Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Stephen Hawking: Spaceflight Pioneer!

Episode Date: March 21, 2018

He is known for his breakthrough physics and popularizing of science, but Dr. Hawking also wanted to fly in space. Erik Viirre led the medical team that helped Stephen experience weightlessness.  He says the adventure helped open the possibility of spaceflight for many more people.  Planetary Society co-founder Louis Friedman and Society CEO Bill Nye share their memories of the great physicist.  Bruce Betts doesn’t let a bad cold get in the way of the What’s Up segment.  Learn more about this week’s topics and see images here: http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2018/0321-stephen-hawking-zero-g.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stephen Hawking, spaceflight pioneer, 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. You've heard all about Dr. Hawking's amazing life and his contributions to science over the last few weeks, but we've got the story of his adventure in weightlessness, direct from someone who was there with him as the great physicist experienced zero-g. It's not just a great story, it's good news for anyone who hopes to slip the

surly bonds of Earth and visit the final frontier. We'll also hear the reminiscences of Planetary Society co-founder Lou Friedman. Lou enjoyed Hawking's company many times, and we'll start with complimentary thoughts from the CEO of the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Bill, we find you in a Missouri hotel room this time. What are you doing out there? I spoke at the University of Missouri. I'm reluctant to call it the greatest night of my life, but it was good. It was fun. It was a good night. It was up there. A giant of science has passed away, and we'll be talking quite a bit about him on this week's program. You got to meet him. Yes. So in 2010, the Planetary Society gave Stephen Hawking the Cosmos Award, an award that we present only now and then to people that we feel are very worthy, are worthy.

And Stephen Hawking was among them. And he accepted. And we all went to Cambridge by we all. Several people from the board of directors, board of directors went to Cambridge. You know, he had an unusual way of communicating with us with his electronic voice. But he's funny. He was very dry. The dry English wit was there. We all got caught up in his, if I may, aura, his hawking radiation. And it was quite a night. It was just more about me, Matt. That was the night that the board pressured me to take the CEO job. So it was around February of 2010 is when we all sat with Stephen Hawking. more about Dr. Hawking. The fact that this guy was an outstanding scientist, made contributions to physics that who knows may last forever. But he was also somebody who very much wanted to share

science with others. He did. And if you ever read his book, A Brief History of Time, you can read it. And they're all English words and everything. But these ideas are enormous. I mean, just these ideas, these steps and thought are fantastic. And I'm pretty sure if you asked him in so many words, he would say, when you're in love, you want to tell the world. And he loved what he did. And of course, his circumstance was extraordinary. did. And of course, his circumstance was extraordinary. Stuck, physically stuck in a wheelchair, unable to speak, yet able to produce these brilliant insights about the cosmos and to communicate with us outside of his world. It's really, I know books have been written, and they should be. He's really a remarkable man. We'll leave it there, except, of course, that we're

going to go on to hearing more about his life from someone else who was there with you at that awarding of the Cosmos Award to Stephen Hawking, Lou Friedman, the co-founder of the Planetary Society that we'll be talking to in a couple of minutes here. But thank you, Bill, and safe travels. Thank you, Matt. He's the CEO of the Planetary Society. I want to be weightless, and I want to feel the acceleration of a rocket pressing me into my launch couch.

Don't you? But space has so far been reserved for only the healthiest and wealthiest among us. That may change as we finally approach the long-awaited inauguration of suborbital flights by Virgin Galactic and others. But scores of men and women have been safely experiencing zero-g and high-g's for decades, albeit for less than a minute at a time. Dr. Eric Virey has helped many of them through this adventure. With an M.D. and a Ph.D. in physiology, Eric teaches and conducts research on the faculty at the University of California, San Diego. He's also associate director of that school's Arthur C. Clarke Center for Human Imagination, which is where I connected with him just hours before producing this week's episode. Eric Furey, I'm so grateful to you for jumping in at the last minute to join

a series of conversations today about Stephen Hawking, a couple of other people, as I've told you, Bill Nye and Lou Friedman, who had experiences with him, but yours was rather unique. And it's hard to believe that it was, what, 11 years ago that you got a call from your friend and colleague, Peter Diamandis. What did he ask you to do? You're quite right, Matt. It was a unique event. And it's one of those calls that I get once in a while in my life from Peter to help him out with so many of the amazing projects that he does. So this project was for the company Zero-G Corporation. And through Zero-G, Peter had answered the call to help Stephen Hawking experience weightlessness. He wanted to fly in space and to really show that he could do this, given the incredible challenge that he has with his body, with ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease, and the essential

basic paralysis of the majority of his body. But he still wanted to fly, ultimately to fly out into space. So the first step, as for many wannabe astronauts and the actual astronauts, is to experience weightlessness in something called parabolic flight, where an airplane is flown way up to about 32,000 feet and then gently arcs over and descends down to 24,000 feet in about 30 seconds and in that time the people inside experience weightlessness as we're passing through the gravity field of earth it's just as if we were in outer space and so Hawking wanted to do that I think both for the ability to demonstrate that people with body challenges like his could do it, but I think also for fun.

The guy was just totally excited about so many things. You know, we've heard all these stories in the past week since his passing about he was such a jokester and loved, just enjoyed things. And so he wanted to have fun too. And that was what Peter offered to him through zero G and asked me to help out in working with the team to enable Hawking to do that. So before we go on, I must say how incredibly envious I am because not only did you get to experience weightlessness on a zero G flight, but to do this with Stephen Hawking, my, my Lord.

Well, yes, it's a once in a lifetime experience for all of us, Hawking and everybody else on the team. So it was, it was pretty special. I had worked as the chief medical officer with zero G on a number of projects from the beginning and got to fly with all kinds of cool people and had a special chance to even fly with my wife and daughter. So I've had about five flights and therefore around 60 or 70 parabolas. And it's a way awesome experience. So it's been an incredible privilege. Now, there was more to this than just a flight of fancy for Dr. Hawking and the rest of you. You wrote a paper that was published in The Lancet, one of our planet's

most distinguished medical journals. Yes, yes. Well, that was just a very special opportunity. So we had a really great team of physicians who collaborated on this project. We had Jim Vander Ploeg, who is a NASA flight surgeon, who actually is now the flight surgeon for Virgin Galactic. And we had two of Stephen's doctors, Edwin Chilvers, his pulmonologist, and Ian McKenzie, the anesthetist. So the four of us worked together to review what we needed to do to keep Professor Hawking safe during the weightless intervals and also to enable him to enjoy it. The main thing being making sure that he didn't get any motion sickness. And so we worked out a plan, collaborated with the flight operations team to make that plan. And that's our description of how we

monitored his body while he was in weightlessness and in hyper-G. So you remember that the price of the really fun part of flying in weightlessness is that at the bottom, the plane has to go back up. And so in those times, you're experiencing an increase in gravity, so almost twice your normal body weight. So, of course, for Professor Hawking's very fragile body, that was really the risk of the extra weight. And so we had practice maneuvers to make sure that he was positioned comfortably. had practice maneuvers to make sure that he was positioned comfortably. We were monitoring his body functions, his heart rate, and the oxygen in his blood. And so all of those things were going on in real time while we had him up in the weightless intervals and then down in the hyper-G intervals. The paper is absolutely fascinating. Do you think it's safe to say that this was very likely the least healthy person ever to experience zero G? Well, if not, if not the least, at least one of them.

Absolutely. Yes. We had a big, a big challenge. I will tell you, we all had our fingers and toes crossed through the whole flight, but we carefully designed it. The best part was that we did the parabolas one at a time. So each weightless interval, we did one at a time and the whole team had to agree that everything was good and that if they were good, then we could carry on further. So the original flight plan was actually for six parabolas. Professor Hawking communicated to the world through his interface, which was the camera on his glasses, that he would manipulate his face muscles to control the computer screen. But he had special staff assistants who could communicate with him sort of through facial expressions, even without the gizmos on his glasses. Which he did not have on these flights, right?

Yeah, that's right. And if you see the pictures, it's kind of amazing because the other unique part of the flight is the pictures of his face. And he's got this big frigging grin on his face. He's just so happy. And in fact, that's what was going on. So one by one, we did the six parabolas. And then his staff came to us at the end of the six. And he says, no, no, no, I want to keep going. I want more. So we actually did two extra parabolas just at his request, because everything was going well well and he had asked for it. So the guy was just having a blast. The pictures that we have, as I say, it's just really cool because you really see his face with joy on it, which is quite in contrast to the pictures we

have of him in his wheelchair, sort of hunched over with his head turned and his glasses on, sort of hunched over with his head turned and his glasses on, so obscuring some of the expressions. But you can see it in the pictures of him in weightlessness. Of course, it's dangerous to draw conclusions from a sample of one. Yes. But based on how he tolerated and even enjoyed this experience. Does this say anything to you? Does it give you hope for people who are maybe not the most perfect of human specimens that maybe the rest of us might be able to enjoy spaceflight? Well, absolutely. And so that's going to be the challenge for all these commercial flight operators that are coming up to offer spaceflight experiences, it would have been

a very big challenge for any of the operations that we see now for Professor Hawking to actually fly into orbit around the Earth. The main reason is that coming back is a pretty substantial G load for a little while. So it's on the order of about 4G. So again, now four times your body weight for maybe a minute or a few minutes. That's a much bigger stressor than we have on the 0G flights with our hyper-G intervals there. Although, of course, what happens is that if you do six or eight or what is typically done on a zero g flight 15 parabolas cumulatively you have a number of minutes of the hyper g intervals so those and people do fine our major challenge is um the weightlessness and we've had young children and people in their 90s and in fact

taking directly from uh professor hawking's flight was really super because the Nick TV came and did a flight with us a little about a year later that I helped out with where we took four paraplegic children into weightlessness. So these were kids who had never been out of a wheelchair. And again, it was there's a great video of it and just super fun. And we have super pictures of them. And the awesomest quote was one of the girls said that it was the first time that she got a chance to stand up. Wow. It was wow. So I think the answer to your question is yes, we all should be able to fly. We'll be working with the flight dynamics people to minimize the g-forces. That's what's the real, the re-entry g-forces coming back to Earth.

So getting you out there, yeah, we'll be able to get you up there. It's coming back home, that's going to be the challenge. Eric, you have given me one more reason for all of us, perhaps, to be grateful to Stephen Hawking for his contributions to science, even in this most untraditional area, not the one that he is usually connected with. Absolutely. Well, as I said earlier, it was an incredible privilege to be able to enable him to take this flight, to demonstrate that he could do it and so many of us can do it. As you know, his challenge for our people with the sort of more typical physiology is we should be grateful for the abilities that we have to be mobile. More especially, his message to people with any kind of loss of function is that you can still do things. You can be a professor of physics. You can fly into weightlessness, a real messenger for humanity that we can do things. Thank you, Eric. I really am very grateful to you for sharing this experience with us and

congratulate you on having gained this tremendous memory of Dr. Stephen Hawking. My pleasure. Thank you so much for the chance to talk about it. We've been talking with Eric Veery. He is Associate Director of the Arthur C. Clark Center for Human Imagination at the University of California, San Diego. I'm a big fan of the center and a listener to its podcast, Into the Impossible, which I recommend. His home department at UCSD is neurosciences, but he's also in the departments of surgery, cognitive science, and at the Institute for Engineering in Medicine. And he has served as medical director of a Qualcomm Tricorder XPRIZE and the related Nokia Sensing X Challenge. Planetary Radio continues now with an old friend.

Louis Friedman was my boss at the Planetary Society for many years. He co-founded the society with Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray and served as its executive director before handing the reins to Bill Nye. He's also a planetary scientist, an engineer, and a tireless advancer of space exploration and science. I knew Lou was one of the people behind giving the Planetary Society's Cosmos Award to Stephen Hawking, but I did not know the depth of interaction the two men enjoyed over many years. Lou, welcome back. Nice to be here, Matt. I'm sorry the circumstances aren't better, but this is a celebration, not too sad of a memorial for Stephen Hawking. We already heard Bill Nye met him, I assume when you also got to see him at the award of the Planetary Society's Cosmos Award. But you were just telling me that you interacted with Dr. Hawking other times. Yeah, I've had several meetings with him.

Of course, you know, he comes to Caltech, or he came to Caltech every year as part of his work. He worked closely with some of the astrophysicists there, and in particular with Kip Thorne, who I've long been friendly with and even did a little with back in the day. Who I invited to be on this show, but he couldn't. Kip is very hard to get. He is. He's a tough guy. Big movie producer, physicist. That's what he is.

And especially since Interstellar, but even, and especially now because everybody knows he was Stephen Hawking's principal scientific contact, at least for many things here. I was asked on behalf of the Planetary Society to introduce Stephen Hawking at a Beckman Auditorium Caltech program. Actually, the Planetary Society was co-sponsor of that program. So Stephen had spoken at one of our programs even before the Cosmos Award. And I was at the microphone at Beckman Auditorium to introduce him. But he wasn't there yet.

He was over in the dining hall at the Athenaeum. And his group was having a VIP dinner, which I wasn't invited to. Not that that bothered me, of course. It should have. So I was told to go out on the stage and just keep the crowd entertained until he came in. And so here is everybody waiting to see Hawking. And they got me to just sort of prattle up there on the stage. And then Hawking came in.

And he came in from the back through the main entrance in his wheelchair coming down the aisle and I said oh ladies and gentlemen here is the man who has written the explanation about what time is and the and the whole history of time I'm sorry he's late he didn't get that part right and I think Stephen was mildly amused at that, although he couldn't instantly respond. That was my first actual personal interaction with him. We talked a little bit after that program. I met him two or three times afterwards during his visits here to Caltech, and even once had lunch with him at his temporary home that he was staying at here. But the big interaction we had with him was the one you mentioned, of course.

That was very, very special, Planetary Society giving him the Cosmos Award. I don't know if you know, but the intent was to give him that award during one of his visits here at Caltech. And we had kind of talked to both his people and the Caltech people about a date and we'd have a big public event at Beckman Auditorium. But he became ill that year and he couldn't travel. We had to call off our plans.

And in the discussions we had at the board meeting, we said, well, you know, we could go there and present the award to him. If he can't travel, why don't we offer to go there and present the award, and we can do a lot of publicity with it. We won't have the same size event because we're going to do it right at Cambridge University, and we don't have quite the logistics that we had here, have quite the logistics that we had here. But that's where the idea was born for several of us board members to troop off to Cambridge to give him the award. And we did have a very, very nice event, a public event, in which we spoke about the future exploration of Mars. Not only was Stephen

there, but Sir Martin Rees, the Astronomer Royal of Britain at the time, and several other notables were there. And, of course, the board members of the Planetary Society were there. And I just watched this video, re-watched it. There is a YouTube video, which we will provide a link to on this week's show page that people can reach from planetary.org slash radio. And there were the typically eloquent Andrewian and Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about what it means, why they were so pleased to be giving this award. You were standing there beaming. You were holding the heavy award during all of this. Yeah, that's my job. I do the heavy lifting. I'll tell you, there's one other experience. I did a double take. There was a recording, a presentation of a TEDx event at Caltech. And Kip Thorne and a colleague were on stage, and it was sort of a quiz program. They were able to make a call out to someone to get help with a question, rolling down the aisle is right after they supposedly have, quotation mark, called him, is Stephen Hawking.

And he's rolling down the aisle in Beckman Auditorium at Caltech, and he goes past someone right on the aisle. And I think, wait a minute, I backed it up. It was you. You were there on the aisle beaming as he rolled past you. Yeah. As I say, I had several interactions. And oh only interesting. Now, I have to admit, my field is not cosmology.

My field is not the physics of the origin and evolution of the universe, and the things that Stephen wrote about are not my discipline at all, and I didn't understand—I still don't understand multiverses at all. In fact, I'm skeptical about it than anybody really does. You're not alone. So many of those things are, and even his book, The History of Time, that book has been described by many people as the most read, least understood book in history because there's a lot in there that people really don't understand.

It's not a child's book at all. No, it's not. I totally agree. But he did bring these subjects, including time, including space, questions of the origin of the universe and the fundamental physics, to a level of popular attention that engaged people so strongly, and he tried to even do it with kids, with his daughter writing children's books. That's why he was so deserving of the Cosmos Award. He did bring it to public presentation of science. And clearly, he shared that sense of wonder that

you, that he had, that so many of us have. That's why we do this. Even if it's, you know, we concentrate on planetary science, now and then I get to talk about cosmology on the radio show, you, that he had, that so many of us have. It's why we do this, even if it's, you know, we concentrate on planetary science. Now and then I get to talk about cosmology on the radio show, but it's all of one nature, I think, isn't it? And that was so much of what the society has been about. I remember Carl and Bruce and I in a meeting, not in this building, but in a former building. Carl Sagan and Bruce Murray, of course, your fellow co-founders. Why are we so interested in these things? And they're all part of the same question.

We're looking for ourselves out there. We are trying to understand our relationship with everything. And so it is all the same question. You're quite right. There's another remarkable aspect of Stephen that I want to comment on, which, of course, he lived in a, I don't know how to describe it, a robotic world in many respects, of course. And his participation in the real world was, to some extent, virtual. He had to get a lot of input from a lot of sensors, and he had a lot of

interaction with it. Of course, he existed in the real world. It's a subject I've been interested in now for a number of years about thinking about the future of exploration. Will the future of human exploration involve us physically in having to climb mountains or trek through deserts or do what we typically think of as human exploration? Or will it be by sitting in chairs and getting our data through all of the sensory inputs? And what Stephen has taught us in some way is, yes, we can do that. And for him, it was as much a human adventure as it is for astronauts who jumped around on the moon. Now, it is true that this man also was not satisfied with that. He wanted to participate in real exploration.

He believed that humans should go to Mars. Humans should colonize Mars. He thought it was necessary for the survival of Earth that humans set up and live as a multi-planet species. He was not saying that the whole future of exploration will be robotic, but just the opposite. He was a very strong advocate of humans exploring other worlds. And you have said on this show, as well as elsewhere, you think humans will go to Mars, And you have said on this show as well as elsewhere, you think humans will go to Mars, but that probably those robotic emissaries with all kinds of wonderful extensions of our own senses may be all that we send out further in the solar system,

that humans may not need to go to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn or wherever. I do believe that. I think that is the right way, and I said it as much as an argument to provoke thinking about how we do it and also to emphasize that what we do on Mars is not just getting there. It's hundreds of years of doing things there that it will take us, and during that time, technology will greatly advance in many ways. The other thing that I wanted to ask you about that I think was striking about Hawking,

particularly because of the limitations that he faced, was the sense of humor that he apparently retained until the end. And the entertainment that he both received and enjoyed and delivered as well. I mean, I think that was also remarkable. And the fact that this guy, who was the most famous living physicist, would do The Simpsons. It's a quite accurate observation, of course, and we saw it many times. Even in some personal interactions, we would see that sense of humor. I can't explain it. I mean, there's no way that I could picture myself in his shoes

and think how I would react to that situation. It's impossible to imagine how I could retain a sense of humor, how I could retain even a willingness to do all the other interactions that one does with daily life. And it wasn't just sense of humor. That's the one we comment on because it is amazing that he did that. But he had an interest in fine food. You know, the times that we ate meals together,

it wasn't that he got some special diet of a tube of just uninteresting food. No, he was interested in good dining. He was interested in many other subjects of culture and of what people did with their lives. So he lived a quite eclectic life as well, of course, the deep one that we know about in physics. I can't imagine how he did it. And that, to me, may be even a more remarkable part of his brain. He was also very interested in politics and somewhat controversially. He took controversial stands, one that I might just mention. I don't want to get into politics in this discussion.

But, I mean, he got a lot of people angry by taking a stand supporting the boycott of Israel during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the issue, of course, of settlements and the annexation issues that go on there. But he was outspoken on that subject and on other subjects, including even current politics up until the time he died. So he was an involved person in many, many fronts and it was in a thoughtful way, not in a way that was just, he wasn't a showman. He was, I guess he was a little bit of a showman since he had to go with the zero-g flight for the whole, in front of the whole world and other things. Of course, he was a showman.

But I don't think his politics were a showman thing. I think they were sincere. I hesitate, I'm reluctant to make comparisons between Albert Einstein and anyone else. But after all, Einstein was politically involved and very concerned about social issues. And he had a sense of humor. Has anybody who has ever seen him either on a bicycle or sticking his tongue out would know? Yes, I think that's an apt comparison.

And if you want to compare Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking, I'll just go back to my baseball analogies, which everybody gets me annoyed. Well, what are you going to do? Ask me to compare Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb, the two greatest ballplayers of all time or something? So these are the two greatest physicists of the 20th century? I don't know. You know, it's just the aspects you described are remarkable.

Geniuses in general are not singular dimension people. They have multidimensions. Yeah. And you've known a few. Yeah. I've been very fortunate to have people I've gotten multi-dimensions. Yeah. And you've known a few. Yeah. I've been very fortunate to have people I've gotten to know, yes. Lou, thank you. I am glad that you were available to share some of these memories, these reminiscences of Stephen Hawking. You have provided a dimension that I have not heard from anyone else. And so I'm very grateful. Well, I appreciate that, Matt, because he connected with the Planetary Society.

And that's one of the joys that I have personally is that I had these connections in the Planetary Society. We were able to deal with people like Carl Sagan and many others. But with Stephen Hawking, it added a whole personal element that I'm very pleased with. Thank you. That's Lou Friedman, co-founder of the Planetary Society and our executive director emeritus, involved with many, many other things, including solar sailing. He wrote the book. Check it out.

He's also the guy who once upon a time gave the go-ahead to a space geek to do a radio show and now a podcast about space exploration and planetary science. That's right. Thank you, Lou. Okay. Well, some people told me at the time, oh, that's old technology. We don't want to get involved with that. But you hung in there, and now it's new technology. You're doing great.

Everything comes around. Time for What's Up with Dr. Bruce Betts, the chief scientist for the Planetary Society, which has not made him immune from catching some crud while he was off doing business for the Society last week. Welcome, poor guy. Thanks. Yeah, ironically, I spend a lot of time in clean rooms. But you did get to see LightSail get packed up and then unpacked, right?

Yeah, it was very cool. So I got to see first it put into the Peapod Deployer Mechanism at Cal Poly, and then unpacked, right? Yeah, it was very cool. So I got to see first it put into the Peapod Deployer Mechanism at Cal Poly, and then all of that put into the Prox-1 spacecraft. They were integrated at Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico. So it was fascinating. It was very involved and laborious to put a box in a box in a box. Turns out there's a lot involved in doing that to make sure things work. I especially loved your description of how they had to put glue over every screw to make extra sure that they wouldn't be shaken loose. Not just one set, but one type of glue goo on the threads and then another one around the top.

the threads and then another one around the top. We can't say we glued it, so we say we staked it. So all of the screws are staked and bolts. Alright, so more proof that space is hard. I don't want to keep you going longer than you need to. We can talk about light sail and we will another time. Tell us about the night sky. Alright, well it's a planet party in the sky. You've got Venus low in the west looking super bright in the evening sky shortly after sunset. I'll just go ahead and stumble over words, if you don't mind, in a delirious daze of lack of sleep and coughing. And then in the later evening, you've got Jupiter coming up in the east around 11 or midnight.

And then you've got Saturn and Mars getting closer and closer together. They're coming up around 2 or 3 in the morning. You can see them in the pre-dawn east or south. They are similar in brightness, Mars being the reddish one, Saturn being the yellowish one. And they will get quite close on April 2nd. All right, we move on to this week in space history. It was 2001 that the controlled to orbit of the Mir space station happened, coming in and burning up, plunking in the South Pacific Ocean. Wow, and now we've got the Chinese space station entering, I've been told, early April, first week of April maybe.

We may be talking to somebody about that soon. week of April, maybe. We may be talking to somebody about that soon. Mir was a bigger beast. We'll be talking more about Mir because I can't help myself. It's a thematic show. And we're going to move on to random space fact. Don't strain yourself. I decided not to. The Mir Space station operated in orbit from 1986 to 2001. It was the first modular space station. So in other words, made up of different components like International Space Station was assembled later on. Nice work. We move on to the trivia question.

I asked you how many missions carried humans to space as part of the NASA Mercury program. How did we do, Matt? People relaxed a little bit. It was Jeff Sellers who was chosen by random.org. He is a past winner. We don't get a lot, actually, but he won about two and a half years ago, and his time may have come again. He says there were six total Mercury flights with six astronauts flown. No room for anybody else in there. Total flight time for these missions, 53 hours, 55 minutes, and 27 seconds. Correct? Yes, indeed.

Jeff, congratulations. You have won yourself a Planetary Society t-shirt and a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account. More about those prizes in a couple of moments here. The only Mercury astronaut who did not get to fly in Mercury, the only one of the Mercury 7, as many listeners pointed out, Deke Slayton. Poor Deke Slayton, who was determined to have a little bit of a heart problem, but would eventually make it, as we heard from Claude Plymate on the Apollo Soyuz project in 1975. And then Claude added, and you think you've had rough flight delays.

That's pretty good. That's pretty good considering how you feel right now. I like that reaction. We got some other interesting stuff from Bob Klain in Chandler, Arizona. He did come up with six. He says, I don't think I got this wrong, but if I did, que sera, sera. Oh God, oh God, what have I done to you? It only hurts when he laughs. I'm sorry. A number of people also, including Setapong Koziatrakul, which I probably didn't

get right, and Torsten Zimmer, which I hope I did, said, you know, if you counted our cousins, Ham and Enos were also in the Mercury program, those two chimpanzees. Finally, from our poet laureate, David Fairchild, you would think that there were seven Mercuries in space, as every spacecraft name would end in seven, just in case. But there were only six, you know, because Deke was grounded, right? Except he later soared on board Apollo Soyuz flight. Without further ado, on to the next contest. How many space shuttle flights, space shuttle flights docked, docked with the Mir space station? Go to planetary.org slash radio contest. Oh, excellent question. And you have until March 28th, Wednesday the 28th at 8 a.m. Pacific time to answer this one and win yourself a beautiful Planetary Society t-shirt intersecting Mars and Earth with Planetary Society at the intersection.

You can see it at chopshopstore.com in the Planetary Society store there. And a 200-point itelescope.net astronomy account on that worldwide network of telescopes operated out of Australia, where we have so many listeners that we love. All right, everybody, go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about health. Good Lord. Please send your best cold remedies to planetaryradio at planetary.org. Karev, Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of the Planetary Society,

who joins us every week here for What's Up. Ad Astra. It means to the stars, and it has meant so much to me for many years. So in this time of growth for our show, I'm going to close it with that heartfelt wish for all of us. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by its globe-spanning 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, Ad Astra.