Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Special Live Edition of Planetary Radio: The Loss of Space Shuttle Columbia

Episode Date: February 3, 2003

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Welcome Welcome to a special edition of Planetary Radio. My name is Matt Kaplan. We have put aside the program that we were going to play for you tonight, and it will return along with our regular format next week on February 10th. But in light of the tragedy that took place Saturday morning, we wanted to do something a little bit special. So we are live, as this is being transmitted at least on KUCI, with a special tribute and consideration of the meaning of what happened on Saturday. On the Planetary Society website, this statement was posted on February 1st.

The space shuttle Columbia was lost today in the quest to explore space. The astronauts who died during re-entry from orbit were humankind's representatives in that quest. We extend our heartfelt sympathy to the families, friends, and loved ones of the crew of STS-107. We also share the sorrow of NASA and all the teams that were part of this flight. The causes and implications of this tragedy will be widely discussed in the days and weeks ahead. The Planetary Society and its members worldwide are devoted to space exploration, and we will help in any way we can with the recovery from this tragedy. Today, we can only express our concern and sorrow. Today, we can only express our concern and sorrow.

And it is signed by Bruce Murray, Wesley T. Huntress, Jr., Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Louis D. Friedman, who is the executive director of the Planetary Society. And Lou Friedman joins us on the phone now, if this is working. Lou, are you there? I'm here. Nice to talk to you, Matt. Lou, thank you for joining us. We certainly expected to have you back on Planetary Radio, but not under these circumstances. It is a difficult time.

It's a time that we've encountered before in the space program, and it reminds us all, of course, that space is risky. I've actually written on that subject three or four times in the last couple of years, but fortunately in those cases it was always, but unfortunately, in those cases, it was always about robotic spacecraft that we've lost. And those were serious losses, and we were sorry to have that happen. But, of course, it pales in significance to the loss of human life. And just as the human exploration ventures are great triumphs, there also can be great tragedies, and that's what we're experiencing now.

It really is about risk and exploration and what it means to be human, isn't it? It does. The humans are, as we said in our statement, they're the emissaries, they're representatives in the exploration of space. And fortunately, at least I'm alive in the generation that still regards humans as important. We haven't turned it all over to robots yet. The idea of exploration is a very human idea, and we're not, I think, satisfied just by extending our robotic reach out there and saying that's enough. So the humans are very much the emissaries of our aspiration to explore other worlds,

to explore our limits, to go faster and farther and higher. At the same time, I think we do live in an age that's heavily influenced by robotics, and the cost of these enterprises must be taken into account. So we need to focus not on humans versus robots. That's an issue that I think is thankfully behind us, but on the specific roles that humans do. This is where the Planetary Society feels quite strongly that humans should be used only where they're essential, where the risk is balanced by a great potential gain,

and not for the mundane tasks that could be done better in a robotic program. So there is a balance to be struck. Definitely. Humans sometimes are in the way of certain activities of science in a space station or in a laboratory. At other times, of course, they're going to be essential. And of course, when we get to other worlds, we don't ever think that it should end with robotic exploration. It should definitely be leading toward human exploration. So it is very much a balance. We call, for example, in our Mars program, a series of robotic missions,

but we want to actually have even the near-term robotic missions lead to a Mars outpost that can be the first infrastructure for the humans that will get there. So we'd like to begin work on that now and not wait to some distant future like some would counsel. So in that sense, we're more aggressive about the human program. On the other hand, because of the kinds of things that can happen because of the great risk, we would not use humans for the mundane activities of delivering cargo to space or even some aspects of laboratory science that are unrelated to the life sciences themselves. Let's talk about this mission of Columbia, this last mission of Columbia. It was a very special one in terms of the science role that it was playing, wasn't it?

Yeah, it was a long, delayed science mission, and the principal job of the shuttle is to construct the space station. The principal job of the shuttle is to construct the space station, and the United States has got itself all bollocked up in a plan in which the space shuttle's sole justification is really the development of the space station, and we're entirely reliant on it. But there was a space science goal, and it had to be put off and put off and put off in the recent last year and a half, and this was the flight that was culminating in that.

And it was doing a wonderful thing. It not only had many hundreds of wonderful experiments, but it also had students involved from around the world, and in our own effort, something very special, a Palestinian and Israeli student working together on an astrobiology experiment that was conceived by Dr. Aaron Schenker in Israel and Dr. David Wormflash, who's at the NASA Johnson Space Center. And I should mention that David Wormflash will be joining us in about less than 10 minutes.

Oh, wonderful, wonderful. about less than 10 minutes. Oh, wonderful, wonderful. And so we were actually able to do a meaningful astrobiology experiment related to the idea of bacteria traveling through space and bring in a peace initiative with a Palestinian Israeli student. So that's one of the real advantages and virtues of the space program is it's very inspiring and involves so many people on Earth and the inspiration to achieve the best.

And in this sense, I think the value of space transcends the value of any given experiment. And I would hope that even our experiment, which, of course, was on this tragic flight, even our experiment still has that legacy of bringing people together on a great goal. I can't decide whether it was monumentally terrible, unfortunate timing, or good timing. The NASA budget was unveiled today, or at least notes. There was going to be a press conference I know you were going to be monitoring, which has been postponed. But I wonder if you've had a chance to look at the information that has been released. I have looked at some of it, not a whole lot.

The press conference, of course, was called off, and the summary statement was delayed in getting out. So I only know a little about the budget. The president, as far as Planetary is concerned, the President had proposed a new initiative with nuclear power that's going to be used for deep space exploration, which we welcome, because the future of exploration will greatly benefit from having a nuclear power system that could be on the surface of Mars or taking us to the outer planets. taking us to the outer planets.

In addition, the Human Physiology Initiative for Earth orbit studies of human capabilities for the future. And it had the Pluto mission, which we had so long campaigned for, and finally appeared to have won a victory in having the administration and NASA accepted as part of their program. So we were, I think we're encouraged by the budget. As I said, I don't know all the details yet, and it's going to change now because it's got to go to Congress, and Congress has to take into account all the events of this past weekend, so I'm sure it's going to change. But the intent and the commitment to exploration is very good. What would you hope would happen with the NASA budget?

Well, I have resisted for years, Matt, giving budget directions, budget guidelines. I want the budget to go up 5%, 10%, 20%. I'm like every other citizen. I want my budget to go up 100% and I want my taxes to go down 100% and the two don't ever meet. I think the answer is not, I can't think about the budget in terms of money. I have to think about it in terms of programs. I have to think about what I want to accomplish. I want the Mars program to be a vigorous active program of exploration every two to four years. I want landers on the surface.

I want good orbiters to do site selection for future Mars outposts. I want the outer planets explored. I want a mission to Europa. I want a mission to Pluto. And I think they can be all balanced in a program that is not out of line with previous budgets. in a program that is not out of line with previous budgets. And from time to time, there has to be a national commitment to undertake great ventures like we had with the Apollo program and our Mars program, and I hope someday we'll have humans to Mars as well. So to me, it's not a matter of trying to think of what I want with the NASA budget.

There's great issues now confronting it. Do we build a replacement orbiter for the one that was lost, or do we say that's going backwards and committing to the past? Do we now look at the next generation of launch vehicles and decide how we want to do human flight in the future? Then once we've derived an answer to that question, we come up with what the budget is that's necessary to do that. I hope we make a commitment to the future and not to the past.

I hope we make a commitment to human exploration, even if it's on a longer time scale, and that we don't make another short-range negative decision about trying to fill in a stopgap measure, as we did with the shuttle, and then have to live with it for 30 years because we didn't make the commitment to the future of human exploration. Lou Friedman, that's about all the time we have left for this segment. I want to thank you for taking the time tonight to go on with us live on this special edition of Planetary Radio. Well, thank you, Matt, and thanks always to the Planetary Society members who are on our website,

to your listeners in the UCI area who are on the radio station, because this enormous outpouring of public interest now is, I think, what's going to sustain the space program in the weeks and months and years to come. Thank you, Lou. Lou Friedman is the executive director of the Planetary Society and one of the founders of that group. We're going to be back with David Warmflash, Dr. David Warmflash, who was one of the investigators

with an experiment on that ill-fated shuttle, Columbia. He will be with us live here on Planetary Radio in just a moment. Please stay with us. © BF-WATCH TV 2021 This special edition of Planetary Radio continues now, as promised, with Dr. David Wormflash. David, are you with us? Yeah, hi, Matt. David, thank you very much.

I guess we're talking to you at your lab at the University of Houston. Right, that's right. This has been a hell of a three days for you, hasn't it? Oh, it is. I just came straight from the airport, actually. You were in Florida? Back from Florida. I guess you were there waiting for what you expected would be a triumphant landing.

Matt, I was right at the runway, as close as you're allowed to get, right in front of the clock. I was standing with Dr. Yael Bar of the Israeli Aerospace Medicine Institute and for a while with Dr. Aram Shankar of the Israeli Aerospace Medicine Institute, and for a while with Dr. Iran Shankar of the Israeli Aerospace Medicine Institute, although Iran had gone up, some reporters had called him up to ask him some questions, what's going on as the clock was getting near zero. And Yael and I were just wondering what could he possibly be saying. No one knew anything at that point, but he's pretty good with that, with kind of improvising. And it got near zero, and we got really worried, and we just didn't see it.

It didn't come, and something was up. And then we heard announcements that last contact with the shuttle had been at 200,000 feet over New Mexico somewhere. And then we got the call to get back on the bus to be evacuated. And then on the bus, everybody's cell phones started going off, all the people calling us and asking, do you know anything? And we didn't know anything, and that usual kind of confusion was horrible. They didn't know anything, and that usual kind of confusion was horrible. I guess you must have been pretty much aware that Columbia and the crew,

and for that matter, your experiment, were lost, or so you thought. Well, we still think that the experiment is very likely lost. There's always an outside possibility, given the type of container that was holding it. But we're not thinking about that right now immediately. We're thinking about these astronauts were involved with us in the experiment, and we kind of just in a few days, and we're scientists, but we're also humans. And Lou Friedman was talking about how this was really a science mission, and the astronauts were kept extremely busy with all of the experiments. Of course, there were many others other than yours that we talked about on this radio show just a couple of weeks ago.

But your experiment had an angle that I don't think the others had, and that was this involvement by a Palestinian student and an Israeli student. That's right. Were the astronauts aware of that? Actually, yeah. The astronauts were, all seven astronauts, were aware that there were various experiments from different students of different countries, including Israel and Arab countries.

And then the two astronauts who actually worked on the experiment for us, people are starting to get to know the astronauts by name. Casey was the astronaut who activated it. She is the Indian-born American astronaut, a wonderful woman. She knew more of what exactly the experiment was, and Laurel is one of the doctors, and she deactivated it for us on the last day before it was supposed to land. And they had a list of all the experiments and more or less how they worked on the CBEX-2 module, which was a module sent up by the ITA company, which is a small space company in Pennsylvania.

A lot of these experiments go through these companies, as I think I mentioned on the last time that I was on. So they had an idea about the experiments, and then the Israeli astronaut, Ilan Ramon, he knew specifically that this was a special project between a Palestinian student and an Israeli student, and he was very happy about it, I heard.

Yuval Landau, the Israeli student, is in Israel, and it's about coming up on 4 a.m. there, so we didn't bother him. I don't think we should wake him up. No. We did, though, talk to Tariq Adwan earlier today, who sends you his regards. He wished that he could join us again this evening, but he could not.

He could not break away from the plans he had this evening. And, of course, the two of you and others have been getting a lot of coverage. I heard you on Fox News Channel yesterday. and others have been getting a lot of coverage. I heard you on Fox News Channel yesterday. If that had happened, say, two or three days ago, if I had known that that would happen and the experiment would get all this publicity, normally I would have been just ecstatic about it, but who would have wanted it this way?

Yeah, of course. You mentioned that, as far as we know, the experiment is lost. And we're not really breaking a story here because I think you said it's already been carried by the Jerusalem Post. Right. The Jerusalem Post is running an article that came out today mentioning an outside possibility that the way that these experiments worked in the CBICS-2 module, there are a couple of different machines that hold them. And the one that held this experiment and the other two experiments on which I was a principal investigator with Aran Shankar was called a DMDA. And the ITA company sent two of these DMDAs up, and the president of ITA, John Cassanto, has been saying that his company,

who are the ones who know the device, they can recognize it, they can recognize the container from the outside, device, they can recognize it, they can recognize the container from the outside, they have been stating publicly that they believe that one of the two DMDA devices that they sent up can be visualized in one piece in some of the material that has been recovered. The debris that is spread over 100 miles. Right. They are saying it's built like a brick and that they know their piece of equipment very well. Now, that doesn't say anything about, first of all, which one of the DMDAs it is,

whether it's the one with these experiments. And not only the experiments that the two students and I and Aran Shankar and other members of the Israeli Aerospace Medicine Institute sent up, but there were several others on that device from other researchers who had nothing to do with us with some pretty valuable experiments on things like understanding how cancer cells grow. And there is an outside possibility that they might be on there, but first of all it has to be the correct one of the two GMDAs, which look identical on the outside.

And second, it would have to be shown that the seals are not broken to the extent that the samples would be lost on the inside. However, the GODS experiment, as Tariq explained last time, the way it works is that we have bacterial samples growing on kind of rock material in space, but right before the shuttle leaves orbit, one of the astronauts, who in this case was Laurel, would add a fixing agent, which was glutaraldehyde, and then that is basically like a preservative, and that will preserve it for a very long time. If this were to be the case, and this is a very big if, I want to emphasize that.

It's a long shot, certainly. But if, it would mean that really all the growth, if there has been growth in space on the rocks, would have been preserved, and it wouldn't be necessarily time-dependent, so that if the authorities had to hold on to it for a while, but then later we were to get access to it after weeks or even months, then there's a possibility it still might be scientifically useful. No question. Time for, you know, hopes and prayers. When I mentioned this to Tariq earlier today, he had not heard about this story yet, and he had the right word for it.

He said it would be a miracle. To think that even as an extreme long shot, the possibility that this experiment might still be completed, and the work of these astronauts. You know, if you watch the astronauts, they're on NASA television a lot the last few days, both before and after the tragedy. And if you just watch them working, they were so fascinated by all of these experiments. They were well aware of the scientific value. all of these experiments.

They were well aware of the scientific value. This mission was just packed with very useful and important scientific studies. And although we are just so, of course, we've lost seven brilliant people, seven great, wonderful human beings, seven great, wonderful human beings. But I think that it's not too much of a speculative statement to say that they would have wanted something to come out of this tragedy, if something could come out of it, short of the crew making it back alive, given that it had been a tragedy already, if an experiment had survived and had produced some answer to a scientific question, I think that they would have really liked that. I have no doubt you're correct there. And we should mention that some of the other experiments on board Columbia,

the results were sent down by telemetry and voice report. And so certainly just in terms of the research, it wasn't in vain. But you know what? It wasn't in vain even if no results had been returned. No, definitely not. if no results had been returned? No, definitely not. We've gained experience in, I guess, putting together a science flight, and unfortunately it came to a tragic end.

But I don't think that if you would ask any of the astronauts, given the danger and given the odds, and they were aware of the dangers, I don't think any one of those seven would have thought twice about getting aboard that vehicle. That's how they were. That's the type of people they were. I'm sure you're right. David, warm flash, we have only a minute or two left here. Where do you and your co-investigators go from here if the experiment is not recovered? Well, if it's not recovered, then obviously there aren't any post-flight studies we can do.

We have ground controls, but it's only the ground controls. But we have ideas for doing experiments in the future, hopefully in the near future. We hope that NASA will be able to have either the shuttle fleet running again safely or come up with other ways to bring things into space. And it's also possible to talk with the Russians to try to, in the event that it takes a while, to get the American space transport to orbit running again, which I don't think it will. They seem to be pretty confident and moving ahead a lot faster than, let's say, after the Challenger disaster. after the Challenger disaster.

But the Russians are also available, and we have some contacts with a few of their biomedical people, some of the physicians there that we've known from conferences and might be very interested in collaborating on different astrobiology experiments and space biology experiments. David, we will wish you the best of luck in all of those future efforts. David Warmflash, Dr. David Warmflash, has been speaking to us from his lab at the University of Houston. David, we'll look forward to having you on Planetary Radio again sometime in the future.

Thank you, Matt, and I hope the next time it will be under happier circumstances. Let's hope so. Thanks very much. And that's about all the time we have left for this special live edition of Planetary Radio. We will return to our regular format next Monday, Monday the 10th. We hope that you'll be with us then for all of our regular features. We will certainly hope for a return to space and that these lives that have been lost are not forgotten, that the mission and the purpose

that they live for, a very human one, will be remembered by all of us and acted on. And this has been Matt Kaplan with Planetary Radio. Thanks very much for listening. We'll see you next week. © transcript Emily Beynon