Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Visiting the Spacecraft Technology Expo

Episode Date: May 14, 2012

Spaceplanes, spacesuits and rockets, oh my! Mat Kaplan talks to exhibitors and others at the first ever Spacecraft Technology Expo in Los Angeles.Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hello, podcast listeners. For some of you, you're hearing me for the first time in, what, three weeks? And for that, we deeply apologize. Now, if you've been to Planetary.org lately, you know that we have a brand new website. We relaunched it about three Wednesdays ago, and that launch promptly broke our link to a variety of podcast aggregators, including iTunes. We're very sorry about that, and we think we've got it fixed, so we hope that that's where you're hearing us now. Those of you who switched to our website to hear the show, you've missed a couple of great ones. I hope you'll check us out either here at planetary.org

or over there in iTunes or your favorite podcast aggregator. Thanks for hanging in there, and we'll try to never, ever let this happen again. Come with me to the Spacecraft Technology Expo, 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. I spent three days last week at the first ever Spacecraft Tech Expo. Stick around to hear from a handful of the companies and individuals who came to the Los Angeles Convention Center

to either see or sell everything from tiny connectors to entire launch systems. All our regulars are also along for the ride, beginning right now with the Planetary Society Science and Technology Coordinator, Emily Lakdawalla. Emily, sounds like you've had some fun with a couple of recent trips, one out to the desert. That's right. As a blogger from home, one doesn't ordinarily get to do too many field trips, but I got two fun ones last week. And one of them was to go nearly all the way to Death Valley to some sand dunes where they were testing what they call the Scarecrow model of the Curiosity rover.

Scarecrow. Is this sort of a prototype or what? Well, they have these model rovers for both Curiosity and for the Mars Exploration rovers. They're stripped down so that the actual weight of the whole chassis is the same here on Earth as the full-size rover is on Mars. So it only weighs about 38% of the actual weight of the rover as built on Earth. Of course, the reason that they call it the Scarecrow is because they have to remove a lot of important things in order to get down to that weight.

And this thing doesn't have a brain. Oh, that's terrific. I love that. My favorite movie, of course. So they're still obviously practicing getting ready for what's going to be coming up in early August. Yeah, they're really just getting started with that practicing. You know, they built the rovers with engineers who knew the kinds of conditions that would need to get into, but now they're really practicing for mission operations. And one of the challenging things is to predict exactly how far the rover is going to go when you tell it to drive. And you know how many wheel turns you tell it to go. But if you're driving up on a sand dune, you also know that there's going to be some slip that the rover won't drive

as far as you commanded it to because the wheels won't get perfect traction. So they're just testing, just trying to make sure that all their predictions are correct for where they'll be able to position the rover as they drive it. Good principle for everyone, allow for slippage. That other trip that you made was not quite 100% Hollywood, but there was a good helping of it. It was mostly Hollywood. I got a chance to screen the fifth season finale of a show called The Big Bang Theory, which features as its main character, some scientists. And they do a really good job of trying to get the science and engineering right as far as they can. They are a weekly TV show. There's only so much they can do. But the finale featured one of the main characters getting ready to launch to space aboard a Soyuz. And with him in the Soyuz was

Mike Massimino, otherwise known as the Hubble repairman, who flew two missions aboard Atlantis, including the most recent one to repair Hubble and replace its instruments. Yeah, Mike, who was on this show about the time that that IMAX movie came out that documented those repairs. He's a big guy for an astronaut. He is a big guy. And he told me he only barely fits in a Soyuz that fortunately his sitting height is short. So he was able to get in there. But in actual fact, he never did sit in a real one during any of his missions because he didn't get to go to the space station. The Hubble's in a very different orbit. So their mission was just to go up to that spacecraft, fix it, and come back down.

But it was a real treat to be sitting in even a fake space cockpit with him. And there you are, a nice photo on this May 9th entry in the blog at planetary.org, sitting in basically half of a Soyuz with Mike Massimino. And you can also go there and check out her brand-new entry about her trip out to the desert to see the scarecrow crawling around. She's Emily Lakdawalla, the science and technology coordinator for the Planetary Society and its blogger and a contributing editor to Sky and Telescope magazine. Up next is Bill Nye. Bill, fresh back from Washington, you and I spent time doing different things

at the Spacecraft Technology Expo, which was last week in Los Angeles. You met some interesting people there. Oh, yes. We spent quite a bit of time with people from ATK. They make big rockets. I'm with people from ATK. They make big rockets. SpaceX was there with the Dragon capsule. And Lynx was there from XCOR Corporation. Very cool. These people are making rockets that are going to take passengers to low Earth orbit. And it sounds like either the most important work in the world or a trivial thing on the side, but it's exciting.

These are independent contractors making rockets that will advance space exploration for all humankind. And the thing is, we are caught up right now, Matt, in this political turmoil here in the U.S. about fretting over important line items in the NASA budget. And it's somehow connected. You know, we have people on the inside. And there's some connection between the funding for this what's called commercial crew and the funding for our planetary exploration. There's some conflict. But when you walk around and you see these new space capsules and this new – the Liberty rocket would use – get this. It would use solid boosters descendant from the space shuttle strap-on boosters. And then it would have a European Ariane second stage liquid-fueled rocket on top. International cooperation.

The future's exciting. And isn't the answer, to use the phrase again, that a great civilization makes room for planetary science and the commercial development, getting humans up in a low Earth orbit and sometimes, like with the Lynx, even in a suborbital for people who can afford such things. They told me it's only 95,000 a flight. people who can afford such things. They told me it's only 95,000 a flight. That was the X-Core, folks. Yeah. Yeah. The longest journey starts with a single step. The other thing that impressed me about that X-Core Lynx spacecraft, it's like an airplane. I mean, if you can fly a small plane, you could, looking at it, you'd know where all the controls are for that thing. And it just shows you the importance, seriously, of how far electronics have come that allows us to lower the cost of the computation needed to

operate these exotic spacecraft. The future is very bright, Matt. And we at the Planetary Society will continue to advocate for the best use of our resources for an exciting future in space. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Matt. He's Bill Nye, the CEO of the Planetary Society, and he'll be joining us again next week here on Planetary Radio. The Spacecraft Technology Expo was dreamt up by a group of conference developers who became convinced that its time had come.

Their choice of Southern California for the show is understandable. The region remains an important center for both traditional aerospace giants like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and for upstarts like SpaceX. Surrounding and nourishing giant integrators like these are thousands of small, specialized subcontractors, which explains why there were so many standard 10-by-10-foot booths at the Expo. There were also some big announcements. Perhaps the biggest came from ATK's Aerospace Systems Group.

Five-time shuttle astronaut Ken Rominger is now Vice President for strategy and business development at ATK. It was Ken who announced the latest advance in the use of composite materials rather than heavier metal alloys for the fabrication of the most important part of a human spacecraft, the part where the humans live. At ATK, about a year ago, we announced the Liberty launch vehicle, but what we didn't have was a complete system. But the exciting news is, in fact, the capsule that completes our system right here in the picture.

So it was designed kind of as a science project to see, hey, how do composites work? How well would they work? And over the period of years, what we've come to find is, you know what, the composites work very, very well. Ken Rominger of ATK. Down on the exhibit floor was the main attraction for visitors to the Spacecraft Technology Expo.

The Human Spaceflight Park was exactly as you'd hope. There was a Dragon space capsule from SpaceX, complete with seven couches for astronauts. space capsule from SpaceX, complete with seven couches for astronauts. And for the first time anywhere in public, XCOR had unveiled a full-scale mock-up of its Lynx suborbital space plane. And that wasn't the only attraction provided by XCOR. I had to do a bit of climbing for this one with help from the company's chief operating officer, Andrew Dalton. Andrew, we haven't talked in a while, and the last time we talked, it wasn't nearly as much fun as this. I'm in the cockpit, or at least the mock-up of the cockpit, for Lynx, and you've got the full-scale model right over here.

It's so exciting to see it. I mean, we're just tickled pink. It's really coming together. Oh, absolutely. And every day, you know, we get closer and closer. We have real hardware on the floor. We're putting real engines on the back of real fuselages. We're putting real LOX tanks inside that fuselage. We've got landing gear. Everything's coming together.

So how far are we from Rick Serifoss or somebody like that sitting next to a paying customer in the right seat here? Hopefully that's going to happen in the next 18 months or so, maybe 24 months, hopefully sooner. But end of the year, we hope to start flight tests at the beginning of the year. We aren't pushing. We want to make sure it's safe. Then a proper flight test program, minimum of 9 to 10 months.

And then if all falls into place and it's perfect, of course it's never perfect, into next year we're going to be flying. You guys have come an awfully long ways from the first time I stopped by out on the Mojave, and we saw a little engine demo on a little rolling cart. Yeah, we call it the T-Cart. The first fully reusable little thruster that the guys did back in the day. Yeah, we're moving forward.

You have to have learned a lot in the process of putting together a spacecraft. What are the things that really stand out? Are there technologies, or is it more on the human side of getting into the business of taking people to space that you've learned a lot? Yes. So I think one of the things that's important that XCore shows is sometimes if you have too much money too soon, you make design decisions that will impact you and hurt you in the future. Because XCore didn't have a lot of money early on, they had to do things in a very innovative way, both from a process as well as hardware technology, that has actually, I think, vaulted us ahead of many people in both areas. And then you get this part about the human

element. When you have a group of dedicated people out in the middle of the desert, you know, howling at the moon, I like to say, magical things start to happen. And at a certain point, you need the money. It's a business, right? It's a business. You're in it for fun, but... But early on, if you have too much money, maybe they would have designed the engines differently. They would have had some compromise. Well, it's okay, we can get through that.

Or the operational cost. Oh, we could survive X numbers of operational cost levels increase above where we're at today. But because they really had to drive the cost down, the safety up, the reliability up, they had to do things in a much different way than if they had a lot of money. And those innovative solutions are going to be paying dividends now. But now we've got a great team. It's building up.

We have money in the bank and touch wood in a year or so, we're going to be flying people like you to space. I wish it was me. I will grab a seat if you offer one're going to be flying people like you to space. I wish it was me. I will grab a seat if you offer one, but I'll also just come out to watch. And we'll sell you a T-shirt. Oh, man, that would be terrific. I'd be happy to wear it. And this is a very cool cockpit, by the way.

Thank you very much. Yeah, the guys over at Orville Outfitters, Global Effects, have made this cockpit up for us. They're a great group. And they're building your pressure suits. And they're one of the pressure suit suppliers, absolutely. So we're very excited about that. They do everything, soup to nuts. Last thing, you've got a waiting list.

And what currently is the thinking about what it's going to cost to take a ride? Actually, it's no thinking. It's an actual published price, $95,000. It gets you full-up training, medical screening, G-force pressure suit training, and a flight to space and a nice stay at a fancy resort. Sounds good to me. I'll check the bank account. Thanks so much. It's my pleasure. Anytime. Andrew Dalton of XCOR.

Our visit to the Spacecraft Technology Expo continues in a minute. 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.

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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. We're in the middle of a very brief visit to the first ever Spacecraft Technology Expo. The Expo took over an exhibit hall and meeting rooms at the Los Angeles Convention Center last week. Before the break, Andrew Dalton of XCOR told us about the imminent launch of its Lynx

suborbital space plane. He also mentioned an organization I've long wanted to learn more about. Jeff Feige is CEO of Orbital Outfitters, a company with a fascinating background. It is affiliated with one of the leading fabricators of high-tech props, sets, and costumes for Hollywood. Some of those have been spacesuits. Now Orbital Outfitters is building the real thing. Astronauts will be wearing them when they ride the links to the edge of space. We saw the need for a suit that was robust, affordable, and actually could do some things for how the person looked. Where things really started to come together was we knew folks who had the skill sets to do the work.

We knew a set of customers who had the need. We knew some places that we could put the money together. And at a certain point, there's a moment when all that gels and you say, we all just need to start a company here. Obviously, people have been building spacesuits for a long time now. Are you able to start looking at new approaches that make them easier to deal with? I think in some areas we certainly have some new technology. Certainly the performance of our suits is very, very, very high.

If I would try to say things that we do differently, we do a lot in the area of performance. We do a lot in the area of sizing. We do a lot in the area of sizing. We do a lot in the area of trying to figure out manufacturing techniques so that we'll actually be able to meet the volumes that are anticipated for Lynx. No one's ever had to make hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pressure suits. And so that's something we're beginning to have to worry about and design for. If I buy my ticket to ride on the Lynx or perhaps some other suborbital provider that you guys might be providing suits to, do I keep my space suit or does it go back on the Lynx or perhaps some other suborbital provider that you guys might be providing suits to, do I keep my space suit or does it go back on the rack for the next guy?

Well, for the moment, it goes back on the rack for the next guy. Many customers have expressed an interest in doing exactly what you're describing. The problem that we run into, and I'm sure you've never heard this one before, is suits are ITAR-controlled technology. Good old ITAR. Good old ITAR. So basically, we as orbital outfitters and you as the individual who took your suit home would both be under all the restrictions of ITAR and then we'd be facing the ITAR liability, if you will, even though the suit's in your living room.

We should say, by the way, for people who don't know, that ITAR liability, if you will, even though the suit's in your living room. We should say, by the way, for people who don't know, that ITAR is one of the more popular acronyms here at the Spacecraft Technology Expo because everyone has to deal with this legislation that is designed to prevent the sharing of technology with people we don't want to have have it. International trafficking and arms regulation. So what we're really talking about is the set of legislation that makes it illegal for me to sell a tank to North Korea also has a subsection of a subsection of a subsection

that covers space technology broadly and pretty much says any space technology out there is, even if it's a dual-use technology or something like this, has to be treated in terms of how we deal with foreign companies as a weapon system. Fascinating. Absolutely. That ends up just being a huge hassle, especially for a small business like us, who, if you were smart enough, you could learn how to do what we do on our own. There's no part of our technology that is fundamentally going to enable some foreign power to be a threat to the U.S. or anything

like that, yet we still fall under the jurisdiction of it and until that gets dealt with, here we are. How far along are the suits that you're developing for XCOR? Because Lynx is getting reasonably close to beginning to send people up. We're in our final iteration of the final few changes for XCOR right now. We'll be providing them with flight suits very shortly. Basically, for their sake, I won't discuss specific dates, but some flight hardware has already been built,

and the flight suits will be provided to them shortly. How soon do you get your ride? I'm crossing my fingers somewhere in the test process. Jeff Feige of Orbital Outfitters. I wish we had time to visit with more exhibitors at the Spacecraft Technology Expo. There's just one more guy I have to let you meet. Ruben Metcalf is a New Zealander who was wandering the exhibit hall selling, well, an opportunity. Ruben, what's a fellow who doesn't have $200,000 spare dollars but wants to go to space to do?

Well, there is one option. There is a website, so you can find it at www.idreamofspace.com. And if you are so inclined, you can spend $10 and have a 1 in 25,000 chance of going to space. Now, this is not just random knowledge on your part. You are the founder of I Dream of Space. Somehow I found myself in this position, yes. How did you guys come up with this idea? You know, it was pretty simple.

Space Travelers is getting into the public domain where it's the idea that you might be able to go to space within your lifetime is possible, which brings a whole other level of engagement to somebody who might not be into space, have ever got into space, so to speak. And I think as long as you're trying to attract and engage the general populace with something that comes with a six-figure price tag, that's going to be a challenge. So if you can get a value proposition to a very broad audience, and I'm talking international, every language, and say $10 for a 1 in 25,000 chance

of going to space and bring that into 140 characters, then that's something that people can engage with. Because of that, they might actually go to space, if that makes sense. It makes great sense and well put. You don't know yet whose rocket I'm going, whose spacecraft I'm going to end up on if I'm lucky enough to win, right? That's right. So we have budgeted for $200,000. That'll get you on just about anybody's. Exactly, exactly. And so we're basically talking to everyone and seeing, okay, well, you know, who's the most likely to go first?

And, you know, it could be anyone's game right now. It's a race. It's a space race. It's the space race, basically. So tell us once again, how can people put in their $10 for this $1,000 and $25,000 shot? How can people put in their $10 for this $1,000 and $25,000 shot? idreamerspace.com. It's pretty simple. $10 equals you in space, maybe.

Oh, and also you can tell all of your friends that you are a potential astronaut and you are 15,000% more likely to win than pretty much any lottery around the world. The California lottery or any other probably. The California lottery actually I think is bigger than 15,000%. Alright, I'm going to put in my 10 bucks and I want you to put in a good word for me with the random selection process. Thank you so much and best of luck with this as you spread the good word about regular folks, the 99% going to space. Absolutely.

Reuben Metcalf of I Dream of Space. There are photos of my visit to the Spacecraft Technology Expo at planetary.org slash radio. Next up is What's Up? Bruce will join me in a moment. Got Bruce Betts on the Skype line, meaning that it's time for What's Up on Planetary Radio. Welcome back. Thanks, Matt. Good to be back. How are you doing? I'm doing just fine.

I won't tell people why I'm doing just fine. I won't tell people why I'm pleased by your enthusiasm there. But anyway, it's good to talk to you as always. Tell us about the night sky. The night sky has got some seriously cool things coming up, Matt. Venus up in the evening in the west. But hey, check it out because it's vanishing in the next few weeks. It's going to go party far too close to the sun. But that means as it goes closer towards the sun, its phase changes because it has phases just like the moon. So if you check it out in a telescope, you can actually see it getting more and more towards a crescent over the coming weeks. But it also will be dropping lower and lower in the western evening sky. You can also check out Mars.

It is up high in the southwest in the early evening. And Saturn up in the south in the early evening. And I think we've discussed before the spiffy trick to find the star Arcturus. If you find the Big Dipper, Ursa Major, and you follow the handle and it arcs, you get to Arcturus, the star. Well, if you keep arcing, you will get to the bluish star Spica in Virgo, which is only about five degrees from Saturn. They make a nice pair right now with Spica looking bluish and Saturn looking yellowish. So that's groovy, but also we have a solar eclipse. It is an annular solar eclipse, so the distance of the moon from the earth is such that it does not block out the

entire sun. It leaves an annulus, a ring of sun around it, even if you're on the path of annularity. But it also forms a partial solar eclipse, much broader area. The partial solar eclipse area includes Eastern Asia, across the Pacific, and throughout most of North America. And this is on May 20th, Sunday, May 20th. Don't miss it. The path of annularity goes from China to Japan, across the Pacific, and into the Western U.S. Got a very excited bunch of people who've been telling me, are you going to go see it? Are you going to go see it? And no, I'm not really going to go see it where it's, you know, at its most glorious,

although I know a lot of people who are. But I hope it will have clear skies here, because we'll have at least a partial annular eclipse, I'm told, in Southern California. We will indeed have a partial eclipse and also more next week, but we've got a partial lunar eclipse on June 3rd and 4th and, of course, the transit of Venus coming up on June 5th and 6th.

There won't be another one of those until 2117. Random space fact! You've been watching too much Spike TV, I think. The dog has to come soothe me again because she thinks I'm stressed out. Okay, okay, good dog, Sophie. The WMAP spacecraft, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, which made a map of the cosmic microwave background radiation

and came up with all sorts of important parameters about the universe, it was measuring microwave electromagnetic light radiation from 380,000 years after the Big Bang. That's when all the stuff flying around finally got transparent to photons. Which is pretty darn close to the beginning of it all. It is, but it's importantly a little while after. Yes. Let's go on to trivia. What did you ask people a couple of weeks ago? I asked you, how many flights did the Space Shuttle Enterprise make separated from the

carrier aircraft? In other words, how many landings did it have on its own when it got dropped off the top of a 747? How did we do, Matt? Well, we had an interesting group of answers. A lot of people who were pleasantly surprised to learn everything that they'd learned looking this up about Space Shuttle Enterprise, the orbiter that never went into space, that a lot of, especially Star Trek fans,

would be, you know, maybe someday retrofitted so it could make it up there. But it was Enterprise that was carried aloft by the shuttle carrier aircraft. I was there for a couple of these many, many years ago. In fact, I was. I was five years old. It was nearly 35 years ago. All of these happened in the second half, the latter half of 1977.

Hard to believe, 35 years ago. And it was a brilliant success. There were five flights. That's what we heard from our friend Torsten Zimmer out there in Germany. He says he discovered that NASA actually was considering retrofitting the craft for orbital missions and that they toyed with the idea again after the Challenger accident. But Randy Bottom pointed out that Enterprise was extremely valuable as they figured out how to make things better after Challenger and Columbia,

after those two disasters. So it may never have made it up into orbit, but it did play an important role in the evolution of the space transportation system. It did indeed, and now it's moved over to New York for permanent display. So, Torsten, we're going to send you one of those Planetary Radio t-shirts. Bruce, what have you got for next time? All right, we stick with the WMAP spacecraft and cosmology, and one of the key values that was measured by that spacecraft,

as well as other techniques, is the value of the Hubble constant. So good old Edwin Hubble determined there was a relationship between the distance of a galaxy and its speed. The farther away they were, the faster they were moving. And the connection,

the linear connection between those two values has been termed the Hubble constant. What is the current understanding of the value of the Hubble constant. What is the current understanding of the value of the Hubble constant? There's still error in it, so just get it approximate. But what is the value of the Hubble constant? Go to planetary.org slash radio

and find out how to enter our contest. You have this time until the 21st of May at 2 p.m. That would be Monday the 21st at 2 p.m. Pacific time. That's it. All right, everybody. Go out there, look up in the night sky, and think about dogs, particularly the one right next to me who's still trying to soothe me after that traumatic random space fact. Thank you, and good night.

That's something you'll never get from the dog star sitting next to you trying to soothe you. He's Bruce Betts. That'd be painful. It'd be warm. He's Bruce Betts. That'd be painful. It'd be warm. He's Bruce Betts, the director of projects for the Planetary Society, joins us every week here for What's Up. Planetary Radio is produced by the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California, and made possible by a grant from the Kenneth T. and Eileen L. Norris Foundation

and by the members of the Planetary Society. Clear skies.