Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - SpaceUp LA: What would you do with $13 Billion?

Episode Date: November 11, 2013

What would YOU do with an extra $10 Billion for space exploration and development? That’s what Mat Kaplan asked the passionate space enthusiasts at the 2013 SpaceUp LA Unconference.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

What would you do with $10 billion for space? This week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. SpaceUp is the worldwide network of space unconferences. This week we'll visit SpaceUp Los Angeles to ask its passionate attendees a question. What would they do with a whole lot of money handed to them by the President of the United States to encourage space development and exploration?

Then we'll check in with the passionate Bruce Betts for another report on the night sky and much more. Bill Nye is away this week, but senior editor Emily Lakdawalla is standing by. Emily, today it's two missions to Mars, one getting ready to go and one that is on its way, we hope. What's up with the Mars Orbiter mission? India's Mars Orbiter mission launched last week into Earth orbit. They don't have a rocket that's powerful enough to send it directly to Mars. So they launched into Earth orbit and are slowly raising the apogee of their orbit until they can finally get it high enough to where they can fire the rocket again and head on to Mars. Well, they completed their first three rocket burns successfully, but the fourth one ended early for some reason. I've read the press release on ISRO's website, and it has something to do with them trying, testing out their backup systems. India has done a lot of satellites in Earth orbit,

but hasn't yet done a mission that requires the amount of redundancy and autonomy that a deep space mission like a Mars mission needs. So testing all of these things is very important. It sounds like the test didn't quite go as planned, but also that they're not terribly concerned about it. They're planning a cleanup maneuver for later today. And so hopefully we'll be seeing them on their way to Mars in a little more in about December 1st, I think is still the current plan. All right. We will once again wish them luck. And Israel, of course, that is to India what NASA is to the U.S.? That's right. On to a NASA mission now. You have some terrific photos provided by NASA of MAVEN being mated to its spacecraft, but it had to get there, first of all, and that's one of the best photos. That's right. I always love the photos when they enclose a spacecraft inside

the fairing. That's the nose cone that protects the spacecraft as it rises through the atmosphere on the rocket. Because you know that that's the last time that any of those engineers who have so lovingly crafted and cared for the spacecraft, it's the last time they'll ever actually set eyes on it. We'll still see, you know, a diminishing dot heading off among the stars after launch, but this is the last time human eyes will ever be set on the actual spacecraft. So it's always poignant to see it enclosed in the fairing, but then after it was enclosed in the fairing, it's on this giant dolly,

and there's like a dozen engineers just physically shoving it out the door to get it to the truck, where it was then raised onto the top of the rocket. The Kennedy Space Center does a fantastic job of posting just beautiful, high-resolution images of all of the missions that are getting ready for launch, and I highly encourage people to check out their gallery.

So do I, and they are in Emily's blog this week. Check for it at planetary.org. And I got a feel for these guys in their bunny suits shoving this thing. That must be kind of sweaty work. Yeah, it must have been hot. Emily, thanks so much. Thank you, Matt. She's the senior editor for the Planetary Society and our planetary evangelist, also a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Saturday, November 9th. It was a cool, almost chilly evening at the Torrance, California airport. A hundred or so space enthusiasts had gathered in wide open hangars

to talk about their favorite subject. This was SpaceUp LA, a two-day gathering that has been taking place for several years under the coordination of Eric Giever. Eric invited us down to talk with this mostly young crowd. He helped me get things started as the air pump for an inflatable video screen whirred along behind us. Eric, thanks so much for welcoming us to SpaceUp LA. We've been to San Diego twice. I don't know how we've missed coming to LA. I'm glad to host it. This is the third year I've organized SpaceUp LA, and it's been a ton of fun, a ton of planning, but I've had a great time. This is a cool location, but you couldn't find a place with four walls?

Yeah, well, we're at the Western Museum of Flight, and it's a really great venue, in my opinion, for this type of event because it really allows for a lot of collaboration and really getting a chance to talk about what we're passionate about all around us with aircraft and spacecraft. For people who have never heard of it, missed our other shows, what is Space Up? What is an unconference? Well, Space Up is a space-themed unconference.

And what an unconference is, it's a bar camp style of discussion. Now a bar camp is a type of event where the participants, not attendees, but participants, are the ones who have an opportunity to collaborate and network with others at the event. Now, what happens is that we start with a completely empty session grid. And the session grid is actually populated by our participants as the day goes on. Now, it could be anything, in this case, anything relating to space. It could be space engineering concepts, new ideas and exploration, or even some of the space-themed movies and video games. But everything hopefully related to space that we're all passionate about here.

So it really is a fun and unique event, unlike most conferences. And people just put their topic up on the big board, which is across from us, and people either come to hear them or they don't. That's right. I was pretty impressed because the first year we did this, a lot of folks were brand new to the SpaceUp concept. They weren't quite sure what they wanted to talk about. They wanted to kind of hear what people wanted to say and then later on maybe had a small idea. But over the course of the past few years, we've really grown and folks who have done this before, they know what they want to talk about they get right up there and we filled the board really quickly in a matter of minutes. One of the reasons I wanted to do this tonight

was to allow our audience to catch some of the fever some of the enthusiasm that has come out at every SpaceUp unconference that I've attended. Is this gonna keep up not just, but all over the country? I really hope so. Not only over the country, but all over the world. We've had SpaceUps in close to 10 countries, I believe, in just the past couple years alone. And it's been growing. It's a concept that I believe people really want and actually really need because it's so different from your typical conference where you really don't get to speak your voice and talk about what you're passionate about in any regard, not just space, but any type of unconference, really.

And as with the other ones that I've attended, yeah, there are a few older geeks like me here, but most of the crowd here is, what, 20-somethings, early 30s? You know, we have the full range. We have as young as 8 years old, I believe, 7 or 8. We attract not only a lot of students, that's high school and college level students, but also a lot of aerospace professionals. I'm talking in their 50s and even higher. We're going to get some of these people, when they join the conversation in a minute, to tell us where they're from because we're going to hear from people who are with some of the most exciting companies working in the field.

Oh yeah, definitely. I mean, although we do have a lot of students, we have folks from Boeing, NASA JPL, Lockheed Martin, SpaceX, XCOR, all of them. All of them. I saw Dream Chaser, a Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser model back there. XCOR has taken a big part in space ups over the past few years. They even have a live rocket over here to show us at our hardware alley. I was talking to a couple of guys. They co-own a MakerBot in the back there. They've been churning out little plastic bits. That's right. Actually, I believe there's four of us in attendance today that co-own that 3D printer, including myself. We use it to print anything on our imaginations or anything we can find online for that matter,

but we have a lot of fun with it. We like to show off what we have. Anything space related I have brought here with me. So it's a really fun thing to be a part of. Getting toward the end of the first night here, some people are still eating their pasta. What's happening after this? What is this next really special session? So tonight we have a special series of talks called T-5 talks. These are talks that are in a very specific format. These are the only talks that are predetermined in this event because everything else, as we described before, you register for a session when you arrive. But these are predetermined talks that you have exactly 15 seconds to talk about a certain slide and then the slide transitions to the next slide. So the talk lasts

five minutes, 20 slides in total. My colleague Emily Lakdawalla did one. She couldn't come tonight. She said to say hello to everybody, but she did a great one in San Diego. It was just spot on. It's going to be a really exciting format. I'm sorry I won't be able to grab any of those here tonight, but we will be doing that other segment that we're going to start in a minute here. In fact, don't go away, Eric, because I'm going to let you be the first to respond, if you wish, to my big question. The noise you hear in the background, by the way, is the fan holding up the inflatable screen. I thought maybe I should mention that. Here's the premise, everybody. You are the NASA administrator. The President of the United States has called up and he said,

you know, we're not giving enough freedom to you folks who know what you're doing in this field. So here's $10 billion. What do you want to do with it? You can do anything you want with that $10 billion that encourages what we need to do in space. Eric, I'm going to give you the first shot. This is a pretty easy one for me. I've always been passionate about getting humans to Mars, and I think establishing a permanent colony on Mars and a way to get there and back would be

the ultimate way to spend $10 billion. I think we can do it with that amount if we have the dedication and have the knowledge and develop a little bit of new technology to do it. But I definitely want to see round-trip trips to Mars and permanent settlements there. Eric, thank you so much. Thank you very much. And we're going to turn now to the attendees at the 2013 SpaceUp LA. Let me see hands, folks.

You are the NASA administrator. What are you going to do with that $10 billion? Right up here in the front. All right. My name is Brian. I'm from Compton. I do work for, let's say, a major aerospace corporation. I don't always like to mention their name. But if you've ever heard a rubber ball bounce off the floor, maybe that'll give you a hint. But now if I remember correctly, $10 billion is about half of NASA's yearly budget. So I don't think that's enough to get us

to Mars and back, as wonderful as that would be. I would like to see, however, perhaps an advertising campaign so that we could then turn that into more money to come through the vote and through popular support. You sure you don't work for an ad agency? A $10 billion ad campaign? Hey, you know what? Let's do it, man. Let's do it.

Personally, I'd spend, oh, maybe 1% of that on the ad campaign. Did you have your hand up too, right next to him? Hi, please introduce yourself. I am Simone. I'm also from Compton, working for the same rubber ball company. And while I wouldn't spend all $10 billion on this outreach, definitely a significant portion to let people know that space is important, just to make sure that the money keeps coming in every year. We need to make sure they know, because there's a lot of people out there who don't know that space,

that what they do daily is affected by what we've done in space and space research. And I know a great radio show you could, you know, spare maybe a million of that 10 billion on. Definitely. The gentleman in the back who needs no introduction, but introduce yourself anyway. I'm the CEO of the National Space Society. My name is Mark Hopkins. Hey, Mark. I'm the CEO of the National Space Society. My name is Mark Hopkins. Hey, Mark. And what I would do with the $10 billion is I would invest it over a period of time in research and development in order to hasten the day when humans can tap into the vast majority of the resources of the solar system, which lie in space rather than on the ground,

and as a consequence, dramatically improve the standard of living for all humans. Mark Hopkins of the National Space Society. We'll hear from many more of the SpaceUp LA attendees in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Greetings, Planetary Radio fans. Bill Nye here. Thanks for listening each week. Did you know the show reaches nearly 100,000 space and science enthusiasts? You and your organization can become part of Planetary Radio by becoming an underwriter.

Your generosity will be acknowledged on the air each week, as well as on the Planetary Society website. To learn more, visit planetary.org slash underwriting. That's planetary.org slash underwriting. Thanks again for making us your place in space. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your place in space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too,

giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. I spent a very enjoyable Saturday evening with like-minded space enthusiasts. We were at SpaceUp LA, the Los Angeles incarnation of this unconference that lets the attendees themselves

determine and deliver the program. We're in the midst of a special session at the Western Museum of Flight in Torrance, California. Here's the question I asked. You are the NASA administrator. The president of the USA has just given you $10 billion to spend as you think best. What do you do with it?

Oh, and if you think you've got a better idea, share it with us. Leave a comment on the show page that you can reach from planetary.org slash radio. Hi, I'm John Schilling, and I work for the Aerospace Corporation. Surface of the Earth to surface of Mars in one fell swoop is just too much. But we've got companies even here who can get spaceships into low Earth orbit. That's halfway there. I would have NASA build a logistics base in low Earth orbit, a space station optimized for any American private, corporate, or government to refuel, refit, and prepare to go farther.

We don't need to worry about where NASA, what one place NASA is going to go. I think we give people the tools, they will go everywhere. You couldn't do that with the ISS? You'd have to start fresh? At this point, I think you would. The ISS is too optimized as a scientific platform. Not that science is a bad thing. Okay. And why low Earth orbit? It's the first place you can do it.

And it's hard enough to get to low Earth orbit? It's the first place you can do it. And it's hard enough to get to low Earth orbit. I'm not going to make people go another 100,000 miles farther out before they get their first tank of gas. Alright, okay. We'll just have to save L5 for all the other stuff that we're going to build out there someday. And it will be easier to get to L5 if you have a base in low Earth orbit,

I guarantee you. Way up in the front here. Hi. You are the youngest NASA administrator ever. $10 billion. What do you think we should do with it? My name is Benjamin Radcliffe, and I think we should build cat spacesuits with it. We've got to take cats into space. We may have a cat expert here. I know we have a spacesuit expert. Maybe we could find out from her how difficult it would be to build a cat space suit. Can you think of anything else you'd do with that $10 billion? That's an awful lot of money,

$10 billion. Make a moon base on one of Jupiter's moons. Oh, that's cool. How about Europa? Yeah, Europa would be good because there's lots of water. That's right. That's exactly right. Yeah, give her a hand. Did you drive here by yourself? No. No, I didn't think so. Are you interested in this stuff? Why are you excited about space? Because space is awesome. That's a good enough answer for me. Okay. Thank you so much.

Speaking of spacesuit experts, please introduce yourself, Molly. My name is Molly McCormick. I'm an engineer at SpaceX. And I would use $10 billion, you said? Yes. I would use the $10 billion almost exclusively as prize money and bounty money. And that allows you to go after an assorted range of problems and issues. And it draws in people. You wind up spending more money just collectively to actually fix the problem than you would if you were only taking that $10 billion with one group and trying to fix the problem. And you usually wind up with a better solution as well. So you're using the XPRIZE as the living example of this?

Sort of, except you wouldn't necessarily need a third party to run it. What you could do, for example, is say, okay, we've identified the 10 or 20 most troubling articles of debris that's currently in orbit and not functioning properly. It's not serving any other purpose. And then you say, okay, for these, or let's say there's 10 of them, then $1 billion to go remove that as a threat per problem. And it could be NASA just running the whole thing. Molly, are you working on that cat spacesuit? I would imagine that it would be more of a temperament problem, trying to get a cat into a spacesuit. And hairballs would become infinitely more troublesome.

So clearly you've given this a great deal of thought. Yes, the last, like, two minutes since it was first mentioned, very serious thought. Thank you, Molly. Lee Valentine, Space Studies Institute. The first thing I would do, and this wouldn't take a billion dollars, is to reestablish in this country the kind of organization to do pre-competitive space transportation research that we had 60 years ago with the NACA. We don't have that now. We badly need something like that

to support not just my company, but numerous other space transportation companies. Second thing I would do is beef up asteroid search. The asteroid impact threat to the human race is potentially colossal, and we're not doing enough to search for these objects. And that search really serves two purposes, not just defense of the human race on the Earth, but also as a source of materials resources for human communities that will be established off the earth eventually. Ten billion dollars is a lot of money. That's true. There are a couple of other essential technologies that should be done and supported. One of them is closed environment life support

system research. We're getting a lot of nods to that. That's a critical thing. It's a critical enabling technology for human settlement. And it's not been done in a fashion that gives us great confidence that we'll have a system that we can use in the near term. And the last thing, of course, is in situ resource utilization, mining and manufacturing. We really do need to understand where ore bodies are, what we can make from them, and how we can establish communities using those resources almost exclusively. And finally, I would agree with Molly. I would establish

most of this money as a prize kitty. And we might spend that down on our own projects, but I have no clue about how to effectively spend $10 billion. Are we ever going to stop talking about cats this evening? There was a whole bunch going on there. We could go through them one by one. But what do you think? Right there in the back. Very enthusiastic young gentleman. My name is Daniel Hastings. I am a senior intern at XCOR Aerospace. And I would put it all towards propulsion. Experimental R&D, cool concepts, and just really big rockets. Like what kind of propulsion? VASIMR? Well, yeah, electric propulsion, liquid propulsion, all shapes and size, because that's how we

move around the solar system. Ever heard the singer Donovan from the 1960s, his song about the intergalactic laxative? Oh, my God. Oh, you, look it up. I'm sure it's on YouTube. It'll get you from here to Mars. That's the, that's part of the chorus. Anyway, not exactly what you were thinking of.

Hi, sir. I'm Dale Amon. I'm actually with two of the sponsors. I'm part of the senior leadership with National Space Society, and I'm also an ex-corps engineer, which you can tell from the hat, if you could see it from there. Now, Hastings actually took part of what I wanted to say, which is that propulsion is a very big part of what we need to do. And one of the major areas

is nuclear propulsion, because the private sector cannot do that. There are just too many political problems. And it's not to make the pun, but I will anyway, it's too hot to handle for the private sector. So we really need to put a lot of money into that. Back in the late 60s, early 70s, we had NERVA. We were almost all the way there with the nuclear rocket engine. I think we really have to return to looking at that because that's what opens up the solar system. Propulsion, once again, nuclear propulsion, which is a big part of a lot of the technologies that have been proposed.

Stan Rosen, also with the National Space Society. I like all the ideas I've heard. I'm not sure the one I'm going to nominate is any better. But the size is about right, I think, to finish off what was intended by the Constellation Project to build a lunar lander to go along with the lunar crew, a technology that's being developed in Orion, and the launch vehicle in SLS, and give us the capability to send people back to the moon and start using institute resources to build a civilization and some research bases on the moon. That would be great. Ten billion dollars is about bases on the moon. That'd be great. Ten billion dollars

is about to close the deal. And Stan, of course, for those who don't know him, long and distinguished career in aerospace. Long as much. One of the founders of SpaceUp here. Yes. So my name is Chris Radcliffe. One thing that I can tell you is that from talking to, well, pretty much everybody in the room here, but also people at previous Space Ups and other space conferences, is that there are a lot of wonderful ideas

by a lot of passionate people who would bend over backwards to make those ideas happen. And I think that what Molly said about prizes, you know, you give a prize, you have a little bit of a carrot to dangle in front of them, and they go the extra mile. So you add all those miles up, you have a little bit of a carrot to dangle in front of them, and they go the extra mile. So you add all those miles up.

You bring all the people in, and you let them do all the things in space. And you give them just enough, just a little touch of that $10 billion each, and you just let them go to it. That's what I would do. Okay. Chris, like I said, you helped to invent this whole thing, Space Up, and it is spreading, isn't it? It is. It is all over the place, and I love that. The kind of enthusiasm, the kind of gung-ho attitude that we've heard, not just in this session this evening, but even more so in

some of the pods, some of those breakout sessions. This is pretty typical? Yeah. That's the one thing that I've heard over and over and over again is passion. People have a passion for whatever part of this they're doing, whether it is Martian concrete or spacesuits or spacesuits for cats. They love what they are doing and they would go to other planets to do it. You know, one of my favorite sayings is that we're preaching to the choir, but that even the choir needs to be preached to. I love that.

So, folks, thank you so much for helping us share a little bit of the fun, the excitement of just one Space Up event, this one, the 2013 event in Los Angeles, California. I especially want to thank you, Eric, for coordinating all of this, putting it together. And Molly was your partner, right? Yes, Molly was definitely helping us out this year as an organizer. Thank you. Okay. We're going to move on to What's Up with Bruce Betts.

That's in just a few moments here on Planetary Radio. Time for What's Up with Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society. I must say it was good to see you yesterday, though certainly not under the best of circumstances. No. We had the memorial service for my former Ph.D. thesis advisor, Bruce Murray, and colleague and friend. Always sad, but as memorial services go, it was quite lovely and nice and showed that he had many, many aspects to him. He certainly did. I miss him greatly, and I think you probably do even more.

So let's move right on before we get too sad here. Tell us about the night sky. Really, what is up with this Venus, man? It has been up there for weeks, outshining everything. Yeah, and it's just been getting even stupider bright, to use the technical term. Stupider brighter. Bright stupider. I feel kind of badly. I mention it every week. It's so redundant. But my gosh, it's just stunning over there in the West soon after sunset. So go see it because, you know, several more weeks, it'll start going away finally after its many months serving as the so-called evening star. If you do have a small telescope, check it out through that. Well, even better with a big telescope. I believe it's about the equivalent of a quarter moon. It looks like that. So half of its face as we look at it is lit up.

Jupiter coming up around 11 o'clock in the east and also looking really bright. Not as bright as Venus, but very, very bright. And then Mars coming up two or three hours later looking reddish, hanging out not too far from the bluish star Regulus. We do have the Leonids meteor shower popping up during this time frame. But Leonids, except for its big peaks every 30, 33 years, is usually not too good a meteor shower. But if you're in a dark site, go ahead and check it out. It can be quite quite meteorish we had a fireball in southern california a little over a week ago fireball being a very bright meteor uh anything brighter than venus roughly is called a fireball so but you can still

form it with just pebble or small rock-sized objects as they go flying through the sky. We move on to this week in space history. Appropriate for this time of Bruce Murray's memorial, 1971, Mariner 9 became the first Mars orbiter. First time we really got a good look at Mars and exposed all sorts of the truly exotic parts of Mars that we didn't see in the first flyby spacecraft. Yet another of those Mars missions that Bruce Murray was intimately involved with. Yes, indeed. On to the next segment. I guess you've got a little something to introduce that with.

I do. Ladies and gentlemen, here are the attendees at SpaceUp LA. Random Space Fact! Very enthusiastic group. They sounded bigger than their actual numbers with that. Nice work, guys. Random Space Fact! Mars' poles have these layers of bright and dark ice dust, ice dust, giving a historical, basically, climate record of at least the geologically recent history of Mars. And someday we'll go poke around those and probably give us an interesting insight into the past.

There was a nice image of these in the memorial service yesterday. By the way, we're going to have more excerpts from that memorial service, hopefully on next week's show. All right, we're ready for Trivia. If you were forming a singing group that was going to perform without instrumental accompaniment, and you wanted a star, a very bright star, literally to be in the group, what star or set of stars would you ask? And how do we do to my silly question, Matt? People love these, these sillier questions. And also not too difficult if you thought about it a little bit. Now, the one answer we got that was out of step with everybody else came from our friend Wojtek Nowolek in the Czech Republic. He did not choose what everyone else

did. He said he'd choose a Mercury manganese star, which strangely enough has a prominent spectral line that aligns with ionized Mercury, therefore allowing us to bring up once again on this show Freddie Mercury. Oh, very nice.

Very bohemian. Yes. As you'd expect, though, virtually, in fact, everyone else, including our winner, Kevin West of Imperial Beach, California, said it is the star Capella. So, Kevin, we're going to send you the Planetary Radio t-shirt. But a lot of people pointed out there's more to capella than meets the eye there is indeed capella is actually two sets of two as i recall there's one particularly bright one uh but you've got all sorts of stars located in a small area as seen in our sky and so did people have any inspirational thoughts about this okay i, I know they did. What were they now? Well, a lot of people pointed out that this is a four for one, that you actually get an entire a cappella quartet by picking a cappella.

But it was only Joseph Murray of Hoboken, New Jersey, hometown of Frank Sinatra. Anyway, it was Joseph who said that we'd have to call this quartet the Charioteers. Do you get it? I'm trying. Auriga. Auriga? who said that we'd have to call this quartet the Charioteers. Do you get it? I'm trying. Auriga. Auriga? Oh, Auriga, the constellation that Capella's in. Very nice. Yeah, well done. Well done.

We got a whole bunch of great star puns from Ian Bethune. So I'm not even going to go through them. There are just too many, but they're really very funny. He did a good job. We got a few others like that. Paul McEwen was the one who pointed out that you should someday ask about singing dogs, and then Sirius would be the lead. Oh, man. Now I need a new trivia question for next week.

Now, finally, this one. I just wondered if this is anything you've ever heard. This came from Chris Vaughn in Thornhill, Ontario. He said, according to Professor Adam Burroughs of the University of Arizona, just before a star goes supernova, it vibrates at middle C. Talk about your music of the spheres. Wow, how tuneful. All right, you better get us on to next time.

What observational technique was used to discover the rotation periods of Venus and Mercury? What observational technique used to first discover the rotational periods of Venus and Mercury, approximately? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Give us your entry. When do they need to get that in by, Matt? By the 18th, Monday the 18th at 2 p.m. Pacific time. Just try to make a joke out of this one, folks. Extra points if you're capable of that.

Okay, we're done. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about clearing your throat. Thank you. Good night. Now I have to include you clearing your throat. Thank you. Good night. Now I have to include you clearing your throat. He's Bruce Betts, the soul of clarity, here on What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the unconventional members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.