of force or way to push people away and to tell them not to come back.

It's a lot harder to do in space, just like everything associated with mining is. But it's a really fascinating situation where we're, you know, the Outer Space Treaty, Jason, that was written to help avoid conflict in space, right? Territorial conflict in space. Yeah, so it was written in 1967. And it was basically, it's a bilateral treaty, even though you have signatories, you know, across the globe, it's basically it's a it's a bilateral treaty, even though you have signatories across the globe. It's basically a treaty trying. It's the United States and Russia trying to limit each other's strategic advantages in space. Yeah. Nowhere were they thinking about private companies prospecting for resources in addition to that. That was nowhere on the radar. Right. That was so far fantasy. I don't even know what they thought about in terms of fantasy. So I think what we're seeing here is this maturation of the commercial or completely

private, right? This is the stuff that we're talking about. So let's actually maybe jump back and talk about our two main players here. We got Planetary Resources, which is based in Washington State, my beloved Washington State. We also have Deep Space Industries, which I think is, is that down in Florida? I think they're in Texas. I'll look it up. Yeah, and they're both, but what's interesting,

both these companies have private venture capital. You know, there's, I mean, I guess you have the country of Luxembourg has signed an agreement with Deep Space Industries now, but effectively you're not using taxpayer money in the United States to support these companies that are trying to build a very interesting case for a long-term business of mining precious metals and other resources from these asteroids. You have, with planetary resources, you have some

really big-time investors from Google and Intel and other, you know, a lot of Silicon Valley money. As I said, you get the country of Luxembourg supporting deep space industries. And it's a lot of it's just predicated that in 30 years, you're going to have a windfall of profit. And they actually have some very clever ways to make money leading up to that with remote sensing here on the earth and patents and laser communication and all sorts of interesting things like that. But the goal, right, is to have these robotic machines grab precious metals. And I think even also what's precious in space is pretty much anything you don't have to launch from the ground, water ice, which you can turn into fuel and refuel spacecraft in orbit with it. You're able to resupply and refuel spacecraft. So it's a really interesting area. And it's even more interesting

in that the government doesn't have to spend taxpayer money on this risk, right? We're actually at a point where the industry, in a sense, is mature enough that there's enough money sloshing around. You can just basically say as long as they have the legal, I think what you saw from this commercial space launch competitiveness act was even though if this isn't, I think, broadly, if this throws up some gray areas in terms of the Outer Space Treaty, they can tell, the investors can tell that the United States government is supportive of this endeavor from Apollo. They're not going to tell them after they've invested millions of dollars that they can't do this. I think that's really why you saw this legislation pass. We're all wrong about DSI.

Their corporate headquarters is, get this, at the NASA Ames Research Park in Northern California, basically Silicon Valley, though they also, not surprisingly, now have an office in Luxembourg. You know, I wonder if we aren't headed into, and I'll be the first to coin this phrase, I hope, the era of the new 49ers, except it'll be 2049 and they'll be staking claims out there in the deep solar system. That's good, Matt. I like that. That is good. It brings up an interesting question too, right? There's a difference between staking a claim and actually bringing stuff back to the earth for commercial resale. The interesting thing about these business cases is they're all predicated on an enormous amount of technology development that no one's really even started yet and we were talking earlier

about planetary resources they're still trying to detect asteroids much less go out claim them figure out what's on them figure out how to mine them figure out how to bring the stuff back figure out how to either process it in space if it's water ice or figure out how to get it back to the earth if it's metal or something that's of financial value on earth. So there are a whole slew of questions between here and actual planetary mining or asteroid mining. But in the meantime, it'll be really interesting to see how these companies

make ends meet until they have those capabilities. You know, if you're, like we mentioned with planetary resources, if you're able to detect all of these asteroids, you can also detect other things in Earth orbit or in space. So it becomes sort of a de facto space situational awareness array. And maybe they could rent that capability to the Air Force or to companies who have satellites that they want to make sure aren't hit by space debris. So there are a lot of interesting market niches, and it's totally unclear where this is going to lead at this point. Yeah, and you can see that. And again, I think they're already pivoting a little bit towards hyper multispectral, hyperspectral observations of the Earth, which has a quite a bit of market,

private market already in existence that would buy that information. I think they're going to be going after patents that, you know, they have a business models. And I think the interesting, as you bring up, the amount of technical difficulty is so great. The question here is, is it achievable even with these these leaner companies, within the amount of money available through private venture capital? You can raise quite a bit of money if you're smart about it. You look at Uber's raised billions of dollars, right? But NASA spends tens of billions of dollars a year on a variety of things. All of these are going to fall behind because I believe OSIRIS-REx is technically

going to be the first mining spacecraft in, uh, to an asteroid. I don't think they're going after the resources because they're technically, you know, going to grab some of these samples. Oh, maybe there'll be some diamonds in that two kilograms of stuff they bring back. Hey, you know, it pays for itself, right? But, uh, you know, it's a hard thing to do. And I, it's one of those situations where what's is not whether or not even i hope that they do it i think that would just be astonishing that would be awesome if they did it but the amazing thing to me is that we were even talking about it that it's not fantastical right this isn't some crackpot somewhere writing frantic

screeds on the internet these are are groups of people, highly capable, highly technical, capable people, some of the best people who used to work at JPL and NASA and private industry and software, coming together and making a real attempt at it. We've never been there in human history before. And we're seriously, again, we're seeing the consequence in terms of policy has to change. We're running up against the limits of what policy was defined of Cold War strategic policy limiting, you know, potential threats in space. Now we have to expand that because we have private investment where the technology could theoretically change. This will be a good test of what's the bureaucratic overhead cost to NASA. And if you can eliminate that, how much more nimble can you be and how much less money do you actually need to be successful? Yeah, and can you mitigate the risk that is often overcome by that bureaucracy?

That's a key factor that a lot of people... Yeah, exactly. There's a reason. OSIRIS-REx has a very good chance of succeeding, despite the fact it's the first time NASA's ever tried to do this, because they spent almost a billion dollars buying down that risk, right? That's right. The solution that you're seeing a lot of these private companies go is in swarms of smaller spacecraft that can accept a certain amount of loss, and you'll just make up for it in your sheer numbers. A higher expected rate of failure.

Yeah. you'll just make up for it in your sheer numbers. A higher expected rate of failure. Yeah. And this is, I think, why it's going to be so exciting to see if deep space industries can pull off this asteroid mission that they have just come up with, which is basically on a shoestring budget compared to anything that NASA would do. Will they be able to pull this off in the next few years? It's going to be fascinating to watch.

We do live in exciting times. So I think we've pretty much wrapped up this show. But Jason, you said something that was interesting to me about this outer space treaty, right? This is effectively a bilateral treaty, but a broad treaty

about not claiming territory in order to prevent conflicts in space, right, between the Soviet Union and the United States. If we didn't have that treaty would the united states have ever stopped the apollo program if we had to lay a claim to the moon in order to have that defensive advantage or if there would be even defensive advantage if there was actually a race to claim territory in the Cold War, I'm going to throw out there, maybe we would still have we would have our lunar base back in like 1974, because it would be a national security imperative that we would have to retain our foothold in space.

Would that have ultimately been a better thing for human exploration? Absolutely not, because it would have resulted in a militarized program. Absolutely not, because it would have resulted in a militarized program. The Air Force would have been running the Apollo program and the stuff that happened on the moon we wouldn't even know about. So I think that that would be overlapping claims over what are supposed to be international waters but are claimed by China and the Philippines, and that's an interesting parallel, I would say. It's a good thing that things went the way they did. Yeah, it's actually quite enlightened to take that attitude about all this potential land, I suppose. So I guess if you look at it from the pure perspective of presence, you would maybe have seen more an aggressive presence, but it would have been at the cost of science and potentially global stability and world order, which I suppose is a good thing that we have. And we never would have gone past the moon. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What a great question to leave us with, Casey. I guess we can wrap this up.

Hey, I have an idea, Matt. One more thing before we wrap up. To anyone still listening, should we do a regular feature as to a hypothetical? Maybe we could take from listeners, toss us a hypothetical space policy question, and we'll take a crack at answering one per episode. In graduate school, they referred to this as counterfactual history. Yeah. Alternate history. Yeah. Everyone can pretend to be a grad student. Last week's Planetary Radio, speculating with John Logsdon about what if the Soviets had won

the space race. I love that idea, Casey. Let's see what kind of responses we get. People, of course, can write to us about this program at planetaryradio at planetary.org or leave your comments wherever you're listening to the show on SoundCloud or at planetary.org slash radio where you find this show page. We do want to hear from you

and we are very grateful to all of you who have let us know what you think of the program so far. The reaction has been good, guys. I think we ought to keep doing it. Okay, you insist. I'm good with that. We have been talking once again on this Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio with Casey Dreyer, the Planetary Society's Director of Space Policy, and with Jason Callahan, the Society's Space Policy Advisor, based in Washington, D.C., where so much of what we've been talking about and will continue to talk about unfolds.

This effort is part of what the Planetary Society does. That goes right back to the beginning of the Society and its advocacy for space exploration, particularly for planetary science. It is still something that we hold very dear to our hearts, and we trust that you do as well. You can learn more about the Planetary Society, and by the way, our brand new, our relatively new membership program. Become part of this program and everything else that the Society is up to,

including LightSail 2. Just go to planetary.org slash membership, and you'll see all the great incentives and rewards and all the things that should make you feel very good about becoming a member of the Planetary Society. And for those of you who are already members, thank you. You make it possible for us to do all this. With that, we'll say goodbye until the first Friday in October. Guys, once again, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. I think I'll see both of you guys next week down at the launch in Florida. You're going to see Casey. Sadly, you won't see me.

Ah, bummer. I look forward to hearing from you guys who get to go down there and watch that launch of the asteroid material retrieval mission, OSIRIS-REx. Have a great time. Thanks so much and good luck to Dante Loretta and his whole team and go OSIRIS-REx.