Cosmic Queries – NASA v. Billionaires with Lori Garver

Mining on the moon? Owning an asteroid? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer questions about the private space industry, the role of NASA, and the future of space law with former Deputy Administrator of NASA, Lori Garver.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk, Cosmic Queries Edition, always popular with our audience. And today, we're going to talk about the future of space. Public versus private space missions. Everybody's thinking and talking about this subject. Chuck, have you been in any conversation where they heard you were related to StarTalk? And this did not come up?

• 0:36Chuck Nice?

  Um, yes. No, I'm joking.

• 0:43Chuck Nice?

  No, people are very much, I mean, it's, maybe that's a good thing, though. That's the one good thing about it.

• 0:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a buzz, yeah. What, no matter where people land in the issues, it's a topic of conversation, which is something. We haven't really been talking about space lately. I mean, right? There was, you know, there's been these lulls in it. Well, we've got on the show today, someone who is perhaps the most pedigreed person in the world to talk on this subject. Oh, my gosh. An old friend and coworker, Lori Garver. Lori, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:18Speaker 02

  Thank you. It is wonderful to be here.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have a, you know, an arms-length resume, and every item on that resume is space-related. The one we have here, just because we're being lazy, is that you're a former deputy administrator to NASA, appointed by Obama. So the deputy administrator is the second highest-ranking person at NASA, if I remember the, the org chart. And you're the recent author of Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Agency. I see what you did there.

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, there's a lot.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, disclosure here, I actually blurbed the book.

• 2:03Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 2:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if you look somewhere on the cover or inside, so I'm going to read you my blurb. So here it is. Former NASA official Lori Garver offers a front-row seat.

• 2:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the decades-long struggle within and among space bureaucrats and space billionaires. Bring popcorn as you bear witness to an untold slice of space history. Neil deGrasse Tyson, American Museum of Natural History. Because I read that book, it was like, where's the popcorn? Oh, my gosh. Wow. Oh, my gosh. So Laurie, Laurie, Laurie, you've done tours of duty in government, in industry. You've seen sides of this, more sides of this, of this multi-dimensional space than most people have.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How do you, does this make enemies with everybody or friends with everybody? Like, do the bureaucrats see you as an industry person? Do the industry people see you as a bureaucrat? Do the academics see you as a kiss up to the, do you have any friends at all?

• 3:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, I have a dog and I live in Washington. So that's probably.

• 3:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's one friend. You got one friend. Okay. So goes the old saying. The dog is proud of you every day, no matter what you did that day.

• 3:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. Be who your dog thinks you are. That's my motto. You nailed it. I've got people who see what, from their corner, view my perspective as not quite in their corner because I think my view and the point of the book, thank you for your blurb and introduction, is that I brought a different perspective to my two tours at NASA. I've been there over 10 years, twice for about five years each, ran the policy office in the Clinton administration in the 90s. And we have always been going to be on this path, you know, of.

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Launching into space age, people have been talking about it for decades. It didn't just start with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but because of them, we are talking about it more and for a lot of reasons that I'm sure we will talk about today. We have a lot of people questioning why we're doing it a certain way. Is this the best way? Why isn't it just NASA anymore? Why aren't we back on the moon? And why aren't we on Mars? Many questions.

• 4:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Plus, if you go private, sort of independent space industry, the huge space industrial complex probably feels threatened at some level. Is that a fair comment?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  That's the real rub, I think, is that aerospace managed to, late 50s, early 60s, transform their, the equipment and weapons they used into civil space programs. And it's those very contractors who have been working for NASA, contracting with the space agency ever since and doing wonderful things, but doing it on contract where you got paid the usual large amount, whether you delivered or not, year after year. And they didn't want to let that go, obviously. The glamour of launching astronauts is a wonderful thing for them, especially because

• 5:30Speaker 02

  they were also getting billions to do it. If you calculate about $350 billion that we spent on human spaceflight since Apollo, we've launched about 350 people. So they've been getting a lot of money to launch astronauts and to be able to market themselves as that kind of company and not just a weapons building company. So they did not want to do this.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, we just slipped by a fast number there.

• 5:54Chuck Nice?

  I'm not a natural physicist, but that math kind of sounds like a billion dollars a person.

• 5:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I don't just slide by that, Lori. So we're talking nearly a billion dollars, if you average that out, a billion dollars per human being launched into space since Apollo.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  That NASA has done. That has nothing to do with these private individuals.

• 6:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, no, but that's a number, just dangling there in front of us all.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  It's in the book. It's hard to, you know, just like with the shuttle, we can say, oh, there's marginal costs, there's all this, but the bottom line, NASA, not the whole budget, NASA's human spaceflight budget.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so for those people less economic, one-on-one fluent, the marginal cost is the incremental cost, not including the startup costs and the capital costs that made the thing happen in the first place, correct?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Right, and I'm including those in the billion. We're just putting it all in there. So a lot of people will consider that an unfair number.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they want to use the marginal cost, which is vastly lower, but you had to set the thing up in the first place.

• 7:00Chuck Nice?

  However, in all fairness to what people might consider bloat, that is the purpose of a government involvement in anything that large, is that...

• 7:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Chuck, did I just hear you say, "in all fairness to bloat"?

• 7:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you, did I, was that in that sentence?

• 7:19Chuck Nice?

  I know, because I know that people often say...

• 7:22Speaker 02

  Let's give bloat a fairness.

• 7:23Chuck Nice?

  I know, because people say...

• 7:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The only we're saying is, "give bloat a chance."

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  Give bloat a chance, man! Like, you know, so bloat on, bloat, bloat on. No, my point is that people think that the government wastes money, right? And that anything the government is involved in is a waste of money because the government is doing it.

• 7:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a whole, a whole set of people think that way.

• 7:45Chuck Nice?

  There's a whole set of people that just think that. And so, but my, but what I'm saying is, there are certain things that the government has to do because the money, there is no money in it. So it's all waste, it's all waste. If it were private, listen, so look at me like, listen to me right now, just follow me here. If you were in 1960 trying to go to the moon as General Electric, that is a complete waste of money. 100% waste. There is nothing in it for you as a company. There's no profit, and there's no shareholder. There's no benefit at all. It's 100% wasted money.

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  So when you think of like, the government wasting money, there are many benefits that we got from going to the moon. It turned out not to be a waste of money, but if you were a corporate CEO, that's a total waste of money.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Chuck, that is the first time I've ever heard someone defend bloat. Just wanted to put that out there.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  That's 100% an excellent point. We don't want people to think what NASA is doing should be done by the private sector. The real difference here is NASA, the government, should be driving technologies and doing new and exciting things. Neil talks about this all the time, like going to the moon. Since then, perhaps, doing the shuttle program, which was supposed to reduce the cost of taking people and stuff to and from space, it didn't reduce the cost. And so that is what we're talking about post-Apolo.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, very good point.

• 9:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so it's the bureaucracy. It's like, the right stuff, Form 3612B.

• 9:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the point is, the, um, once we realized that the reusable space shuttle did not actually make things cheaper, in fact, Lori, correct me if I'm wrong, even the Air Force bailed out of the space shuttle as a launch system for, for secure satellites and other activities because it was too costly. And they would just launch it themselves for less. Do I remember that correctly?

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Well, NASA had argued successfully that all the defense military satellites should be on the shuttle, yes, in the beginning, but after Challenger, which, you know, was our 25th flight, a new policy said the Defense Department military payloads go elsewhere. You know, they had to sit around for years because they were waiting on the shuttle. But the government was trying, you know, to amortize, um, to, you know.

• 10:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To the credit, to the credit, yeah.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  Right. Uh, and they ended up really limiting the shuttle's payloads after that to only those missions that required the space shuttle itself.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the volume, the volume in the payload section, right.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Well, you couldn't just launch satellites with the volume of the payload because you were risking astronaut lives at that point. So it was only those, those things afterwards that, there were plenty in the queue who, that had already made themselves uniquely capable with, with the shuttle, so they didn't move off. But for the most part, we built the space station with a space shuttle after that.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. And so one last thing before we get to our Patreon questions. But Lori, what of the point? You know, one of the clarion calls when someone says, you know, the government spent, you know, X billions of dollars on this, and where has it gotten us, and private enterprise should do it? One of the rebuttals is, the money is not in space. The money is spent on Earth. And there's thousands of engineers and scientists who are paid to do this work from that money on Earth that contribute to their economies and their real estate and their schools. And so what do you, how do you view that as a legit comeback to that kind of attack?

• 11:47Speaker 02

  You know, I think when we are spending the public's money, we should always be aware of what is the purpose. And NASA's purpose helps us to improve the economy, our national security, and it is an inspiration for people to study math and science. Those were the original, I call them fear, greed, and glory. You have a different take slightly on that, but that's why we do it. So to the extent we are going about exploring space like we did in Apollo and in the early days with new technologies, the return on that government investment, the return on those jobs is a multiplier.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  What is the problem is when the government starts just paying us to do stuff we've already done, and A, that competes with the private sector, and B, it isn't a multiplier because you're not incentivizing certain

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A new thing.

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Something that, yeah, is going to have a bigger, a bigger market. The launch industry that we privatized was so obviously ripe for this because we weren't launching any satellites anymore commercially because we had priced ourselves out with a shuttle and the US rockets were being run by a monopoly, United Launch Alliance. So we really have now come back against China, Russia, and the French, who were launching all the satellites, and now that's huge for our economy. So those, those investments were job multipliers.

• 13:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so Lori, here's an interesting dimension here. Throughout all of Gemini, Apollo, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo.

• 13:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have contracted with the space industrial complex, but their names are not on any of the vessels. Okay, you didn't see Lockheed Martin, Boeing, they're not on any of the vessels. So it looked like we, NASA just did it all themselves. But that wasn't the case, whereas now with pure private industry, it says SpaceX going up. No, no bow to doubt it, right? So is there any reason for that shift?

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Yes, it is fascinating to me that the companies themselves, who have been building this stuff for years, they didn't get their names on them, and I don't know if they ever asked, but they do advertise with those programs constantly. And so you'll see their logo tied in with the programs. But what the difference is now, primarily with SpaceX, is they are putting their own skin in the game. That when they've got a program, the way NASA is now contracting, SpaceX sort of owns it and NASA is just buying a service. So when I was at NASA in around 2012, they were launching to the space station for the first time. SpaceX asked if they could put NASA's name on the rocket.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow.

• 14:37Speaker 02

  Guess what NASA said? No, not our rocket.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 14:42Speaker 02

  And for Gwen Shawwell, she is still, the president called. I thought I could break that free, but the head of NASA wasn't interested in doing that. The lawyers gave them some, you know, it's not our rocket. Well, I was shocked when for a commercial crew, they come out, not only is the rocket filled with logos of NASA and SpaceX, but they drove out there in Tesla cars. I mean, the fact that NASA has embraced this program, who initially, one of their arguments for not doing it was the public won't pay attention if it's not NASA. I mean, we just couldn't have gotten it more wrong in some ways. But they're doing a good job, I guess.

• 15:27Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a little, it's more than even I would have probably done.

• 15:32Chuck Nice?

  And I think it's funny because when you say the public won't pay attention because it's not, if it's not NASA. It's like there's one car service that takes people to the theater or the movie or a concert. And everybody thinks that people are actually concerned about the car service. You know?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:53Chuck Nice?

  It's like, no, the car service only takes you to the main show. Space is the main show. Space is the show.

• 16:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good point. Is what, you know, what are you doing in space and who are you launching?

• 16:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And NASA probably would have never launched 90-year-old Will Shatner. They would have seen it as a stunt. And you look at the media attention that got.

• 16:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's a certain sort of cultural.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  But you know NASA probably shouldn't have launched William Shatner. You know, I mean, would you want your tax dollars going to that? I don't think so.

• 16:23Chuck Nice?

  I don't know.

• 16:24Speaker 02

  I don't think so. I'm thrilled that he got to go.

• 16:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We owe him something, I think.

• 16:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  I'm thrilled that he got to go.

• 16:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the comedians owe him something because you all imitate him all the time.

• 16:32Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's what I was gonna say. It's just like.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  But what was fascinating is when.

• 16:36Chuck Nice?

  Your tax dollars at work.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Y'all gave 10% of every gig that you did it in, you know?

• 16:43Speaker 02

  When he returned, he was more eloquent than anyone I've ever heard. He was clearly moved by the experience.

• 16:49Chuck Nice?

  I will say that you're right about that. My, I will say my favorite memory of all of these launches was seeing him step off of the vessel and talk about the emotional connection that he now had to, you know, what just happened.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just for what it's worth, astronauts, at least historically, were not selected based on how emotional they were.

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  Dude, this is amazing. I can't believe what I'm seeing. Oh, my God. What is that red light? What's that red light? Hello? Hello? Oh, we're gonna die? Oh, my gosh, we're gonna die.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  It was a George Costanza rule. That was the opposite. They wanted to be cool. Houston, we have a problem.

• 17:37Chuck Nice?

  Right. Yeah.

• 17:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Lori, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, we're gonna hit our Patreon questions. They're raring to go here. And Chuck, you got the list?

• 17:47Chuck Nice?

  I do.

• 17:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. All right. When we come back, more with a friend and longtime coworker when I was sort of had a lot of overlap with the space industry and with NASA itself, Laurie Garver. We'll be right back.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  I'm Joel Cherico and I make pottery. You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com. Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day. And I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. And this one is all about the transition of NASA and just the world and its acceptance of commercial space relative to space programs. So it's civil space, I guess that was called. And so Lori, you've just written a book. And I happen to know this book was going to have a different title. What title did you originally propose it as?

• 18:56Speaker 02

  Well, I proposed it originally as Billionaires and Bureaucrats: The Race to Save NASA. The publishers changed it to Space Pirates, which is how I refer to the community of people in the space movement. We like to think we have a movement. I'm not sure we do, but we like to. And they eventually changed it to Escaping Gravity.

• 19:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is also a pleasant title. I have no problem with that. It was just not uniquely that book, because any book on space can say Escaping Gravity.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I had to reformat it a bit, but I liked it too. They did their research on it, and that's what they came up with. I think Billionaires and Bureaucrats was very early on, although I've been involved in a lot of different aspects of NASA, as you said, that has tended to be the flashpoint in my career. I was a bureaucrat, and I was supporting doing this with the billionaires. I actually think you need both. So the answer is very clear. It's not a versus.

• 19:58Chuck Nice?

  I think you need one a little bit more than the other. I'm just gonna say, alright.

• 20:05Speaker 02

  Well, yeah.

• 20:06Chuck Nice?

  I'm just, I know I'm, I know I'm somebody who just defended bloat and I'm about to defend bureaucrats.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Billionaires.

• 20:13Chuck Nice?

  But, uh, yeah, billionaires don't add, uh, to the public good as much as bureaucrats do.

• 20:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, as much as good bureaucrats, but you need the money at some point.

• 20:21Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah, you're right. But you know what's funny is we say bureaucrats, but what I call them are, career government officials, which-

• 20:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but Chuck, you have never heard bureaucrat in a sentence that was positive.

• 20:34Chuck Nice?

  That's my point.

• 20:37Chuck Nice?

  But then you look at people like, let's just say, take for instance, a Solicitor General. That's a bureaucrat, but that's somebody who has a very important, um, position in the government. You know, these non-

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, but no one, yes, Chuck, but no one will call him a bureaucrat because the bureaucrat is an insult.

• 20:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh, you're right.

• 20:57Speaker 02

  But it shouldn't be. I don't think it should be either.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. I agree. I'm just telling you, no, don't, don't shoot the messenger here.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  I think we, my point is I do think Neil and I would agree with Chuck in that this is really, good people for the most part.

• 21:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Doing work on behalf of the public and NASA is one of those great agencies doing that. Now, did I talk about in books, some of the individuals and things going on that shouldn't be? Yes, and that's partly because I believe it's such an important thing that we need to be doing as government. And when we can't share with the public that what we're doing is all above board and efficient, we have problems. And so I think billionaires weren't, were not even part of what we were thinking of in the 1990s when we were looking to more involved private sector and launching rockets.

• 21:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:49Speaker 02

  Uh, we didn't have people worth the amount of billions that we do now, and it was not even a consideration. Lockheed Martin won the first effort to privatize sort of the post-shuttle space transportation. It didn't end up working for technical reasons, probably some business reasons as well, because we had at that point, the constellations of satellites that were predicted to be launching. Ended up being hopefully well now delayed rather than canceled by the bursting of the dot com bubble.

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back at the time in the day.

• 22:25Chuck Nice?

  Forgot about that dot com bubble.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 22:28Speaker 02

  See, there were companies trying to do exactly what SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin ended up doing in the 90s, but they lost their shirts because they didn't end up having stuff to launch.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is Elon Musk's famous quote, "How do you make a small fortune in the space industry? Start with a large fortune."

• 22:49Chuck Nice?

  That's funny.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Lori, the book is out now. People can buy it at your favorite book outlet, whatever that might be. And Chuck, you got questions for us?

• 23:01Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we do. Let's let's jump right into it. Here we go. This is Lucas Charleston. He says, "Do you think of private companies? Do you go into space exploration? Will it prompt competition that will speed up technologies that will cause more companies to go into space exploration?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:24Chuck Nice?

  And where would their funding come from? Now, there's the rub.

• 23:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the rub.

• 23:32Chuck Nice?

  There's the rub.

• 23:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I might disagree with Lori on this one. We'll hear your answer first.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  I think it is already happening. I think the earlier companies that did this drove technologies that have made their way into other either parts of the satellites to reduce the cost and the mass, because a lot of this is about launching smaller things cost less. And now that that capability is expanding, although a lot of these are protected IP rights, you do end up having more and more companies. I think there's over 100 startup launch companies right now. They're not all going to make it, but they are all adding their own unique innovation. And the people who are doing it were trained from, you know, working for the previous

• 24:21Speaker 02

  companies.

• 24:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and IP is intellectual property, right?

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As you use that abbreviation. So what you're saying there, I hadn't really thought about this. The total number of startup companies, you only exist as a startup because you're coming to the table with something nobody else has, some niche that you hope grows to become large. But the fact that you're at the table at all, the sum of the startup companies represents a remarkable moving frontier of science and technology. Is that a fair statement?

• 24:50Speaker 02

  Yes, and much of that does make its way into consumer products. These are things that really, it's a virtuous cycle. What used to be, it costs so much because everything was so expensive, that ended up being its own negative feedback cycle. But now you're seeing people, oh, well, it doesn't cost that much to launch, so I can try this out. And then things work, and then they're gonna, oh, well, maybe we could refuel on orbit. Maybe we could do these other things, things that have been on NASA's plate for a long time. But frankly, NASA became a little calcified and risk, you know, scared of risk, mainly

• 25:30Speaker 02

  because the political establishment in Congress and some administrations didn't want to see anything fail.

• 25:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More of your frenemies scattered around the government. So, but getting back to that other important point of that question, and this is where we might part ways, Lori. People use the word exploration as though anyone going into space is exploring. But when I think of exploration, I think advancing a space frontier, going farther onto objects that have never been previously explored, I do not see a business model for that. And so I see NASA as uniquely capable of posing questions and answering questions that would later on, they'd hand it over to industry, once they figure out the sources of risk.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  And I have agreed with you on this point for a long time. The only difference being, these billionaires, they are out there, they don't have to satisfy a shareholder. They can just do it. And once they have, the real question to what you said is, at what price point is there not a market? And if they can do something that lowers that price point enough, that then it does make sense. There, there might be more business cases. But I, I don't see many beyond tourism at this point.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, got it, got it. All right, Chuck, keep going.

• 26:54Chuck Nice?

  What a perfect segue to Avnish Yoshi or Joshi, who says this, hello, Dr. Tyson and Deputy Garver. I'm Avnish, I'm 11 years old. I heard about an asteroid in the asteroid belt called 16 Psyche. I also heard there was a mission being sent out with the objective to mine that asteroid and to make sure that it was a planet core. First of all, is this true? Secondly, when will that happen? And third, what technology will we use? Also, dovetailing onto what you guys just said, will NASA continue to do this kind of research

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  when commercial organizations take over space exploration?

• 27:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, Chuck, the child is how old?

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Did the 11-year-old really say that?

• 27:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so now, and he says, I'm, I'm from, I'm Avnish, from Houston, Texas. And then it says, this totally was not written by his father.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Or NASA, yeah.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I was gonna say, what's he got going in his basement? But in, in Houston, they don't have basements. So it'd have to be in his garage.

• 28:12Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 28:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To see what he's working on that nobody knows about.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Well, asteroids and the Psyche mission, those are, and, and the overall question is so important. And I would say.

• 28:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, it's named after the, the Greek mythological character Psyche. So, did you pronounce the E at the end? Like Penelope, Psyche?

• 28:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's on Psyche.

• 28:31Chuck Nice?

  I was about to say Psyche.

• 28:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, let me, let me tee this up for Lori a little more. So that asteroid, if I remember correctly, represents a planet that had mostly formed and it was broken apart? But if you have a mostly formed planet, all the heavy stuff falls to the middle and the lighter stuff floats to the top. We have an explainer, um, a video on that. And so if, what, what is heavy that would fall to the middle? Uh, palladium, gold, silver, platinum, iron. Ching, baby. Except for the iron. Except for the iron. Chuk, chuk ching. Yeah. So you would hand pick your asteroids that have been pre sifted to be rich in these elements that you might care about more than other elements. Now, Gore, Lori, go for it.

• 29:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is a great background for my, my points about the value of not just the psyche mission, but asteroid search is asteroids for three primary reasons are areas that we as humanity care about. One is what Neil just talked about, and this is a particularly, um, hopefully rich asteroid. And for any kind of future space development, people feel we will need to use the resources of asteroids. Probably never gonna, you know, mine the gold and send it back. It's never gonna get cheap enough to do that, that it's worth it. But utilizing those for space development, those materials is really important for a future.

• 29:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, that's how the movie Don't Look Up ended. Okay, someone came in and said, don't blow this out of the sky. Let's mine it for its resources. And. By the way, that guy was a billionaire in the movie.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  And that's, yes, he was. God, what a hilariously silly movie. But the, um, the second reason there, okay, they can hit us. Obviously, this is something that we have run this experiment. People know the dinosaurs didn't make it because they didn't have a space program. Um, NASA has a role. I won't say they're the lead role because there's a lot of questions about that, but diverting a potential, uh, Planet hurting or killing asteroid is something that we need to care about. So we need to understand asteroids better, track them to see when they're coming and figure out ways to move them if needed. And the third-

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to add to Laurie's point, it's not to understand an asteroid. This isn't a psychological session. Tell me about yourself, asteroid. It's that physically, many asteroids, we do not know what's holding them together. And are they piles of rock? Are they solid? Are the two pieces stuck together? And so if you should go up and try to push it, you want to know full well in advance how it's going to respond to how you touch it. Otherwise, your whole mission could fail. So when Laurie says casually, yes, we want to understand the asteroid, it is, there's a lot behind that word.

• 31:28Speaker 02

  Lot of meaning there.

• 31:29Chuck Nice?

  I like the more understood meaning better. It's just, you know.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  How do you feel?

• 31:35Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  Cold? Are you cold?

• 31:38Chuck Nice?

  I'm trying my best to hold it together.

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What do you have against Earth? Why are you headed towards Earth?

• 31:45Speaker 02

  So the third is, we believe that life very likely transferred here in a commoner asteroid. So they may have the seeds to life. So comets and asteroids are incredibly important and therefore, to the point of the question, we need to be studying them. And the government, in my view, has an important role in doing that. Now, to the extent the private sector, this is the perfect way you could transition. The government does a mission like Psyche. We're able to-

• 32:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A first mission. A first mission, yeah.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  A first mission, able to characterize the asteroid, able to help determine ways that it could potentially be moved and how, when we see the signature of asteroids coming toward us, what that might mean. They look like close up. There's a lot of science that will go into this. But when we have that information, you can imagine certain industries having more interest in going to the asteroids in the future that have heavy metals and the things that they all want to study.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're going to take a quick break. And Laurie, when we come back, why don't you start off telling us about space resources? Is that what they're called? There's a startup company or organization that wants to be the first to mine asteroids. So when Startalk?

• 33:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cosmic Queries continues. Nice little bit of alliteration there. We've got Laurie Garver, old time friend and space professional when we come back.

• 33:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Laurie, we left off with a question from an 11-year-old who lives in Texas. So he doesn't really have a basement, probably. So I wonder if his parents know what he's making in the garage. Okay.

• 33:42Chuck Nice?

  He's got a cloaking device on the garage.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cloaking device? So you can't, they couldn't know?

• 33:46Chuck Nice?

  They have no idea.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Laurie, this notion that NASA would have a mission to the asteroid Psyche, which would be rich in the kind of materials that would sink to the middle of a planet. And this is an asteroid left over from a shattered planet. What? I heard that there's some companies today that have prioritized mining asteroids for just that purpose. Can you comment on any of them?

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Sure. You know, there have been companies looking at this for decades. And mining the moon is probably a first order issue.

• 34:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's an easy target. Yeah, yeah, very good.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  That the government is going to start with. The whole reason, we haven't talked about Artemis yet, but the whole reason to send people back to the moon this time is to land at the South Pole, near where you could mine resources, namely water that might be trapped in the ice in the shaded parts of the South Pole of the moon. Those companies.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me just explain to Chuck, there are places in the South Pole where the rim of the crater permanently prevents sun from reaching the crater because the sun doesn't get very high in the sky. Okay? So literally, we're looking for water where the sun don't shine.

• 34:59Chuck Nice?

  You know, that just does not sound the kind. It's certainly not potable. Certainly not potable. That's all I'm saying.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Well, those astronauts drink their own urine, so I'm pretty sure they're feeling good about it.

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and like sweat, right? And the moisture that they evaporates from their skin.

• 35:19Chuck Nice?

  Wow, very doomed. It's very, that's very doomed.

• 35:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's very doomed.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Well, we're gonna all be there. These are technologies that we might wanna see be perfected.

• 35:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all doomed. Okay, so go on, we're already interrupted.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  So, mining asteroids, mining the moon is something that companies are starting to look at seriously, and I think the business plans will be long term. I think the technologies will be driven by the government. Another great example of how this sort of hand in glove situation can help us advance space development and potentially exploration.

• 35:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you're good at getting around asteroids, you know, tell the mining company, oh, by the way, that one of those is headed towards us. Could you deflect it over to the left a little? They'll probably have the ability and the resources to do that. And...

• 36:10Speaker 02

  I'm just waiting for the Space Force to step up and say that is their job.

• 36:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've been up in their face about it ever since they were birthed, so...

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Okay, what's their reaction?

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nods. I don't think that was their original intent, right? They weren't thinking that way, but I'm saying that's a security...

• 36:26Speaker 02

  But this was an issue for us at NASA is we would have the expertise, but then the military and in that point mainly the Air Force will come and say, well, you know, we're the guardians of the galaxies. It's like, no, well...

• 36:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Air Force fully contained everything space in the Pentagon before we had the Space Force. So that's what you're saying there, yeah. Okay, Chuck, give me another one.

• 36:50Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 36:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And authorities keep an eye on that kid? We don't want him to develop the nation.

• 36:56Chuck Nice?

  Please do, exactly.

• 36:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What superhero nemesis is he gonna be?

• 37:01Chuck Nice?

  I don't know. Avnisha's, his, I'm puberty man, like, you know, that's... Yeah, exactly.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta look at what superhero doesn't have a nemesis yet. Line him up for that, okay.

• 37:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 37:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So go on.

• 37:15Chuck Nice?

  This is from Alexander Newhouse, who says, Deputy Garver, what is the current state of space law as it relates to public and private missions going to outer space?

• 37:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, let me tighten that and say, what is the state of space law related to who owns what?

• 37:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, do I own the asteroid that I mined?

• 37:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right? If I pitch tent on Mars, do I own the acre of land around it? So where does all that sit right now?

• 37:48Speaker 02

  It is a work in progress. That one of the big challenges, and this is pretty typical throughout history, a technology advances to a point where, oh, we don't have the governance set up correctly to manage this. And that's really where we are in space. We started in the 60s with the Outer Space Treaty, which said that celestial bodies cannot be privately owned. And by signing that, the US as a spacefaring nation did not claim the moon, you noticed, when we landed.

• 38:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In spite of putting the flag there, which is what anyone does when they're claiming something.

• 38:27Chuck Nice?

  Hey, listen, this is for us all. It's like, it's like an Oscar. I'm accepting this on behalf of everyone who was nominated. I mean, I'm taking it home.

• 38:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gonna be my mantle, not yours.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and, and those moon rocks in the not basement in Houston, Texas, and Johnson Space Center are everyone's. But just try to, try to get a little piece one, find out NASA, they're Nases.

• 38:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  But we really have a lot of progress made. Space lawyers have been working on all kinds of activities. But in my mind, the big issue of rights claims is not settled. And one of the things the companies who want to go and do the mining of the asteroids want is to be able to claim if we can get there, we, it can be ours and we can make money off of it.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the homesteading model, basically.

• 39:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  And, and the space pirates really believe this because that's sort of why I name them the space pirates. They really believe that it should be people going out and doing this like the frontier in the United States. We had, you know, the ability to just have the, you could work the land, you could own the land.

• 39:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, 1800s, 1800s, United States was all about that, right?

• 39:51Speaker 02

  And that is the kind of thing they like to model. In in outer space, but we are a long ways from that.

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna say a problematic historical period to base any model on.

• 40:05Chuck Nice?

  Just speaking personally.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  I was going to know we aren't unaware of any native people out or even organisms out there, but that doesn't mean they're not there and our history is replete with, yes, these not so great lessons.

• 40:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus NASA, I think, has all but completely removed the word colonization from their official documents.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  Oh, I I think frontier is even not.

• 40:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not even that, yeah.

• 40:28Chuck Nice?

  No more. Not even frontier, huh?

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right. Of course, it's not called, it's not called manned space, it's called crewed, C R E W.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Well, and when you said, you know, everyone, we put our flag on the moon, we did a prone mankind. So that's why we've got Artemis.

• 40:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was early enough so that no one knew how to otherwise say it.

• 40:49Speaker 02

  I didn't feel, I didn't feel the warmth.

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You didn't feel it?

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Nope, not till, not till Valentina.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You weren't feeling it.

• 40:59Chuck Nice?

  That's great.

• 41:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell Chuck who Valentina is, because he doesn't know.

• 41:05Speaker 02

  First woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova.

• 41:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Russian.

• 41:09Speaker 02

  And it took the US 20 years after her to have our first, Sally Ride.

• 41:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ride Sally Ride was the headline. Yeah. First small, small text, American woman in space, right?

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Rather than the headline, after 20 fricking years, we finally get around to having a female astronaut. So Chuck, let's do a lightning round, okay? How many can we knock? Well, actually, it's not up to Chuck, it's up to Lori. Okay, Lori, we'll do a lightning round, okay? We'll, we'll, we'll see how your sound bites work.

• 41:39Chuck Nice?

  I said you didn't do too bad with these, with the ones that we have, so we're.

• 41:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay, go.

• 41:43Chuck Nice?

  Um, here we go. Um, this is Chris Hampton. He says, hey, I'm currently 25 years old. Do you think that by the time I am in my 80s, that I will be able to take a sightseeing trip to Jupiter or Saturn, or at least just see those planets as I go around them, even if it's a one-way trip?

• 42:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me lead off by saying that's why we invented telescopes.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, how far away do you want to be? That was my question.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so Laurie, humans to the out beyond the asteroid belt, that's really what that question is. What do you think?

• 42:25Speaker 02

  Maybe. It would take leaps. You know, we always judge our near future. We think we can do more in it than than we can. But in the far future, we tend to misjudge for the opposite reason.

• 42:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Correct.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  So I don't want to roll. I wouldn't roll it out, but we don't have the technology today.

• 42:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's talking 55 years in the future.

• 42:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Not today. We don't have the technology.

• 42:45Chuck Nice?

  Well, let me ask you both. What is the biggest?

• 42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This sounds like a no.

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  What's the biggest impediment for doing something like that?

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Uh, human, so humans' ability to survive the radiation because our propulsive methods are slow.

• 43:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 43:03Chuck Nice?

  So it's a combination.

• 43:03Speaker 02

  So, so you could, if you could go a lot faster.

• 43:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  You might be able to survive.

• 43:08Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go get there and back and not get heavily irradiated. But plus, you got it ready to, you know, invest, you know, Saturn is twice as far away as Jupiter. So, you know, Jupiter is, is it a five year trip, six years? And Saturn to reach, are you ready to give up that big a fraction of your life to see what you might be able to see through a telescope? Or better yet, to see what a space, orbiting space probe will do?

• 43:31Chuck Nice?

  And could take really great pictures.

• 43:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of Saturn? Yeah, oh, my gosh.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  So that's the, the real question is, so why?

• 43:38Chuck Nice?

  Why?

• 43:39Speaker 02

  You know, why would you want to? And that's a big, big question in a lot of.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So NASA should sell picture frame windows with extr- 8K video of their space missions and make people think that they're actually on this crap.

• 43:51Chuck Nice?

  And listen, that would work. I mean, I see it as, as a ride at Disney that's very popular, you know? But you're right, why? I, I mean, listen, I think it would be great to lay eyes on, you know, any part of Antarctica. Okay, but guess what? I don't, I'm, I don't, unless, unless I can walk, I'm not going. I'm not going.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  Okay, so, so now you're gonna get me because I had done it. And it was a little bit of a junket, government blow situation. But I was checking out Antarctica as a government employee. And I don't know, it's not the same if you're not there.

• 44:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  You, you've gotta be there.

• 44:35Chuck Nice?

  You're just making his point now.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  I, I totally am.

• 44:38Chuck Nice?

  You're totally making his point.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  He's gonna just look out a window and when, when the plane, the massive, you know, cargo plane lands at 12,000 feet on the pole because it's mountainous region, flat only because it's all filled in with glacier.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, wait, just to be clear, Lori, that's not happening on any planet or any moon in the solar system.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  I know.

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He, he's not disembarking from the spaceship.

• 45:02Speaker 02

  That's the difference.

• 45:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is, yeah, that's kind of an important difference here.

• 45:05Chuck Nice?

  It would be the equivalent.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  For Chug, but for Chug, uh, you get the chance to go to Antarctica. I wouldn't rule it out.

• 45:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 45:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do it, okay.

• 45:12Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But wait, wait, Lori, have you noticed his skin color?

• 45:16Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, you, I was just about to say, Lori, you will not find a frozen black man anywhere on this planet.

• 45:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As, as they thawed the caveman out of the glacier, that will not be a black person.

• 45:30Chuck Nice?

  There was not one caveman named Lamar, okay?

• 45:37Chuck Nice?

  You ain't find no Daryl, no Daryl was in the cave, okay?

• 45:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Threw, thawed out from the glacier that consumed him.

• 45:46Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. All right.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, no, we're done here, we don't have any more time.

• 45:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Oh, man, that was super fun.

• 45:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lori, I don't know why we haven't had you on before, because you would have been the-

• 45:56Speaker 02

  I don't either.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Mike, you had such a trove of insight.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  It's so interesting when, when she asked me, their publisher, I'm like, yeah, I don't think I've heard of it.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, no, we, that's an oversight, and I'm embarrassed by that.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  That's okay.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you were totally in the middle of all that as it was going down. And so now you could be like our, as they do on the news, their expert commentator who used to be in it, and now they observe it and then comment on it.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, like all those sports stars.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. So that's, maybe we'll have to connect you in that way going forward. But good luck with the book. Um, like I said, it's a front row seat, and please remind us of the name.

• 46:32Speaker 02

  Escaping Gravity: My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Age.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, which is precisely what we are in the middle of, thanks to your help. In spite of all the enemies you made along the way. And Chuck, she's very candid about who became a friend and who became an enemy, simply because of the worldviews that they carried forward. And that's a bit of candor you don't typically see. So, thanks for that gift. I'll call it a gift, Lori, of your life story to the rest of us. All right, Chuck, always good to have you. Lori, are you on social media?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yes, I am.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, how do we find you?

• 47:05Speaker 02

  Twitter, Lori underscore Garver.

• 47:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lori with an I, yes.

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Yes, L O R I underscore G A R V E R. Same with Instagram.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, excellent. And Chuck, always there at Chuck Nice Com. Yes, sir, thank you. You got it. All right, this has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries: Space Program Edition. Space Program becoming Space Industry Edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always. Keep looking up.