Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - VIP Tour of a Huge Solar Sail BONUS: Falcon 9 and Dragon Head for the ISS!

Episode Date: May 21, 2012

Join the VIP tour! Planetary Radio visited L’Garde, Incorporated to see how its giant solar sail is coming together. You’ll hear from Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck, and L’Garde co-founder Gordon Veal.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A 1200 square meter solar sail, 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. Join me on a tour of Lagarde Incorporated. This relatively small company believably claims that it is the world leader in the creation of inflatable space structures. We'll explore their Orange County, California headquarters with a congressman and NASA's chief technologist.

Bill Nye is on the road and has the week off. I bet he watched last Sunday's eclipse. I know Emily Lakdawalla and Bruce Betts enjoyed it. Let's visit with Emily right now. Emily, I guess you got to enjoy the Eclipse with your daughters. I did. It was perfectly positioned in the afternoon while I was grilling outside. We put on our Eclipse glasses. My two girls, who just happened to be dressed as fairies for the evening, were looking at it and they both saw it. My older one said, Mommy, the sun looks like a moon. And I thought that was pretty cute. I was actually on my way back from San Diego and had to drive inland at one point to get

out of the thickest part of the marine layer, which was perfect because there was enough of the cloud cover that I could perhaps still somewhat dangerously look right at the sun. And what amazed me was we stopped in a little sort of working class town north of San Diego. Everybody was out looking at the eclipse, taking pictures. The clerk came out of the liquor store. It was a real shared opportunity. Yeah, I think the most fun I've ever had during an eclipse is when I took two pairs of eclipse glasses down to the park in Santa Monica and just handed them to everybody who passed by,

and they all saw it and said, wow, it was really fun. And I know a lot of folks had their telescopes out with appropriate filtering yesterday as well. One guy had a solar scope in the Balboa Park in San Diego, and boy, was that good timing. Listen, other than that, there's some other really cool stuff to talk about, including, I guess, you've written about this little moon discovered by Cassini. That's right.

So this is one of the tinier moons of Saturn that happens to be orbiting rather close in. And it's called Methone. It's only six kilometers in diameter. And I've been waiting for a long time for Cassini to get a close look at it. And it's really very surprising. You can't see any craters. It's just this smooth kind of egg in space. It might be made just of a pile

of dust that's collected together. And so it has this really strangely smooth surface. Possibly an interplanetary dust bunny. That's kind of funny. Yeah, it may well be. And it may be just as temporary as a dust bunny, at least in geologic terms. How about turning to Mars now, where you published an image from somebody that you call jaw-dropping, and you're concerned, though, that maybe we apply that to too many of these images. Yeah, you know, I get a little bit tired of superlatives being applied to images, and I'm extremely cautious about saying that any image is the best I've ever seen,

because after all, I'm in the business of looking at space images just because they're all just so awe-inspiring. But this one was really spectacular. You see a view of Mars from Viking 1 data. It's 35-year-old data, but it looks just spectacular. It's got this artistic, cinematic feeling. You see the atmosphere of Mars floating over its limb and all of these craggy craters just vanishing off into the distance. It's just gorgeous, and I feel like I'm flying over Mars every time I look at it. All right, very quickly, please give credit to the fellow who came up with this.

That's right. Daniel Matrasek from Czechoslovakia is one of the guys who just does the most amazing work with really old planetary image data. Emily, I bet it's not the last time our jaws will drop. Thanks for joining us once again. Thank you, Matt. She is the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. All of these things we've talked about and more can be found at planetary.org slash blog.

It was back in March that I drove south to Orange County from Pasadena. There, in a typical industrial park, was an atypical company. Founded in 1971 to build inflatable structures like decoys for the military, Lagarde Incorporated now builds gigantic structures to be deployed in space. One of those is a 1,200-square-meter solar sail. Legard Incorporated now builds gigantic structures to be deployed in space. One of those is a 1,200 square meter solar sail. If all goes well, it will unfurl itself in 2014 and take up residence at L1, one of those Lagrange points where a spacecraft can remain indefinitely.

Will you join me for a VIP tour? We'll head into Legard's high bay with California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and NASA's new chief technologist, Mason Peck. Hanging above us and laid out on long tables, among other things, are the spars, wings, and other components of what will become a giant sail in space. To appease all the politics of the engineering world, we've taken a step and gone from Mylar to Kapton in order to make everyone comfortable with the sail material.

Mylar has a pretty poor track history in space. We argue that that's not really important because of the low stresses that we have here and over there. One key point, Bert's going to chime in my ear really quick. This sail, once it's deployed, will make the thrust that's equivalent to the weight of a pink sweet and low sugar packet. So it's not a whole lot, but over a long period of time, we keep integrating it, right? That thrust happens the first second, it happens the second second, it happens the third second, and we keep thrusting like that, and we can do useful things. The metal on this side is maybe 500 angstroms, the metal on that side

is 400 angstroms, or something of the ballpark. And an angstrom is approximately an atom. So when we talk about 1,000 angstroms, that's one micron. We're talking about material here that's two microns thick, so we can do all kinds of math. And again yeah this becomes solid in space this is supported by a series of lines in between these booms that become solid okay so that's the that's the stripe net uh structure on the back and the and the these lines are attached every so often along the boom at those ring locations and and once the booms are deployed and solid then this sail rests on those strings and rests on the booms themselves.

It's like a sail on a sailboat, but it doesn't necessarily become rigid. It's not rigid. I see. It's not rigidized, no. Of course, you're not worried about birds or anything flying into it. Space debris, but... Is there a good question to be asked about micrometeorites well there is and it's a good question right i mean one would think first about the booms because

they're inflated but by the time we're uh you know we're deployed we're only inflated for a short period of time so after that then micrometeorites aren't necessarily an issue you know a large meteoroid if it ripped through a boom obviously that that can cause some issues if we poke holes in this it's a graceful degradation, if it ripped through a boom, obviously that can cause some issues. If we poke holes in this, it's a graceful degradation. I mean, we're only getting a pink sweet and low packet of thrust anyway. If we poke a little hole, it's a grain of sweet and low that's gone. One of the features of this material, though, as I understand it, is that cracks don't propagate the way they would in some other material.

And we've actually worked with these materials and these designs to put in some rip stops into them so that we can prevent that from happening in the future if it does happen. So that way we can sort of budget. But you're going to the part of space that's beyond the space debris. That's correct. We have a short window where we have to be anxious about it, but once we're past there, then much less anxiety. One of the areas of cooperation that we're going to have to have is to develop a way to start picking up or getting rid of that space debris. It's an important issue.

It's interesting you bring that up. We've actually done some investigations with solar sails on a theoretical level only, using them as the engine to de-orbit or up-orbit debris, as it were. Now, the magic of grabbing onto that debris, we have a concept. Other folks are working on the concept, too. But once you're grabbed onto the debris, a solar sail is an awesome, awesome tool to use because of the low mass, the low cost. You don't have to continue to propel it.

And we can take a long period of time to get debris from where it is to where we'd like to have it. So it's a terrific tool for that. Maybe we'd like to have it going up rather than going down. And we have worked that. It's a very astute comment. Yes, we've taken some debris from the geo-orbits and just truck it on away. And we can be beyond the graveyard orbit, which is 1%, 2% above geo. In any case, we can take it beyond the graveyard orbit where folks normally park their stuff.

We can take it beyond there within a year. And then anything on top of that, if it just keeps working, it's just gravy and just keeps trucking. Yeah, everybody's assuming that we're going to get the space debris and either vaporize it or bring it down so that the atmosphere will vaporize it. For geo, that's a particularly difficult problem because it's a long ways away. And so, you know, boosting it up is usually the more palatable alternative. There you go. Nathan Barnes and other leaders of Lagarde Incorporated talking solar sales with Congressman Dana Rohrabacher.

Let's rejoin the discussion in Lagarde's high bay. You'll hear the congressman again, this time joined by NASA's new chief technologist, Mason Peck. But the conversation picks up with comment about the length and breadth of solar sailing's legacy. You know, not only have we worked on it, but academia has worked on it, other organizations have worked on it, Planetary Society, right? Lots of folks have been working on this, so there's a great amount of foundation to build from

and just take the leap. And it's great that OCT has the foresight to invest some money. Planetary Society has been very helpful to me because obviously there's a lot of people who don't take near-earth objects seriously but the planetary society does and I do and I people think I'm some sort of nutty you know fruitcake for worrying about a meteorite

or something and I just I mean I just think we ought to have a plan at least and we don't even have a plan right now. It's hard for people to recognize a danger until it actually happens. That's the bad news about that. I was hoping to see something more about these small satellites. Congressman, you were talking about commercial space, and I think you know this, but the fact is in this country right now there's a burgeoning industry in providing components for these kinds of small spacecraft. And again, I think you know this, but these CubeSat-sized spacecraft,

that's what they're called, these CubeSats, there are commercial companies right now building components for these and offering them as systems for funding that's actually outside the government sphere as well. So it's not just one of these sort of closed systems where the government funds itself. There are now small companies starting up providing these components. There are hundreds of universities across the country that are building these things right now, have built them. In fact, they've been around actually for 15, 20 years, to be honest.

So in some sense, they are mature in every sense. They're mature technology. This is state-of-the-art, but it's also pretty high reliability. This is stuff we know how to do. As remarkable as this seems, so NASA's actually starting a number of programs to sponsor small satellite work. I could go through them if you want, but the good news here, again, from a commercialization perspective,

is this is the kind of scale that allows individuals and small companies and universities to own their own spacecraft, to actually operate their own spacecraft, which is transformational. That was NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck, who has been visiting NASA centers, contractors, and independent companies that are at the forefront of opening the final frontier. I want to include one more comment from Congressman Dana Rohrabacher. The Republican representative has strong feelings about some of the current spending priorities Congress has laid out for NASA and the nation.

If the human being's presence is so costly that we then can't do three or four other projects, well then that has been a very damaging concept. Because I think Mars is the best. We've already canceled a couple of robotic trips to Mars. In order to build a rocket that will someday, I mean, in order to build a rocket that will someday, 15 years from now, permit us to have a person go to Mars, and who knows what's going to happen in the next 15 years. So, I mean, I say let's send the robots and really get the job done ASAP. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher of California.

He joined NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck and Planetary Radio for a tour of Lagarde Incorporated last March. When we return, we'll sit down for a conversation with one of Lagarde's founders, Dr. Gordon Veal. This is Planetary Radio. I'm Sally Ride. After becoming the first American woman in space, I dedicated myself to supporting space exploration and the education and inspiration of our youth. That's why I formed Sally Ride Science, and that's why I support the Planetary Society. The Society works with space agencies around the world and gets people directly involved with real space missions. It takes a lot to create exciting projects like the first solar sail, informative publications like an award-winning magazine, and many other outreach efforts like this radio show.

Help make space exploration and inspiration happen. Here's how you can join us. You can learn more about the Planetary Society at our website, planetary.org slash radio, or by calling 1-800-9-WORLDS. Planetary Radio listeners who aren't yet members can join and receive a Planetary Radio t-shirt. Members receive the internationally acclaimed Planetary Report magazine.

That's planetary.org slash radio. The Planetary Society, exploring new worlds. Welcome back to Planetary Radio. I'm Matt Kaplan. Congressman Dana Rohrabacher and NASA Chief Technologist Mason Peck had hit the road immediately after our tour of Lagarde Incorporated's headquarters in Orange County, California. I had a few extra minutes and I spent them with Gordon Veal. Gordon is one of the founders of Lagarde. He was its Vice President of Engineering for 35 years. He now serves as the small company's Manager of Quality control. I was anxious to talk

to him about Lagarde's solar sail plans, along with its past successes. We just came in from the high bay here at Lagarde. Very impressive stuff out there. Well, thank you. It's been a lot of fun things to work on over the years, and we feel like we've been developing a lot of things that will be very, very useful in the future of the space program. In general, we feel like we're contributing a lot to what NASA does and to the good of the country. You're one of the founders here, right? 41 years? I've been here 41 years, yeah. It's a really long time, but you know, the time goes by so quickly, and like they say, especially when you're having fun. And I think for all of us,

having fun is a major part of doing any job. And when you can be doing good things, new things, and exciting things, it just makes it very, very enjoyable. You have plenty of exciting things going on out there. One structure hanging in the back, that's one I think I was told that you had special responsibility for. Well, that was a forerunner of the inflatable antenna experiment that flew on the shuttle 77, flight 77. It was only a one-orbit experiment because at shuttle altitudes the drag is very, very high. But it turned out very nicely. We learned a whole lot from it, which is always the purpose of an experiment, is to learn from it.

We've used a lot of what we learned on that in the process of developing our solar sail technology. How big is that disk that inflated in space? It was 14 meters in diameter, which is roughly 45 feet in diameter. And then the struts themselves that went down to the spacecraft were about 100 feet long. Lagarde describes itself on your website as really being the leader in these inflatable structures in space. A fair description? Yeah, I think it is. We do extremely lightweight inflatables. Now, there's other people that do inflatables in space,

the astronaut spacesuits, for instance. But they're a totally different kind of structure than what we do. They're very thick but very, very well engineered as well. But we do very lightweight structures, especially for things like the solar sail. I think the boom on the sail that we're going to be flying here shortly weighs roughly 2 1⁄2 pounds, which for a very long structural member, that's extremely gossamer. Do you remember how long that spar is? I mean, we saw one out here. It's long. Yeah, that one is, I think it's about 30 meters.

Two and a half pounds. Right. Yeah, just really light. And of course, that's what's required for a solar sail, to be just very, very light. So this sail, which, with any luck, is going to be launched in 2014, perhaps on a SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle. I guess that's still not entirely tied down. It's a big structure that you hope to deploy. Yes, it's very big, but it packages down into a package that's smaller than a dishwasher. Then it expands out to this huge structure. It's about 35 meters on a side. So it's going to be very exciting, and hopefully it will work properly.

We're going to certainly do everything we can to make it work properly. And once it's on station, it will be able to stay in orbit around the sun at the L1 point so that we can get better warning from solar flares and solar activity so that we know if it's going to be anything that's going to damage any of the satellites or any of the electronics on the ground even. So this is another instrument that will give us advance warning when something, as happened just very recently, this giant solar storm. Of course, they can get much worse than that. So this is more than a test item when this goes up. It's going to perform this work for us at L1. Well, that's the

plan, to not only be able to demonstrate the technology, but also to be able to perform a useful function once it's up there at the L1. Your colleagues here are obviously thinking even bigger. We saw an animation of a sail that apparently covers, I think he said, 10,000 square meters. Right. And that started actually many years ago. That was one of our first projects we were doing with another company, Team Encounter, and their goal was to build a sail that would be able to go out of the solar system and just keep going forever.

As it turns out, this was a commercial company. Somewhere along the line, they lost their funding, which means we lost our funding. But we did a lot of the early technology that we're now using on that program. There was a lot of conversation about being able to rely on an enormous amount of thought that has gone into solar sails in the past, some of it from my organization, the Planetary Society. Exactly, yes. Dr. Friedman and the Planetary Society has generated a lot of work, and whenever you're in any engineering environment, you try and use everybody's work that's available to you,

and that's just, you know, you don't want everybody's work that's available to you. And that's just, you know, you don't want to be reinventing the wheel. So you take advantage of whatever good work people have done. And that's just how engineering is. So you see a bright future for inflatable structures in space? Yeah, we really do. Of course, they have to be the kind of a structure that can be rigidized once they are in space so that you can vent the inflatant, but certainly for deploying the structure, inflatable is a very good way to go. Thanks so much for

talking with me and also for allowing us to join this terrific tour at Lagarde in Tustin, California. Okay, well, I'm glad you could come, and you're always welcome to come back. Thank you for being here. Check out my March 16 blog entry about our tour of Lagarde. It includes photos and a very cool animation of a solar sail deploying in space. We'll have a link to it at planetary.org slash radio, or you can just search for Lagarde once you're at planetary.org. Back with Bruce Betts in a moment. So Bruce, I'm sorry that we're relegated to talking on the cell phone today, but Skype is having some problems.

Nevertheless, where were you during the annular eclipse? I was at that exotic place known as home. And it was visible. And, in fact, I got nice pictures of projections of lots and lots of almost annular eclipses on the wall of my house because the leaves of the trees were forming lots and lots of almost annular eclipses on the wall of my house because the leaves of the trees were forming lots and lots of little pinhole equivalents that were projecting these onto the wall. Yeah, Emily actually talked about this in the blog entry that we talked about at the opening of the show.

But this is apparently not the only amazing event that is going to be taking place in the current time frame. That is so true. There's so much amazing going on. There's a partial lunar eclipse that will occur on June 3rd, 4th, so the night of June 3rd, and it will be visible for most of Asia, Australia, the Pacific Ocean, and the Americas. But also, the extremely rare, perhaps the rarest of visible, predictable celestial events, a Venus transit. Transit of Venus across the Sun, so Venus between the Earth and the Sun, the disk passing across the face of the Sun on June 5th or 6th, depending on your time zone. And this will not occur again until 2117. Wow.

So don't miss it. They come in pairs. This is the second of the pair. We had one in 2004. Now there's one in 2012. So for the West Coast, so Pacific time, it'll be starting a little after 3 o'clock or 1500, 3 o'clock in the afternoon, on June 5th, best viewed fromclock in the afternoon, on June 5th.

Best viewed from somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, but most of North America will be able to see the start of the transit before it ends in sunset. Eastern and Southern Asia, Northern Africa, most of Europe will see the end of it. So check out things online. Do not stare at the sun and blind yourself. That would be a drag. You can use appropriate techniques to either project it onto something or truly appropriate solar filters.

But it is great. It will be about seven hours, a little less than seven hours in duration for it to cross across the disk of the sun. Very exciting. Makes me want to go out and buy one of those solar filters from my telescope. But there are other somewhat more mundane things going on up in the sky. Indeed. We have Venus. You can still check out right now, low in the west in the early evening, but it's in a hurry to get out of the evening sky

because it has to make its date for the transit on the 5th of June. That's about to go away. Not going away quite as quickly. We have Mars in the southwest, pretty high up in the early evening looking reddish, and Saturn high in the south still hanging out about five degrees from the much bluer looking but similar in brightness star Spica. So check those out as well. We move on to this week in space history. It was 50 years ago this week that Scott Carpenter made his Mercury flight.

Wow. Still quite amazing to think of. Half a century ago. Hmm. We move on to... It really does sound kind of ethereal, kind of ghostly over the telephone. Speaking of dead people, Johannes Kepler was the first person to predict a transit of Venus by predicting the 1631 event. So indeed, the founder of all those Kepler's laws and Keplerian motion could allow them to predict stuff like this. But he couldn't predict it accurately enough in terms of timing to know that it wasn't going to be visible in Europe,

so no one actually saw the 1631 transit. Yeah, but we can't be too hard on the guy. He came up with some great stuff. Oh, yeah. And the fact that he even got close was way beyond anyone in the rest of human history. All right, we move on to the trivia question. And I asked you, on Apollo 11, which of the astronauts sat in the middle seat during launch? How'd we do, Matt? Well, it was very interesting because apparently Apollo 11 treated things a little bit differently than all of the subsequent Apollo missions. Usually it was the command module pilot who sat in the middle.

That would have been Mike Collins. At least at launch, Buzz Aldrin took the middle seat. He was the lunar module guy. That's what Ron Brown told us. Ron of Florham Park, New Jersey. He's our winner this week. Ron Brown told us. Ron of Florham Park, New Jersey. He's our winner this week. He said it was Buzz who sat in the middle seat of the Apollo 11 command module at launch. I guess then he moved over and let Mike take the seat. It was Ben Owens who told us that

Buzz got the middle seat because he won the best of three rock, paper, scissors with Mike Collins a few minutes before launch. I don't know that, is that actually winning to be in the middle seat? Because he got to sit next to Neil, I think. Okay. And Neil, we should say, as commanders, as captains always do, he was in the left seat, and that is where the launch abort lever was. They didn't actually use that, right?

Not that I recall, no. Good. All right, well, we move on to the next trivia question, and back to Venus transits. Who performed the first known observation of a Venus transit, and in what year? Who actually first was able to observe this, and in what year? Go to planetary.org slash radio, find out how to enter. And you have until the 28th. That'd be May 28th at 2 p.m. Pacific time to get us that answer,

and maybe win yourself a Planetary Radio t-shirt. All right, everybody, go out there, look up at the night sky, and think about the glory that our paper towels. Thank you, and good night. You know, it's the one consumable where I really, my wife says, forget being green, she's very green otherwise, but do not try to get her to ration her paper towel consumption. He's Bruce Betts, the Director of Projects for the Planetary Society,

joins us every week here for What's Up. We delayed completion of this episode until very early Tuesday morning so we could share this. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, 0. And launch of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as NASA turns to the private sector to resupply the International Space Station. Congratulations, SpaceX. Next week, a conversation with science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and made possible in part by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation and by the members of the Planetary Society.

Clear skies. Thank you.