Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Staying Alive in Space

Episode Date: June 10, 2020

Keeping humans alive and well in space is hard enough. How will this be accomplished on a 3-year journey to Mars and back? Paragon President and CEO Grant Anderson shares the great progress we’ve made and the remaining challenges. Astronauts headed for the Red Planet may not need ice cream to stay alive, but will life be worth living without it? You may win a pint of Ben & Jerry’s moooony new flavor and a Netflix Space Force spoon to eat it with in this week’s space trivia contest. Learn more at https://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2020/0610-2020-grant-anderson-life-support.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Staying alive as you cross the expanse, 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. We're back with another fascinating expert for you to meet. This time it's the leader of a company that is working toward keeping men and women alive and well as they make the long journey to Mars and back, also to the moon. It's a big challenge, possibly as big as any other we face if humans are going to reach the red planet. President and CEO Grant Anderson of Paragon Space Development Corporation will join us shortly. Ice cream may not be essential for life support on that mission, but it would be nice. And it's what you might win in the new What's Up Space Trivia contest.

I don't know if Bruce Betts will ever forgive me for the torture I'm about to inflict on him. We're back to headlines from the downlink this week, where there is great news about the InSight mission. We don't want to become overconfident, but it appears that the long-suffering mole heat flow probe is finally under the surface of Mars. NASA and German Aerospace Center engineers have used the lander's scoop to help the self-hammering instrument bury itself. Maybe now it can get a grip and head down the several meters scientists have hoped for. Godspeed, InSight. With its big Long March 5B rocket back on track, China has laid out a very ambitious schedule of launches to assemble its big modular space station. The work gets underway next year.

Crew Dragon astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley have settled into life aboard the International Space Station, which may be their home for as long as four months. The Planetary Society has a terrific guide to their mission at planetary.org, where you can also read about the commercial crew program and the ways the ISS is helping us learn how humans will survive in deeper space. As always, you'll find the downlink at planetary.org slash downlink. It offers much more than space headlines. For example, did you know that past Planetary Radio guest Mae Jemison filed a police complaint when her arm was twisted

and she was thrown on the pavement during a traffic stop? This was four years after she became the first black woman in space. Let's face it, humans are ever so much more fragile than robots. It takes a lot to keep us alive in the not very friendly and nurturing environs of space and other worlds, but we're learning, we're adapting. As you're about to hear, some of the advances are stunning, but Grant Anderson knows we have a long ways to go before we can travel the solar system or live on the moon as comfortably as we must. Grant is co-founder, president, and CEO of Paragon Space Development Corporation.

He used to be the company's VP of Engineering and chief engineer. You can tell his heart and soul are still in engineering. He holds several patents, and he was the Chief Design Engineer for development of the ISS solar arrays back when he worked at Lockheed Martin. We covered a wide range of challenges when we talked a few days ago,

and he left me feeling hopeful. Grant, it is great to get you back on Planetary Radio. It has been almost exactly three years since we talked, long overdue for a conversation. And my understanding is that there's some new stuff, some developments to talk about. But first, welcome back. Well, thank you very much. It's really great to be back. Let me start with the question that may be uppermost in our space geek audience's mind. uppermost in our space geek audience's mind. How confident are you now that we will, before too long, be able to keep some number of astronauts alive and well on a Mars mission lasting at least

a year and a half, could be as long as three years? Well, there's two parts to that. One, I'm confident will happen, that what can be done. And the other part is that I know we're not there yet. Okay. In spite of these advances that I think we're going to talk about in a minute or two, I mean, where are we lacking? What's left to be done to make this happen? I mean, we know we can get rockets there and back, but keeping people alive, that's the bigger challenge? get rockets there and back, but keeping people alive, that's the bigger challenge? That's the part that we have no existence proof to show that we can do. We know we can navigate to Mars. We know we can land on Mars, although probably lower amounts of mass than we need to for a human mission. But we really don't know if the life support system will function and function

correctly for all that time. The space station has been a wonderful test bed. And of course, it's been supporting people. But there's been a fair amount of failures and glitches and stuff like that that aren't that dangerous because we're 30 minutes from an escape to the ground from Earth and from orbit. But when you light the candle and you're on the way to Mars, that's a whole nother ball of wax. Let me back up some and go back to the beginnings of this topic, life support systems, because they go back a lot further than when humans started going into space, right? And

Paragon is involved with some of this. I mean, you make systems to support divers. And do you have stuff on submarines? We do not right at this moment. We actually have an active program on a submarine rescue system. I can't get too much into it, but it's how to rescue people from a submarine that has been stranded below surface. And yes, people have been diving in valves and within suits for years now. It's interesting. It's related and it is in our field, which is life support in extreme environments and being 200 feet underwater is an extreme environment. But things happen a lot faster with altitude. You change altitude in the sea and you get a multiple change of PSI. It's 14.7 pounds per square inch for every 33 feet of water.

Of course, you don't have that happening in space, but then you've got to protect yourself from everything else. Generally, the ocean doesn't try to boil you or otherwise, doesn't try to boil you or otherwise, but it's still a matter of providing the right supplies that are required by a human at the right time and continuously until the mission is over. You know, they make this look so easy on Star Trek, even though periodically on the Starship Enterprise, they would say life support is disabled and, you know, people would start to choke almost immediately, it seemed. There's so much to this. I mean, maybe we can break it down into some of the categories that you and Paragon actually work with, beginning with the air that we breathe. And I saw one of the sections on the website is air revitalization systems, that you're doing some of this work for a spacecraft

that Boeing hopes to put some humans in pretty soon? Yeah, we supply the humidity control system. And yeah, when humans breathe, really, you can think of humans as one big chemical factory. We breathe in oxygen to use nitrogen as a buffer gas. And we drink water. And then we expel all these things. We expel out the oxygen we don't use. In general, you breathe in nominal air that has almost no carbon dioxide in it, about 21% oxygen. You breathe out about 16% oxygen, 5% CO2, and then the rest is still the nitrogen gas. It's funny you mentioned about the Star Trek thing because, yeah, what always fascinates or frustrates us in life support is nothing happens that fast. It's just as deadly. But, you know, yeah, the life support is broken down and within

a few minutes, a few seconds, suddenly people are choking on their own CO2. Yeah, it's not really true. You know, it takes a little while to build up gases to a noxious level or at least or even a toxic level. But I will say at the same time, you know, the fans on a spacecraft in zero gravity or microgravity are life critical because if you're not moving the air past your face, you're building up yourself in a bubble of CO2, just like a candle would build up a bubble of combustion products. And it will eventually snuff out the candle. And there's a, you have the same problem with humans. You know, I read this once in a science fiction story, and I wondered if that was seriously a problem because somebody actually does pass out in this story because the air is not circulating. I mean, how in a space as complex and large as the International Space Station, how do we make sure that the air is constantly being refreshed in every place that an astronaut might stick their head? That is an issue.

We've done that. way back in the early 2000s for what was then called Spacehab, because they had a module that went back in the shuttle and it went up to the space station and it was packed full of supplies and they would over a few days unpack the system. And we had to analyze how, what would the airflow be like with it halfway unpacked or a third unpacked or three quarters unpacked? Because very often the astronauts to try to especially the ones that did on space station for a long time would escape to the module as sort of a place to be the way from everybody else that's isolation while you're isolated from everybody on earth getting a few days away from the people you're stuck in a small can with uh is is considered

premium time so we had to analyze actually how the airflow happened in different levels of unpacking. The other thing we've seen on space station is that there are times when they have to go behind the panels and, you know, and either rotate down a rack or take off something and get into a rack. And they have had problems with astronauts getting headaches because the circulation isn't very good there. And so they try to limit that. And they have had problems with astronauts getting headaches because the circulation isn't very good there. And so they try to limit that. And they also have monitors and buddies to make sure that they're watching each other while it happens. It is a concern for the Orion vehicle.

We did the analysis on airflow. have a requirement that when anywhere within the cabin, you have to have about a foot per second worth of airflow past a person's face in order to wash away the CO2 and bring fresh air in. And we do the analysis to show that, yes, that is the case, that no matter where the person is in the vehicle, and we model all of the different fans or all the different registers that are pushing out air and all of the intakes. And then we move a human model around in a CFD analysis, computational fluid dynamics model, and we check to see whether the phase velocities are correct. And it's a very real concern, and it's something we're doing with, say, the moon lander. Absolutely fascinating. We're going to get back to that work that you're contributing to toward putting humans back on the moon as well, but we'll stick with CO2 for a moment.

What do you do with it? I mean, once you pull it back into a system, how do you control the level of CO2 to say nothing of making sure we're getting enough oxygen? Well, there's a few ways to remove the CO2 from the air for short missions. And we define missions in person days. So in other words, if you have four people for two days, that's eight persons days. Or if you have two people for 10 days, that's 20 person days. In general, when you're below about 70 or 80 person days, we use what's called lithium hydroxide, which is a chemical that will combine with the CO2 and make a calcium product, calcium carbonate, I think it is. I'm not a chemist, so don't quote me on that. You just lock it into that and then you throw away the canister when it's done. However, when you get to something like space station or for these longer missions,

space station or for these longer missions, you use either a molecular sieve. What they do is they preferentially pass oxygen faster than CO2. So you keep switching from one bed to the other and you let the oxygen wave go through and you end up with almost pure oxygen coming out the other side until such time as the CO2 starts to break through. Then you switch over to the other bed, which has now been cleaned. And Then you switch over to the other bed, which has now been cleaned. And while that one is doing the same process, the one you've just switched from, you vent the CO2 to space. Or in the case of some systems, we collect that CO2, bottle it up, and then we use it in another reaction called a Sabatier reaction, where we react it with hydrogen and you end up getting out water as well as methane.

And then you got to figure out what to do with the methane. And one of the things that many people have talked about, including Robert Zubrin, is then using the methane for fuel for returning, say, a rocket from Mars. The thing that sticks in my mind is when you're talking about these person days, I mean, it could be 10,000 person days for a trip to Mars. That's a lot without being able to stop off to pick up more oxygen or fix your CO2 absorber. Yeah. That depends on how many people. If it's a five-year round-trip mission to Mars, you'll end up spending for each person about a thousand and 825 days so if you have five people yeah you're up to nine thousand hours when you get to that you have to

recycle it either you recycle it or you somehow pay the penalty of having to launch extra mass in order to replace the oxygen that goes out with the co2. One problem with blowing the CO2 overboard is, well, that oxygen has been used by your body for energy, and the CO2 is a byproduct you breathe out. Well, that means every time you vent that CO2 to space, you're losing that oxygen, so you have to bring it along to replace it. Definitely for a longer mission on, say, to Mars, you want to recycle that. You want to break down the CO2. And there's one way, one technology we work on for that is called SOE, which stands for

solid oxide electrolysis. If you think about your high school or even middle school experience, you put two wires in water and you get hydrogen coming off one wire and oxygen coming off the other. You can do pretty much an analogous thing with CO2 so that you end up actually with oxygen coming off one side and carbon monoxide coming off the other. And then you can crack the carbon monoxide to get the rest of the oxygen out and you end up with nothing but carbon and carbon dust. So you have to be able to then recycle that oxygen back into the system. You'll still always have to replace some. You also, of course, metabolize oxygen, not only the CO2, but into sugars that are used by your body. And those go into building molecular systems for your body. And so you will end up

using oxygen that is non-recoverable. So there's always going to be a little bit of replenishment on a long trip. Is that fairly energy intensive, cracking the CO2 to get the oxygen back? Yes, it's not only energy intensive, but it takes a pretty high temperature. The SOEs run at about 500 degrees centigrade, or Celsius, sorry. Yes, it takes a fair amount of energy. So it takes electrical energy to rip the bonds apart because a carbon dioxide bond is pretty darn strong. We could spend the rest of our time just talking about the air we breathe. But maybe I'll just leave it with one sidelight. You've already mentioned humidity.

Why is it so important to have a system to control the levels of humidity. What would happen on a closed system like the International Space Station or a spacecraft on its way to the moon or Mars if you didn't have something to control humidity? When you breathe out, you're not only breathing out carbon dioxide, but you're breathing out moisture. In fact, most of the water you lose in your body, say I live here in the desert in Tucson, Arizona, if I'm out hiking, I may not be sweating that much, but every time I breathe, I'm putting out moisture in my breath. If you're in a closed capsule and you're breathing, the humidity will quickly drop to 100%. And if you've got four people in a small capsule, it's a matter of minutes. It's not hours. Well, when you get up to a certain level,

anybody who's lived in Florida and had a glass of cold beer, you know that there's a lot of water in the air that will condense on your glass. And it's the same thing. Your spacecraft walls will be cool, most likely, at least one wall, the wall that's not facing the sun, depending on how you rotate and everything else. But still, it's going to be cooler. So if you get the relative humidity up above what's the dew point, as we call it. So what the dew point is, is you say the air is at 75 degrees Fahrenheit. If your dew point, though, is 55, that means that if it touches a surface that's 55 degrees or less, the water will condense out of the air onto your surface. Well, if people have seen the movie Apollo 13, and I think Swickard comments, well, it's like flying a toaster through a car wash is when they get all this condensation on the inside of the vehicle. That's really bad for electronics. You don't want to have a whole bunch

of condensation. Also, condensation promotes mold growth, and that's a big problem on long durations missions. The space station, they go through a whole protocol of wiping down surfaces to keep mildew and mold from growing on surfaces, even though they have a good humidity control system. But you have to be able to remove that water. There's really two ways to do it. One is a condensing heat exchanger, where you have a heat exchanger you know is colder than the dew point and you force water to be condensed out and then sucked up and separated and then you use the water for recycling. And then there's other ones like what Paragon supplied to Boeing, which is a membrane-based system that selectively passes water through and then just ejects water to the vacuum of space.

And that's good for short missions, again, like the commercial crew programs, like the one that's flying the space station right now. Let's turn to the other end of what makes water so important, particularly on, well, on any mission, but particularly a long one, and that's recovering enough, recycling enough that your astronauts have something to drink and maybe even grow food. When we talked three years ago, you told me that the system then on the International Space Station was maybe 65, 70 percent efficient at recovering the water in that closed-loop system. Are we doing much better now? Because I assume we're going to have to do a lot better to get to Mars.

Yes, we are. And yeah, that's true. That 65, 70 percent is when it's operating. If you take it over the whole lifespan of the system when it's not operating, of course, it's not it's not producing anything. So the efficiency, of course, goes down. The calculations on efficiency. efficiency. Yeah, Paragon actually developed a technology, again, using a sort of a selective membrane that will recover 98% of the water, especially that you urinate. So yes, you are drinking your pee in the end, but that will close the environment to 98%. So then really with our system, you end up with a bag of salt, which is the salts that are in your urine when you pee. And that one is supposed to fly to space station early next year and start working. And that will substantially reduce the amount of water they have to ship at the station

by hundreds of kilograms a year. That's an experiment, but it is necessary for sustainability on the moon. So we're very hopeful that once that experiment runs its course, that we will be baseline for the moon missions also. Is 98% recovery, is that good enough to get to Mars and back? Yes, that is. We have worked and are working on a program right now for doing the same thing for feces or for poop. Maybe some of your listeners will understand better. In fact, in the normal weird humor of the aerospace world, we actually call that program stool, S-T-O-O-L-E. That's doing the same thing. It's desiccating the feces and taking the water out because that's

the other part where water is lost over time. But yeah, at the 98% level, people consume about two kilograms of water a day. So you're only needing to provide a few cc's, cubic centimeters of water per day. And that's something that you can carry with you. And by the way, you want to carry with you because water is also a great radiation shield. Yeah, so I've read. I think you should call it scat, by the way. And I guess, you know, that's important

because you need it to fertilize your potatoes you're going to grow on Mars, right? Kidding, just kidding. Much more of my conversation with Paragon's Grant Anderson is seconds away. Greetings. Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society. Even with everything going on in our world right now, I know that a positive future is ahead of us. Space exploration is an inherently optimistic enterprise.

An active space program raises expectations and fosters collective hope. As part of the Planetary Society team, you can help kickstart the most exciting time for U.S. space exploration since the moon landings. With the upcoming election only months away, our time to act is now. You can make a gift to support our work. Visit planetary.org slash advocacy. planetary.org slash advocacy. Your financial contribution will help us tell the next administration and every member of Congress how the U.S. space program benefits their constituents and the world. Then you can sign the petitions to President Trump and presumptive nominee Biden and let them know that you vote for space exploration. Go to planetary.org slash advocacy today. Thank you. Let's change the world. Thermal control.

It's puzzling to some people why that is difficult to maintain on a spacecraft. After all, it's flying through something that's a medium that is not much above absolute zero. And yet it is a challenge, isn't it? Oh, it's a really big challenge. There's again, a few things. You are a chemical factory. A human is a human at rest, just sitting there,

not doing anything, not doing any vigorous exercise, but thinking runs about 100, 120 watts. So everybody, everybody in the world is bright because we're about the same power as a bright light bulb. So if you have five people in a spacecraft that's built like a thermos bottle, by the way, because it's protecting from the outside, and I'll talk about that in a second, you'll build up heat just because five people put out 500 watts. So think of it as essentially starting an oven inside of your vehicle and you've got to get rid of that heat. Now, it is true that on average space, especially if you're in low Earth orbit, you've got this beautiful planet that's running at about 300 Kelvin or generally a little cooler than what we're used to. But the rest of the space is pretty bad. If you're looking away from the sun, you're

looking at a four Kelvin environment. So it's sucking heat out of you. And then if you have the sun on you, even with the good reflective clothing, you've got fifteen hundred watts per meter squared hitting you. So you've got to reflect that and not absorb that heat, maintaining that thermal balance. And and you and of course, there's no air to take the air away. It's not like your car. They take the heat away. It's not like your car, like you have a radiator that air is running through all the time and you're ejecting heat to the atmosphere. The only real way to get rid of heat external to the spacecraft is radiation. And that's pretty inefficient. I won't go into the equations, but you have to get the radiator. The hotter it is, the faster it radiates heat.

But you also need to get it down to a temperature where it's useful enough to then cool the equipment inside. So it takes a real thermal balance and a lot of analysis to make sure that you're rejecting enough heat. This thermal control and these radiators, this is another area of expertise for Paragon, isn't it? Yes, there's really two different areas for radiators. One is making sure you have

what's called a turndown ratio. So sometimes you want to reject a lot of heat when you're, say, approaching space station and you've got all of your computers running because you want to have your avionics, both your primary and your backup and even your second backup running. And they're all doing a lot of work to make sure that you're rendezvousing and docking correctly. You're putting out a lot of heat there and you're near the earth and a few other things.'re putting out a lot of heat there and you're near the earth and a few other things. So you have a lot of trouble rejecting heat and you're producing a lot. Then you're, say, on the way from earth to the moon and you're out in the middle of nowhere.

So all you can really see is a four Kelvin environment. For those who are privy to Apollo, they actually had something called the barbecue roll they did, where they rotated the spacecraft very slowly in order to make sure that all the sides were sort of heated up and cooled down and maintained a good overall temperature. At that time, they also shut down a lot of systems because they weren't in launch mode or docking mode or anything else. So you had low heat production and a really big, good environment for rejecting heat. And you can actually get too cold. One of the key technologies there is, again, what we call turndown ratio, which is how much can you turn down the radiator so they don't reject too much heat and get you too cold when you're in that type of environment. And Paragon works a lot on

different turndown technologies, shape memory alloy radiators, and what we call stagnating radiators, which is what Apollo used, where generally you let certain lines freeze and not flow your coolant and other ones flow it. And then when you get back into a high heat environment or when you're starting to fire up your computers getting to the moon, then melts those those lines and you end up using your radiator again the other side is how you construct radiators traditionally radiators again not Apollo but other ones like on space shuttle were a honeycomb face sheet material so there's a aluminum honeycomb with aluminum face sheets and then a tube running through it that has a lot of problems of problems, both because you're only using one side of your radiators very often. You also have a bond line, a glue line between your tubes and your radiating surface, which then cuts down on the amount of heat you can transfer. Paragon developed something about 10 years ago called X-Rad technology, and that's actually a trademark. What we do is we extrude the radiator, and so it's all one piece, and build the radiator out of these extrusions.

And there's two good things about that. One is that it's a very efficient radiator because there's no losses and bond lines. But the other one is that we can change the design very quickly and not have to totally redo the tooling like you might have to do on a honeycomb radiator. That's a great segue into the next question I was going to ask you anyway. You're describing a lot of systems, machines, some of them fairly complex. What are the things that worry you the most about these systems when they have to keep running, it's truly a matter of life and death. I mean, are they seals, bearings, contamination? I mean, what are the things that keep you up at night when you think about keeping these running? That's the big

problem going to Mars right now. In the past, we've designed things for like the space station that it assumes you could have another one sent up from earth in a few months so if a pump fails you could have a new pump well when you're on your way to mars you can't have a new pump sent to you so what you need is two things one is access to what you need to fix so you need to make sure that you know unlike modern cars today where you can hardly find the spark plugs anymore you need to be able to make it so that the astronauts can get into the system and fix something and you have to have a plan in advance for what you might have to fix. So one of the things we consistently do is the risk analysis of what is likely to break. So like

a resistor sitting there on a board is probably not going to go bad. But now a microcontroller that's a radiation might. So can you make it so you can replace the microcontroller or the pump seal you know very often i hear about taking a 3d printer to mars and one of the problems with that is 3d printers only print certain materials so then you have to have the discipline all the way back in the design phase to say we will only make say o-rings out of this material because we know this 3D printer can build them. Or if you don't trust the 3D printer, because of course something can break down too, and then what, you need two of them or three of them? And how do you put the spares in

for the 3D printer that might break? The other option is to carry them with you, and then you've got to have a good analysis to say, okay, we're going to need at least three more O-rings, but we won't need 10 more O-rings. So we're going to take seven. And you've got to do that down to the last little iota of things that might go wrong and plan for it. There's got to be a paradigm shift in how we build stuff because of course, engineers like to optimize. If this O-ring for this pump, pumping this fluid at this pressure, the best O-ring is made out of, say, nitrile rubber. But then this O-ring over here for this pump, the best O-ring, because it's pumping a different fluid at a different pressure in a different way, should be some other type of soft material. Well, if you do that and every engineer optimizes there for one thing, you end up with 18 different types of material that you need to take with you or spares.

So you have to have a little discipline of saying, OK, engineers, you're only going to build seals out of nitrile rubber. And some engineer will say, but that won't last that long. Great. We're going to take spares. But and then the engineer says, but if you make it out of this rubber, it will never break. Maybe. says, but if you make it out of this rubber, it will never break. Maybe. And then, you know, and so you have to have that push me, pull you for a little bit until you have discipline on what you are building things out of. And it's very hard for an engineer to be told you're going to have to suboptimize in order to satisfy the maintainability and replacement requirements. I got to say again, this is so fascinating. You know, we talk a lot on this show about why it's so difficult to get humans to Mars and back. And you are providing a terrific additional demonstration of that.

So let's go to the moon. NASA recently announced that three companies, Blue Origin, SpaceX, and Dynetics, have been selected for further development of the Artemis Human Landing System, basically the 21st century version of the lunar module. NASA still hopes it's going to get men and women up there in less than four years. What's Paragon's role on one of these teams? You're working with Dynetics, right? That's correct. We're on Dynetics team that was announced. Our role is the life support system, of course. How important for your work is going to the moon before we go to Mars? I mean, we've had the International Space Station as a testbed. Is the moon an essential step to teach us how to get to the red planet? Yeah, I do believe so. And I know that some people in the space community disagree with it.

But like I said, there's no existence proof that says that we can build a life support system and go to Mars. The moon is a good midway place where you can test out systems, do a little bit of what I was talking about with the discipline of how you design and see what works and what doesn't work, where you can at least get home in a few days, which is doable. where you can at least get home in a few days, which is doable. And you stick the extra things on you need, whether it's lithium hydroxide, like I talked about for CO2, in case something breaks down. But there's operationally an issue also. One thing that a lot of people I don't think realize is, but they do maybe now because of coronavirus. If you've been on a Zoom call and you're not running video or you can't see people and somebody pauses for one second too long to say something, people start jumping on top of each other. Well, we have this problem and it takes training going to the moon. You've got one and a half seconds for the light to go in either direction. So you

have to have this three second pregnant pause every time you say something. And that's not accounting for when people have to think about something before they talk. Really, when you get like three or four or five light seconds away from Earth, which is only a few days into the mission going to Mars, you're no longer really able to discuss things with the ground. You can do video clips back and forth or blogs in a way, or podcasts, but you really can't carry on a conversation. It may seem like I've gone far away from what we do as life support, but say you're trying to repair something. If you don't have the materials and the instructions and the training, and you need to call home to figure out how to do something, it's not like Joe Mechanic that built the system down here on Earth

can walk you through it. It's going to have to be something where they send you up with a manual or whatever else. But going back to the technology itself, there are certain absolutes. Maybe not so much with HLS, which is the human landing system, but with the HALO, the human landing system but with the uh the halo the the human orbiter system around moon i see that as absolutely the test bed for

mars missions because you're far away enough from earth that you need to pay attention to p's and q's you don't have an immediate escape it also has to operate for long long periods of time and sometimes have quiescent periods, which we may also need where you launch it and it doesn't operate for a bunch of years until you get the crew on and go. You've got to make sure that the system will survive and be started up afterwards. All that will be tested on the Halo and what they call the Gateway. I would be really reluctant to look the spouse and children of an astronaut in the eye and say, I'm confident that we've done everything to keep your spouse alive all the way to Mars and back until we've

tested it to that degree in an environment like around the moon. I have become a convert to your way of thinking largely because of talking to people like you about this topic. I got just one more question that's sort of about the physical challenges. We know pretty well that the dirt on the surface of Mars wants to kill us. Moondust, maybe even more so. Is this something that you're already taking into account and have to take into account as you design the system that may be keeping people alive when they land in this Dianetics lander on our satellite, the moon. Oh, and you bet. Yes, it keeps me up at night. There's a joke in the industry that there's two types of people, those who think moon dust is a problem, but we can fix it. And the other one

think that moon dust means the sky is falling. Don't mind me coining that phrase for what we're talking about. I'm more on the sky is falling side of it. At least with the moon, the morphology of the moon dust, the regolith, is unlike anything, not only on Earth, but that we can even simulate on Earth. Because when you've had something bombarded for 4 billion years by micro-meteorites in a 10 to the negative 12 tor, very, very low pressure environment, it just does not have any of the characteristics that we're used to of dealing with, say,

lunar simulants on the ground, which have interstitial air, which is a great lubricant, by the way. So moon dust, it will harm seals. The astronauts that went to the moon and Apollo said that zippers were falling apart, their gloves were falling apart, the dust got under, in their fingernails, went straight in their fingernails, and didn't come out for weeks after they got home. They pretty much had to wait for their fingernails to grow out. It's pretty nasty stuff. Seals and seals that will work with that are a concern. I will say that Paragon recognized this two decades ago, and we think we have the right materials that will survive exposure to this dust. But it's really not a known. One of the things we'd love to do is, as part of the

CLPS program, which is a commercial lunar payload program that NASA is running, to plunk down a few testers on the moon that will test rotating seals and static seals and see how they will survive the lunar dust. And then one other very important part is that is one element of going to the moon that is not translatable to Mars. The dust on Mars is a very different thing than the dust on the moon. We may find all the ways to mitigate dust and prevent it from harming our equipment and everything on the moon. And then we get to Mars and none of that is applicable anymore. And we have to rediscover over again. So what I'd love to do again is those same experiments we plunked down on the moon and test before we do the final build of the moon lander. I'd love to be able to stick that same

device on a Martian lander and test it in Martian dust and see if the types of seals we think will work will actually work. Lunar dust is a real issue. There's requirements within our spec that are no surprise of a lot of filtering systems, HEPA filters, as we call them, the high efficiency filters. But knowing that those will actually work is a problem. The Apollo program spent millions of dollars on dust mitigation. And as far as I know, none of them worked. John Young used to say that to me and some of the others. I haven't talked to Harrison

Smith in a little while, but I know that dust is an issue in their minds. Well, I hope that within a year or two, you may be able to start sending some of those seals and devices up there on some of those Eclipse landers. We wish them luck. Going in a slightly different direction here, before we wrap up, Paragon is a great example of the thousands of subcontractors who, you know, you may not build rockets or spacecraft, but you make it possible for other companies, the Boeings and SpaceXes of the world,

to build and fly them. Is that... Can you talk about that role, the role that is played by these literally thousands of companies that make it possible for us to do things in space? Sure. They're a necessary part of the ecosystem. Of course, I run a company, so I have to say I'm a necessary part of the ecosystem, but it's true. If you look today in an industry as mature as the airline industry, while they have been consolidating, the good thing about having multiple tier one, tier two, tier three suppliers is that you spread the risk. One of the issues that I think SpaceX is going to run into and maybe Blue Origin to a lesser degree is they want to do it all themselves.

They want to have in-house environmental control, in-house propulsion, in-house structures, everything like that. The problem is, is that works for the first generation of vehicle, and you can actually push the envelope in a lot of different areas. But when you're working on the second or third or fourth generation of vehicle, the expense starts going up. Boeing right now or Airbus does not foot the whole bill for developing a new aircraft. They spread the risk among these other big suppliers and other tier, what we call tier one, tier two, or tier three suppliers. Those suppliers know their part of the business really well, whether it's avionics or the air pressure control system or the landing gear or

the elevons or whatever on an aircraft. It's equivalent in space too. What I see is this ecosystem of these suppliers. What we're doing is we're advancing our state of the art and our technology. We're putting the money into it. We have the best visibility into what might be needed, what might work. Sure, the big primes can come down and say, hey, we have this challenge, but we're probably in a better place to discover the solution, or we may already have a solution, we just haven't told you about it yet. So if you really want the whole commercial space industry to thrive, making sure that these sub-suppliers that specialize is really important to make sure that you end up with the best of the best, really.

And you got to forgive me. I stupid and are trying to get contracts to create the same kinds of devices. And that competitive pressure, just as there is among the prime contractors, that might just be, you know, I'm sorry, you might prefer to do without it, but it probably drives innovation and keeps costs down, doesn't it? Yeah, I know. I will say that we do a little special dance when we win a job in direct competition with our competitors. That's the free market way. It's a good way of coming up with the best that way. And it does keep us on our toes. Our job is to stay ahead of the curve in innovation. And if you really want to distill Paragon down into one thing is we are

a company of innovation that does life support. And part of our business model is actually that innovation is very applicable to say the outside world and non-space stuff. So we work actively with our patents and with our licensing and even in joint ventures or spinoffs to take that technology out to benefit a lot broader community than just the commercial space sector or the government space sector. It's definitely a sporty game, which is the name of a book that came out in the 80s about the airline industry, but it applies still today. And it keeps us all on our toes, that's for sure.

I got just one more for you, Grant. Do you still spend a lot of time on your bike? Yes, I do. I do. I tend to bike every weekend. Every two years, I do an epic trip. Last year, I did London to Glasgow, which is about 540 miles, which didn't go all according to plan.

I crashed one day and broke a rib, but I did complete the last 280 miles with a broken rib. And then I came home and got it fixed. One of the things that I think really makes Paragon unique is we really do pay attention to work-life balance. The old saying is nobody on their deathbed said, gee, I wish I spent more time at the office. We want to make sure that people go out and live their lives while we are mission driven and we have a mission that is critical for the future of humanity, we feel. You've got to

also remember that we are human beings with 80 plus or minus 10 or 20 years on this planet. Life's too short to give up everything. What I do is get out and bike. It satisfies two things. One is it keeps me in shape because even if I'm not on the bike ride, I'm preparing for a bike ride. So when I want to have that second donut, I restrain. But it also allows me to meet new people and go new places. And I'm a people person, I'll admit. I like to meet new people. That's apparent. Ever been out there peddling along and come up with a solution that you weren't able to come up with sitting at your desk? You know, if you were to ask me, I don't know if I could point to one, but I can tell you that most of my best ideas are in the

shower in the morning. Grant, this has been delightful. Thank you very much. I'm sure that the audience is going to find this as fascinating as I did. I wish you and Paragon the greatest of success as we head out there, hopefully to the moon very soon and not too long after to Mars. Well, thank you very much.

Great to talk to you again. And I hope we get to see each other face-to-face soon. Just stay safe and make sure you follow protocols to keep yourself from not being a statistic. I'll try and pay attention to my personal life support. You stay well as well, all of you and yours. Life support expert Grant Anderson of Paragon Space Development Corporation. Here comes What's Up. Time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. So we are joined again by the chief scientist of the Planetary Society. That'd be Bruce Betts, who's also the program manager for the LightSail program. And before you go into What's Up in the Night Sky this week,

here's a relevant comment for you from Marcel Jan in the Netherlands. I never knew that Bruce had such powerful friends that he's able to make such special arrangements with gas giants. Can he make sure they appear a little higher above my horizon? I'll skip all of the gas giant jokes that are going through my head. Yes, yes, I can. I will try. Let's see. Netherlands. Yeah. I'll work on it. Marcel Jan will be in touch, okay?

Or he will be in touch. And so will the gas giants. There it is. What's actually going on up there? Gas giants. Well phrased. phrased, rising around 2300 or 11 p.m. in the east and then getting up as high as I can get them later in the night. We've got Jupiter looking really bright and Saturn looking less bright, but still bright and yellowish. They're hanging out near each other still. And you can see them

in the east in the early evening, in the south later in the evening, and if you follow a line from Saturn to Jupiter, it will lead to the teapot asterism, so stars that look kind of like a teapot of Sagittarius, the constellation. A couple hours later, Mars comes up, and it's getting brighter and brighter as it moves towards opposition in October. It'll be hanging out near the moon on June 12th and 13th. And then if you want your challenge, you got Venus. You know, it has hung out with us for months in the evening sky. Now it snuck past the sun and is getting a little bit higher in the pre-dawn east and will continue to get higher in the pre-dawn east and will continue to get higher in the pre-dawn east.

And if you want a real observing challenge, in the pre-dawn on the 19th, you got Venus, which is super bright, and a very crescent-y moon low in the eastern horizon on the 19th together. But wait, don't order yet. On the 21st of June, there will be an annular solar eclipse. So the moon directly in front of the sun, but not blocking it out completely. And that'll be visible from Central Africa, Saudi Arabia, Northern India, and Southern China. And a lot more people will be able to see a partial eclipse during that time on the 21st throughout most of Eastern Africa, Middle East, and Southern Asia. That should make a substantial number of our

listeners, because we have lots in those regions of our planet, pretty happy. Maybe we can get a report from one or two of you. Oh, that would be cool. All right, we move on to this week in space history. It was 1963 that Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space. And 10 years ago, Hayabusa, the Japanese mission, returned a little bit of sample, but the first samples ever from an asteroid to Earth. More to come. Isn't it later this year? Is it returning? Yeah, that would be Hayabusa 2 coming back late in 2020.

Yeah, yeah. And with samples of Ryugu. And Osiris Rex still ahead of us as well. Yeah, it's doing its sampling and then returning samples from Bennu in 2023. Excellent. All right, we move on to Renu Street. Oh, yeah. move on to Renew Space Fact.

Oh, yeah. This is going even further back with our obscure cultural references than usual, but that sounds like a voice that Fanny Bryce would have done. Oh, my. Going back in time, launched in 1958, as we've discussed before, the Vanguard One satellite is the oldest human-made object in space. But I wanted to note how very small with such low mass it is. It's a 16-centimeter diameter sphere, a little over 6 inches, with six short antennas sticking out of it with a mass of only 1.47 kilograms. So you can hold it in your hand if you can catch it.

You know what I always thought was really cool about Vanguard? And this was even when I was a little kid and it had already been up there for years. It had solar cells, which just fascinated me as a little kid. They still do, if truth be told. But it had a few solar cells on that little sphere. Indeed, that's another space fact about it. It's the first spacecraft. It was the fourth successful satellite, and it was the first to have solar cells. Beginning a nice legacy there, I guess.

Okay, we have a contest to take care of. All right, I asked you who is scheduled to be the first non-American astronaut to launch on a SpaceX Crew Dragon launch. How'd we do? I'm going to let the poet laureate in Kansas, Dave Fairchild, answer for us. Coming up in August will be SpaceX once again, flying to the ISS with astronauts within. On the mission called Crew 1, Noguchi-san will shine. He's ridden on the shuttle and the Russian Soyuz line. Has he got that right? Yeah, he will be flying on three different vehicles by the time he goes up with the Crew Dragon.

So this is Soichi Noguchi, or as some people pointed out, Noguchi Soichi, if you want to do it the way they say it in Japan. And one person who submitted it one of those ways is our winner this week, Ian Gilroy in Australia, New South Wales, Australia. One of our many Down Under listeners. We love to hear from you. He is going to win himself. Well, he's just won himself the book What Stars Are Made Of? The Life of Cecilia Payne Gabashkin by Donovan Moore and Jocelyn Bell Burnell. Oh, and

a Planetary Society rubber asteroid. Just a couple of other nice responses here from Setapong in New York. Apparently Thomas Pesquet from France will be the backup. So it's going to be an international astronaut no matter what. You knew about this.

Well, yeah, I know everything. It's so not true. He can move gas giants. Of course he does. Oh, well, yeah, I can do that. Gene Lewin in Washington. A haiku for us this week. Noguchi prepares within a dragon he'll ride. The expanse

awaits. And so does the ISS. Finally, from Stephanie Retrom in Arizona, such exciting times and no one better to share it with than the Planetary Society. Yay! All right, I think we are ready for a new one and a terrific prize. All right, here think we are ready for a new one and a terrific prize. All right. Here's the question. What was the last space flight of an astronaut who had been an astronaut in the Apollo program? And who was that astronaut?

Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Give me that once again. Yeah, it was a little complicated. So I'm looking for the name of the mission and the astronaut. And this is the last Apollo astronaut who flew in space, not as part of the Apollo program, but the last Apollo astronaut who's part of the Apollo program to fly in space on, it turns out, not an Apollo mission, but many, many years later. You have until the 17th, June 17 at 8 a.m. Pacific time, as usual, to get us this answer. And get this. Have you seen any of Space Force, the Netflix series?

No, I have not. I've watched two and a half episodes so far. I just didn't have time yet to finish the third one. I think it's very entertaining. The first one was, I thought, especially good. Steve Carell and John Malkovich, a whole bunch of other people has a fantastic cast. Well, we heard from Ben and Jerry's, the ice cream people, you've probably heard of them. Yes. Yes, I have. Ben and Jerry's, in collaboration with Netflix, decided to come out with a new ice cream flavor to celebrate Space Force, the TV show in this case. It's called Boots on the Moon. And they sent me a pint, which I will get back to in a moment.

And they sent me a pint, which I will get back to in a moment. But they also sent us a coupon to send to one of you, whoever wins the contest. This coupon is good for any one Ben & Jerry's pint, three count of pint slices, or eight ounces of cookie dough chunks. Boots on the Moon will not be available until we're a little bit further into the summer. You may want to wait because I can tell you this pint came with other goodies and it was packed in your favorite material in the world, Bruce Betts, dry ice. It's actually my second favorite material in the world. Oh, it's your first ice cream? Maybe.

Anyway, here's the description from the pint itself. A universe of milk chocolate ice cream with fudge cows and toffee meteor clusters orbiting a sugar cookie dough core. Now, this pint, which we still have about a third left of at my house. This is the longest a pint of Ben & Jerry's has ever lasted in my house, maybe in the history of the world. I'm going to do the cruelest thing I've ever done to you, Bruce. I'm going to eat this in front of you right now. Okay. And I'm going to eat it.

Did you say chocolate with other chocolate? Yes. Chocolate with chocolate and toffee. I'm going to eat it with the special astronaut space force spoon that has a dog tag, which came with the package. Here we go. Ah. Mmm. Mmm.

Does it taste terrible? Tell me it tastes terrible. Oh, it's the worst thing I've ever tasted. Ah, geez. You're not telling truth. I'm lying to Bruce to make him feel better. It is utterly delicious. It is one of the best ice cream flavors I have ever tasted.

Now, back to Bruce. I'm so relieved. I mean, I'm sorry you're having to eat such a terrible, terrible product, man. Yeah, really. I think I should give it a second chance. Wait, I got to warm my bite here. Oh. Mm.

Are those sounds of pain? Mm. Oh. Oh, I am in agony. Oh, I'm so sorry. Taking one for the team. Good job. Things that I do for the Planetary Society and our members. All right.

Well, anyway, that coupon, and we'll throw in an astronaut spoon, a Space Force spoon. Those will be yours if you're the winner. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky, and think about Matt eating ice cream. Thank you. Good night. I think he could tell I was lying. That's Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week here for What's Up. So good. Have you caught the June Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio? It's at planetary.org slash radio, as well as all the other usual sources. Casey Dreyer and I take up the great challenges facing all of space exploration in the coming months. And we consider the considerable challenges so many are facing on the streets of the United States right now. We also welcome Chief of Washington Operations Brendan Currie for a Beltway update.

I've heard from a couple of listeners who were left with a misleading impression due to some slips in the editing process. That's on me. Please keep us on our toes. I read all your mail and messages and respond to as many as I can. The address is planetaryradio at planetary.org.

Or just add a message to your Space Trivia Contest entry at planetary.org slash radiocontest. Thank you. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its members who are empowering the world's citizens to advance space science and exploration.

Mark Hilverda is our associate producer. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. Per Aspera, Ad Astra.