Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - The SpaceShipTwo and Antares Disasters: Special Coverage With John Logsdon

Episode Date: November 4, 2014

It was a terrible, tragic week for commercial space development. Historian and space policy analyst John Logsdon helps up understand the greater meaning of the SpaceShipTwo and Antares disasters on this special edition of Planetary Radio, with additional thoughts from Bill Nye.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're going to learn from what went wrong, discover how we can improve safety and performance, and then move forwards together. I truly believe that humanity's greatest achievements come out of our greatest pain. This team is a group of the bravest, the brightest, the most determined, and the most resilient of people. We are determined to honor the bravery of the pilots and the teams here by learning from this tragedy. Only then can we move forward, united behind a collective desire

to push the boundaries of human endeavor. Richard Branson, leader of the Virgin Group, speaking in California's Mojave Desert on November 1st, a day after the loss of Spaceship Two. Welcome to a special edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. We had planned to bring you Linda Spilker of the Cassini mission today. We're delaying that report from Saturn so that we can devote much of this episode to the two disasters that struck commercial space development last week.

Emily Lachter Walla will be heard later in the show. First, of course, came the October 28th explosion of Orbital Sciences' Antares rocket at Wallops Island, Virginia. Also lost was the Cygnus capsule, loaded with two and a half tons of supplies and experiments headed for the International Space Station, including a test version of the Arquette telescope from Planetary Resources. No one was injured in that accident, and NASA has assured everyone that the ISS astronauts will be fine.

A greater tragedy came just three days later. As I record this, there are indications that Spaceship Two's unique feathering twin tail swung up prematurely shortly after the suborbital spacecraft was released by its carrier. It may be weeks or even months before there is full understanding of what went wrong. Pilot Peter Sebold was badly injured, and co-pilot Michael Alsbury lost his life. Both men worked for Scaled Composites, the company that was largely developing the innovative space plane for Virgin Galactic. We'll hear from space policy expert and historian John Logsdon in a few minutes.

First, though, here is Planetary Society CEO Bill Nye. Bill, as we speak, it has now been a little more than 24 hours since that tragedy in the Mojave Desert. I know that this is something you and others at the Planetary Society and really around people around the world have been thinking about and commenting on. And I wanted to give you, first of all, a chance to share your thoughts and any condolences you may have. Well, of course, your heart goes out to these guys. I mean, we at the Planetary Society and they at Virgin Galactic know each other pretty well. We cross paths at space conferences and we have lunch together from time to time. It's heartbreaking,

but it just points out how risky spaceflight still is, because the amount of pressure that you create, the amount of the rate at which you burn fuel is so much higher than you and I might have an everyday experience running cars, or if you're of an age, gas powered lawnmowers. The rate at which fuel is consumed is amazing. It's the, not to be flipped, but it's the beer can problem where the weight of a modern aluminum beer can compared with the amount of liquid inside is comparable to the weight of a spacecraft compared with the amount of fuel inside. And so when you got that much fuel burning that fast, and the Antares rocket blew up earlier in the week.

What's going to happen though? I'll tell you. People are going to press on. People at Virgin Galactic are not going to give up. They're going to redouble their efforts to make sure that it's absolutely safe next time. This is human nature. Space flight has, especially human space flight, has suffered many setbacks over the years. And this is just another one, but we'll keep moving forward. You mentioned that loss of

the Antares rocket from Orbital Sciences, of course, which was what we started the week with. I don't think anybody could imagine things could get worse than that in one week. That, of course, has had a lot of fallout, a lot of speculation about what this means for commercial development in space. And we've even heard some media outlets saying, well, NASA lost another one. Not really true. You know, this wasn't NASA. These are guys trying to provide a service that NASA cannot. So or ESA or JAXA or ISRO, Indian Space Research Organization. So commercial airplanes have had accidents over the century. So commercial space planes are bound to have them. It just shows you how difficult it is.

If you talk to the test pilots, though, I'm sure they would have said there's nothing they'd rather be doing, would have been doing, nothing they would prefer as a job. And they were excited about it and they were very confident. And the engineers who designed it were excited and confident. And nevertheless, it got away from us. But stay tuned, everybody. We as humankind are going to press forward. I'm sure Virgin Galactic is going to press forward. We will get there soon enough.

I did hear from both Will Pomerantz, who's an executive at Virgin Galactic, and George Whitesides, who's in charge over there. They say just, we'll stay the course. They thank the Planetary Society for supporting space exploration. If I can use that term writ large, we're explorers. We're trying to learn how to get in and out of the atmosphere from the Earth's surface to make discoveries that will change the course of human history. Thank you, Bill. Thanks a lot, Matt. He is the CEO of the Planetary Society and will hopefully return next week under much happier circumstances. John Logsdon joined us last June to talk about human spaceflight.

As the founder and longtime director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, this author, historian, and analyst of space development seemed the ideal person to talk to about what last week's events may mean for the still very young commercial space industry. I spoke with him via Skype at his Washington, D.C. office. John, welcome back to Planetary Radio. Not under the best of conditions, unfortunately. You graciously consented to coming back on the show to talk about commercial space before we learned of the terrible loss of Spaceship Two. Before we get into what last week means for the commercial space industry, I want to give you a chance to express any thoughts that you might have

for the people who are closest to that terrible loss. Of course, the condolences go to those that lost their life in this and their families and loved ones. That goes without saying. But also the whole community that had worked up a lot of enthusiasm about public access to space have to view this as a real setback, as a blow to their enthusiasm and their hopes. And I hope that doesn't dash them. I hope that they keep their eyes on the future, recognize this was a test flight. Tests sometimes fail.

And you find out what the problem is and go ahead and fix it. I have seen quotes from you just about everywhere since the loss of Spaceship Two, which, as we speak, was only just over 24 hours ago. Can you summarize for us what you've told the rest of the media? Well, I think the first point was that this was a test flight, and it was much more similar to high-performance aircraft test flights than it was any kind of routine commercial space operation. This is an early stage in the evolution of public access to, first of all, suborbital space flight. And so history tells us that a lot of test flights have major failures like this one, and some test pilots lose their lives. It is part of,

unfortunately, part of the process. What do you think this means for the commercial space industry? And now I want to start bringing into it what we originally had planned to talk about, which, of course, was the loss of the Antares rocket and the Cygnus capsule on that mission to resupply the International Space Station. Pretty shocking that both of these would happen in the same week. But how big a disaster is this for commercial space in general? Well, I think it's an unfortunate coincidence. The two accidents really have nothing to do with one another. It is the private sector that's always built and, to a large degree, operated space equipment. What's different, what this word commercial means these days, is very different for Antares than it was for Virgin Galactic and scaled composites and Spaceship

2. This was a totally private enterprise, private investors trying to sell an exciting service to fair-paying customers. And the government was involved really at a very great distance, licensing the test flight to make sure that there was no third party damage. But this was a private venture. By contrast, Antares was a launch contracted for by NASA for NASA purposes, bringing supplies and experiments to the space station where the private sector had lead responsibility for delivering the service, but with a significant amount of government oversight. So the word commercial is a little too broad to cover the two things. I really think they're qualitatively and rather fundamentally different undertakings.

My colleague at the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer, wrote a very good blog entry. It's available at planetary.org, of course. And you've also written a piece there that we will provide a link to or links to from the show page this week at planetary.org slash radio. But in Casey's piece, he talked about, at least initially, many in the media and others in the public, right up to CNN, calling the loss of Antares the loss of a NASA rocket. Well, it's a rocket carrying out a mission for NASA. But if a Boeing aircraft crashes when it's operated by United, maybe that's not a perfect comparison. But is it a Boeing aircraft that's crashed or a United aircraft. I mean, it was orbital sciences that built the Antares, that checked it out, readied it for launch, and controlled the launch. NASA was kind of two steps back looking over orbital's shoulder. I mean, there's a tendency to think anything that happens in space must

be NASA. But in this new world, the private sector is taking a much more upfront role. And I think the Antares Commercial Supply Services is a good example of that. What do you think, if anything, asking you to speculate here, of course, this might mean for Orbital Sciences Corporation, which saw, not surprisingly, a pretty precipitous drop in its stock price last week? which saw, not surprisingly, a pretty precipitous drop in its stock price last week. Well, fortunately, it seems the launch pad did not suffer major damage, so that's not going to be a pacing item in getting back in flight. We don't know what caused the accident yet, so it's awfully hard to speculate at this point what it will take to get the rocket flying again.

The CEO of Orbital, Dave Thompson, said if it is the old Russian engine, and this is an old engine, if that was the problem, it will accelerate the replacement of that engine with a more up-to-date, a hopefully more reliable engine, and that's likely to take a while. So without knowing any details, I would think Orbital will be down for a while. Do you think that this means anything to their colleagues and competitors over at SpaceX? Well, I mean, it would be nice if SpaceX had the capability, if Orbital's down for a while, to take on some of the, carry some of the cargo that had been assigned to orbital missions. I don't know what SpaceX's

surge capability is, though. So a lot of thinking to be done over the next days and weeks about how to maintain the supply chain to the space station in the optimum way, using not only U.S. assets, but assets around the world. Do you have any doubt that the future of commercial space development is still pretty bright? Well, again, let's not put both of these accidents and both of these undertakings under the name commercial space development without differentiation. I think an increased private sector role in providing regular services, this accident shows they're not routine, but at least regular services, carrying cargo, eventually carrying crew,

developing the ability to do things in space that don't require government contracts. I think, yes, that is bright. Whether you can harness, develop the technology to carry people on adventure flights suborbitally, as Virgin Galactic was trying to do, whether you can develop that technology and operate it at an acceptable level of safety, I think this accident at least requires a pause and thinking through how that service will be delivered. Because space is hard, and even suborbital space is hard. NASA, of course, will remain at the center of what most of us think about when we think of space exploration and space development. Looking way out into the future here, what do you see as the ongoing appropriate role for NASA?

And has it been encouraging the private sector, particularly in the case of commercial trips up to the International Space Station, in the way that you think it should be? Well, the answer to that last question is yes. NASA has been more encouraging than the U.S. Congress has been, particularly with respect to commercial crew, which has been underfunded and thus behind schedule. I mean, one thing, one thought I had as this all unfolded, Matt, was that NASA makes some things look easy. Think about landing Curiosity on Mars at seven minutes of terror, and it worked perfectly. We didn't realize just how hard that was. But maybe in comparison to some of these other things, we should look back and think about

the excellence of NASA's performance. So I think that that public-private partnership in doing things in space and pushing back the space frontier and exploring is the way to the future. And I think it's going to include not only U.S., but companies and countries from around the world. Thank you, John, especially for doing this on very short notice and in what is a difficult week. And I look forward to talking to you again soon. Okay. Take care. I look forward to talking to you again soon. Okay. Take care.

Dr. John Logsdon is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Affairs at George Washington University in the nation's capital there in Washington, D.C., at the Elliott School of International Affairs. He founded and directed for many years GWU's Space Policy Institute. He is the author of the forthcoming After Apollo, Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, which is probably what we will be talking to him about next on this program early next year, and the award-winning John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Full disclosure, he's also on the Planetary Society Board of Directors. There is more coverage of the loss of Spaceship 2 and the Antares rocket at planetary.org, including that blog post from Casey Dreyer.

You might also enjoy John Logsdon's October 28th essay that looks back more than 40 years to Richard Nixon's actions that nearly ended human spaceflight in the U.S. Better news is just one minute away when we'll visit with Emily Lakdawalla and Bruce Betts. This is Planetary Radio. like never before. If you're interested, you can go to planetary.org slash SOS to learn how you can become a space advocate. That's planetary.org slash SOS.

Save our science. Thank you. Random Space Fact! Nothing new about that for you, Planetary Radio fans, right? Wrong! Random Space Fact is now a video series too and it's brilliant isn't it matt i hate to say it folks but it really is and hilarious see matt would never lie to you would he i really wouldn't a new random space fact video is released

each friday at youtube.com slash planetary society you can subscribe to join our growing community and y'all never miss a fact Can I go back to my radio now? Welcome back to a special edition of Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Looking forward to another visit with the Planetary Society's Senior Editor and Planetary Evangelist, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, welcome back. It would be terrific if you could give us some good news from around the solar system this week. Well, the good thing is, Matt, that I have lots of good news for you.

And I think number one is the successful return to Earth of the Chang'e-5 test vehicle. This is a vehicle that the Chinese launched to go make one trip around the moon, a lot like Apollo 8, and then come back in order to test a sample return capsule that was actually kind of cute. It looks like a miniaturized version of their Shenzhou human capsule. They did this test in order to make sure that they would be capable of returning samples from the moon to Earth, which is what they plan to do with the Chang'e 5 spacecraft itself in 2017. It got pretty toasty, too, but I guess it did its job.

It seemed to work just fine, and so now they're ready to start the more ambitious and difficult part of it, which is actually landing and gathering samples, launching them to lunar orbit, uniting with a spacecraft in lunar orbit, and then sending the capsule back to Earth. So they still have a lot of challenges ahead. Very ambitious indeed. How about Hayabusa 2, not far away across the sea there? Yeah, that's right. Hayabusa 2 is just about ready to launch. This is Japan's second sample return mission from an asteroid.

And the spacecraft, they're just button ready to launch. This is Japan's second sample return mission from an asteroid. And the spacecraft is, they're just buttoning it up. They've got the xenon fuel on board and they're going to put the more scary chemical propellants on board pretty soon, get it on the top of a rocket and launch it on November 30th. Where else around the solar system

should we be looking? We should definitely be looking out at a comet, Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko, which Rosetta is planning to drop the Philae lander on next week. So I'm going to be traveling to Germany to cover that. I'm very excited about it. I'm also pretty scared. It's a very challenging thing they're trying to do, but it's going to be a tremendous experience, regardless of the level of success of that mission. And I'm hoping that we'll be able to talk to you while you're out there in Darmstadt

watching all of this happen. In the meantime, though, on the 27th of October last week, you posted some more terrific photos from this comet. And I'll tell you, they are just mind-blowing. It is so amazing, first of all, to see this eerie, completely alien environment, but then to see a comet doing what a comet does. but then to see a comet doing what a comet does. And of course, this comet is doing what it does more and more with every passing day, which is why they have to hurry up and get that lander on the ground before the jets start going completely nutty. It's going to be wonderful to watch. It's the first time we've ever orbited a comet,

so it's the first opportunity we've ever had to watch a comet evolve in real time, to actually watch these jets form and change and possibly change its surface. I don't know of any surface changes that they've seen yet, but I know they're looking for them. There's a lot of strange stuff to see on this strange, irregular little body. Among them, what are these things that look like sand dunes? I know, right? I mean, it's really odd. You look at this strange landscape with all these spires and blocky boulders, and it's difficult to understand which way is up., and it's difficult to understand which way is up. So it's really hard to understand what these features are. They do look exactly like

sand dunes. They can't possibly form the same way sand dunes do, but they probably do represent some granular material doing something in very low gravity, responding to some kinds of forces that we don't understand yet. But that's why Rosetta is there to study it. And we're getting all the pictures and data we need to hopefully answer those questions. Pretty darn fascinating. Before we say goodbye, I bid you adieu for this week. Anything from Mars that you want to mention? Oh, just that Curiosity's been doing its walkabout

of the Pahrump Hills outcrop. And we haven't heard very much about science from that yet, but it's going to be really exciting. The rocks are absolutely beautiful. Thank you, Emily. I feel better now. And I'm sure you'll have more for us next week, no doubt. Always glad to be of service, Matt.

She is the senior editor for the Planetary Society, our planetary evangelist, and contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Next week, to Germany for a landing on a comet. Time again for What's Up on Planetary Radio, and we have Bruce Betts, the Director of Science and Technology, on the line. And I don't want to go into this segment, in which we have a lot of fun, and pretend that nothing bad happened. Do you have anything that you want to share with the folks who are suffering these losses most this week? Well, obviously, as you've probably discussed, our thoughts are with the families of the pilots from Spaceship Two, first off.

But there have been so many people affected by both Spaceship Two and then the other rocket problem and disaster. Space is hard, and it's said frequently, and it sounds cliche, but we kind of get used to all the flawless launches after launches. And this week reminds us that fundamentally rockets are big things filled with explosive materials that are already lit on fire, and that's just scary. I will only add to that something that another guy who used to do a show about space used to say at the end of every program, and that is, we've got to keep looking up. Sounds trite, kind of like space is hard, but they're both true.

As long as we're talking about looking up... Well, we have beautiful stars, but you can also see some planets. You can still catch Mercury in the pre-dawn low in the east if you watch in the next few days. And then Jupiter's up quite high looking super bright as always in the pre-dawn and coming up in the middle of the night. And you can also still check out Mars in the southwest evening sky. After that crazy week or two of eclipses and comet flybys of Mars and everything else going on, it's been kind of wild. So just go out and relax with the planets and the stars. On to this week in space history.

Carl Sagan would have been 80 this week. So we are coming up on Carl Sagan Day again, for those people who celebrate that. We did two years ago with somebody that I'm going to be mentioning in just a few moments, somebody behind the movie Interstellar. Good. Let's move on to Random Space Fact. Hey, and by the way, I'll mention it now instead of waiting. We heard from Mark Little in the United Kingdom who said,

loving the new random space facts. Thank you very much. I guess he knew I would pass that along to you. They are really funny. It was fun to see you shooting another one of those yesterday out in front of the office. Yes, they are quite entertaining to shoot. Glad people are enjoying them. They're at planetary.org, of course, and at the Planetary Society YouTube channel.

Guiana Space Center near Karoo, French Guiana, run by ESA, is located approximately 500 kilometers north of the equator. So it's of the major launch bases. It's the closest to the equator. And you get certain advantages going into certain orbits, but anytime you're trying to launch eastward, you're actually going faster as you launch when you're nearer the equator than you are when you're farther from the equator in terms of a linear velocity. So at Guyana Space Center, you have rotation from the Earth that's about 463 meters per second, whereas Cape Canaveral or Cape Kennedy, I'm sorry, Kennedy Space Center,

at 28 degrees latitude, you're about 406 meters per second instead of 463. Also the kind of place that some people dream of building a space elevator someday, because if that ever happens, which I have my doubts, but you'd want to put it at the equator, I'm told. And what happens if the door gets stuck on the 534th floor? More like 5,340th floor. That would have been better. All right.

We go on to the trivia contest. And I asked you, who discovered Comet C2013A1 sighting Spring, which, of course, had its close flyby of Mars recently? How did we do, Matt? Lots of entries. Everybody's back in the swing this time, going after that Planetary Radio t-shirt. Interestingly, it was this fellow that some people say, in fact, one person who says it is Paul McEwen of Cleveland Heights, Ohio, though I'm sorry, Paul, you aren't the winner, said that he's the world's greatest comet discoverer. That's what he's called. Currently over 70 comets that he's credited with discovering. Robert H. McNaught, that's the answer we also got from William Wilkerson,

who Random.org picked out as our winner this week. William of Pittsburgh, California. And that's correct, right? It is indeed. Well, William, we are sending you that Planetary Radio t-shirt. And boy, do we have a great prize package. And I think a really cool contest next time around. Indeed we do.

And Matt, you get credit as the motivator for this question. Well, thank you. And really, I give credit to the movie Interstellar that I have been eagerly awaiting for two years now, ever since the great physicist Kip Thorne told us to watch for it when we were sitting with him celebrating Carl Sagan a couple of years ago. It's out in the week that this radio show appears. I'm going to be seeing it in just a couple of days as we speak. I'm thrilled. Christopher Nolan film, that gives me some confidence. Matthew McConaughey, Anne Hathaway, Michael Caine, a whole bunch of other really great folks. And I will give a full report, a full review next week. Please tell people,

with this interstellar travel theme, What is the question for this week? If you had warp drive, where in the universe would you go and why would you go there? We'll be looking for the funniest or most awe-inspiring answers to award prizes too. Tell us more, Matt. We got this great prize package from Paramount Studios and the folks at Allied doing promotion for them. And I'm not sure how we'll break it up, because who knows? You know, if we get two or three great answers, we'll spread the swag around a little bit. It includes a whole bunch of interstellar movie swag. A sweatshirt, T-shirt, hat, water bottle, poster, flash drive.

Flash drive. And a copy of the soundtrack, which I have no idea what that music is like yet, but I'll tell you in a week. Flash drive? Is there a warp drive? Yeah, I don't know if this warp drive is, what would that be, USB 6.0 includes warp drive? Okay, sir. Tell them how to enter. Go to planetary.org slash radio contest and when do they need their entry and by? They better get it in this time by, oh, let's say Tuesday, November 11th at 8 a.m. Pacific time. All right, everybody, go out there. Look out the night sky. Think about trophies. Thank you and good night.

Make it so, number one. He is sending us on course for the stars this week. That is the Director of Science and Technology for the Planetary Society, Bruce Betts. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and is made possible by the members of the Society. Clear skies. Thank you.