Cosmic Queries: Rocket Science Is Hard

Find out why “rocket science is hard” when Neil deGrasse Tyson answers fan questions about Antares, Rosetta, Philae, SpaceShipTwo, the Space Shuttle and more with the help of Bill Nye and Chuck Nice.

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.

• 0:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and this is StarTalk.

• 0:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill Nye, Bill, thanks for coming on to StarTalk.

• 0:32Bill Nye?

  It's great to be here.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh my gosh.

• 0:34Bill Nye?

  I'm reluctant to call it my favorite thing ever, but it's pretty good.

• 0:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck Nye.

• 0:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I am here.

• 0:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming.

• 0:41Chuck Nice?

  Always.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We are now in Cosmic Queries.

• 0:44Chuck Nice?

  Cosmic Queries.

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I always wanted to do Cosmic Queries after hours.

• 0:48Chuck Nice?

  Yes, well, we're doing it after hours. And this is, of course, where we take inquiries from all across the interwebs.

• 0:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The interwebs, internet, our fanbases.

• 0:58Chuck Nice?

  Our fanbases.

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And listeners, yeah.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  From everywhere, and they ask you questions. We do not share the questions with you. Today, of course, we have the inimitable Bill Nye with us.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But here's the thing.

• 1:10Chuck Nice?

  Who is an expert.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the topic today is what?

• 1:12Chuck Nice?

  The topic today is rocket science is hard.

• 1:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, and so while I know a little something about rocket science, whatever I know, Bill Nye knows more.

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I figured I'm not going to take this alone.

• 1:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I don't look stupid on the air.

• 1:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, you never.

• 1:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll just say, oh, Bill, you take that one.

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I could do it, but I got you here.

• 1:29Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:30Bill Nye?

  Well, boy, that's pressure.

• 1:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, you worked for Boeing, you're an engineer man from way back.

• 1:34Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, airplanes, which are rocket-like.

• 1:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, but no, but you've thought about rockets in your life.

• 1:39Bill Nye?

  I've thought deeply about rockets.

• 1:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there you have it.

• 1:42Bill Nye?

  I've launched a lot of rockets.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I've thought lightly about rockets, okay.

• 1:44Chuck Nice?

  You know, between the two of you, we might just get somewhere. All right, let's jump right into this. Our first question is from Paul Curcio or Curcio, one or the other. And Paul is coming to us from Twitter. Paul says this, "Have any benefits come from some of the shuttle disasters we have witnessed?"

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there's only been two disasters. When we say some of them, there were two shuttle disasters.

• 2:13Bill Nye?

  You learn something every time, are you kidding? Yes, we learn things. By the way, this is where the next rockets are not going to have the plane mounted on the side. That's not going to happen again, people. A greatly complicated.

• 2:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, the space shuttle orbiter is, has the engine under its belly and they're adjacent to one another.

• 2:34Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, we're not gonna do that again. We learned that. Put it right on top.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Put it right on top.

• 2:39Bill Nye?

  Or take off like an airplane from a runway. That would be the ultimate. But it takes a very lightweight airframe, spaceframe structure. Not saying it's not doable, just not there quite yet.

• 2:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, however, isn't it true that that wasn't a good idea even without the accidents?

• 2:55Bill Nye?

  Oh, absolutely.

• 2:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so then, what did we learn from the accidents? This would be Challenger nineteen eighty-eight?

• 3:01Bill Nye?

  One, uh, you may be right, yes.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Late eighties, no, no, eighty, oh, no, eighty-six.

• 3:06Bill Nye?

  Eighty-six, absolutely was eighty-six.

• 3:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eighty-six, and then Columbia. Columbia. And two thousand and one.

• 3:12Bill Nye?

  Yeah, so, uh, what it shows you is, yeah, and you gotta take the ice.

• 3:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  February two thousand and two.

• 3:16Bill Nye?

  Gotta take the ice seriously. Pokes a hole in the insulation and you got trouble.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, the ice comes from condensation that would only happen because they're in a humid environment called Florida.

• 3:26Bill Nye?

  Uh, I think you get ice even in New Mexico.

• 3:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think so?

• 3:29Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Twenty percent humidity is gonna get your ice on it?

• 3:32Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, things are cold.

• 3:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, all right.

• 3:33Bill Nye?

  You gotta take it seriously. Normally, the ice isn't a problem. It's when you have it mounted on the side and the ice falls down on your insulation.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, now if you're at top of it and the ice falls down, it just hits the launch pad.

• 3:42Bill Nye?

  Rock on, rock on.

• 3:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you were reaching over there. That's what, no, that's what we learned, I guess, you know? I'd heard from my rocket people that, uh, rocket disasters are, uh, opportunities rich in learning experiences.

• 3:55Bill Nye?

  Yes, hilarious, yes. And the Antares blew up, which was a drag, and that was what I like to call it.

• 4:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Orbital sciences mission to re, to resupply the space station. But not manned, though, right?

• 4:06Bill Nye?

  Unhuman, just full of money. And, uh, blew up.

• 4:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they quickly said, well, the, they quickly said, the, the officials quickly announced that the, the astronauts on the space shuttle are, are fine, even though this was a supply ship to them, that they'll do just fine until the, I'm thinking, then why would you have to send this one in the first place?

• 4:27Bill Nye?

  Or they've planned for something going wrong from time to time. I bet you have stuff in your cabinet, next time that there's a hurricane and you gotta pull down your uh, salmon in a can, your tuna fish.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called a car and you drive somewhere.

• 4:40Bill Nye?

  Okay, uh, it took you three days though, didn't it, not to change the subject, but you didn't leave right?

• 4:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I was, I was hit by hurricane sanding.

• 4:47Bill Nye?

  You had your fingers crossed for days.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, we lost, uh, electricity and so that was...

• 4:52Bill Nye?

  But that's not exactly rocket science.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's not, it's not. So, so we did learn some things. Uh, the design of the space shuttle, anything else?

• 5:01Bill Nye?

  How serious you have to take it.

• 5:02Chuck Nice?

  Right, ice is a big deal.

• 5:03Bill Nye?

  So, you got everybody on the crew saying, uh, by the crew, I mean, people at the base, people who are working on...

• 5:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People on the ground.

• 5:10Bill Nye?

  People on the ground saying, "Well, it seems like about a one in 300 chance that it'll work and people are launching anyway." It shows you, it do- it could, it could be a lot more reliable than that.

• 5:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:20Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 5:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says after the fact. Where were you before the fact?

• 5:23Bill Nye?

  Oh, we were all waving arms and pounding. My, uh, no, my old aeronautics professor said, you know, "Don't ever, ever do this." I paraphrase.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:31Bill Nye?

  But it was done anyway for, uh, financial reasons.

• 5:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 5:35Bill Nye?

  And it was really, and I know we're answering this question, it was really during the Nixon administration when he decided that for the sake of votes, NASA jobs were more important really than NASA exploration. And the evidence of this, if you look at Nixon's Oval Office, at one point he's got Earthrise, Apollo 8, on, uh, Isaac, Isaac Newton's birthday eve, 1968. And then, six months later, after he's got the votes in California, he takes that picture down and puts up another one.

• 6:06Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 6:07Bill Nye?

  He was not a believer.

• 6:09Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was just being a politician.

• 6:11Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, just. Politicians are a hard job. Politicians are a hard job. Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, you couldn't see the hands going up with the V fingers.

• 6:19Chuck Nice?

  Sparrow, what do we need to get the space mode?

• 6:23Bill Nye?

  Wow, so how about next question, Chuck?

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, next question, Chuck.

• 6:27Bill Nye?

  Hundreds of them over here.

• 6:28Chuck Nice?

  Yes, we do. Okay, so, uh, this is from at FishMyMan?

• 6:34Bill Nye?

  That's his name?

• 6:34Chuck Nice?

  That's his name. At FishMyMan from Twitter. This is Cod. His name is Cod.

• 6:40Bill Nye?

  Get it?

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  And his handle is at FishMyMan.

• 6:44Chuck Nice?

  How do we balance the burning desire of our genetic predisposition to explore with the need to ensure safe passage? I think he's kind of

• 6:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a great question.

• 6:56Chuck Nice?

  He's kind of talking also about maybe commercial space flight.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And let me, let me add some punctuation to this, and I'm going straight to you on this, Bill. You're an engineer and you will tell the launch people, "Look, you shouldn't do that because it should be a little safer than that. That, that could go wrong. Don't do that." At some point, somebody's got to push the button and launch the damn thing.

• 7:14Bill Nye?

  Oh yeah, you gotta shit all the engineers, get on with production.

• 7:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At some time, you have to stop listening to the engineers and get on.

• 7:18Bill Nye?

  I'm sorry, what?

• 7:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What? What is that threshold? Who decides it?

• 7:23Bill Nye?

  Well, that's what we call management. Doggone it. So the managers have to be literate enough to know what the acceptable level of risk is and act accordingly.

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But the naive, the naive mind would say, "No risk is acceptable."

• 7:38Bill Nye?

  Oh, no, no, that's not a true fact. That's a false fact.

• 7:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a false fact?

• 7:42Bill Nye?

  No, you've been in automobiles.

• 7:44Chuck Nice?

  And there's a risk attached?

• 7:45Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Chuck Nice?

  Especially when I'm driving.

• 7:47Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, I'm sure you have a sense that something could go wrong. And these guys, the people who fly in rockets, have a sense that something could go wrong. And I'm very sorry about the Virgin Galactic crash the other day, a surprising result, and one that they will straighten out. And that, I claim, is not just part of the process, but it's part of the management process, where you learn what is acceptable. And I think what was going on, changing the subject to the space shuttle in the previous question, a lot of people knew the risk was a lot higher than was advertised, and they pressed on anyway. At Virgin Galactic, it looks like, perhaps, the risk was underestimated, that it's actually

• 8:31Bill Nye?

  more dangerous than, than people were saying. In other words, there wasn't deliberate, deliberate ignoring of the facts, there was ignorance of the facts.

• 8:40Chuck Nice?

  Ignorance.

• 8:41Bill Nye?

  So we'll see what happens.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Two different reasons.

• 8:43Bill Nye?

  Yeah, why the feather, feathering thing? It's a surprising result, why that would cause trouble. And it could have to do, I'm shooting from the hip as an engineer, could have to do the materials involved.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is the brakes put on too early, the air brake.

• 8:56Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, just too high, too many molecules in the atmosphere at that level. If you'd waited a little longer where you got a fewer molecules per cubic something, you might have been, I'm just working with the data we have. Stay tuned. There are people who are experts at figuring this out.

• 9:12Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Okay.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck.

• 9:14Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool. Here we go. This is from Carlos and Carlos is CDS on Twitter wants to know this. How easy is rocketry these days? Been tough recently. Do we pretty much have it figured out? Or are we just kind of playing around?

• 9:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me shape that question back to you, Bill. We've been boldly going where hundreds have gone before.

• 9:41Bill Nye?

  I know.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Into low earth orbit.

• 9:43Bill Nye?

  Ah.

• 9:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would think that low earth orbit should be zero risk at this point, given how long we've been doing it and how many people have done it. So that if we're going to put lives at risk, it should be by doing something we've never done before. If I were to think of an acceptable risk, it'd be doing something that's never done before. Not doing something hundreds have done before you. So we just saw it back in, in November, in October, we saw two disasters, two spaces, it was early November. We saw two disasters, people not even going into orbit.

• 10:17Bill Nye?

  So here's what I'd say to you. You may be mixing, the modern verb is conflating, air traffic, airplane airliner travel with rocket travel. A few hundred is not that many.

• 10:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 10:32Bill Nye?

  You think about how many airplanes people tried to build in the early 1900s and how many crashed.

• 10:37Chuck Nice?

  How many failed?

• 10:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And from the films, it looks like 100% of them.

• 10:39Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah, well.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw the film.

• 10:41Bill Nye?

  In other words, a hundred or a thousand isn't that big a sample size, really. And the other constraint, when it comes to the Antares rocket, the Orbital Sciences rocket that blew, that was an old rocket being repurposed. Being refurbished.

• 10:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so are you saying that maybe we need to go up into low earth orbit so much that it becomes like?

• 11:03Bill Nye?

  Well, this is Neil's dream.

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is what he's saying. This is what Bill is saying.

• 11:06Bill Nye?

  So as many as a hundred sounds, as many as a hundred flights sounds like it's not that many in the statistical scheme of things.

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, do you know how many flights take off every day and land every day on Earth? I mean, it's.

• 11:17Chuck Nice?

  I can't say that I do.

• 11:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's some, I have a video, I'll show you. It is some countless scary number.

• 11:22Bill Nye?

  It's tens of thousands.

• 11:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's countless scary number of airplanes.

• 11:25Chuck Nice?

  You're talking globally.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Globally.

• 11:26Bill Nye?

  Yeah, there are about, there are about a hundred thousand passengers in the air.

• 11:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At any given time.

• 11:32Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if you said to the Wright brothers, you know, you know, in about a hundred years, we're gonna have a hundred thousand people in the air at any given time.

• 11:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, they, they.

• 11:41Bill Nye?

  So that's what I say about space travel. We're just, compare the two accidents. Antares a very old rocket being refurbished and it had a leaky fuel line, it sounds like, or a leaky pump. And then, uh, the Virgin Galactic rocket was a brand new rocket and so it had the brand new problems. The in-between ones is what we're all hoping to develop.

• 12:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The in-between. We want in-between.

• 12:04Chuck Nice?

  We want in-between. So there you have, so Carlos, there's your answer.

• 12:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 12:08Chuck Nice?

  Rocketry, not easy. Hopefully we'll get to a place where it is. That place will be in-between.

• 12:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In-between.

• 12:15Chuck Nice?

  Okay?

• 12:17Bill Nye?

  You got it? Well, in-between old and.

• 12:18Chuck Nice?

  In-between old and right out of the shop.

• 12:21Bill Nye?

  Right out of the shop. Still smells new.

• 12:22Chuck Nice?

  Anytime somebody said this is a brand new thing.

• 12:25Bill Nye?

  And that's where Letterman asks, uh, Sir, um, Branson, are you gonna go on the first flight? Oh, not on the first flight. Yeah, so give him a few.

• 12:35Chuck Nice?

  So there you have it. If it has that new rocket smell, you don't wanna get on it.

• 12:40Bill Nye?

  I feel bad about the pile.

• 12:42Chuck Nice?

  Wait till you see a couple sandwich stains on the seat. That's, that's the rocket you wanna take.

• 12:48Bill Nye?

  That's right. That's true.

• 12:49Chuck Nice?

  All right. Let's go to Deepak Prem. Deepak Prem at Astro Prem. He wants to know this. He says, "I can understand that it's justified to spend resources on space exploration, but why risk human life in the name of tourism?" He is quite emphatic about that.

• 13:11Bill Nye?

  So Deepak, you have the option of not buying a ticket. You'll be okay. You don't have to buy a ticket. You don't have to go. Uh, stay.

• 13:19Chuck Nice?

  No, but he's thinking in the abstract.

• 13:20Bill Nye?

  So stay here and so on. The people who are willing to take the risk will throw down and go up.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  Uh, is there any benefit to, to, to the risk?

• 13:29Bill Nye?

  Well, apparently, everybody who flies in space, by all accounts, has this new appreciation for the earth. When you see the earth from above, apparently, I've not done it except by, uh, the TV.

• 13:40Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:40Bill Nye?

  Uh, it changes your perspective. You realize what a fragile, small world we live on.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but Bill, in the early days, there were joyriding airplane flyers, right?

• 13:50Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 13:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So they must have known risks and some of them would have died. And that was, uh, and that was the touristic risk. So it's clearly people will do this.

• 14:03Bill Nye?

  People will get on roller coasters and take risks.

• 14:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, if, if they, if they, if you told someone was a hun- one hundred percent chance they would, one in a hundred chance they would die by getting on a roller coaster, nobody would take the risk.

• 14:12Bill Nye?

  Yeah, that's what, yeah. That's right.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you say there's one, one in a hundred chance you'll die climbing Mount Everest, people line up around the block to do it.

• 14:19Bill Nye?

  That's right. That's what they do.

• 14:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why? What's the difference?

• 14:22Bill Nye?

  I guess you're exploring, going someplace new. You're, uh, going where no one has gone before.

• 14:28Chuck Nice?

  And, uh, Mount Everest is just Mount Everest where roller coasters are pretty much everywhere. So like.

• 14:35Bill Nye?

  There's only one of those.

• 14:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, there's only one, you know.

• 14:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mount Everest.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  And there's only one space to go to.

• 14:40Bill Nye?

  No, but there's, people seek thrills for deep and, um, evolutionary reasons, apparently.

• 14:48Chuck Nice?

  Aw, man. You can't just do that. You can't just make these statements like that and move on?

• 14:53Bill Nye?

  People who don't take risks get eliminated. There's something about us, the people that go over the hill to look in the valley, they make discoveries.

• 15:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  People who take risks get eliminated too. So just excuse me.

• 15:06Bill Nye?

  But it's deep within us, the drive.

• 15:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but those who survive. Survive longer than those who never took the risk.

• 15:13Bill Nye?

  Well, the tribes, yeah, the tribes.

• 15:15Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 15:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's how you gotta word that sentence.

• 15:17Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright.

• 15:18Chuck Nice?

  So, the inherent benefit of risk-taking is long-term.

• 15:23Bill Nye?

  Or even medium.

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  Right, so, short-term disaster, long-term benefit.

• 15:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it may accrue to your descendants, but only if you have descendants before you go on that risky venture.

• 15:31Chuck Nice?

  Eh, right.

• 15:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, you are wiped from the gene pool.

• 15:34Bill Nye?

  Or you, or you pull it off. You go over the hill, make the discovery, and come back.

• 15:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 15:38Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 15:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or do it and never come back and start your own.

• 15:40Bill Nye?

  And people come with you, yeah.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Colony, yeah, okay.

• 15:42Chuck Nice?

  Okay, what else? Super cool, man. Alright, this is Matt Kenan, Matt Kenan O A to Twitter. He wants to know this. Can we alter the popular notion in the media that a failure means nothing learned?

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it, Bill. That's all you.

• 15:56Bill Nye?

  That was, I was charmed by the many, many news stories after the Antares rocket blew up, and then after the Virgin Galactic crash. Does this mean the end of SpaceX? Are you kidding? Those people are gonna redouble their efforts. They're gonna go back at it harder than ever. They're gonna work as hard as they possibly can to solve these problems, because they see the great promise.

• 16:17Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:17Bill Nye?

  Are you joking me, Mr. Question Person?

• 16:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And how do you really feel, Bill, about that?

• 16:21Bill Nye?

  For crying out loud, no. When something goes wrong, you just try even harder.

• 16:25Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:26Bill Nye?

  Otherwise, you get outcompeted by the other guy who does succeedly try harder.

• 16:31Chuck Nice?

  And you know what? That doesn't, that makes, it makes no difference what it is across the board. That kinda is the way.

• 16:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a general, it's an approach to life.

• 16:38Chuck Nice?

  It's a general approach to life.

• 16:40Bill Nye?

  Now, you two guys have ancestry.

• 16:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 16:43Bill Nye?

  Where I imagine people told you you couldn't do a lot of things.

• 16:47Chuck Nice?

  This is true.

• 16:48Bill Nye?

  And look at you both.

• 16:49Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 16:50Bill Nye?

  Ruling the airwaves.

• 16:52Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, I come from, that is my lineage. My great-grandfather invented the horse diaper. And a lot of people don't realize. They were like, "That's a disgusting premise. Why would you ever wanna do that?"

• 17:04Bill Nye?

  No, but if you're going to Central Park, that could be just the thing.

• 17:06Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So, thank grandpop nice for that.

• 17:10Bill Nye?

  Nice, well you done.

• 17:13Bill Nye?

  Is that true?

• 17:14Chuck Nice?

  Huh?

• 17:14Bill Nye?

  Is that true?

• 17:15Chuck Nice?

  Now, Neil, you know better than that.

• 17:16Bill Nye?

  I don't know. Stuff comes out of your mouth. I don't know. No, but one of the, one of the perennial jokes about space exploration is how do you evacuate your bowels and empty your bladder? And this is a very serious problem that has to be solved when you're gonna fly in space.

• 17:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, at zero gravity.

• 17:33Bill Nye?

  And you're a horse, uh, you're an owner of a horse and you have

• 17:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're in zero G.

• 17:38Bill Nye?

  And you have patrons riding in your handsome cab.

• 17:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk. Stay tuned for another segment.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. Here's more of this week's episode.

• 18:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, Bill and I have not seen these questions.

• 18:10Chuck Nice?

  No, you have not.

• 18:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I brought him along because they're rocket questions I would not be able to answer. That's why I brought him along for backup. And so

• 18:17Bill Nye?

  Give the engineering perspective.

• 18:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, exactly. So what do you have for us?

• 18:20Chuck Nice?

  All right, so here's a, speaking of engineering wonders, let's talk about a little Rosetta Filet.

• 18:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 18:27Chuck Nice?

  So, um, this is from Andy Stens who wants to know, um, what if another civilization seeded comets and asteroids, et cetera, with organic material trying to propagate life around the universe? Is that feasible? Now, I mean, where he's talking about is the fact that we were able to land on a comet. So he's, uh, in a, in a longer version, he says, would we be able to actually do something like that? Take who we are and instead of sending a rocket, we put who we are on a comet and let who we are, go out and leave our solar system and go forth.

• 19:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a little problem with that.

• 19:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 19:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. The very act of landing on a comet means you have given your rocket the exact orbital trajectory of the comet itself.

• 19:13Bill Nye?

  To start with, then you light another engine and push it the rest of the way.

• 19:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, you could do that.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so if you've matched the, the comet or the asteroid, then what does it mean to put on the asteroid?

• 19:24Chuck Nice?

  You don't need it. You don't need the asteroid.

• 19:25Bill Nye?

  You don't need the asteroid is what you're saying.

• 19:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's exactly my point.

• 19:27Chuck Nice?

  I got it now.

• 19:27Bill Nye?

  Oh, no, no, the asteroid, Neil.

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 19:30Bill Nye?

  From an engineering standpoint.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 19:32Bill Nye?

  These kids who want to mine asteroids, you've heard about them, planetary resources, for example.

• 19:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To quote Bill, all the kids are trying to do it.

• 19:38Bill Nye?

  The big thing they want to mine is water.

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, mortar.

• 19:43Bill Nye?

  And what they want to do is take solar panels to make electricity from the sun. Electrolyze the water so that it becomes, H2O becomes hydrogen and oxygen.

• 19:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Break it apart.

• 19:55Bill Nye?

  Then put it back together as rocket fuel in a very fast fashion.

• 19:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:58Bill Nye?

  And get a jolt.

• 19:59Chuck Nice?

  And get a jolt.

• 20:00Bill Nye?

  So this is not, I mean, it's extraordinary, but not completely unreasonable.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, so you're saying you would go to the asteroid that is a source of water for future rocket fuel for you?

• 20:10Bill Nye?

  And the word asteroid might be-

• 20:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a filling station.

• 20:11Chuck Nice?

  It's a filling station.

• 20:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's all. I'm good with that.

• 20:13Bill Nye?

  The word asteroid might be closer to comet, something icy.

• 20:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm good, I'm good with that. And there, there are water-rich asteroids that are not, uh, comets, so.

• 20:20Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, no, that's cool. I, I, th- these would be filling stations.

• 20:23Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and so-

• 20:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Quick marts.

• 20:25Bill Nye?

  It's, yeah. If you got time, a lot of time at the quick mart.

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 20:29Bill Nye?

  Furthermore-

• 20:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, you gotta look like the Saturn V rocket, where every ounce of fuel that you're gonna use your entire journey, you're leaving with Earth to take. And then you run into the rocket equation problem.

• 20:38Bill Nye?

  There you go.

• 20:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell, to give us two minutes on the rocket equation.

• 20:41Bill Nye?

  Well, everybody, you know how heavy the thing you're gonna try to lift is. Your payload, that what you pay for. And, uh, think about this. The moment you light the rocket engine, the rocket weighs less. With every moment of time that passes, more fuel is burned and the rocket weighs less.

• 21:00Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:00Bill Nye?

  So the great deep calculus rocket equation question is, how much fuel do you start with?

• 21:05Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 21:06Bill Nye?

  And so there's, that's-

• 21:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause some of the fuel is to move other fuel you haven't burned yet.

• 21:12Bill Nye?

  That's it.

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To burn it later in your trajectory.

• 21:14Bill Nye?

  Related rates.

• 21:15Chuck Nice?

  It's, it's like doing pull-ups.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're-

• 21:18Bill Nye?

  Uh, yeah.

• 21:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. You're lifting your own body weight, so-

• 21:22Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 21:22Chuck Nice?

  If you have long arms and you are heavy, it is very difficult to do pull-ups.

• 21:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true. And if you pooped while you were pulling up-

• 21:30Bill Nye?

  I knew this was coming.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every next pull-up would be easier.

• 21:32Bill Nye?

  I knew this was coming.

• 21:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is the point of the rocket equation.

• 21:35Bill Nye?

  You could also, it could just be gas.

• 21:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the gas would have recoil effect and you can- Ways to make the pull-ups easier for you on route, okay?

• 21:45Bill Nye?

  But those are, those are, uh, third order effects.

• 21:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, exactly. Okay. All right, what else you got?

• 21:51Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you have it, Andy. Uh, the, the answer, well, one, one other question is, uh, you don't, you really wouldn't need to do it unless it's a filling station. That's the answer.

• 22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's the answer.

• 22:00Chuck Nice?

  That's the answer. All right, let's go to, uh, Jay Knickerbocker. Right, not to be confused with the New York Knickerbockers. Jay says, "Images of the comet show in tumbling at a high rate of rotation." If that is accurate, how did Rosetta match its rotation to the comet? So, filet could make a stable landing regarding the failed harpoon. How are they sure it didn't fire? Or is it possible any sensors indicating such simply failed? And it is, in fact, tethered. So, he's...

• 22:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know there was rotating all that fast.

• 22:40Bill Nye?

  Well, the word "fast," when you watch the animation on the electric internet, it looks fast, but it's a rotation rate was about once every 12 Earth hours. Is that fast?

• 22:49Chuck Nice?

  So, that's not really all that fast.

• 22:50Bill Nye?

  Well, it's twice as fast as the Earth spins and is a difficult deep-space problem to get your Rosetta probe rotating at about the same speed.

• 22:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But however, to the question's point, I would say that if they show the rotation on the GIF at the actual rate, that would be a really boring GIF.

• 23:09Bill Nye?

  Well, it'll take you a while.

• 23:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll take to sit there for 12 hours and watch the thing turn around.

• 23:13Bill Nye?

  Furthermore, it is tethered by gravity. Even though it's a very low-mass thing, it still has...

• 23:19Chuck Nice?

  It still has gravity, which is why it bounced, went up however many...

• 23:23Bill Nye?

  Almost over a kilometer, apparently.

• 23:24Chuck Nice?

  And then came back down. Okay, alright, alright.

• 23:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got it.

• 23:28Chuck Nice?

  So, there you have it, man. There you have it.

• 23:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Next question.

• 23:31Bill Nye?

  And the telemetry, as far as the sensors not sensing it, the telemetry's pretty reliable.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I got a question for Bill. I mean, it's named Rosetta because it was the Rosetta Stone, which was helped us decode ancient languages, in particular, the Egyptian hieroglyphics.

• 23:45Chuck Nice?

  And taught me Spanish.

• 23:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, Rosetta, the...

• 23:50Bill Nye?

  The name for the same thing.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, but the filet, I didn't do my homework on filet. Do you know, where was filet named after, Bill, do you know?

• 23:57Bill Nye?

  Uh, it's a nymph out there.

• 23:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Really?

• 23:59Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 24:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A sea nymph that, where if you go towards it, you crash into the rocks?

• 24:04Bill Nye?

  Uh, I should know that.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The water nymphs?

• 24:06Bill Nye?

  Yeah. I've looked it up.

• 24:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That doesn't sound like you'd want to name...

• 24:08Bill Nye?

  Let me encourage everybody who wants to know. Check out planetary.org and read Emily Locktowall's blog. It's in there.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, disclaimer?

• 24:16Bill Nye?

  Can't say that?

• 24:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no disclaimer.

• 24:19Bill Nye?

  Oh disclaimer, I'm the CEO of the Planetary Society. Neil deGrasse Tyson's on the board of the Planetary Society.

• 24:26Chuck Nice?

  And Chuck Nice will be reading the blog.

• 24:28Bill Nye?

  So Chuck, here's what went wrong with that. Dr. Tyson used the word disclaimer when I think he meant disclosure.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, you're right. He's right. Totally called me out.

• 24:39Bill Nye?

  It's the schools.

• 24:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a rookie mistake.

• 24:40Chuck Nice?

  There you go. All right, let's move on. Uh, this is Mark Parton. Mark wants to know this. He says, "Good day. I heard that..."

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it G apostrophe D A Y?

• 24:51Chuck Nice?

  No, it wasn't "good eye."

• 24:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "Good eye."

• 24:53Chuck Nice?

  It was "good day."

• 24:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck adopts the regional accent.

• 25:00Chuck Nice?

  Well, he's got the DJ, the DJ voice, "good day." "Good day. Uh, I heard that filet bounced off the comet before settling back to the surface several hours later. The long bounce was due to extremely low gravity after seeing the pictures of the solid rock surface. I wonder how something with such a low gravity formed rocks? If this and other comets and asteroids were formed from leftover dust from the formation of a solar system, how did this dust compress into such solid materials without significant gravity?"

• 25:35Bill Nye?

  This is awesome.

• 25:36Chuck Nice?

  That was a great question, Mark!

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These are off, these people are doing their homework.

• 25:41Bill Nye?

  So the thing is...

• 25:42Chuck Nice?

  That was great!

• 25:44Bill Nye?

  "Good day, Mark." Is that who it is? That's who it is, it's Mark. So when you're in deep space, there's nothing to slow you down if you're a particle of dust. One of the strange insights that troubled me as a young man and I still stroke my chin from time to time.

• 25:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're still a young man.

• 25:59Bill Nye?

  When you look at the dust on the bookshelf, it is a strange thing that not only is the Earth pulling the dust down, or toward the center of the Earth, the dust is ever so slightly pulling the Earth up. So in deep space, when you have dust many, many kilometers apart,

• 26:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:17Bill Nye?

  And they're being attracted, they actually slam together at a pretty high speed. And this was one of the ideas behind the filet probe, was to figure out, uh, what is the asteroid like? Is it puffy, meringey? Or is it rocky, solidy? And, uh, is it a cream puff or, uh, a walnut? And this, uh-

• 26:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it's a comet. It's, we know it's a comet, so it'll be mostly, uh, evaporative ice.

• 26:42Chuck Nice?

  Ice.

• 26:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So, so here's the thing, Bill, which is, which to me is quite cool. It was not until recently that we had any clue what the structural integrity of comets or asteroids actually is.

• 26:53Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 26:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we've seen comets go around the sun and just the tidal force of the sun breaks it apart into the 20 pieces. We had a comet slam into Jupiter. It was one piece at one time and then became 24 broken pieces afterwards. And no one went to it with a sledgehammer. It was just the gravitational stress of going by Jupiter that did that at all. So we don't really know how tightly held together these things are.

• 27:19Bill Nye?

  And that was part of the mission.

• 27:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's part of their mission. Now, there's some asteroids that are the fragments of broken planetesimals. Those would be chunks of rock and get out of their way.

• 27:29Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 27:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But comets and some other asteroids, they might be rubble piles. Just rocks that gather together. There are rocks that we, there are asteroids that we know have the density, where the ma- the material is made of rock, but you calculate the density? And it's the density of something almost as light as water?

• 27:46Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like a marshmallow rock.

• 27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, exactly.

• 27:48Bill Nye?

  Exactly.

• 27:48Chuck Nice?

  It's like a marshmallow rock.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. So you, it's got rock, but the rock isn't all the way through it. It's got this, it's porous, or it's got, well, it's just a pile of rubble traveling together pretending like it's one solid object.

• 28:00Chuck Nice?

  Oh, uh, like a bunch of little thugs.

• 28:03Bill Nye?

  Hey, you guys, I looked up filet.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 28:06Bill Nye?

  The island of time.

• 28:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 28:09Chuck Nice?

  Filet is the island of time.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is he allowed to pull out his thing and look up the answer? I mean, we're supposed to.

• 28:15Bill Nye?

  Well, anyway, just something I should know, and it has to do with the sun god Ra, and he had an island, and Filet was the island.

• 28:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 28:23Chuck Nice?

  There you have it.

• 28:24Bill Nye?

  So, this asteroid.

• 28:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Filet sounds a little Latin rather than.

• 28:28Bill Nye?

  It's Greek, I think. When you get the PH going.

• 28:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, okay.

• 28:32Bill Nye?

  So sixty-seven CP is Charmonkoff.

• 28:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly that, yeah.

• 28:38Bill Nye?

  Russian words, excuse me?

• 28:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody named John Smith ever discovers a comet.

• 28:42Bill Nye?

  Sixty-seven CP would be an island of time.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Charmoninoff.

• 28:49Bill Nye?

  Yeah, and I did it for several days, and now, under pressure, I'm blowing it. Go take it.

• 28:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you got?

• 28:55Chuck Nice?

  All right, so that, by the way, was a great answer for Mark. There's your answer, Mark. Um, this is, this is how.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, by the way, just while we're there, if there's an asteroid headed our way, and you want to deflect it.

• 29:07Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 29:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you lay, and you send something that's gonna push it, and you later learn that it's made of a rubble pile, you end up pushing some of the rocks and not the others.

• 29:15Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you wanna know what this thing is made of, and how it's held together, before you do any of these rescue missions, or any kind of mission at all. And like, like Bill said, that's part of the reason why we went there in the first place.

• 29:26Bill Nye?

  And this is a big push at the Planetary Society, is assessing the near-Earth objects.

• 29:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 29:31Bill Nye?

  Did I mention planetary.org? Did I disclose? That I'm the CEO and the.

• 29:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the deal on the board? What's the word I use? I'm so, I'm embarrassed.

• 29:38Chuck Nice?

  Disclaimer, is what you said.

• 29:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm embarrassed.

• 29:41Bill Nye?

  I wasn't disclaiming anything, I was disclosing.

• 29:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm embarrassed.

• 29:44Bill Nye?

  We'll get through it.

• 29:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what else?

• 29:45Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's move on. Another great question. All right, here we go, here we go, here we go, here we go. Um, you know what? This is a pretty, uh, this is Chris Van Gundy. A pretty simple, straightforward question.

• 29:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 29:59Chuck Nice?

  How can we determine the difference between a brown dwarf and a large rogue planet?

• 30:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 30:06Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 30:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, brown dwarfs are still-

• 30:10Bill Nye?

  You use your, like, uh, GPS?

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, brown dwarfs- Is that what she used? Yeah, we showed a, a rogue planet in, in Cosmos and showed that with infrared filters, it's still sort of radiating the heat left over from its formation. There, it is hotly debated still.

• 30:27Bill Nye?

  Get it? Hotly debated.

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. What is the boundary between a brown dwarf and a, and a planet? Just, at what point do you say, "This is a planet, this is not a planet"? And now you've got like, the beginnings of a star, and then when do you have a star? Right, so-

• 30:42Bill Nye?

  We have one like Jupiter that's a beginning.

• 30:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Jupiter is, is still a way, a little too light to have a, it's a star that never made it, but it's not like it was close.

• 30:50Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 30:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so Jupiter's not massive enough to be, so we have people working on how to define brown dwarfs. Is it chemically, what's going on in the atmosphere? Is it temperature? But then the temperature changes over the life of the thing.

• 31:01Bill Nye?

  Are the school kids gonna have to relearn?

• 31:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, and then as the temperature changes, the chemistry of the atmosphere changes, so what are you gonna observe about it in order to say what kind of object it is, and is the object changing? And, so, so it, it's still a hotly discussed topic.

• 31:15Bill Nye?

  Look at that. I'll be at, at about three Kelvin. Three degrees above absolute zero.

• 31:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, it's hotter than that, yeah.

• 31:22Bill Nye?

  A hundred, is it a hundred Kelvin?

• 31:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what, for the temperature of the stars?

• 31:25Bill Nye?

  A brown dwarf.

• 31:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, no, no, Kelvin!

• 31:27Bill Nye?

  Oh, no, no, no, sorry, sorry, a rogue planet.

• 31:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, no, rogue planet would be, I mean, it could be as much as, I don't know, several hundred degrees, uh, Celsius, I mean-

• 31:36Bill Nye?

  Several hundred degrees, several hundred Kelvins.

• 31:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry, did I, uh, no, let me think, hold on, several-

• 31:41Bill Nye?

  Several hundred Celsius degrees above absolute zero.

• 31:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no, sorry, sorry. Let us, let us agree on what scale we're using first.

• 31:47Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 31:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, uh, how about, uh, Celsius? Surface of the sun is between five and six thousand degrees Celsius, okay? So, a brown, and, and-

• 31:58Bill Nye?

  A lot of sun-

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Red, cooler red giant stars are around three thousand, two thousand degrees. You start getting brown dwarf land when you're one thousand degrees, eight hundred degrees, and then hot planets would be, you know, four hundred degrees.

• 32:10Bill Nye?

  A rogue planet would be four-

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, around there, around, based on my memory of how all this shakes out.

• 32:15Bill Nye?

  So, note well, although the surface of the sun at six thousand degrees Celsius sounds hot, it is hot. But a bolt of lightning is a little hotter.

• 32:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 32:24Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 32:24Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 32:25Chuck Nice?

  Oh snap. That was pretty cool, cuz a bolt of lightning is hotter than the sun?

• 32:31Bill Nye?

  Absolutely.

• 32:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, no, excuse me, not the center of the sun, the surface of the sun.

• 32:34Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay, alright.

• 32:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not that you feel better.

• 32:36Chuck Nice?

  Now I feel better.

• 32:37Bill Nye?

  Hence the expression.

• 32:38Chuck Nice?

  Now my mind isn't nearly as blown.

• 32:40Bill Nye?

  Hence the expression, it was like I got stuck with the surface of the sun.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 32:45Bill Nye?

  No, see, that wouldn't, that wouldn't mean nothing. Yeah, it's a bolt of lightning. Now, now you're talking.

• 32:50Chuck Nice?

  Okay, alright.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, do we have time for one more? If it's quick, go.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  Oh, God, okay, here we go. Exclu- this is from, this is from Dan Zimny. Excluding the size and the distance from the sun, does Venus have more in common with the gas giants than terrestrial planets?

• 33:05Bill Nye?

  No! No! Venus is a rocky terrestrial planet.

• 33:10Chuck Nice?

  No!

• 33:11Bill Nye?

  Second from the sun, and the only reason it's hot, or the big reason it's hot is the greenhouse effect. People, that's fundamental.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio. Stay tuned, more up next.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back, here's more of StarTalk.

• 33:43Chuck Nice?

  Alright, hey, let's jump right back into this. This is Hove, I mean, sorry, Jose Javier Galvez. I had to say it like that. Uh, launching a space-

• 33:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could do him some, some, some regional accents, right?

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  Yes, so this is, launching a space shuttle was originally estimated as very low cost, but in the end, it went up to a billion dollars per launch, which made it kind of unmanageable. Uh, do you think the same can happen now with private companies as they face the huge challenges and risks of spaceflight?

• 34:13Bill Nye?

  Time will tell. And by the way, one billion was an estimate for a while. Now, all in, people are throwing around the word, uh, the number one and a half billion per shuttle, shuttle flight. So here's the thing, when you, the, um, space shuttle was built by NASA, and there are ten NASA centers, and this was a brilliant idea in 1958, that it, it made the space program, uh, if I may, un-cancelable.

• 34:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ten centers across the country.

• 34:40Bill Nye?

  Across the country.

• 34:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In eight states.

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  Too big to fail.

• 34:43Bill Nye?

  Well, uh, well, just too many congressional interests to get, uh, shut down.

• 34:49Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 34:49Bill Nye?

  And so now, uh, everybody keep in mind, when we talk about space exploration technology, SpaceX, and we talk about Boeing, these companies are taking billions of dollars, uh, to produce rockets for, uh, the larger good, for the public good, to fly astronauts from many nations to space. Uh, but when you visit SpaceX, the factory is a big horseshoe. The train cars show up, full of steel and aluminum, they unload this stuff, it goes into the factory, they hammer it out to the right shape, they stir weld it with the world's largest stir welder machine, which is a fabulous friction thing, then they put all the wires in, and they pressure, and they make the pressure tanks, and they install the pressure tanks.

• 35:33Bill Nye?

  Goes around the big horseshoe, the big letter U, and it goes back on a different train car, and goes to Cape Canaveral or Vandenberg Air Force Base, ready to fly. That's the premise of the bit. So it is believed that you'd be able to lower the cost of making rockets. So we will see. Are there subtleties? Are, is there expertise that NASA had that these new companies, by new, I mean more recently developed companies, do or do not have?

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:59Bill Nye?

  Time will tell. When it comes to Boeing, they've been building all kinds of rockets for years and years.

• 36:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disclosure?

• 36:05Bill Nye?

  I worked on, at Boeing.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:07Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 36:07Bill Nye?

  I have some, I have some loyalty to Boeing, but I'm not, uh, either way.

• 36:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You worked on the jumbo jet?

• 36:13Bill Nye?

  Worked on 747.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 36:15Bill Nye?

  Yeah, it was very cool. I have loyalty to that. A lot of vertical tail, fabulous leading edge flap system.

• 36:20Chuck Nice?

  He got, hey, listen, what can I say? I, I can never hate on a man for getting a little vertical tail.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  So I'm saying, I just, you had me a tail, Bill.

• 36:35Bill Nye?

  In the aerospace industry, we call that Not just any tail, vertical tail. We call that empennage.

• 36:40Chuck Nice?

  Empennage.

• 36:41Bill Nye?

  So you, I see in your hand, you have a pen.

• 36:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir.

• 36:43Bill Nye?

  That's from the Latin word penna for feather. So we write, we used to write with quills.

• 36:48Chuck Nice?

  Correct.

• 36:49Bill Nye?

  Now airplane, uh, the shaft of an arrow is the fuselage, right? The tail feathers are the empennage. And airplanes have an empennage and my understanding in your experience, you have three children. Uh, there's been

• 37:03Chuck Nice?

  There's been quite a, uh,

• 37:05Bill Nye?

  Some empennage.

• 37:05Chuck Nice?

  Successful.

• 37:07Bill Nye?

  A lot of information. I was gonna let it taper off, but you're gonna

• 37:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, no, it's cool.

• 37:11Bill Nye?

  It's all good.

• 37:11Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool.

• 37:12Bill Nye?

  Huge hand.

• 37:13Chuck Nice?

  Let's go to Facebook and James Fish and James says

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, I gotta add something to this.

• 37:18Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 37:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the shuttle would have been less per launch.

• 37:22Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we had 50 launches a year, but the

• 37:25Bill Nye?

  It turned out to be too dangerous and complicated.

• 37:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Too complicated and the parts were being used. And then when do you replace it? Do you need a new part or one that's battle tested? And so part of a business model is always can you reuse the, the vessel? And modern airplanes are used multiple times a day.

• 37:42Bill Nye?

  The people flying airplanes now are younger than the planes.

• 37:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you flew an airplane and each time you threw it away, that's a different business model.

• 37:52Chuck Nice?

  We wouldn't be flying so much.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wouldn't be flying so much.

• 37:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly. Okay, go on.

• 37:55Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go, Jose. There's the real answer. How do we do it? Volume.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 38:02Bill Nye?

  Our manager is out of town. We must be crazy to offer these prices.

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's go to Facebook and James Fish and here's what James has, James has to say. There's a lot of talk about quantum computers and how they could change the face of predictive modeling. What potential could it have to change artificial intelligence and lead to a robot uprising? I thought it was going to and change the face of space travel, but he went with robot uprising.

• 38:31Bill Nye?

  So everybody, I'm all for the singularity when computers are as smart as people.

• 38:37Bill Nye?

  But computers and the quantum computing thing run on electricity. And right now, someone literally has to shovel the coal to keep the robots going. So, uh, I'm all for this robot uprising as long as there's an infinite supply of electricity. Well, what if they're controlling the nuclear power plants that they're gonna, okay? Knock yourselves out.

• 38:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're in control of the grid.

• 39:00Bill Nye?

  I think it's a long way off. Well, they were designed by us.

• 39:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the computer has the quantum, they'll control the grid. Right. They're not gonna wait for you to plug them in for them to take over your life.

• 39:10Bill Nye?

  Who's gonna shovel the coal?

• 39:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They, they will.

• 39:14Bill Nye?

  Oh, is that right?

• 39:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll invent a version of themselves that'll shovel the coal.

• 39:17Bill Nye?

  So anyway, let's change the subject back.

• 39:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, you speak like the, it's weird that the robots need some special source of energy. So do we! Yeah, because seriously? We eat food three at least times a day. Just, just, we need-

• 39:30Bill Nye?

  And you're saying recreate us by means of, uh, empanage interaction?

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's, there we go.

• 39:35Bill Nye?

  And, uh, so you're saying it's sort of six or one? Okay, so by the way, changing the subject back to me. I have a little thing about the singularity.

• 39:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Now, just to be clear, there's an astrophysicist at the table. If you use the word singularity, you have to clarify that you're not using it- Talking about one over zero. You're not talking about the beginning of the universe, or the center of a black hole, or any other previous use of the word singularity. Go. I love this tension!

• 40:01Bill Nye?

  We're getting to, uh, where computers, computers have enough computational power to be like a human brain. And, uh, in my book-

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Undeniable.

• 40:12Bill Nye?

  On the New York Times Bestseller list, uh, I, um, have a little discussion about this. You can go to places in the world where people have not made a phone call. Not made a cellphone call, not made a phone call. I'm not saying they won't change in the next little while. But it's gonna be just, it may be later than you think when there's a robot uprising taking over the world. The robots show up in Western China and they go, "Well, there's no place to plug in, man. I'm sorry, dude." And, uh, they, they're not very productive, let alone take over the world of-

• 40:47Chuck Nice?

  I take it you don't believe it.

• 40:49Bill Nye?

  No, no, it's just, it's, it's, there's a lot of other things to worry about.

• 40:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I agree with Bill. There's, there's nothing about it that sounds impending to me.

• 40:58Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Though it be impending to others, which is the perfect setup for like a cult, right? The world is gonna come into, it'll change really soon, really fast, just join the bandwagon.

• 41:09Chuck Nice?

  Send money now.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But that's not what, he's not asking you to send money.

• 41:14Chuck Nice?

  I am.

• 41:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to get Ray Kurzweil on the show, the, the, the big, the exponent of, of the singularity. We'll get, try to get him on StarTalk.

• 41:20Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that he can speak for himself, rather than me commenting on what others have said about him.

• 41:24Bill Nye?

  And he may be right.

• 41:25Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right, well, there you have it. Uh, don't worry about it is the answer to your question. Don't worry about it.

• 41:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, chill, chillax on that one.

• 41:33Chuck Nice?

  Chillax, baby. All right. Okay, let's go to Robert Hartley, who is also coming to us from Facebook. Hello, guys. I'm from Auckland, New Zealand. Uh, just in case Neil asks, because sometimes you want to know where people are from. In regards to the Ontari's failed launch, how much doubt would the team have to have that the mission would go unsuccessfully before making the decision to abort? So what is the protocol for an aborted launch? What has to happen where you go, ah?

• 42:01Bill Nye?

  It's two different things.

• 42:02Chuck Nice?

  Forget that.

• 42:03Bill Nye?

  There's cancelling a launch.

• 42:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 42:05Bill Nye?

  And then there's abort in flight. So cancelling, we're gonna put it off, or postponing is probably a better verb, to place forward, to place ahead, to place later. Postponing is where people ask themselves, is this gonna work or not? Abort generally means, once the thing's flying, and it's gonna cause trouble, should we blow it up? In the case of the last Ontari's launch, it was self-upblowing.

• 42:30Chuck Nice?

  So it was a self-aborting flight then?

• 42:33Bill Nye?

  Undesirable.

• 42:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was, that was a design feature.

• 42:35Bill Nye?

  Yeah. No, no, so, so, I mean...

• 42:37Chuck Nice?

  Why is that clock ticking down?

• 42:40Bill Nye?

  Yeah, exactly. What's that sound? So, anyway, uh, I know what you mean, but this is why you have managers, and this is why you have managers you want to be, uh, literate with, technically, who want to know what's going on, can it, can make decisions based on... Learned input from their subordinates.

• 43:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you be a good manager going to manage aerial school or did you have to be an engineer to manage engineers?

• 43:04Bill Nye?

  Well, let me ask you this. Uh, so many of the Fortune 500 countries, companies are run by engineers.

• 43:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 43:13Bill Nye?

  So.

• 43:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, could well, many of them are tech companies.

• 43:15Bill Nye?

  Yeah. So, uh, is there a connection? In other words, could such a tech company be run by somebody who was not engineering savvy? And the answer is, I don't know, man. But when it comes to rocket launches, you really want people in charge with experience. And this is, but you know, just to talk about the planetary society yet again, on our board is Scott Hubbard, who became the Mars czar.

• 43:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Under, and NASA.

• 43:38Bill Nye?

  Yeah. So there was Mars, faster, better, cheaper was the, the way of thinking. The modern word people throw in is mantra. This is what we're going to do faster, better, cheaper. And, and so there were some successful missions, but there was Mars climate orbiter, which went off into deep space because we interchanged English units with metric units.

• 43:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Went off into space instead of arriving at Mars.

• 43:58Bill Nye?

  Yes. And then Mars polar lander, which became Mars polar crasher. Because the landing gear deployed and the software thought that that had been on the surface. But, uh, I mean, rather there was a little shake and the software thought it was on the surface, but it was still in space. And it crashed. So we brought in, NASA brought in Scott Hubbard, who was a manager. He managed it. He figured out who knew what he was doing and who didn't. And he made some personnel changes. And then we had the successful landings of spirit, opportunity and curiosity.

• 44:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sound like some.

• 44:30Bill Nye?

  You don't regret who you fire. You regret who you don't fire. So, uh, I didn't make that up. That, that's a, that's ancient wisdom.

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we got time for one more question.

• 44:40Bill Nye?

  Bill Wanders, it's management as well as technical problems.

• 44:44Chuck Nice?

  All right. So there you have it.

• 44:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Last question.

• 44:45Chuck Nice?

  All right. Here we go. Uh, this is from Matt Eli, and Matt wants to know this. If life were on a comet, would we know it? Also, I heard mentioned that they are trying to see how much of Earth's water came from comets.

• 45:00Bill Nye?

  Furthermore, there are amino acids on these bodies. These are acids with carbon and double bond, double bond, oxygen, oxygen.

• 45:06Chuck Nice?

  Which are the building blocks of life?

• 45:07Bill Nye?

  And so, exactly. So where is the line drawn between an amino acid out there in space and you and me? Neil? I thought you were gonna chime in with some brilliant insight.

• 45:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boo.

• 45:19Bill Nye?

  Astrophysical, astrobiological insight.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there's some, there are ideas put forth back in the 1960s and 70s led by Fred Hoyle and his collaborator Wick Ramasinghi, who suggested that perhaps there were bugs in space, and that if solar system moved through a virus-contaminated cloud...

• 45:38Bill Nye?

  A big idea.

• 45:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That the whole Earth would be contaminated all at once. And they put that forth as the reason for the 1918 flu epidemic.

• 45:45Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so, and bugs as a bug. Okay, gotcha.

• 45:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, as a disease.

• 45:48Chuck Nice?

  As a disease.

• 45:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disease. The notion that you can have complex molecules in space, why can't you have complex organisms?

• 45:54Chuck Nice?

  Organisms.

• 45:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right. So, uh, that, it's really great science fiction material, but it doesn't really hold up...

• 46:01Chuck Nice?

  Doesn't hold up.

• 46:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On, on, on analysis. Because to make complex molecules, you need high rate of collision with particles, and gas clouds are very low density. And so, you don't have the experimenting, the chemical experimenting that would go on on a planet's surface. And so, uh, if there were life on a comet, and it was microbial, th- there's not any way, we would know unless you land on it and scoop it up.

• 46:22Bill Nye?

  Unless you land on it and sniff around.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And find, sniff around and find some goo. So, which means we gotta go there.

• 46:26Bill Nye?

  We gotta go to the comet.

• 46:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we're there.

• 46:28Bill Nye?

  Where are we alone in the universe, and where did we come from? That's why we explore space.

• 46:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wanna know where we're going.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for listening to StarTalk Radio. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Many thanks to our comedian, our guest, our experts. And I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Until next time, I bid you to keep looking up.