Flying Cars & Pilotless Planes with NASA Engineer, Wendy Okolo, PhD.

How would flying on Mars be different? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Matt Kirshen explore aeronautics, aerodynamics, airplanes and more with NASA aerospace engineer and author Wendy Okolo, PhD.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next, we take a look at the field of aerospace engineering. That's a place we have yet to visit on StarTalk. We bring in a PhD expert and we talk about all things related to flight. What are the forces that keep you flying? Why don't airplanes fly at very high altitude where there's less air resistance? There's a reason for that. Also, what is a blended wing? That and more on StarTalk coming up.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Cosmic Queries Edition. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got with me my co-host, Matt Kirshen. Matt, welcome back to StarTalk.

• 0:55Matt Kirshen?

  It's always nice to be back. How's it going, Neil?

• 0:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good, good, good. You're comedic fellow, but specializing in science with a podcast with the word "science" in it, and I always forget the title of it. What's it called again?

• 1:07Matt Kirshen?

  It's probably science because we are very unsure of our credentials.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, you're still working on whether it's actually science or not.

• 1:16Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, actually, I say we're actually, we're actually very sure of our lack of credentials. That's probably more accurate.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That works too. Today's topic is aeronautics, something we've never actually covered on StarTalk. And I'm ashamed to say, and while I have some knowledge of it, when we need real expertise, we go out and get it. So for this episode, we've got a full-up aeronautical engineer, Dr. Wendy Akolo. Wendy, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Hi, hi Neil, hi Matt. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this conversation.

• 1:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. And did I pronounce your last name correctly?

• 1:55Speaker 02

  Akolo, that's correct.

• 1:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Akolo, excellent, excellent. You're an aerospace engineer. I got your PhD back in the teens, 2015. And so right now, you're working for NASA. For which, NASA has 10 centers. Which one are you working for?

• 2:12Speaker 02

  I am working for the NASA Ames Research Center in California, so in the Bay Area, California.

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Bay Area. Now, I know at Ames, that's where they have all the historical wind tunnels were there.

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Yes, there's some really, really, I mean, there's a really large one there and it was, it's actually pretty close to my office. Well, when I, when I had an office before, I started working remotely.

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. And, and so where do you, you work remotely now from what city typically?

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Houston, Texas.

• 2:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's more NASA, NASA area too.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  I know, I know. I just can't get away. I can't, I can't. But I'm, I'm at Ames often enough, often enough, but I'm still a hundred percent affiliated with NASA Ames.

• 2:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and aeronautics, wait a minute. Matt, do you know what the first A stands for in NASA?

• 2:59Matt Kirshen?

  I'm, I'm gonna guess aeronautics from that very heavy clue. I, I don't know much, but I can follow context clues. That's how smart I am. I'll be honest with you, Neil. I'm still trying to work out whether I can get access to one of these wind tunnels. I've never been in one. I want to know, like, you know, can you do a photo shoot with some umbrellas? Like, how, how strong does this thing get?

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. I, I don't think, yeah, when they're on, I think you want to keep your distance. But let me just finish that. So NASA, so, so Wendy, people lose track of the fact that the first A in NASA stands for aeronautics. A whole chunk of its budget is allocated to that. National Aeronautics and Space and Space Administration. So how much of the full NASA budget goes to aeronautics? What percent?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Oh, I, you know, the thing is, space is really cool. And so sometimes people forget about aero. Um, a decent sized chunk goes to, um, aero, but I can't speak to the exact amount in relation to what space gets, right?

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so no, that's the wrong answer. What you have to say is, uh, not enough.

• 4:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the right answer.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  I, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 4:11Matt Kirshen?

  People get moon giddy.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  They do. They do. I mean, if you even just ask anyone what they think aerospace is, they just, they say space. They forget about planes and potentially drones. Yeah.

• 4:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, you gotta get through the air before you get to the space.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. And the air is pretty complex, too, you know?

• 4:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're damn straight it is. So what division, what, what part of NASA, within NASA, do you work for?

• 4:33Speaker 02

  The Intelligence Systems Division at NASA Ames.

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Intelligent Systems Division?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  That is correct.

• 4:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so is there like an idiot systems division as well?

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We would want to believe, I think Matt is with me on this one.

• 4:47Matt Kirshen?

  Where do I apply?

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of NASA is intelligent. So why are they specifying your division with the word intelligent in the title?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  Because they have me. That's why.

• 4:59Matt Kirshen?

  Is there a division where I can send my crayon drawings and ask why this isn't working? Why is this not flying?

• 5:05Speaker 02

  Probably, probably. I mean, NASA is really open and want to hear, want to hear from people. But the intelligence system's vision is interesting because we work across, I mean, various disciplines, from science to space and astro to aero and just really looking at making components, systems and systems of systems work smarter to achieve predefined objectives. You know, how to fly in a way that is more efficient or more intelligently, really. So you can have systems that work. How do we make them better?

• 5:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this intelligence thing sounds like, and Matt, would you agree with this one? That this is ripe for the plucking by AI? Like AI, this is next. AI has its sights on what you're doing.

• 5:49Matt Kirshen?

  Neil, I don't think we should give computers the air. I don't think they should have the sky as well.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Land, sea and air. Okay, well, give them the internet and that's it, right? That's what you're saying?

• 6:00Speaker 02

  How do you know? How do you know? How do you know they don't already have it?

• 6:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh. Don't say that.

• 6:07Matt Kirshen?

  What inside knowledge?

• 6:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The drones. They run in all the drones.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  Hey, hey, I don't know.

• 6:14Matt Kirshen?

  Fake.

• 6:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, right. Wait, so, so this, this is kind of a new concept for me. This notion of system of systems is, could you just tell me what that is? Like, speaking as an engineer, what does that mean to an engineer? Because to a person, it sounds kind of redundant.

• 6:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 6:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But engineers aren't people. I mean, to other people.

• 6:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, and you bring up, you bring up a good point because you can think about a component and a system of components being a system and a system of those kind of higher level, you know, systems being systems of systems. So, perfect example is, you know, when you consider a, like a, like a region in the airspace that has multiple planes in it or a region in the airspace that has multiple drones in it. So you have these multiple systems kind of interfacing and when you have that holistic view. Of all of the systems, you can start to consider that a system of systems. So it's really the hierarchy and the complexity is where, you know, my own knowledge and definition of a system of systems tends to come.

• 7:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so if you don't have someone who's thinking about that and who's an expert in it, the systems could end up clashing in some fundamentally bad way.

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly, exactly. And I mean, a basic example is just traffic, right? Driving on the freeway. Whoever is designing the freeways, looking at traffic lights and all of that, it's not taking into consideration one car. It's taking into consideration the system of systems, that is, the interplay between multiple cars going in different directions and even people, right? Pedestrians. We are systems interacting with other systems on the road. And so that's that kind of complex interplay that I speak about.

• 7:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, we all just take all that for granted.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  We do.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, I'm very heartened to learn that somebody's on top of the situation.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes. It's a good thing. It's a good thing that, you know, higher order level is good. It's important.

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the little things, when I'm driving in New York, in Manhattan, there's certain, there's a pathways that I get to my parking lot. And there's certain lights that are a few blocks away that if I turn, when the light has been green for like 10 seconds versus 20 seconds, I will always hit another light in the exact same way a few blocks away. So that's telling me somebody's thinking about, I'm just, anytime that happens, I say, okay, I'm glad somebody thought about this, because I certainly wasn't.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. And that's the intelligence, right? That optimization so that you're not stuck at every light.

• 8:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  And then these things would also even change depending on the time of day and potentially even time of year, because you have to optimize for like these different, very different factors. Right? So I mentioned the traffic example, you know, with cars and people, you know, pedestrians. But another system that's important is environment.

• 9:09Speaker 02

  Right, that complex interplay between the manmade systems that we design and then the natural complex systems that we're still trying to understand. How do you optimize all of that? So it's pretty cool, you can go crazy.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, totally, totally.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Crazy. So tell me, what, before we get to the Q and A, because I definitely want to hear what our fanbase is thinking. Because we, and Matt, you, you're equipped, you got all the questions lined up?

• 9:32Matt Kirshen?

  There, I've got some great questions lined up.

• 9:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I don't want to use up all this time. I just want to set a mood here. What is the challenge? This, this question sounds so bluntly obvious, but I gotta ask it. What is the challenge moving through air?

• 9:47Speaker 02

  So, it's really, it's the atmosphere, right? Air has pressures in different regions and a body moving through air disturbs, basically you shake up the pressure. And a distribution of pressure acting on a sur, on a surface is a force, right? And so you can have forces that, you know, kind of when you resolve this pressure on the surface, you can have forces that really impede your movement. It's the same thing even if you're on the ground. So when you look at, you know, a plane or really any body trying to move through the air, that body has a weight as defined by its mass and the gravitational force.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  So the weight of that body changes if we're not on Earth anymore, right? And so you have that weight that you have to kind of counteract with lift.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When we go to Mars, which also has an atmosphere, though very thin, everything weighs correspondingly less, and they gotta bring you in to figure out how to design the, the surfaces in that different environment, right?

• 10:52Speaker 02

  Exactly. You'll be, I mean, extremely like in shape when you go to Mars, because your mass times the gravity, I mean, you, I mean, you'll be just in excellent shape, right? Because you weigh less, right? If you're on a different planet. So everything we know now is to who is overweight or underweight changes. So when you go to another planet that has a different gravitational constant, things will change. The weight will change, the amount of lift that you need to generate, which is the opposite of the weight. Will change and then that drag force that is impeding your your movement, right? That will change as well. So you might need the less propulsive force to maneuver.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  So the atmosphere really is the big thing with moving through air. Atmospheres and pressures that turn into forces.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So so but the air is kind of in the way because you're trying to plow through it. But it's helps you with lift, right? I mean, so it's a weird kind of give take relationship, it seems to me.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. So lift is the exact expression for lift is Q infinity SCL. Where Q infinity is.

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt knew that too, right?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  Right, right?

• 12:08Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt, step up here when, you know, that was your cue, Matt.

• 12:13Matt Kirshen?

  Video only people won't be able to see the tattoo I have of that equation.

• 12:17Speaker 02

  Oh, that's a cool tattoo idea. I like that.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I saw a really cool one, which was like the integral of like what the integral is defined as a Riemann sum. Like it's the integral that is the summation of all these, you know, anyway. Yeah, I digress. So.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why is the word infinity in that in that? Why did you use the word infinity? Where does that come in?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  So it's it's a term that's used to represent the dynamic pressure. And that it's that dynamic pressure really depends on. Yeah, I I bring that up to say it's dependent on density and speed, right? So your lift is dependent on density, speed, the area, right? Like, how large is the area that the pressure is acting on? And something called a coefficient of lift that depends on the body itself. So that density is a function of the atmosphere. The atmosphere is directly proportional, right? So the lift that can be generated. So even though things may seem easier, like we're saying, right? With the weight being less on another planet with a different atmosphere. If the density goes down, you're able, you can only generate like as little

• 13:22Speaker 02

  like the the amount of lift you can generate goes down as well.

• 13:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is this must be why at high elevation airports, their runways are longer.

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the air is thinner, right? I mean, I think in Colorado, in, uh, what's the one that's a mile high? What's that place?

• 13:42Matt Kirshen?

  That's, that's, yeah, Denver Airport.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Denver Airport.

• 13:45Matt Kirshen?

  My wife is from there, so we're, we're there a lot and it's a, it's a bumpy landing. The mountains are there as well, so it's like, there's a lot of air.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not supposed to land in the bumpy mountains. You're supposed to land on the flat airport, okay?

• 13:56Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, we go for the really cheap flights, so, you know, we spend a few, we spend a few weeks in the mountains.

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What airline?

• 14:02Matt Kirshen?

  You know, it's.

• 14:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What airlines are those? Tell us what airline that is. Just, just so we know. So let's get into some Q and A.

• 14:09Matt Kirshen?

  Alive airlines. Um, so, so we've already, we've already touched on a bunch of things. I, um, I'm going to jump straight to Anderson Clark, who's one of our Patreon patrons, says, hi, Dr. Tyson and Dr. Carlo. Uh, Anderson from Boston wants to know, does global warming have an impact on aeronautics?

• 14:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 14:27Matt Kirshen?

  We were just talking about the environment and the interplay.

• 14:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, I love that.

• 14:30Matt Kirshen?

  Quite a nice feeder.

• 14:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, climate change has an impact. I, I can't identify one facet or one thing that climate change does not impact, really. I mean, from agriculture to aeronautics, right? And just, like, you know, on a very basic fundamental level, if you look at fuel, right? And the access to fuel, I mean, the very, very critical facet of propulsions, right? The amount of oxygen that is needed and how it changes the atmosphere. We're just talking about atmosphere. So for sure, global warming has an effect, but in a very, very different, very different ways. And the fuel example was just one of the ones that I mentioned.

• 15:11Speaker 02

  If there is some way, you know, that global warming will affect, and, and this might be even an interesting question for Neil in that, can it change our gravitational constant on Earth? Is there something that could potentially happen with the, with, with our mass and our concentration on this Earth? That it could change that? Who knows in how many years, but there.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I think we're good. Yeah, no, I think we're good there.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The gravitational, uh, what, what I would imagine is with, with climate change, um, we're lifting more moisture into the air because as the temperature warms, the air can support more moisture. And when you do that, you have more. Water triggered events, so, or they become more severe.

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you'll spend more time navigating around storm systems.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or getting rained out or flooded out of what your destination might be.

• 16:05Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, in that sense, yeah, I would say.

• 16:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It becomes, because it's just wreaking havoc with all, you're flying in the air and these are storms in the air. So, you know, there it is.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that makes the complex, already complex system of systems even more complex. Right? And so those are the things that you have to account for as well as the environment is changing. Remember I talked about the environment changing and having to consider the environmental impact and whatever it is that you're doing in designing.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does it also affect major air currents?

• 16:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At some level, because, because Matt, you know that we fly to, if you fly New York to California, it's not the same flight time as California to New York.

• 16:48Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, I do, I mean, I do, I do LA to London a bunch and back to visit my family and it's even more so. It's like, there's a good hour difference between the two journeys.

• 16:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and it's not because, I mean, and it's the same distance. It's just that air currents either carry the plane with it or the plane's flying against it.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Yes, it's headwinds and tailwinds, pretty much. Exactly. So headwinds going against the flow of, you know, against the direction of the plane and tailwinds helping to propel going in the direction of the plane. So it's kind of something pushing you forward as you move or something impeding that motion.

• 17:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Matt, what more you got?

• 17:38Matt Kirshen?

  Well, so I'm going to combine a couple of questions here because they're touching on the same thing and it's still dealing with air, amount of air and atmosphere.

• 17:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I still want to know who the people's.

• 17:49Matt Kirshen?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 17:50Matt Kirshen?

  Absolutely. And I'm also going to tell you that they're both coming to visit you in different cities when you're coming to visit them. So, because Colby LaPrazi is going to see you when you come to Greenville, South Carolina, and Morgan Fisher is going to see you in Toronto.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, me? You're talking about me?

• 18:03Speaker 02

  You!

• 18:04Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, me? Okay, okay. Yeah, because I'm giving public talks in each of those cities.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 18:09Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is not a commercial for my speaking schedule, but...

• 18:12Speaker 02

  You have fans, Neil. You have fans.

• 18:15Matt Kirshen?

  Why not squeeze a little plug in there?

• 18:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:17Matt Kirshen?

  I've seen Neil on tour. Highly recommend it.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 18:20Matt Kirshen?

  Toby says, "Why don't we fly commercial planes higher in the atmosphere to cut down on drag?" And Morgan asks, sort of related to this, "Some extremely high-flying aircraft, such as the U-2 and the SR-71, cruise at almost the edge of space. With so little oxygen, how do the jet engines continue to function? And how do the flight controls grab enough air to maneuver the aircraft in such a thin atmosphere?"

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd love that. So, they sound kind of related, Wendy, right?

• 18:45Matt Kirshen?

  Yeah, they're sort of sister questions, in a way.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so if you're really high up, the air is thin, so your lift is not so great, but maybe you have to be traveling faster, or you need really big wings. But now there's less oxygen, but these are air-breathing engines. So what's up with all that?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  The simple... I mean, so it's interesting, Matt, that you saw that there was a correlation with this. And you're telling me you don't have a PhD in aerospace?

• 19:08Matt Kirshen?

  Oh. Is that all it takes?

• 19:11Speaker 02

  I mean, hey! You know, so there is a correlation, and it's really about finding that sweet spot, in terms of optimization. The higher you go, the thinner it is. And so you think, "Oh, yeah, you can just breeze through." But the higher you go, the thinner the atmosphere is, the lighter the air. So for that amount of air coming in, the oxygen levels for the jet engine, the jet engine has to do more in terms of, it has to compress the air, right, to be able to get the oxygen required. So that goes into one facet of aerospace called propulsion, right? Aerospace is so diverse, and you can really specialize in a number of these things. So propulsion is really going into the design of these engines, right?

• 19:56Speaker 02

  These jet engines that can have an intake that can compress the air and get the required oxygen needed. That's how these aircraft are able to fly at those kind of altitudes. But the higher you go with those kind of, you know, engines, right? That kind of limits you in that you're needing to compress more and more air. So conventional, commercial aircraft have to find their sweet spot and not necessarily fly high enough that they're having to do so much more with their propulsion, um, propulsive systems.

• 20:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if a plane is gonna fly high,

• 20:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it's got to, and it wants to preserve the lift that it enjoys. It either has to have bigger wings or it has to fly faster.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that correct?

• 20:36Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because when you gave us all those parameters for each one of those, you can presumably have more of one and to compensate for less of another, right?

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Right, so it depends, right? Remember I talked about those four forces on an airplane? You have lift, you know, vertically upwards, weight down, thrust, you know, kind of impeding you and drag, you know, horizontally, right? Thrust helping you and drag impeding you. So it depends on what the challenge really is. Another thing I want to say about wings being larger, right? Because I talked about-

• 21:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the U2 has a huge wingspan.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 21:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not going very fast. And the SR71, it doesn't have a big wingspan, but it's going really fast.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  It's going really fast. So it's also not necessarily the size of the wings, but in the design of the wings, right? If the wings are designed such that they are able to kind of create this angle of attack and generate lift in a manner that is, and this goes really into aerodynamics, which is another facet.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh wait, it's another word.

• 21:35Speaker 02

  It's another word, right? That's another facet of aerospace engineering, right? The design of the wings, I talk about the design of engines. So the design of the wings is critical to create a lift coefficients that can be high enough to increase the lift. So you can do it with the area, which is S, because I said lift is Q infinity times S times CL. You can increase CL or you can increase S, the area. And these are just different knobs that, you know, researchers with PhDs try to tune.

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, and that's why, I guess, planes can look really different from each other. And they still end up flying because somebody's trying to make something differently efficient on it for its needs.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  You hit the nail on the head, Neil. They can look so different and-

• 22:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really different.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  Because there's so many knobs, there's so many knobs to tune. They look so different from each other and they can still fly.

• 22:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool.

• 22:28Matt Kirshen?

  So there are a couple of questions touching it. There are so many, I'm gonna try and get through as many of these questions I can because your Patreon patrons have really come through on this one. This is clearly a topic that'll start things.

• 22:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 22:37Matt Kirshen?

  But again, so Dave Hartman has asked a couple of questions about wings and-

• 22:44Matt Kirshen?

  And I don't know what either of these things are. So I'm, uh, what is a blended wing aircraft? Cause he talks about this and then he also talks about the X29, which is a unique aircraft. He says with its wings on backwards. He used to work in aerospace, apparently they, they did. It was posited it would have better maneuverability than traditional designs and it did well in flight tests extending into supersonic, but it used analog computers at the time. Would it be a better choice for today's air force if it used digital computers instead? And, and why aren't canards used on more aircraft? There's a lot of questions coming in. I don't know what a canard is or a, or a backwards wing or a blended wing.

• 23:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So Wendy, I remember seeing an airplane with the wings were pitched forward. Maybe, is that the one where it looks like the wings are on backwards or it seems or, or? So all I, all that told me when I saw it was wings on a tube is a highly robust thing to fly.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. So yeah, that, that kind of goes into what we're talking about with these different aircraft designs, right? And depending on what the objective is, like, I don't know what he said about something working well in supersonic regimes, but not working as well, you know, in subsonic regimes, right? Where supersonic is flying faster than the speed of sound and subsonic is flying slower than the speed of sound. Depending on the objectives of the plane, you can design things that, that may work well in certain regimes and not others. So for example, the blended wing is that it's not like your conventional aircraft. When you get on a plane and look out of the windows and you can see and easily identify the wing, the blended wing is really, it's almost like a flying wing where everything is part of the plane.

• 24:19Speaker 02

  Canards are wings at the front of the aircraft.

• 24:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've seen that.

• 24:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, there are wings.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a catfish is.

• 24:30Speaker 02

  Exactly. Very good. It's like a catfish whisker is what it's like a smaller, yeah, smaller wings at the front. So the idea is that those can potentially create more lift and help the main wings and increase even, increase the lift on the plane. The challenge with that is stability. Right, so you have like static stability and dynamic stability that pretty much are looking into what happens to the plane when something happens. So if you're inherently stable, as most humans are, if I push you, you're not going to fall over, ideally, Neil, right? So if I were to, yeah.

• 25:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I know many unstable people, I just want to be clear. Oh, you mean, oh, you don't mean emotionally unstable?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  No, no, no, physically. Yeah, I mean, that's, that's something else, you know, we can delve into that. But if you were to disturb a body, right, in flight, at rest, in constant motion, or whatever, and if it were to return to its original state, it is considered stable. If you were to disturb it and it started to, you know, like if you pushed me a little and I started to go back and forth and rock back and forth till I eventually fell, without any kind of control or stopping that, that's considered unstable. The challenge with certain designs is that they are not as stable as you can imagine, you know, a wings, a traditional aircraft that are more stable. So they need so much more work done.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  That was the problem with, that is the problem with canards, right, which is the tails and the front, right, they're, they have some sort of dynamic instability in comparison to the conventional wings, such that if there was a wind gust, the plane would, you know, need so much more help to return to its original neutral state.

• 26:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, what about his comment about computers? Because there are planes, there is an era of planes designed before computers were good.

• 26:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when I remember that.

• 26:19Matt Kirshen?

  More intelligence.

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and, and now that computers can control the, the, the surfaces,

• 26:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the shape of the surfaces or the, the flaps or whatever.

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would it be that the canard design, which is unstable under normal situations, has an advantage in whatever its advantage is, if a computer making adjustments a hundred times per second can make it stable?

• 26:45Speaker 02

  And that's the other thing you want to weigh. The, if the benefits of whatever canard design that you're looking for in your airplane in comparison to the requirements, even from a computational perspective, to have these make, to have these make, to make these many adjustments, one and two, from a fuel, right? From a perspective of like fuel savings. These many adjustments to like your Aircraft's body shape, control surfaces will cost you.

• 27:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  So you you kind of you kind of have to weigh that. Uh, but the good thing with, I mean, so that's fly by wire, where you're able to send these commands in, you know, and your aircraft does what it wanted to do. But the great thing with.

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How about flying by the seat of your pants? Is that an official term as well? Fly by wire.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  I'm sure, I'm sure a lot of fighter, you know, fighters and pilots and even astronauts.

• 27:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just chapter in your engineering book.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, it is not, it is not, but but that that would be something. No, but I was trying to say that one of the benefits with being able to do a lot of digital computations um with aircraft design is the ability to just really explore a number of regimes, even for the design process, right? You can say, what if I have, um, what what if I can generate this lift coefficient that varies with alpha, which is angle of attack and size up and a number of things? Well, you can, you can do more quicker and come up with a design that closes. Right? And when I say closes means it's something that's flyable, right? That you can.

• 28:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, you can get something that's perfect, but it's not flyable, right? And that design doesn't close, so.

• 28:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be a bad airplane.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  That would be a bad airplane, right? If it needs wingspan.

• 28:23Matt Kirshen?

  That's why NASA hasn't returned my letters.

• 28:25Speaker 02

  Or your drawings, your brilliant, your brilliant drawings and designs, so.

• 28:30Matt Kirshen?

  The pilot's got a big smile, so I don't know how they don't uh.

• 28:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:33Matt Kirshen?

  Realize that it was happy, it's working well.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Send more.

• 28:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Wendy, you you wrote a book.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  I did.

• 28:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Called Learn to Fly.

• 28:45Speaker 02

  That is correct.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On becoming a rocket scientist. So so this is, the so I I see what you did there, right? Because you're like flying high.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With your PhD aerospace engineering and learning to fly would be learning how to accomplish.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 29:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Things against what might otherwise be hurdles or or or a hand that you're dealt that how you're going to play it, uh, just in life.

• 29:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 29:11Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes, agreed. So there was, you know, it's it's a title that that I really like because you're thinking, oh, am I going to learn how to become a pilot with this? No, but you're really going to learn how.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what disappoint a lot of people. Let me just say that right now.

• 29:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Appendix. By the way, if you actually want to learn how to fly a plane.

• 29:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, there is. There is, right? So, Learn to Fly on Becoming a Rocket Scientist is the subtitle, right? So, it's clear. It's clear in that. And if you read the about.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clear up front.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Very clear up front, but it it's a fun introduction to aerospace engineering. And in some places, I go into exactly how a plane flies and actually, you know, kind of drought lifted dragon thrust and.

• 29:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And analogize that to your life. Is that right?

• 29:56Speaker 02

  A little, but but it but it really covers where I felt like the rubber met the road in becoming an aerospace engineer. And a lot of that was in college where you think, okay, this is fun. This is really cool. This is fascinating. I want to do this. But then you go and you take your first test in calculus, you get a D. And what do you do with that? Right? That's that's the story of a number of people we know. What? How do you move from that D to an A in something as seemingly complex as aerospace engineering? So it's really to encourage and, you know, to enable not just even a current generation or a new generation of people interested in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, but to equip them in these fields. So.

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the tools of the tools of, I think the word, the buzzword of recent years is grit. Right? If you if something doesn't go well, how do you recover from that and keep pushing if your heart is still?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The subject. Of course, if you get delusion that, you know, maybe we lose some people that way, too. But it seems from from your book, it's, dare I call it a primer for how how to how to overcome?

• 31:04Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What could be forces that would?

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Impede.

• 31:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Impede or dissuade your your your success.

• 31:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. How to how to get through mentally and really even. Just even like, how to even optimize your time when you're swamped, right? With certain things and how do you make time? I mean, I get the question like, oh, can I have a life if I do aerospace engineering? Yes, you can. Yes, you can. You can do what you want to do. You can party and eat breakfast and do whatever you want if you're smart about the way you work.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 31:40Speaker 02

  You know?

• 31:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just if you're smart.

• 31:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're smart about the way you work.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  You have to be smart about the way you work.

• 31:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you go to private school, public schools?

• 31:48Speaker 02

  I went to a federal school for high school in Nigeria. So, elementary school, high school, middle school, all of that in Nigeria. And then I went to college at the University of Texas at Arlington. I moved to the States when I was 16. My family's Nigerian-American, so they make us go to school there up until college. And then...

• 32:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so all of you were born in Nigeria, came over for that?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Right, exactly, exactly. So, came over...

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Texas is very different from Nigeria, you probably noticed that.

• 32:17Speaker 02

  It is, it is, but it's warm, it's warm too, so people tend to like that, right?

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Texas is warm, so people tend to like it.

• 32:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, we don't, we call Texas hot.

• 32:28Speaker 02

  It's hot, it's hot, it is hot, it's hot.

• 32:30Matt Kirshen?

  You're saying there aren't as many Nigerians in Wisconsin?

• 32:33Speaker 02

  Exactly, that's it, that's it. There aren't as many, so they, you know, they just...

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Matt, figure that out.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, don't want to freeze.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool.

• 32:54Speaker 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.

• 33:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Matt, keep it going. Time for two more.

• 33:18Matt Kirshen?

  Well, given that we were talking about learning to fly, a few people have questions. So Autumn Rose Miller, Rotten Josh, aka Transmetal2, oh, sorry, Transmetal2, my apologies for getting that wrong, and Brian Purser, all have some similar questions about whether the era of both flying cars is in our future and also self-driving planes, and whether one day flying a plane will be as easy as learning to drive a car where you can take some weekend classes, Brian asks, rather than thousands and thousands of hours of flight school.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so let me take that baton and ask Wendy. Wendy, where the hell are the flying cars?

• 34:00Speaker 02

  I mean...

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We want flying cars!

• 34:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. It's not an easy problem to solve or a achievable problem, because if you, I mean, if you just look, there is potential. There's a lot of potential. And one thing that people tend to forget with potentially flying cars is there needs to be available infrastructure, right, to enable these things to take off and land, right? There needs to be air traffic management that will control these things. And we haven't even really figured it out with the self-driving cars on the ground. We really, we honestly haven't.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, 35,000 people die every year from car accidents on the ground.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's not, and these aren't cars falling out of the sky.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 34:51Matt Kirshen?

  But isn't there more space in the air, though? There's less stuff, you know, you're not going to get a child running out into the air.

• 34:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and aviation is real, aviation is really, really safe, right, in comparison to, you know, ground, ground travel. However, the technology is being developed, you know, as we speak to enable planes fly on, you know, electric...

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Um, electric propulsion is used, electric propulsion systems, batteries and all of that. But the amount of batteries, it's like the, the self-driving cars, right? How heavy do your batteries? Very good. How heavy do your batteries need to be to fly, you know, from point A to point B and maintain a charge as, you know? So there is a lot that will go into that, um, from the technology design standpoint and from the infrastructure and regulations, um, perspective, right? How do we regulate these things?

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do you foresee that? Is that, is that a real future or is this, do we, should we just give up?

• 35:45Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, no. I, I do foresee it. It's just the time scale that we might need to be realistic about, right? Is it happening tomorrow? No.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  That's it. So just, just, just, just say, is it happening tomorrow? No. But, um, but I foresee it. I foresee that, that it will happen. Um, but there's a lot of, there's a lot that needs to be done from a regulatory, from a technology development, from an infrastructure, and even community buy-in, right? We have to be careful with how we're developing these things and how we're creating a new mode of transportation, right, for people.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To me, they'll be quite noisy, right? I mean.

• 36:16Speaker 02

  Potentially, right.

• 36:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like helicopters, helicopters are pretty noisy.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Right, but they, and that's where we're looking at the electric propulsion, right? So it wouldn't, it wouldn't, it wouldn't be as noisy as a helicopter. And there are a lot of studies, um, looking at the noise levels and how acceptable they will be for communities. That goes into community societal acceptance standpoint that we're looking at.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm old enough, I'm like three times older than both of you combined. I remember when I was younger, if a plane flew overhead, you had to stop your conversation in the street because you couldn't speak over how loud its engines were. Now planes fly over and you have to pay attention and then you can hear it. Uh, do you realize in the nineteen sixty-nine World Series, the New York Mets at Shea Stadium, which is in the backyard of, of LaGuardia Airport, Mayor Lindsay redirected the air traffic to not go over Shea Stadium.

• 37:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that we could have the the announcers wouldn't have to wait for the plane to fly overhead.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so these are the kind of things that was happening back then. So planes have gotten silenter over the years. I just want to just a shout out to you and your people, Wendy.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, they they really have. And there's that's the research that people are working on. And these are visions of fly at significantly lower altitudes, right, than than commercial. So those are the things we need to consider. Where are they flying? Who are they flying for? What communities are potentially going to be disrupted? Where are they going to land and take off? And do we have the technology?

• 37:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where the temperature is forty below zero.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. What's that going to do with your batteries, right? You know, yeah.

• 37:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, give me some more.

• 37:54Matt Kirshen?

  Well, so so while we're still talking about self-driving, so Rotten Josh was actually asking about self-driving space vehicles and also I hope I don't mess this name up. Kety Kukana Kety Kukanasvili. I hope I got that fairly close to correct. My apologies if I didn't. Wants to know, this is a bit of a silly question that keeps me up at night. What happens if someone on the International Space Station forgets to turn on the engines now and then? And the station crashes down? Is there a fail-safe autopilot? Do we depend on humans to keep the station in the right orbit?

• 38:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's a there's a broader question there, Wendy. With the power of computers, they can make faster, better decisions than we can daily. And plus, you know, do pilots really fly planes anymore? Were they there just for show because you feel more comfortable that a human being is there? And let me just answer the thing with the space station, then I want to go to you, Wendy, on on the automation of what's going on out there. The space station has a huge cross-sectional area, almost the size of a football field. And well, it's the physically the size of a football field with all of the solar panels and everything. It is plowing into very, very thin atmosphere at two hundred and fifty miles up, enough to to to slowly take it out of its orbit.

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And periodically it gets boosted to go up. And so it's periodically and they don't miss that opportunity because.

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once you start falling down, it happens fast. Cause you go to a lower orbit, there's even more air molecules that takes you even lower. It happens exponentially. So that's not good. So we're cool up in space. Back on earth in the air, Wendy, how much do we really need pilots anymore?

• 39:39Speaker 02

  And that's why they say hurtling down, right? And it just felt like you would be hurtling towards, you know, towards the center of the earth. But remember when we started this, that Matt was talking about AI in the sky and he wanted to leave the sky. And I was like, are you sure we're not there already? Do you know how much? Um, so there, I mean, there pilots don't fly planes for the entire duration of the flight. They do have the ability to override and to step in and to do a lot, especially during takeoff and landing. But a lot of it is automated, right? It's cruise control in your car, um, especially with air traffic management, you know, making sure and things aren't hurtling into one another or, you know, crashes or anything like that. However, there's a lot that pilots.

• 40:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, I didn't expect that to be your next word. Okay, everything is safe and everything.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, this is good. And people.

• 40:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good, however, okay, go.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  However, there's a lot that pilots do that we don't give them enough credit for, right? And so that goes into kind of studying, you know, the human contributions to safety. And we do a lot of that to see how we can model and mimic some of those for AI, right? What you consider artificial intelligence, which is pretty much machine learning, right? How do you teach something to learn on its own? How do you teach it from past behaviors, right? And that kind of reinforcement learning. But there's a lot that they do that's really, really, really, really good stuff. Even with the complexity, seeming complexity of flying something like a giant metal tube in the sky and carry and be responsible for however many passengers. So pilots don't fly the entire flight, you know?

• 41:14Speaker 02

  So Matt, it's already there, you know, autonomy is there and it's here to stay. But there's a lot that they do can override and that we are learning from to be able to integrate in the autonomous systems that we design.

• 41:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I'm old enough to remember when we first learned about autopilot. Uh, there was a quiz, not a quiz, a, a, a, a survey that they sent to people and they said, um, you're in a plane and something goes wrong. Who would you rather trust, the computer or a, a decorated air force pilot to step up to the ranks? And everybody at the time says the, the experienced air, air force pilot. And I'm thinking, wait a minute, you know, I know what computers can do for us. They can make fast decisions quickly. And I, at the time I, I was voting for the computer, but no one else was. Now I don't think people would put a person in, in the line of protecting the plane.

• 42:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, if something goes wrong with the plane and we say the computer can take over. I'm not going to be saying, no, let's get a human being of, I'm not, I, I think people would agree with me on that.

• 42:20Matt Kirshen?

  I can see Wendy kind of wincing. I don't know, like my, my mind is it depends what the thing, the thing is because if a computer has a bug and then does something ludicrous, a human will catch that, whereas a computer, um.

• 42:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, if a human has a bug and does something ludicrous, will the computer catch it?

• 42:37Matt Kirshen?

  That's also a fair point.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, like the pilot from Alaska Airlines that shut off the engines. He was in the jump seat and he was depressed and he went and shut off the engines. That's something loopy that humans do, that a computer, I don't think computers go into suicide mode. Okay, Wendy, what?

• 42:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so this one, this one's a little complex for me because then it, you know, it gets personal. But I think just like Matt said, it depends, right? It depends on what is happening with the bug or with the person. Um, when we design or create algorithms, and I'm going to give you an example with controls, which is what my background is. Controls is another facet of aerospace engineering that works, you know, that makes things fly the way you want them to and, you know, and use. So when you look at an airplane and you see those flaps going up and down, those are control surfaces, rudder, ailerons, elevator, you know, just flaps, right?

• 43:32Speaker 02

  When you look at the representation of a system, right, from a mathematical standpoint, systems are typically nonlinear, meaning it's not y equals x if you were to draw a curve, right, of y versus x. They come in, you know, different, just, just like us humans, we're nonlinear. But when you want to design, most times, I mean, there's nonlinear control, but a lot of times when you want to design a controller or something for that system, you create a controller that works in a specific region, a specific regime. And if you get out of that regime, that controller, and that goes into something called robustness. It may not, it's not, it may not be as robust when you step too far out of your operating regime.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  So when we design these algorithms generally, we design them for ideally what we try to envision as operating conditions. In this region, this works. In that region, it works. When you step out of those regimes, your perfectly idealized system may not, your, your, your computer may not work as well. Humans, on the other hand, because of years and years of experience.

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Completely adaptable to that.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Very adaptable. They're usually very, very adaptable, right? They have experience, they can think foresight, and that's what we're trying to mimic with things like reinforcement learning and AI and machine learning. How do you teach it to know unknown unknowns and account for unknown unknowns and adapt to unknown unknowns?

• 44:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Right? Right?

• 45:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 45:00Speaker 02

  So, so it, yeah. Yeah, it depends. It depends. So I don't, I don't know. I don't, not a yes or a no.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, what you're saying there is not to put words in your mouth, but there's situations where intuition matters.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And a programmed computer might not have the intuition. Maybe ultimately AI will.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And intuition is, I've been in twenty seven thousand air flights, and I've seen a hu, you know, a thousand different scenarios, and this is some combination of five different scenarios. I know what to do here.

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly.

• 45:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I think that's all the time we have. I'm sad about this.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  I know.

• 45:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just scratched the surface of this. Maybe we do a part two or something. I don't know.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, yes.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll talk to our producers about that.

• 45:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Wendy, it's been a delight to have you. We met earlier on Amazon. We had a conversation closer to when your book came out. So Wendy Acollo's book, Learn to Fly: I'm Becoming a Rocket Scientist by E4E Press, available. And thanks for sharing your expertise with us, Wendy.

• 46:02Speaker 02

  Of course, of course. It's available. Get it on, you know, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what I'm supposed to do. Available wherever good books are sold. You're not supposed to.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  I like that. Yes. Yes. Wherever good books are sold.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right. Matt, always love talking to you. It's a host of probably science. Maybe one day we'll become science.

• 46:27Matt Kirshen?

  Who knows? It's unlikely, but it might happen appropriately enough in a helicopter. I don't know if you can hear that. It's flying overhead right now, but not as loudly as it would have done back in the day.

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not in the day.

• 46:35Matt Kirshen?

  It's even picked up in the mics. Thanks to the work of Wendy's colleagues.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, you got it. Okay. That has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, aeronautics edition. Neil deGrasse Tyson, as always. Thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Until next time, keep looking up.