Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - SpaceX Builds a Big Falcon Rocket

Episode Date: September 26, 2018

A mostly SpaceX episode as the ambitious company provides updated details regarding its huge new rocket and introduces its first astronauts. Mat Kaplan shares more from the company’s headquarters, while Planetary Society Digital Editor explains and explores the BFR.  Jason also celebrates the successful landing of two asteroid “rovers” from Japan’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft.  And we’ll tell you What’s Up in the night sky as we offer another space trivia contest.  Learn and hear more at: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0926-2018-jason-davis-spacex.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A big Falcon rocket, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome, I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. Join me later at the headquarters of SpaceX to sit inside a mock-up of that ambitious company's Crew Dragon capsule, the one it hopes will carry astronauts to the International Space Station early next year. We'll also hear from Gwynne Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of SpaceX. First, though, we'll enjoy an extended visit with the Planetary Society's digital editor, Jason Davis.

He'll tell us about the BFR, that huge new rocket SpaceX has begun building. But Jason has also written about the latest great success of the Hayabusa 2 mission. His September 22nd blog post at planetary.org celebrates the success of the first two of three Minerva rovers that Hayabusa has dropped onto asteroid Ryugu. And it includes the images they have captured. Jason, welcome back to the show. I want to start with that conversation about Hayabusa 2, because you did write about it in that blog post of just a few days ago as we speak.

It would appear that Hayabusa 2 is as trouble-free as its older sister, the original Hayabusa, was fraught with difficulties, though ultimately successful. It's surprising how well things have gone. And, you know, that's probably a testament to the Japanese spacecraft team that has tried to learn from all the lessons of everything that went wrong with the first mission. And, yeah, so far, it seems like everything is going pretty according to plan. They arrived at the asteroid and have been doing surveys of it, started with these probes. And, you know, so far, things are going pretty well. I'm following along, of course, not just through your coverage at Planetary.org, but by our colleague, Emily Lakdawalla, who has been writing extensively as Hayabusa 2 has sort of gingerly approached this big rock and then backed off and then

approached again. Would you tell us how this release of the Minerva rovers was accomplished, first of all, and maybe begin with why they're called rovers? They don't have wheels. Yeah. So the Hayabusa 2 spacecraft has what's called a home position, where it kind of hangs out the majority of the time when it's not doing anything and waiting to be in its next operation. That's about 200 meters away from the surface of the asteroid. And we got to keep in mind, this asteroid is only about a kilometer in diameter to begin with.

So pretty small scales involved here. For the operation to deploy the Minerva rovers, it moved into about 60 meters off of the surface and popped both of these out. I have described them as cheese wheels. We got some blowback on Twitter because people were saying, well, there are cheese wheels of various sizes. And I was like, okay, well, think of the big old Italian cheese wheel. And actually our social media manager, Andrew, found a nice picture that was about equivalent to the size I was looking for. I saw the Associated Press described them as snare drums or drum shapes. So, you know, pick whatever comparison you like, I guess.

I'm sticking with cheese wheels. No offense intended to our fromage fans out there. Yeah. Yeah. I like cheese wheels. That'll be the hill I die on. So it dropped these two out from about 60 meters above the surface and they just kind of gingerly floated down, landed. And like you said, they're called rovers, even though they don't really, they're not a rover in the traditional sense. We think of like the Curiosity rover, Opportunity rovers driving around. They're just kind of wheels almost. And they have an internal motor that spins up and kind of creates momentum. The gravity is so weak on Ryugu, they're able to just by spinning this wheel kind of lift themselves off the surface.

And they go on these short little 15 minute hops where they just kind of float off the ground. And they move about 15 meters during that time period and come down. During that hop, they'll take some pictures. When they land, they'll take some measurements with a few probes. And then they do it again. And that's all these things do. And it's really clever. And so far, it's working out for them. I imagine that escape velocity on Ryugu is not much more than these things are doing with their little off-center weights that kind of flip them up, and they come down again 15 minutes later, as you said. By the way, we talked about these on our episode back in July

with the former Hayabusa mission project manager, Hitoshi Kuninaka. He's now the director general of ISS at JAXA, the Japanese space agency. And we'll put up a link to that show if you want to hear a little bit more about them directly from him. They have been taking images. Apparently, they're working right. They're taking pictures and talking back to Hayabusa itself. Initially, after they were released, there was a big celebration and the Japan Space Agency, or JAXA, they said, hey, the rovers have separated from the spacecraft. Everything's looking good.

They're sending telemetry back. And then we didn't hear anything for like 24 hours. So everybody was just kind of like, hey guys, are the rovers okay? And kind of fearing, because when they tried this during the first Hayabusa mission, a similar rover, they missed the asteroid with it and just kind of went flying off into deep space, never heard from again. So there was a little bit of drama there while people were waiting. But then sure enough, the rover sent back pictures. Two of the pictures that were sent back were actually during the drop to the rover. And there's one where you can actually see a little ghostly outline of Hayabusa. And then another one was taken during a hop. So we know at least one of them is hopping. And the hop picture, like you said, it's wild. It's- It's like psychedelic. And then another one was taken during a hop. So we know at least one of them is hopping.

And the hop picture, like you said, it's wild. It's like psychedelic. Yeah, yeah. There's like a lens flare coming into the camera and it's creating these reds. And there's like a purple outline of the lens itself in the glass. Really cool stuff. It looks like something out of Space Odyssey, 2001 Space Odyssey. Exactly. Obviously, they have cameras. What other kinds of science are these,

you know, very small spacecraft going to be able to accomplish if all goes well? When I've tried to look at the descriptions of the other data they'll collect, it can be difficult because some of the information's in Japanese and you either have to find the English translation version. The one thing I was able to tell is that they have these little probes sticking out that can do temperature measurements. So when they land, they can tell what the temperature of the soil is. And then by hopping around, they can compare that to different regions of the asteroid. But I'm not sure what other instruments they have, but I know the goal was to sample from a diverse number of areas on the asteroid. There is much more to the Hayabusa 2 mission. Just this morning, not long before we

started talking, I got an invitation to come to Cologne, Germany, not going to happen, though I wish I could be there, for the landing of Mascot. Well, I don't know if it's actually a rover in this case, but it's a lander. Can you tell us about that one? This one only jumps once. Sorry, I'm a little less certain about that one even than I am the Minerva rovers. I know it has four devices on board, including a camera, I think a magnetometer as well. That, I guess, is going to be the next big event. When will Hayabusa 2 itself come down to the surface and collect those samples that it hopes to bring back to Earth? The last we heard was late October or sometime in October. The mascot deployment, I think,

is coming around the 3rd or here in a couple of weeks. Now, I say that at last check, we heard late October for the sampling because they did do a rehearsal touchdown where the spacecraft was coming in close to kind of, it was a dress rehearsal essentially. And something didn't quite go right. And they ended up backing off. I don't know that we've heard a full explanation of exactly what went wrong. Emily did a blog on that. So I don't know if that changed their timeline at all. In any case, they haven't announced an updated timeline. So as far as we know, it's still late October. We'll keep track of this mission, of course. And Jason, if this was a

regular conversation, we'd probably stop there. And I would remind everyone that you are the Planetary Society's digital editor. But rather than taking a little break here, we're going to go right on into our main topic for this week's show. Basically, everything's SpaceX, because there have been a lot of announcements just in the last few weeks. Later today, I'm going to play some of the material that I recorded when I was there on August 13th. There was an open house at the SpaceX facility in Hawthorne, California, and we got to see quite a bit, actually, of Crew Dragon, the variant of the SpaceX Dragon capsule that, if all goes well, will soon be carrying Americans back up on an

American-built craft to the International Space Station. But we heard a little bit at that time, and then more recently in this other event that just took place a few days ago that Elon Musk was host of, about the BFR, the Big Falcon Rocket, if you'll pardon the expression. And I know that this is something you're following pretty closely. What's the latest on this gigantic rocket? Yes. So we're now in, to use computer science parlance, this would be version 0.3 of the BFR. The first version was announced in 2016. It was huge, taller than the Saturn V, taller than even the most ambitious versions of the space launch system that NASA has planned.

They scaled that back a little bit a year later in 2017 and made a few just minor design tweaks of it. But basically, just to catch everyone up to speed who doesn't know the concept of the rocket, it's two pieces. There is a giant first stage that essentially is just a giant rocket with a bunch of engines. And then the second stage is a spaceship that can hold either cargo or passengers. Of course, the big splash of the announcement was this thing will be used to send colonists to Mars one day. So anyway, during this most recent announcement about who was going to fly on one of the early BFR flights, there was a third iteration of the rocket that came out. And it shows now the spaceship has kind of three fins. Two of them move. One of them doesn't. And a lot of them are pointing out that it's starting to look a lot like, depending on your preference, some modified version of the space shuttle almost because it kind of has this gray underbelly heat shield that it's going to use for reentering and the two wings and, you know,

a tail fin essentially. Or I have to admit this reference is a little, it predates me a little bit. Listeners of a certain age might know the Tintin rocket, which I don't know. Yeah, I guess it was an old science fiction rocket of some kind that, you know, landed vertically on the moon with kind of these three fins on the back of it. Does that sound familiar to you, Matt? No offense here. I'm actually not familiar with, you know, when I was growing up, long before you were a kid, we'd go for Saturday morning matinees at the local movie theater, that's how rockets got places. They went up like this and they came down vertically and landed on generally three or four big fins or landing legs. This looks exactly or very much like those rockets that I imagined as a kid, we would someday be flying to the moon and Mars. Yeah, it's kind of trippy that the design

has come all the way back around to some early science fiction concepts. You bet. And one of the early iterations of the BFR, or rather, there's the BFR, which is the rocket piece, and then there's the BFS, which is the spaceship piece. So it's a big Falcon spaceship. And anyway, that's the piece we're talking about with the tri-fens. The landing legs used to come out of the side of the spaceship in some of the earlier concepts. Now they come out of the fins themselves. And Elon Musk had this either wonderful or terrifying quote, depending on how you look at it, during this last announcement where he said, well, we put the legs in the fins because aesthetically it looked better. Yes. Yeah, it would make for a better movie, I think.

But, you know, I'm kind of charmed that they are taking aesthetics into account. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's adding some amount of additional weight. He actually said that this was a little bit risky doing this, but he just liked the look of it. Yeah, yeah. He's kind of like the Steve Jobs of rockets, I guess, and taking aesthetics into the design. But yeah, so that's how the rocket has evolved over these past two years and three iterations. And he said this is pretty close to the final design they're getting to now. It really is huge. I mean, the spaceship portion of this, he's talking about might have 1,100 cubic meters of space in its payload section.

I looked it up. He said it might be more. It looks to me like it's roughly equal to what an Airbus A380 jetliner might have been able to carry if they'd come up with a freight version of the A380. Eight stories, maybe a hundred passengers in 40 cabins and big windows. I'm sure you noticed that big. I mean, they make the cupola on the ISS look like a peephole. Yeah. Yeah. It has these, has these, these rows of windows. And then it looks like some kind of big observation deck. And there was this picture, this artist rendering of a violinist. She's floating in zero G with a gown on playing for an audience. I mean, it's wild stuff.

I always wonder, like, when you see a concept car drawing, you know, the production car rarely looks like the concept car. So I don't know how much these aesthetics will change between now and then, but if they stay, it's pretty wild stuff. It really is. Elon made a comment during that event about a week ago that really struck home for me because I had had a conversation with him nine years ago. And when I asked him at the end of a great conversation, if he was having fun, it seemed to throw him for a loop. I talked about this last week with Bill Nye. He said in this conversation, fun is underrated.

Well, right on Elon. Yeah, I guess that's, you know, that plays to the philosophy of launching the Tesla. And yeah, he's in it for fun. It sounds accurate. They're talking about over 100 metric tons to low Earth orbit. But then Elon added, or to Mars, because they're talking about building a gas station on orbit. One of the early concepts, I guess it would have been the first concept, showed that essentially you'd launch the BFR with the BFS on top of it.

And then the rocket booster, the R piece, would come back down, land vertically, just like the Falcon 9 rockets land vertically today. It would actually land right on the launch pad, which is crazy to me that they would nail it to the point where it could actually do that. The surface structure beside the launch pad would pick up another BFS, the spaceship piece of it. This one would be full of fuel. It would set it on top and then blast into space. So you'd essentially be sending up a full fuel tank to rendezvous with all of your passengers. And then it would fill up the tank and that would just go on to Mars. It's wild stuff. And as far as I know, that's still the plan. I haven't seen any update on that. It's interesting to me, you know, you've seen a lot of, or we hear a lot about the moon being a good place to extract water ice to mine propellant essentially. But the

SpaceX approach is kind of just like, yeah, we'll just send up a giant fuel tank and fill it up. We won't worry about any of that stuff. So yeah, it's pretty crazy. It is mind boggling. You already mentioned the SLS. How does this rocket compare to these other, I've seen them called super heavy lift vehicles. I guess the Saturn V was the first in that class, but SLS, the new Glenn that is currently being developed by Blue Origin, of course, under Jeff Bezos. And then just recently, I heard from our colleague, Andrew Jones, that there is this big, big rocket being put together by China, or at least planned. And some of these numbers change a little bit. So it's always hard to pin down exactly which one

is the most powerful at any given time. As far as we know, the BFR would be more powerful than at least the initial version of SLS. Now, they've talked about a Block II version of SLS that would have liquid boosters on the sides instead of the old space shuttle style solid rocket boosters. And that would be able to do like say 130 tons to low earth orbit. So it would definitely dwarf anything out there today. Saturn V was up there in the 130, 140 plus, depending on the configuration, I think, the version that was used to launch Skylab. So all of these rockets are kind of in the 130, 140 plus, depending on the configuration, I think, the version that was used to launch Skylab. So all of these rockets are kind of in the same class, this super heavy class you described.

The new Glenn that Jeff Bezos is developing, as far as we know, it's on a slightly smaller scale. So you might think of it more on the Falcon Heavy scale, somewhere in the 45, 50 ton range, depending on the, they have like a two stage variant and a three stage variant. And then finally, like you said, yeah, China is also planning one of these rockets, the Long March 9. And it would also be up there in like the 140 ton class range. If all of these projects come to fruition, we're going to have a lot of giant rockets that are able to lift heavy payloads. And it's not clear, you know, which ones will survive for the long haul and which ones won't. But fun stuff, no matter what. I love giant rockets. So I'm looking forward to this. You and me both. This one, the one we've primarily been talking about, the BFR,

it's now under construction, apparently at a new SpaceX facility at the port of Los Angeles. When might we see this fly for the first time? They're talking about short hops of the vehicle. And I believe they're talking about the BFS when they say these short hops, so the spaceship portion that would come as soon as next year. Knowing SpaceX timelines, I wouldn't be surprised if that slipped a little bit. But, you know, previously when they were talking about some of these milestones, they were talking about test flights around 2022, maybe even a flight to Mars in 2024 with the whole rocket system. Elon Musk has admitted, you know, that these are aspirational

timelines and everything would have to go extremely well to see this thing fly to Mars in just six years. Judging by the timelines that bear out for their normal projects, I would say a more realistic all goes well, I keep saying that, using that phrase, Yusaku Maezawa, the Japanese entrepreneur. And he wants to bring a bunch of artists along with him. I find it pretty inspiring. Going into this announcement, I was really worried that, if it's just going to be some rich billionaire that's going to take this thing on a ride around the moon, that's neat and all, but it wouldn't be as inspiring to me as the plan that they ended up laying out. So yeah, when they announced that this guy wants to take six to eight artists he wants to pick to come with him, and it would be poets or painters or musicians, and just from this wide variety of different types of people who would kind of represent humanity, you know, our art tendencies. And yeah, it's absolutely beautiful. It really is a cool idea. I was pretty inspired to hear that announcement. In our internal speculation within the Planetary Society staff, my best guess was Lady Gaga. I'm sticking with that.

I easily see her as one of these artists who would accompany Yusaku Maezawa to the moon and back. Even Elon Musk himself, when he was invited by Maezawa, said, hmm, maybe I'll go along for the ride. So stay tuned. Yeah, let the record show Matt is correct. He's called Lady Gaga from the beginning. And so far, that choice is still on the board. Kind of a sequel to A Star is Born.

Jason, thank you. This has been fantastic. I know that we will be able to go back to you as we see the big Falcon rocket, the BFR, begin to really take shape and head toward its first launch. Yeah, thanks, Matt. Always fun to chat.

Jason Davis, digital editor for the Planetary Society, who will also be back before too long to fill us in on progress regarding LightSail 2, because he is our embedded reporter with that project, which will be going up on yet another SpaceX rocket, the Falcon Heavy, hopefully before too long. hopefully before too long. Between Jack Northrop Drive and Rocket Road in Hawthorne, California, is a cavernous building where sections of Boeing 747s were once assembled. For more than 10 years now, it has been the headquarters of SpaceX. I've visited several times, most recently on August 13th of this year, when the company invited reporters to see and learn about the spacecraft that should soon carry two American astronauts to the International Space Station. I'm at SpaceX and I'm inside Crew Dragon or actually what somebody actually called here the party bus.

One of the staff here who will not be identified. It's kind of bare inside, but it's slick. As one of the design people told me, it's kind of like a Tesla Model 3. Radically simple interior. I'm going to lay back in one of the seats now and get a selfie of myself, if you don't mind. And there are no controls in this one, but I'm going to take a look at some of the controls that they have out for us to see during this visit to SpaceX. Oh, now I see the controls. I'm looking back at them right now. I'll get a picture and we'll put it on the show page for this week. Sadly, we can talk to the employees, but not with a microphone on, because I've had some fascinating conversations with the head of design who worked out the interior of Crew Dragon

and someone here who works with the simulators and therefore works with the astronauts who will be doing the real thing. And I wish we could share some of this. We'll just have to make it back to SpaceX as we have visited here in the past. SpaceX also held a sort of pep rally that day. President and Chief Operating Officer Gwen Shotwell had with her the four astronauts who will make the first two human flights of Crew Dragon. As we of the media watched, she introduced them to many of the 7,000 men and women who work for the company. Hey, Team SpaceX.

Hey, Team SpaceX. So I had the great honor of seeing these folks and having them introduced as our astronauts a little over a week ago. We wanted to make sure that you guys all had the opportunity to get to know them as well.

These are the four, well actually we're going to have six. These are the four announced. Two astronauts on Demo 2, Doug and Bob. And the two U.S. crew members who are going to fly on SpaceX Crew-1. We have Victor, who goes by Ike, and then Mike. So Mike and Ike flying.

So this time is for you guys to ask them, it's going to be your Reddit AMA with these gentlemen. But they are going to spend a little bit of time introducing themselves. But I want to give you just a tiny bit of information about them. Extraordinary people, for sure. All prior or current military. Air Force Bob and Mike one marine Doug one Navy Ike they're all test pilots they're all degreed engineers which is great yeah And they're all dads. The hardest job.

Reporters were also given a few minutes to ask questions of Gwen Shotwell, other SpaceX leaders, and the four astronauts. In these brief excerpts, you'll hear Shotwell and two-time space shuttle astronaut Doug Hurley. He'll talk about the stylish spacesuits SpaceX has developed, what's most important to him about Crew Dragon, and something he hopes to do when he returns to the International Space Station. How high are the stakes? First of all, I want to say that we are not going to fly until we're ready to fly these folks safely.

So first and foremost, safety is going to be our primary concern. Next in line, we want to make sure that not only we get these folks up and back safely, but that it's a reliable and a mission that we conclude. We want to hit all the boxes, do everything we need to do to demonstrate that this vehicle is capable of taking astronauts up from U.S. soil as often as NASA will allow us to do so. I would love to say that this mission is going to be like every other mission because I want every rocket and every capsule to be reliable.

But I can tell you there will be about 7,000 extra sets of eyes on the build of this system, the testing of this system, and all the interfaces. So whenever we talk about dates, we're always confident and then something crops up, right? So as I said last week or a week and a half ago, predicting launch dates could make a liar out of the best of us. I hope I am not proven to be a liar on this one. We are targeting November for Demo 1 and April for Demo 2. So we have believed in this process of loading the fuel with the astronauts on board. We would never have proposed it had we thought that it was a less safe way to go.

The vehicle has more margin when we load the fuel quite close to liftoff. The astronauts are protected by the launch escape system when they're sitting in Dragon on top of this rocket. So they're already in their seats. They're protected by the launch escape system. They're protected by the heat shield between Dragon and the rocket. And so from our perspective, we were glad that we could provide the data to both NASA as well as the safety advisory panel and basically provide sufficient data to demonstrate to them that this was the right way for us to go. We've got experience with the ACES suit, which is what we flew on shuttle, SOCL, which is on Soyuz, the EMU, the big, huge, white spacewalking suit. EMU, the big, huge, white spacewalking suit.

So we've had experience wearing all these suits, and I think SpaceX took a look at all those things and tried to improve on some of the things that we complained about. One, which is they're really big, really heavy, have a lot of metal in them. Sometimes they're hard to see exactly where you need to see just because of the way the helmets are designed or the visors are designed. And so they took some of those inputs and designed their suit. And I think, as you can kind of tell, if you've seen a picture of the suit or actually seen the real suit, it's pretty neat looking too, which was not a requirement, but we certainly appreciate it. Bob and I have probably worn the suit, I would 20 or 30 times already and they're getting to that point where the suit is about completed

with a design so it seems to be much lighter, more comfortable to wear and the helmet is very light and very comfortable which is pretty nice and I'll let you know how it does in space when we when we get there. I think the only thing that I can add to that is the importance for me personally to kind of return human spaceflight to the Florida coast, back to the United States. I was the chief of the astronaut office for about three years and during that three years what I tried to do was to get as many astronauts as possible to kind of make the pilgrimage that we make right now to Kazakhstan, to the Baikonur Cosmodrome for a launch, to see landing operations for the Soyuz, primarily

because I knew they would savor it when it happened again on American soil and off the Florida coast. Those of us who've launched on space shuttles, it was just something special for us to go through. It was special for our families to be able to see that. The school kids and folks that we try to bring our missions back to and inspire or at least share our experiences with, it's a little bit different if they can do it in their own backyard. And

I'm just really happy to be a part of that process. I'm really, really hoping this time I can actually get an hour to sit and look out the window. Because the shuttle missions were choreographed such that you just never had only like a fleeting moment to kind of glance here or do that, or you had to stay up way past bedtime to do it, and you were too exhausted to do that. So I think that's the other thing I'm excited about doing. And then, you know, Bob and I have known each other for 18 years. We started at NASA together, and to be able to fly with a close friend and somebody who's been, you know, we've been in each other's weddings and that kind of thing, that's pretty special, too. Astronaut Doug Hurley and President and Chief Operating Officer Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX a few weeks ago. We'll talk with Boeing about its CST-100 Starliner in an upcoming episode of Planetary Radio.

Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Bruce Betts is the chief scientist for the Planetary Society. Welcome back. Thank you. Good to be back, Matt. I'm ready for you to take us through the night sky, and we'll do all that other fun stuff that we do all the time. Evening again, the place for planets, but it's getting tougher and tougher. Venus is getting quite low.

Look for it soon after sunset, low in the west, and then to its upper left is Jupiter. Venus is brighter, but tougher to see because it's low down. If you've got a telescope and you point it at Venus these days, if your telescope is good enough, you'll be able to see Venus as a crescent because Venus, of course, goes through phases like the moon does since it's closer into the sun than the Earth in its orbit. And it's in a crescent phase right now. And then you can also easily check out Mars glowing high in the south, looking all reddish and bright. It is just slipping below the brightness of the brightest star in the sky. And then to the right of Mars,

looking yellowish, is Saturn. Would someone with decent binoculars have a shot also at seeing Venus as a crescent? Yeah, if you have good binoculars and you're able to hold them steady enough. I recommend leaning on the car. Yeah, lean on the car. Let me know if it works, leaning on the car or the binoculars.

Yeah, I might do both. Maybe I'll try the telescope too. All right, we move on to this week in space history. It was 2007 that the Dawn spacecraft launched off to its successful orbiting of Vesta and then Ceres. And then happy birthday. of Vesta and then Ceres. And then happy birthday. It's the 60th anniversary or birthday of NASA this week, founded in 1958. I'm disappointed because I know you guys had a birthday cake and a big happy birthday message for NASA at the office. And those of us who weren't at the office that day, well, I'll just wish NASA a happy birthday now and many happy returns.

Did you want me to mail you some cake? I think we still have some sitting around. Would you? Yeah. There's no such thing as bad cake. Well, we will test that theory and let you know how it worked out. Yes, you'll be able to check out a blog and a Planetary Post video from Bob Picardo in the near future about NASA's anniversary. Excellent.

All right, we move on to random space fact. Dum, dum, dum, dum. I don't know. You didn't finish it. Dum, dum, dum, dum. I know. It did. It just feels, for those familiar with Dragnet, you just can't not do that last part.

No, no. It's kind of like shaving a haircut two bits. Speaking of crime and haircuts and close shaves there, that one, I'm going with that. Speaking of close shaves, Lottie Williams is the only person on record to be hit by space debris. Now I get it. She was exercising in a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1997 when she was hit in the shoulder by a six-inch piece of blackened metallic material that turned out to be part of a Delta II rocket.

Tapped her on the shoulder, fell off harmlessly onto the ground and was tested and consistent with getting hit by a piece of a Delta II rocket, reentering and then fortunately slowing down significantly due to atmospheric drag. I have heard that Lotte has remained underground until last week when the last Delta II was launched. I don't know if there's still pieces waiting to deorbit.

Stay in the subway. We'll look into it. Contest time. It was time to play, and it is once again time to play, Where in the Solar System? So where in the solar system is a crater named math? Not Matt, but math, you know, like the subject. I will open with the poem from our poet laureate, Dave Fairchild. If you travel to Europa, future book by Andy Weir, you will find a smallish pockmark in the

southern hemisphere. It's a shallow flat-floored crater, and we call it Math for short because the Celtic god it's named for is too lengthy to report. Yeah, yeah. Named after the Celtic god of wealth and treasure. Thank you for making the search for any crater that came close to being named after me. From Helm de Regne, or Helm de Regne, probably mangling his name, but he lives in San Diego, probably not far from me. He said there is a crater called Bruce on the moon named for Catherine Wolfe. Bruce, not quite the same Bruce, but-

Are you sure? I don't know. Is that something we should get into? Probably not. No, I don't want a crater named after we should get into? Probably not. No, I don't want a crater named after me. You have to be dead. Then stick around. Neither of those was our winner.

That's Howard Medlock of Lubbock, Texas. It has been a little bit over two years since Howard won this contest the first time. And here he is back again. Indeed, he said that crater called Math is on Europa. Do you have any more to tell us about it? Yes, all sorts of exciting. Okay, not really very much. It's a 10.8-kilometer crater on Europa, moon of Jupiter, named after a Celtic god, or Matt.

It's Matthew with one T. You know what we got from a whole bunch of people about this mythic king, a king of Gwynedd, who, get this, needed to rest his feet in the lap of a virgin unless he was at war or he would die. And a lot of people commented on the richness and strangeness of Welsh mythology. Wow, that is really specific and odd. Lastly, this from Robert Johansson in Bergen, Norway. He says he lives in Europa, which is the Norwegian word for Europe. He said, I just made a little impact crater in my backyard.

I named it math after Matt Kaplan. The name has not been approved yet. We're going to push for approval. Thank you. Thank you. From your mouth to the IAU's closed ears. Oh, I should mention that Howard won a Planetary Society t-shirt, a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. He also, though, gets one of those codes so that he can get a free download of Distant Suns VR, Distant Suns Virtual Reality, that great astronomy app, which is only good for Apple devices, iOS devices, but it is extremely cool. We've talked about it a number of times. Well worth checking out.

It's been around longer than pretty much any other astronomy app, I think. And now they have this great new virtual reality variant of it. All right, now we're ready for next time. The Delta II rocket, very, very successful, but just had its last launch a couple weeks ago with the ICESat-2 mission. We have a blog on our website from Jason Davis about the Delta II. How many total launches were there of Delta II rockets? How many total launches? That includes successes and failures and partial successes. How many launches? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. This time you have until the

third. That would be Wednesday, October 3rd at 8 a.m. Pacific time. And somebody who with the right answer, of course, that is chosen by random.org will win a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Check it out in the chop shop store.com Planetary Society store. And a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account from that worldwide network of telescopes operated on a non-profit basis. You can also donate that account. And with that, we're done. All right, everybody go out there, look up the night sky. Think about what you would wear for a headshot that would hang on Matt's wall. Thank you, and good night.

You're not sending me another headshot, are you? I mean, I've already got the first eight up on the wall, including the billboard-sized one. Number nine. It's a beautiful, beautiful shot. Number nine, number nine. He's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Spetz, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society, who joins us every week here for What's Up. Want to join Bill Nye and the rest of us as a VIP at the launch of LightSail 2? When this show is published on the morning of September 26, 2018, you'll have just hours left to get your chance by donating to the Planetary Society's Omaze campaign. You can learn about this and all the other great rewards at omaze.com

slash bill. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by its astronautical members. Mary Liz Bender is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which was arranged and performed by Peter

Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan at Astro. which was arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. I'm Matt Kaplan, Ad Astra.