Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Taikonauts on the Moon? A Conversation With Leonard David

Episode Date: August 26, 2013

Leonard David has been writing about space exploration for more than five decades. Now he has turned his attention to China’s ambitious plans.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Leonard David on the Chinese space program, this week on Planetary Radio. Welcome to the travel show that takes you to the final frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. If you're a space geek like me, you probably don't need me to introduce Leonard David. He is the space journalist extraordinaire, and now he has written at Space.com about China's apparently ambitious plans for space exploration. We'll also hear from Bill Nye, Bruce Betts, and, starting right now, the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdwala.

and starting right now, the Planetary Society's senior editor, Emily Lakdwala. Emily, I was delighted to see your blog entry of August 22nd about the LADEE mission because of a special event we have coming up. But first, tell us about this latest spacecraft headed for the moon. Well, it's a very small spacecraft, a very inexpensive spacecraft. And for those of us who really like pictures from space, you might be a little bit disappointed because there's no camera on it. But it's studying something kind of important about the moon, and that's its atmosphere and its dust environment. Now, the moon doesn't have much of an atmosphere.

It's a lot like Mercury, where the molecules in the atmosphere are so far apart that actually the odds of one molecule hitting another molecule are basically virtually zero. So it's very, very sparse. But it's interacting directly with the surface. And studying these atmospheres help us understand the processes that happen on the surfaces. And in the case of the moon, studying the moon's atmosphere will actually go back and help us learn a little bit about Mercury's surface and what Mercury's surface is made of because we have this kind of similar data set from Messenger. So a great mission about atmosphere. And I just came back from a session we'll be talking about more next week about MAVEN, which you've also written about, the next mission to Mars. But for now, we'll stick with LADEE, because you also let people know that at

least folks who are on the Eastern Seaboard have a good shot at seeing this. Absolutely, because it's being launched from an unusual location on an unusual rocket. It's launching from NASA Wallops Flight Facility, which is on Wallops Island in Virginia. As a result, it's going to be visible from a huge swath of the American Northeast. Lots of people should be able to see it, and it's also happening at midnight. So it should really light things up in the sky. And a lot of people, if you know when and where to look, you should be able to see this thing taking off. It is scheduled for 11.27 p.m. local or Eastern time.

And I will mention that, not by coincidence, we will be gathering in Pasadena for a live event to celebrate this launch, and it will be, well, we're going to start our international webcast at 7.30 p.m. that evening, an hour, roughly an hour before the launch. So we will be having a good time, too, and we hope that people will look to planetary.org to join us for that webcast, since it is already sold out, the Crawford Family Forum in Pasadena. Emily, I regret that you won't be able to join us, but I'm sure glad that you'll be back next week. I will, and in the meantime, go LADEE, go Minotaur. You bet. She's our senior editor and the planetary evangelist for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine,

who still has the cover article of that distinguished publication this month. Up next is the boss at the Planetary Society, Bill Nye the Science Guy. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. Well, thank you, but welcome back to California. You were in wild and western Boulder, Colorado. Yes, for the second time. The first time was with you, and you were making people wild and crazy there in a public appearance. But it's a beautiful town, and I learned all about the MAVEN mission, and we're going to go into that in more detail next week. This is a great Mars mission. Don't let anybody tell you different. Well, as our Dr. Betts always says, it's a

fantastic mission that nobody knows about. Yeah, that's about right. And they understand that, too, the guys who run it. That's the point, Matt. Planetary science at NASA is the best thing NASA does. Hear, hear. And I'm telling you, if you get into this business, you read that Washington Post, that New York Times, that Space News, Deputy Administrator Lori Garver resigned or quit or stepped down or moved on, whatever that verb is, something's going to happen. Something's going to change at NASA. That verb is.

Something is going to happen. Something is going to change at NASA. Everybody agrees that NASA is going in too many directions at once and not getting anything done efficiently. That's what I would say the pundits are saying. So I'll bet you something big changes at NASA. It's an exciting time. Everybody stay tuned. And, of course, as we always like to point out, Matt, if you want to do something about this, read planetary.org because we're out there with our ears to the political train rails and trying to influence policy. I was afraid you were going to say our ears to the grindstone there for a moment.

Ears to the grindstone. That's – no, you don't want that. No. No, that's undesirable. But Matt, we're going to make remarkable discoveries on Mars. We're going to perhaps

double the asteroid budget, asteroid finding budget. And we are going to shake things out to have a more efficient space program in the world's largest space agency.

It's going to be an exciting time, Matt. I get to fly. Bill Nye, the planetary guy. You paint a pretty picture. The CEO of the Planetary Society there, he will join us again next week. Up next, a conversation with Leonard David. I really think he is the dean of space journalists,

and he's just written a terrific article about the Chinese space program. I said up front that Leonard David needs no introduction, or at least he shouldn't, not if you're a fan of space exploration. On Sunday, August 25th, Leonard and I had just finished a weekend media workshop about the MAVEN mission launching for Mars in November. I asked him to stick around for a Planetary Radio conversation. Leonard, it's a special pleasure to welcome you. I'm taking care of at least two items on my bucket list by doing this. The first was getting you on Planetary Radio, which was long overdue, so thank you for this. The second is a chance to talk about the

Chinese space program. You just did this article, an August 21st piece that is in space.com, which I encourage people to take a look at. Should we be preparing to see a taikonaut planting a flag on the moon? Well, I think what was fun to go and try to piece together the whole saga of what's going to happen with China. And this is a U.S. interpretation from a kid that grew up with the space race really hot and heavy. And we didn't know back then the details of the Soviet Union space program. And a lot of that, it just reminds me of kind of a Sputnik moment. There wasn't an artificial satellite orbiting the Earth, and all of a sudden there was, and what does it mean?

So I think interpretations of the Chinese space program in general, I mean, you write these articles to goad some people because one of the things that's going on now is with the Internet, you do a space.com article, you get all these quote-unquote experts or people that know more than you do, and you just read all that, and you get a very interesting cross-section of the public readership of what they think about a topic. And the Chinese space program is one of those that just stirs up a lot of things.

They're copying us. We've already been there, done that. Why do you even write the article? Then you get the people, the Chinese lack of U.S. leadership. It just shows how far behind we're falling now. So you get all this turmoil going. And, boy, that sure reminds me of the old days with the Soviet Union space race. We weren't quite sure how this was going

to play out. You know, vanguards blowing up in the launch pad, the second satellite from the Soviets, they launched a dog. They must be communists. They can't get the dog down, you know, you know, that kind of thing. It was just really, for a kid, it was a great era. But when I look at the Chinese, I just see a lot of capability, building up capability. Yeah, they're relying on maybe some past successes out of the U.S. and the Soviet Union space program and Russia's space program. But they clearly have, to me, a distinct spin to it. And they've been able to move from a one piloted spacecraft to two to three in a very short period of time. That's pretty aggressive. They jumped from a Mercury program to Apollo program

in pretty quick order. But I do, you know, wonder if they have a failure, because traditionally, we've had failure in the US program, we lost astronauts. Soviet Union, Russia lost cosmonauts. How would they take a failure? What would happen? How would they react? Would they double their effort? Would the country look inward and why are we spending money on hurting people or something? So I don't know how that's going to play out.

But the goal direction, if you go into the Chinese websites, and there's a number of these, you can discern a definite pace to this thing that's going to lead them to a moon landing. For the first time in some white papers, they express planning interest in putting a human on the moon. But then you get the reaction of the, well we've already done that. Who cares? You know, as our NASA program seems to be lost in space in a lot of ways, with human space flight and budget cuts and where we're going, where we're headed. That doesn't seem to be the plan over there. I read literally one of their Chinese space officials saying that it's interesting that we could very well have our Chinese space station up there in 2020. That's about the time we're supposed to see the U.S. space station go down.

And they plan to do international and invite a lot of other countries to participate in their space station. In fact, you opened this article talking about a conference that they're sponsoring just a couple of weeks away. Yeah. Clearly they're bringing the world community together in Beijing to talk about human spaceflight issues. They plan, according to some people I've talked to, they're going. And another associated meeting on life sciences that you know they're going to unroll what they their their kind of experimentation program of learning more about long duration space flight so um yeah i mean all the pieces are sort of there floating in formation but we'll um we'll see where it kind of comes together it's fun to watch them in that way there's a visceral

kind of every time they launch somebody, it looks a little bit like John Glenn's going off, you know, and that's okay to be there. It's a lot of fun. The prowess that they have in displaying it for their own public and having some hopeful future about where the space program is going while they go through economic change over in China. That's always the criticism when you write about China through economic change over in China. That's always

the criticism when you write about China and their leadership role in space. I don't know. It's bigger than me. I just, to me, it's just interesting to watch. More about China's plans for space from Leonard David in a minute. This is Planetary Radio. Hey, hey, Bill Nye here, CEO of the Planetary Society, speaking to you from PlanetFest 2012, the celebration of the Mars Science Laboratory rover Curiosity landing on the surface of Mars. This is taking us our next steps in following the water and the search for life, to understand those two deep questions. Where did we come from, and are we alone?

This is the most exciting thing that people do, and together we can advocate for planetary science and, dare I say it, change the worlds. Hi, this is Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society. We've spent the last year creating an informative, exciting, and beautiful new website. Your Place in Space is now open for business. You'll find a whole new look with lots of images, great stories, my popular blog, and new blogs from my colleagues and expert guests. And as the world becomes more social, we are too,

giving you the opportunity to join in through Facebook, Google+, Twitter, and much more. It's all at planetary.org. I hope you'll check it out. You're listening to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan, back with space journalist and certified Martian Leonard David. Leonard was a founding member of the Mars Underground more than 30 years ago, but he has been writing about humankind's push beyond our planet for much longer. He has also just authored Mission to Mars with Buzz Aldrin.

We'll get to that in a minute, but I wasn't done talking with Leonard about the Chinese space program. You bring up economic problems, but also economic advantages. You talk to at least one source who said, as we look at this Sputnik moment 2.0 maybe, there's an important difference there between the Soviets and the Chinese. Yeah, well, and I think there is, and I think again, it depends when you look at their photos of their control center, a lot of young people in there. It's clearly, yeah, they've got generals in there saluting each other,

but there's also a lot of young people in lab coats working issues. So I haven't been over there. It would be fun to go through it. Wouldn't it? Yeah, that would be a lot of fun. But I guess in the end, it's just a, I don't want to say a throw of the dice, but to me it seems to be lining up that they're going to be much more significant in the future. If they go through a failure, it will be interesting to see how they react to that.

Obviously, it would be interesting to see how they react to that. The landing of a robot on the moon, if that is on track, the next lunar lander robotic probe is going to go and land and have a little rover. It's actually a pretty significant rover, but the lander is pretty big. Huge. I've seen pictures. My God, one NASA guy, I have lander envy. I have lander envy. I have lander envy.

That's what he said. You know, I mentioned to you yesterday that my colleague Emily Lacowal and I noticed there was that huge lander with a rover sitting on top of it being lowered into a much, much bigger vacuum chamber. A vacuum chamber can obviously handle something, let's say, human-sized. Yeah, in fact, I sent those pictures over to somebody who does a lot of ground support equipment. I said, you know, they've got some pretty nifty-looking. This is not like, you know, some old dilapidated hardware. This looks pretty sophisticated and new and fresh and clearly designed to take bigger volumes of spacecraft.

So we'll see. Again, you glue these pictures together, and it's like a Rorschach test. I mean, is it something that really is going to happen that way, or am I just overhyping it? What did your sources tell you about the claims that, oh, the Chinese haven't done anything special yet. They've made minor improvements to Soyuz and other existing technologies. Well, some people say that.

Other people look at their hardware and see distinct differences in docking hardware. And one of the things I didn't put in that story, what I found fascinating, was potential of, you know, Chinese have a history of medical ideas about the human body, whether it's acupuncture or whatever, pharmaceutical things, things that we don't experiment with over here, you do wonder whether they're going to stumble into some fairly interesting life science solutions, given their culture and their background. And this guy agreed with me. He said, there's something there. There's something we should be watching. So maybe they've come up with all kinds of

new ideas about long-duration space travel and preventing microgravity impacts on the human body that we haven't gotten around to figuring out yet. So who knows? It's just another set of eyes and backgrounds up there that I like. I think it's great. The more people, the better. Have you heard anybody talk about the possibility that the Chinese would choose to just forget about the moon and say, we're going to put taikonauts on Mars in 15, 20 years? You hear that. It would seem to me that the progression there is what there's, they're good on stepping stones. They seem to be moving. Yeah, it's a little slow and plodding in some ways, but on the other hand, they made pretty good headway in a very short period of time. I can't imagine them doing an even mission to Mars right before they got back to a moon situation

because it will test their capability and their national will and all the other things, economic resources. So it seems like the moon is a natural thing, and it's, again, that stepping stone approach that they seem to be going through. So it seems to me the moon has got crosshairs on the moon. Speaking of Mars, there's this guy named Buzz Aldrin you've written a book with. Yeah. Tell me about that. Well, it was one of those real challenges, but I've done articles with Buzz in the past, and we're good friends.

We've known each other quite a while. It's a privilege to know him and then wrestle with all his creativity. He has a very interesting... It overflows sometimes. It does. People that talk to Buzz, I have lots of tapes, and honing those tapes down, because he does switch gears. He switches ideas.

He gets creative in the midstream in a sentence. He'll come up with, you know, that could be a good idea. And so you've got to keep your wits about you when you're talking with him. And it was a real pleasure. I mean, the point that he was trying to get across, and I hope we got in the book, is that it wasn't a bio. It's not about his past. We got a little bit of that in there.

It wasn't about the lunar landing. We got a little bit of that in there. But it was really about his ideas about the future and why we needed to, again, like the Chinese in a way, the stepping stone approach. We've got to get back to the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo type of testing, build up credibility and capability. But his ultimate thing is homesteading Mars and what that would mean.

And we're pretty happy going around the country now and talking to a lot of public people. Obviously, everybody wants to see Buzz and get a little bit of a sense of, there was the guy that walked on the moon. buzz and get a little bit of sense of, there was the guy that walked on the moon, but we make sure that a good 70 or 80 percent of the talk is about the future. And a lot of lack of leadership in the U.S., the presidential possibility of making a new profound statement about space in a time frame that Buzz believes is more of an anniversary thing of Apollo, what homesteading Mars really means in a much more cultural, international framework.

He wants to go to new places. I mean, my impression is that he's about as much of a Martian as you are. Yeah. Well, he's definitely out there in cycling spaceships. He's very proud of some of his concepts. He invented some of this, right? Yeah, yeah. He always gets back to this. He's an MIT guy. He wasn't a test pilot.

He was a thinker kind of guy, and his whole dissertation was on orbital rendezvous that he basically borrowed from combat duty of flying around maneuvering and meeting the enemy on a certain trajectory. And he got into MIT and was able to put that into work for orbital mechanics. And, yeah, he's got some great stories. And every time we talk on a stage, I hear a little nuance of something I never heard before. And I said, God, I wish he would have said that in the book. So we've had some really good interchanges with the public. And

we hope the book is one that he can use and he is using now. He's got some future ideas about Congress and how to really reinstill more of a leadership role in America and taking that into space and doing something new. And why should we do that? And don't get into some of the rat holes that he believes we got into early on in the space program. I wonder if there are copies of this book being bought by officials of the Chinese space agency. I hope so. That's okay. We just learned we're going to go in a couple of languages, or at least Japanese, so we're happy with that.

I've been very happy to have this interchanged. Thank you, Leonard. It was long overdue, as I said, and I really appreciate the opportunity to talk. Thanks for having me. Space is onward, and let's keep going forward. Ad astro. Leonard David, I have often thought of him as, you know, if Robert Heinlein was the dean of science fiction,

I think you're the dean of space writers, space journalists. He's been at this for over 50 years. He is the space insider columnist for space.com, used to be the director of research for the National Commission on Space, now the co-author of Mission to Mars, My Vision for Space Exploration, by his friend and colleague Buzz Aldrin and Leonard David. We're going to go on to this week's edition of What's Up with Bruce Betts in just a moment. Time for What's Up.

Here's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, ready to tell us about the night sky and Venus, things that go to Venus. Exactly. So first let's tell you where Venus is. Huh? How do you like that segue? Good. In the evening west, so soon after sunset, super bright Venus still dominating over there, but getting closer to the bluish star Spica and to yellowish Saturn,

both of which are similar in brightness, look kind of like bright stars, but much, much, much dimmer than Venus. So going from lower right to upper left in the western horizon, you'll see Venus, Spica, Saturn. And they'll keep dancing with each other for another couple weeks at least. In the pre-dawn, also still the planetary party with Jupiter being the really bright object in the pre-dawn east and reddish Mars below that. Mars kind of lining up with Gemini's brightest stars,

Castor and Pollux, if you use a loose definition of the term line. We've also got on August 31st in the pre-dawn, so that morning, you can see bright Jupiter hanging out right near the moon.

And it'll make a lovely sight. Forgive me. I have a question to throw at you from Ian Jackson. And I meant to warn you about this. Yeah, thanks. Ian's in Feldafing, Germany. He says a question for Bruce from my daughter, Emma.

When will Betelgeuse explode? She's hoping for sometime next week, although I told her that soon in astronomy, it could be in a million years or so. Do you have this on your day planner? I've got it in my Google Calendar, but I'll have to search for when it is. No, we don't know is the answer, and so it's probably somewhere between the two times you just mentioned, which is next week and a million years. you just mentioned, which is next week and a million years.

Okay. It is in those final red giant phases of a star, but that can last a very long time by human lifetime standards, although short compared to the age of the star. So sorry, I don't have something more precise. If I get something more precise, I will let you know. So yes, Emma, there really is an exploding Betelgeuse, but don't hold your breath. This week in space history, it was 1979 when

Pioneer 11 became the first spacecraft ever to fly past Saturn. Kind of a big deal. Followed on by other fabulous spacecraft and Cassini hanging out there right now. Huge deal. Huge deal. It is. Humans.

Humans in the outer solar system. Humans flying past Saturn with a spacecraft. Huge. 1979, this week. With naked pictures on it. Awkward. We quickly move on to random space fact. That belongs on some 1940s radio show, like a character actor on, I don't know, Fibber McGee and Molly.

Watch out for that closet. Very good. You know your radio. I know my Fibber McGee and Molly. All right. On to the actual space fact. Because of uncertainties in measurements, as of now, it is currently

unclear whether Pluto or Eris is larger. You look at the error bars and their diameters, they cross over. So they're both about 2,300 kilometers in diameter. Original discovery, Eris was thought to be even larger, but now they're, as they're both about 2,300 kilometers in diameter. Original Discovery Eris was thought to be even larger, but now as they define both of them more precisely,

it's unclear. So stay tuned. Less than two years to go. We'll have new horizons out there. We'll have Pluto. All right, we move on to the trivia contest. And we asked you, what were the two most recent missions launched specifically to explore Venus? And what have been their fates? How'd we do, Matt? I think it's a late August sort of response. So not quite as many as usual. Better odds for some of you, especially for our winner, Craig Smith, who I think is a past winner, might have been a couple of years. Craig is in Hillsborough, Oregon. a past winner. Might have been a couple of years. Craig is in Hillsboro, Oregon, and he said the last, the most recent, were Venus Express, which is still out there, right? Still out there, still

working. It's partly why I asked this. It was just a reminder to people, there's a Venus mission still working there, and there's another one hoping to be. Tell us about the other one. Akatsuki, another one of those little Japanese spacecraft that thinks it can. Exactly. Missed orbital insertion. Did not work out for them, but they hope when they come back around, they're hoping to make it back and actually have it work in 2015. So we shall see. Craig, we're going to send you the new Planetary Radio t-shirt as soon as you

tell us what size you want, I should say. I just want to add, Ilya Schwartz, who knows about such things, he also got it right. And he mentioned that there are two proposals, nothing scheduled to launch for Venus right now. But he mentions two proposals, the Venus In-Situ Explorer and the Venera D, which could be launched in 2016. Explorer and the Venera D, which could be launched in 2016. And then he says, but BepiColombo, another European mission, making a flyby in, well, next year, July of 2014? Yes, it had, well, when it launches, it'll head off with its main destination of Mercury, but tie in a Venus flyby as two spacecraft have in the past.

What do you got for next time? All right. Who was the first person to tweet from space? Who was the first person to tweet on Twitter from space while actually being in space? Not, you know, exposed to space, but in orbit. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and enter. And what are they competing for? And when do they need to have it in by, Matt?

They're going to be going for a T-shirt, the new Planetary Radio T-shirt. It's John Glenn, isn't it? Yes, yes. It's always John Glenn. That's always the right answer. Yeah. September 2nd, Monday, September 2nd at 2 p.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there.

Look up the night sky and think about what would happen if you put your 3-D glasses on backwards. Does that actually make the two-dimensional image one-dimensional? Thank you, and good night. He's Bruce Betts. He always brings an extra dimension or two. They're just really tiny and folded up. He's the director of projects for the Planetary Society, who joins us each week here for What's Up.

Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation, and by the international members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies. Thank you.