Extended Classic – Let’s Make America Smart Again: The Future of NASA

Re-visit our Let’s Make America Smart Again series as Neil deGrasse Tyson, comic co-host Chuck Nice, and Ellen Stofan look at the past, present, and future of NASA. Now extended with Neil and Chuck chatting with former HI-SEAS IV crew member Dr. Sheyna Gifford on interstellar space travel. NOTE: StarTalk All-Access subscribers can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free here: https://www.startalkradio.net/all-access/extended-classic-lets-make-america-smart-again-the-future-of-nasa/ Image Credit: NASA.

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?

  Welcome to StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and we are right now recording this episode of StarTalk from the Mashable World Headquarters right here in New York City. And in this latest installment of our new sort of sub-series of StarTalk called "Let's Make America Smart Again," we have my co-host today Chuck Nice.

• 0:45Chuck Nice?

  Hey!

• 0:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright dude.

• 0:47Chuck Nice?

  Alright bud.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You also host a spin-off of StarTalk, which I'm still getting into, called "Playing with Science."

• 0:54Chuck Nice?

  Playing with Science, right?

• 0:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does your mama know you're playing with science?

• 0:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:00Chuck Nice?

  What are you doing down there?

• 1:03Chuck Nice?

  What is happening down there Chuck? Um, I'm playing with science! Um, yeah, no, it's a sports-science mashup show where we interview athletes.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because we've had sports guests on flagship StarTalk and had whole followings unto themselves.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So...

• 1:20Chuck Nice?

  So we took that and spun it off and now we're...

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Does that mean you're not giving me any sports athletes anymore?

• 1:24Chuck Nice?

  No, no, it just means that, uh, it means that when we have athletes, you'll come on the show.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  That's all.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, that's good, it's good to know.

• 1:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk.

• 1:36Chuck Nice?

  So we're doing that and we also have...

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, science and sports.

• 1:38Chuck Nice?

  Science and sports. And then for everything, we also have StarTalkAllAccess.com where we have exclusive original content, like something that, uh, you and I did, um, which by the way, I'm gonna put a clip of that.

• 1:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You filmed that?

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:54Chuck Nice?

  That was good.

• 1:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was good.

• 1:55Chuck Nice?

  That was good. But, and by the way, the thing we did, it's called, um, Have You Touched My Meteorite? You don't remember that? We were in your office?

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I.

• 2:07Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I'm gonna send you the clip of this.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  He's denying it, perhaps.

• 2:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I deny the allegation, and I deny the alligator.

• 2:12Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna send you the clip, but you gotta put it on Twitter if I send it to you. It's me, it's, we're in your office, we're having a conversation, and so, uh, uh, this is so funny. In the middle of the conversation, you go, "Wait a minute, have you touched my meteorite?"

• 2:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said that?

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  Yes, and I went, "No." And then you're like, "Would you like to?" And I was like, "Hell yeah, I thought you'd never ask."

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's true, I do stash a couple of meteorites in my.

• 2:35Chuck Nice?

  It was, actually, it was very cool, but not for that.

• 2:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, everybody ought to, or should. Uh, so for this edition of Let's Make America Smart Again, we're gonna talk about the future of NASA. And so we've brought in an expert on, you know, I mouth off about NASA, but very few experts on this. And we've got one with us, Ellen Stofan.

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  Hey, nice to be here.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're the former chief scientist at NASA?

• 3:02Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 3:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That sounds like a badass business card to me.

• 3:06Chuck Nice?

  God.

• 3:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I'm chief.

• 3:07Chuck Nice?

  By the way, I would just walk around all the time, just, uh, hi, uh, yes, um, Double Latte, uh, chief scientist at NASA.

• 3:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, when they say your name, that's what they're right on the side.

• 3:18Chuck Nice?

  Right, when they say, well, and who is this for? Uh, chief scientist at NASA.

• 3:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So your, your background is, is a planetary geologist?

• 3:26Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool, and so thanks for helping us out.

• 3:29Speaker 02

  Oh, happy to be here.

• 3:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To do this, and so, um, we, we, this is a Cosmic Queries version of Let's Make America Smart Again.

• 3:38Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 3:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we're gonna just take questions with even pre-solicited from our fanbase and social media typically.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 3:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And these are questions about NASA, and where it's coming, where it's going, and just to be clear, uh, you're no longer the chief scientist, you've left that post.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  That's right, I stepped down in December at the end of the administration, and so now I'm trying to figure out what to do next.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The man whose name goes unmentioned.

• 4:00Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The administration.

• 4:01Chuck Nice?

  The administration.

• 4:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What was your academic post before NASA?

• 4:06Speaker 02

  Uh, before that, I worked for a small group of people, uh, at a company called Proximi Research, and I did research on Venus. I'm a member of the Cassini Radar team.

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You did research on Earth about Venus?

• 4:16Speaker 02

  Oh, correct. It's a little hot on Venus.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 4:20Speaker 02

  So, I study volcanoes on...

• 4:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I went to...

• 4:24Chuck Nice?

  I went to on Venus.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  I study volcanoes on Venus, Mars, Earth, and one of the moons of Saturn called Titan.

• 4:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. So you're vulcanologists?

• 4:34Speaker 02

  That is correct.

• 4:35Chuck Nice?

  Vulcanologists?

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are you out of your vulcan mind?

• 4:37Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 4:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's that line from Star Trek.

• 4:40Chuck Nice?

  You're out of your vulcan mind? Damn it, man!

• 4:45Speaker 02

  It's almost as good as chief scientist, but not quite.

• 4:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, just to let the audience know, there's certain positions at NASA that are appointed and that they rotate, so that you're not a career civil servant in that post.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  That's right. The chief technologists and the chief scientists usually come in for two to three years, advise the NASA administrator on policy across the agency.

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NASA administrator's the highest ranking.

• 5:08Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. The administrator is appointed by the president.

• 5:11Chuck Nice?

  And doesn't sound nearly as cool as chief scientist.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's for sure.

• 5:16Chuck Nice?

  It's just like, what do you do? I'm the administrator of NASA, and you, I'm the chief scientist. Done with you, let's talk to you.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Except Charlie Bolton is the coolest person around, so he could get away with that.

• 5:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've had him on Star Trek. It was great, great. He deployed the Hubble telescope, so we got...

• 5:32Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, if you've been to space, you've got stories.

• 5:35Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sure.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's pretty cool.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, presumably you've thought about the past, present, and future of NASA. Would you say NASA's on track in all the ways NASA wants to be on track?

• 5:52Speaker 02

  Um, NASA's on track.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me say that another way.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 5:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We all have ideas of what NASA should be doing. Is NASA doing it?

• 6:01Speaker 02

  I think so. But there's always a caveat there, because NASA's part of the executive branch, it gets its direction from the president, but then Congress ultimately decides on NASA's budget. And so, there's always this tension between what does the president want? What does Congress want? And does that bear any resemblance towards what's really important to NASA, which is moving humans out beyond Earth, exploring this planet, exploring the solar system, the sun, the universe. And not to mention one other small thing, this planet, which is the most important planet to all of us. So, how are those resources being spent? How are they divided up? And that's the tension.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sometimes it's good tension, but it sounds like generally it's not.

• 6:48Speaker 02

  Well, no, I think it is. It is in general a good tension because obviously if you look back over the history of NASA, at the time of Apollo NASA was about 4% of the federal budget. Right now NASA is about 0.4% of the federal budget and so that means you have to you have to make choices. NASA still wants to invest in aeronautics.

• 7:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's one tenth the commitment of the country. That's amazing.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  From back then, right.

• 7:10Speaker 02

  You know, and so to someone like me, I would say, let's go wild and make NASA 0.6% of the federal budget. You know, that would be a huge amount of money.

• 7:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's 50% increase.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, a huge amount of money for NASA, but really not that still that much of the federal budget. And to me NASA is doing a lot of amazing things and those things actually benefit us every day.

• 7:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I said, let's just go to a penny while we're at it. If we're gonna raise it from 0.4. Right, just go to 1%, right? Yeah. Just take it up to a penny? Yeah, yeah. And we're good. Yeah, we're good to go. Yeah, exactly.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  We'd have humans on Mars very quickly if that were the case.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you'd be doing the backstroke on Titans.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  That's right, that's right.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice, nice. I like every part of that except the smell.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  We'd be finding life around the solar system. We'd be exploring planets around other stars. We'd be making huge advances. And again, for people who say, oh, that's a waste of money, those when you push for technology, you benefit our economy, you have spinoffs that affect our lives in amazing ways.

• 8:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let me ask you. But just, wait, just a clear, since we have so, I think methane is odorless. You know, you're right. They add that odor to it so that you can smell it. Yeah, so the reason why you thought it smelled. Is because, because I dealt it. That's why. That's why I thought I smelt it.

• 8:32Speaker 02

  You're contributing to global warming.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Absolutely. You smelt it, dealt it. So I think it's it's hydrogen sulfide has that rotten egg smell. Exactly. Mixed in with the methane. Right. But I wouldn't expect nothing less from you.

• 8:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't presume, but if I think, I'm not letting you get by saying you want to go do the backstroke on the methane lakes of Titan because of the smell, that's all I'm saying.

• 8:56Chuck Nice?

  No, you're right. You know, it just doesn't work as a joke when I say in the odorless methane lakes with the hydrogen sulfide ad. That one just doesn't work.

• 9:06Speaker 02

  Well, it's about 92 degrees Kelvin on Titan, so it'd be a cold swim for you. But my real question is, is there anything else swimming in those seas besides you?

• 9:17Chuck Nice?

  Nice, right. Well, it will be once I get out of the water.

• 9:23Chuck Nice?

  It was not cold.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, what question you have?

• 9:29Chuck Nice?

  All right, let's jump into it. And as we always do, we start with our Patreon, patrons' questions because they support us financially.

• 9:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a whole, like, go-to page on our website?

• 9:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 9:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That where you can... And I would... It was a little mysterious to me for a long time, Patreon, because I thought, is this just another thing where they're just asking for money? But you actually do like kickbacks?

• 9:51Chuck Nice?

  There are some kickbacks.

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, the kickbacks at every level.

• 9:53Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 9:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're actually buying access.

• 9:56Chuck Nice?

  You're buying access to the program, just like, you know, like, for instance, if you were a Russian businessman and you wanted to, I don't know, gain some influence, you know, it's the same type of deal. So, yeah, there's two ways to support the show financially, if you're so inclined. One is Patreon, and the other is StarTalkAllAccess.com, where we have, we'll create all kinds of exclusive, original content, plus everything that we do. And the money goes back into what we do so that...

• 10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what it does is, we use it to do innovative things that can't otherwise be justified by the business model at that time.

• 10:33Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so we can grow whole new branches.

• 10:35Chuck Nice?

  And that's what it's...

• 10:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what we're doing.

• 10:36Chuck Nice?

  That's what we're doing. And it's working. And you've put it so much better than I got to remember what you just said there, because that's what it is. So, anyway, here's our Patreon question from Chris Ryu. Chris wants to know this. Hey, let's fast forward a decade, or even a few, and imagine a permanent Mars colony. Assuming that NASA was responsible, what changes do you think there would be to the role of NASA globally? Would it perhaps take on a more worldwide role? Would it become maybe Wassa?

• 11:15Chuck Nice?

  And that's Chris from the Atomic Club, or the Atom Club, in Strumminster, Newton, United Kingdom.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  Very good. Well, first of all, I think before we actually have a colony on Mars, it's going to be a little bit more than a decade or two, because those first journeys to Mars with humans, which will probably be in the early 2030s for an orbital mission, hopefully down to the surface soon after that, to really-

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Soon after, you mean other missions.

• 11:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the mission that first goes into orbit is not going to be the one that lands?

• 11:44Speaker 02

  I don't think it'll be the one that lands, because that entry, descent, and landing on Mars with humans is so, is so hard, because the Mars atmosphere is, is so thin. So we're hoping to get humans down on the surface by the mid to late 2030s, to really have people there for sustained, long periods of time. I, I think we're maybe three or four decades away from that. But, but it's already going to be a worldwide effort. I don't know if I want to call it WASA, but, you know, already NASA is actually working, there are 16 space agencies that are working on this, how do we send humans beyond low Earth orbit?

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space agencies in different countries.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, you know, the typical ones people have heard of may be the European Space Agency, the Russian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency, but we've got space agencies from South Korea, emerging space agencies from Africa who are participating-

• 12:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  India as well, yeah.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  India. So it already is a global effort. Not only that, I don't think it's just going to be a government effort, it's going to be public-private partnerships, and we already see things like SpaceX with Red Dragon sort of moving forward, though it's not clear what's the exact timeline on Red Dragon is right now, but I think it's going to take kind of everybody participating to actually make it happen.

• 12:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So are you saying that that first colony will not be NASA and American tax monies? It'll be a collaboration, the way this questioner is asking?

• 13:00Speaker 02

  I think it will be a collaboration, but I think there will be, I hope, America continues to lead. We've always led, but that doesn't mean we can't have partners, and so I hope we continue to lead. I hope there is a US base on Mars eventually, and I think a lot of people do envision it sort of like Antarctica, where there's a US base, a British base, but I'm actually hoping we all live together internationally like we do up on the International Space Station. That's sort of the dream in partnership.

• 13:30Speaker 02

  I know, I'm hopelessly, hopelessly optimistic.

• 13:33Chuck Nice?

  That's good.

• 13:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's very wishful thinking there. Also, I wanna, I wanna differ with something you just said.

• 13:43Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 13:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said we've always led, but I think we only really led after maybe 1968.

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Oh, good point, yeah.

• 13:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Cause we weren't the first in space.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  The Soviet's led.

• 13:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They had Sputnik, they had the first satellite, they had the first non-human animal. They had the first...

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Leica?

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leica, yeah, Leica. They had the first human, they had the first woman, they had the first black person, a Cuban, they had the first space station, they had, so...

• 14:16Speaker 02

  First landings on Venus.

• 14:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, first landings. They actually had the first photo of Earthrise on the moon, which wasn't released till after our photo was, was... So, so, we were reactive to so much of what Russia did, leaving me to wonder that if Russia never went there, whether we would've ever had a space program in the first place.

• 14:36Speaker 02

  I, I think we may have eventually, but it would've come much slower. And so, there's an interesting parallel going on with that right now, as you see the rise of the Chinese space program. Lot going on in China right now, they're getting ready to put their space station off.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just need to be kicked in the ass.

• 14:50Speaker 02

  You know, if that's what it takes to get us to Mars, which gives back, reflects back to your first question about, is NASA on the right track? We're on the right track to get humans to Mars, that whole plan I talked about, but it could easily go off the rails. And, and so, in my mind, maybe it takes a little incentive by competing with foreign nations to keep us on track.

• 15:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that train reference, with referencing rockets. It might go off the rails.

• 15:16Chuck Nice?

  Right. Which, by the way, if we can get a train to Mars, I'm there. That's, that's a great ride, right there.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What else you got?

• 15:24Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. Hey, Along the Same Line, this is Gudar Kane from Facebook says, "Do you think NASA will lose significant funding in the near future?" Says, "We're talking about all these grandiose plans, especially with..." Competition and if so, what will NASA? Uh, what research will be halted first? And I would like to add to that. What are we doing in terms of public, private partnerships? Because if we're losing funding, are we? Are we supplementing that in some way? Or is it when we pull funding away? That's the end of it. Programs just shut down.

• 16:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, NASA hasn't been losing funding. Actually, over the last several years, our budget has gone up over the president's request and up. It's barely keeping pace with inflation, but it is going up when other lots of other parts of the federal budget are going down. And that's because NASA still continues to have huge bipartisan support in Congress. So.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it has 10 centers, half of which are in blue states, the other half are in red states. That's the way to do it.

• 16:27Speaker 02

  So, so it continues to have a lot of support. What, what again, though, the subtleties are, for example, I testified in February before a congressional hearing on the, on the future of NASA. And there was a lot of talk by some members about, do we need to refocus NASA's budget? Do we need to focus NASA on what it should be doing? That's a bit of code for why is NASA doing earth science? And that's when I start to get worried. So it's not only the absolute number, it's how is that money spread around? And to me, NASA's earth science budget is an extremely important part. If we don't measure what's going on on this planet, we are not going to understand it.

• 17:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because earth, after all, is a planet.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  It is a planet.

• 17:08Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In case you didn't know that. We have time for one, one more before we go to break.

• 17:14Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right, okay. Um, let's make this very, uh, let's make this interesting. Uh, Chad Thompson would like to know this. Could NASA be the precursor to something like the Star Trek Federation? Hmm. Which is really kind of cool. I mean, now you, you spoke to that kind of briefly, but is there a concerted effort to bring these agencies together globally?

• 17:39Speaker 02

  There is. There is, again, there's something called the Global Exploration Roadmap. You can Google it. All these space agencies, the heads of all the international space agencies, get together several times a year and meet and say, "What are we doing? How can we work together? How can we ...?" You know, everybody's got limited resources, so it's better to work together. And so, you know, if you look at the space station, people have suggested it should be nominated for a Peace Prize. You know, it's literally higher ground where we can get along. And to me, if we can keep space in that realm, the better off we're gonna be.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A space station is the greatest collaboration of nations outside of the waging of war. If you look at the budget. God, that is so discouraging. Interesting fact. I mean, it's heartening in one respect that we can get together and do things. Well, others, so there's the Olympics, there's the World Cup. Okay. And there's a space station. If you look at the budget that drives these, the space station's a greater budget and a greater sort of total investment. And the only other time nations get together like that is to kill one another. Damn. Yeah. Oh, we are awful. You know that? Human beings, you suck. This is, this is ... Except for space. Except for space. This is why we should fear AI.

• 18:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because when it achieves consciousness, it'll be clear to it that we just have no right to be alive at all. There you go. And it'll be its first task. Let me tell you something. I have no intelligence at all, and I still agree with that.

• 19:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're done with this segment. When we come back, more of our Cosmic Curious Edition of Let's Make America Smart Again. See you in a moment.

• 19:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. StarTalk. We're talking about the future of NASA in this edition of Let's Make America Smart Again. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I've got my co-host Chuck Nice tweeting at ChuckNiceComic.

• 19:45Chuck Nice?

  Thank you, sir. Yes.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. And I've got with us, since we're talking about the future of NASA, we've got somebody who has just been working for NASA for the last several years in the capacity of chief scientist. I've got Ellen Stofan here. Ellen.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Hey, nice to be here.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not your first time on StarTalk.

• 20:01Speaker 02

  Not my first time, but always happy to be here.

• 20:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. Excellent. We love this. And so Chuck, you've been soliciting queries?

• 20:08Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I have from all over the Internet.

• 20:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  About the future of NASA. So let's see. And in this, again, our goal here is to imagine a smarter America going forward. So let's see. What do you have here?

• 20:18Chuck Nice?

  All right. So Ana Jesus coming to us from Facebook would like to know this. What is the main difference between NASA and SpaceX in terms of what they would like to achieve in space exploration in the near and far future? And let me add to that, what is the chief purpose of NASA? Or what is NASA's mission statement?

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Well, I should be able to quote NASA's mission statement from memory, but I can't. But it's basically to understand our world, our solar system, our universe, and to use technology to move humans beyond Earth. That is really, if you want to sum it up, that's NASA's mission: exploration, knowledge. So SpaceX is a contractor to NASA. NASA has lots of industry partners. SpaceX is one of them. They launch cargo up to the International Space Station. Starting next year, they'll launch Crew up to the International Space Station from Florida. So they're one of many contractors. Now, obviously SpaceX has obviously

• 21:23Speaker 02

  stated that they want to see humans on Mars. NASA wants to see humans on Mars. So our goals are actually really aligned. And we have a partnership with SpaceX to help them land one of their Dragon capsules on Mars. And I'm excited because they've done a lot of work on entry, descent, and landing that'll hopefully make it able for us to land humans sooner.

• 21:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You said earlier that one of the challenges is that Mars has a thin atmosphere. Could you detail why that's more of a challenge to EDL, entry, descent, and land than on Earth?

• 21:56Speaker 02

  Our atmosphere is much denser, so if people haven't seen, there's a great video that JPL put together before the Curiosity rover, before the Curiosity rover landed called "Seven Minutes of Terror," and it basically takes seven minutes when you're coming in from a trajectory from Earth to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface. You have to slow yourself way, way, way, way down.

• 22:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got good speed to get there, now you've got to eat up that speed somehow.

• 22:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and to absorb that speed coming, the atmosphere is just not helping you very much, but it's heating you up, which is bad, so you've got to find some way to slow yourself down. So, Curiosity weighed one metric ton, and we used a combination of...

• 22:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On Earth. Unless that's the mass, was it a mass of a thousand kilograms?

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we used heat shields, parachutes, this bizarre thing called a sky crane to land it on the surface. We estimate for humans, you're going to need 20 to 40 metric tons landed on the surface. And the more you can bunch that into single landings, the cheaper it is, so there's issues with that. So how are you going to slow yourself coming down? You're going to have to use something called supersonic retro propulsion, which basically means...

• 23:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it makes it hurt?

• 23:10Speaker 02

  It does, because you're firing retro rockets while you're going at supersonic speeds, which causes all kinds of turbulence. Everything you're shooting out the back comes back at your spacecraft at supersonic speeds, so it's a crazy thing. SpaceX has actually been working on it.

• 23:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's right, so if you're moving supersonically and you try to put retro exhaust in front of you, you overtake the exhaust.

• 23:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 23:35Chuck Nice?

  That's so wild.

• 23:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's wild.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it's complicated, to say the least.

• 23:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can roll down the window and stick your hands out and slow down.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  No, and it's not that it's insurmountable, "Oh my gosh, we can't ever send humans to Mars, it's too hard." And it frustrates me sometimes, I'll see commentary of saying, "Oh, we just need to stick at the moon, Mars is too hard." Mars is not too hard, we can figure it out.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, just any engineer would froth at the mouth to have the opportunity to solve these problems.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Exactly, and again, when you solve tough problems like that, you're stretching technology, you're stretching computational skills.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're patenting.

• 24:11Speaker 02

  You're patenting stuff, you're spinning off stuff into our economy right here on Earth.

• 24:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me another one.

• 24:17Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go, this is Jeff Sostorets, and Jeff says, "Chuck, you have butchered my name too many times."

• 24:24Speaker 02

  No, no, no.

• 24:26Chuck Nice?

  I'd like to clear the record. It's sauce like spaghetti and Tourette's like the syndrome. Sauce Tourette's. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff, for phonetically clarifying your name. Here's what he wants to know. What is the average age and education of a NASA employee? Is the demographic getting younger or older over the years? So are we attracting people to NASA?

• 24:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, we all saw the video of the launch and return of the first stage in the SpaceX rocket. And you see Mission Control for SpaceX. There's nobody there over 30? There's one old fart who's 40 in the corner, looking around like this. Everybody else who's jumping and hooting and hollering? If they're 35, so that skews young, it looks to me.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  It does skew young. And if you look at our NASA centers, which again, we have nine NASA centers, plus our federally funded research and development center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, making 10 around the country.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  Is that how it rolls?

• 25:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're in the loop.

• 25:37Chuck Nice?

  If you're in the loop, it's the FFRDC.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 25:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, you still struggle.

• 25:40Chuck Nice?

  I almost, it almost rolled off.

• 25:43Speaker 02

  It's hard to get it to roll off.

• 25:45Chuck Nice?

  I need to know more about the FFRDC.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  The average age is about 52 to 56, depending on the center. Now, part of that is because we have people who don't want to leave. You know, they love what they do. They're still productive. We've had scientists who are still, you know, writing significant papers in their 80s. So that does tend to hurt your statistics. On the other hand.

• 26:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know it was in the 60s, everyone just died at age 60. That was it.

• 26:15Chuck Nice?

  Well, kind of.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  We have people who don't like to retire. They love what they do.

• 26:22Chuck Nice?

  Lot of smoking and a lot of ham consumption.

• 26:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ham was a big part of American diet back then.

• 26:29Chuck Nice?

  Big part of American diet back then.

• 26:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every holiday, everything.

• 26:32Chuck Nice?

  Everything, yeah. And then when you didn't have ham, you had Spam. I'd be like, really?

• 26:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I told my son that Spam was food. And he said, what daddy? What?

• 26:45Chuck Nice?

  Dad, you're eating emails that you don't want? What?

• 26:50Speaker 02

  We've also had periods of time where the federal government has hiring freezes on. And so, and NASA downsized when the shuttle program ended. So, all of that's combined to make the federal, our federal workforce older. And we need more younger people in there.

• 27:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you have a hiring freeze, but it applies to NASA, it's a brain freeze.

• 27:09Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 27:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh, was that good?

• 27:13Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly. What do I get, a B+? I'm gonna give you a B+ on that one. You said C? Yeah. No, no, no.

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's a brain freeze.

• 27:23Chuck Nice?

  It's a brain freeze.

• 27:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If it applies to NASA, it's a brain freeze. Because you're not, you're not bringing in fresh, fresh brain blood.

• 27:28Chuck Nice?

  Right. Which means that those, those, those resources are being allocated someplace else. Most likely, Wall Street. You know?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Right. And, but, and the other thing is, though, you really want that mix of ages. Because, you know, we've got people who really know how to land on Mars. You know, we have people who know how to keep humans up in space safe. So, you need that kind of wisdom, and you need the fresh blood coming in that's gonna carry that forward.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you also need a culture where fresh blood, who is not biased by how you always did do it, can be open to a new idea.

• 28:04Speaker 02

  Exactly. And that, that need for innovation is something that we worked on a lot over the last couple of years at NASA. How do we ensure that we're the most innovative? As a 50-year-plus-old agency, you really do worry about, are you being the most innovative? And NASA worries about that.

• 28:19Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know the age of NASA, because it was founded the same week I was born.

• 28:24Speaker 02

  1958.

• 28:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I, I feel the pain.

• 28:28Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, a lot of people don't.

• 28:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I feel.

• 28:30Chuck Nice?

  A lot of people don't know this, but...

• 28:32Speaker 02

  He feels that lack of innovation.

• 28:34Chuck Nice?

  Whenever Neil calls NASA, the, the message is, "I'm your father."

• 28:43Chuck Nice?

  Brad Carrico from Facebook would like to know this. Does NASA have a future solution to the growing space junk problem? So are you guys working on this?

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Uh, NASA's working on it.

• 29:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where's space junk come from?

• 29:01Speaker 02

  Um, space junk is because over the last 50-plus years, we put a lot of stuff up there. Um, some of it has broken up, so there are actually even like old stages of rockets, pieces of spacecraft. There's been, and there was an occasion a couple of years ago where two spacecraft ran into each other, um, and it created a whole lot more pieces of debris. So there's just a lot of stuff up there. Now, it slowly, slowly de-orbits, but we do worry about it. A couple of times a year, they have to move the International Space Station slightly to avoid space junk, other satellites. We have to watch when we launch things to say, is there anything else on the path?

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Now, space is big, so this isn't anything to panic over, but space agencies around the world and private companies are looking at, how do we literally vacuum that stuff up? And people have, I've seen proposals of-

• 29:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Back up, back up. Wait, the space station is not a particularly nimble thing.

• 30:00Speaker 02

  No, it is not.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not even sort of structurally... I mean, this, um-

• 30:08Chuck Nice?

  I like this.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  It makes you do it tomorrow.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space station dance. My two arms are like the solar panel.

• 30:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. You're not gonna participate here.

• 30:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, if you push over here, this will like bend, but you're not gonna push the whole, I mean, so you're telling me they do avoidance maneuvers with the International Space Station?

• 30:32Speaker 02

  They-

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they don't run into somebody's shoe, or whatever piece of debris was left in space?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  They do. And they've even had rare occasions where they've realized there was debris approaching the space station and they haven't had time, because obviously to do a maneuver, you have to say, you have to plan this out. This isn't something you wanna be like, oh yeah, let's move, psh, you know?

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not the Millennium Falcon.

• 30:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  No. So there've been times where the astronauts have actually retreated into the Soyuz capsule and waited out a potential debris encounter. Don't you love the way that's phrased? A potential debris encounter.

• 31:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  Something crashing into the space station.

• 31:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Death, yes, yeah, death. NASA for death.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  But it's avoided. I mean, the space station, if you looked at it closely, it's got little pings and pockmarks all over it from little tiny pieces of debris hitting it at 17,000 miles an hour. And so that creates little problems. But so far, but to get back to your question, get in, no problem.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  17,000 mile an hour debris?

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  That's all.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  But that's why it's getting old. And at some point, we will have to deorbit the space station. Right now, it's funded through about 24. By about 28, this, for example, the solar-

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  2024.

• 31:37Speaker 02

  2024. So by about 2028, a lot of the systems will be degrading, especially the solar panels, which are getting pinged by this micro debris all the time.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when we deorbit that, does the, who puts a new one up there? When do we do that?

• 31:52Speaker 02

  You know, that's a great question. And so there's this big, what is going to happen to low Earth orbit?

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  After the space station? Is it going, you know, if you talk to NASA, they would like it to be the commercial, the private sector that moves in, private space stations, a place for, you know, private company, space companies, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Orbital ATK. Let's find the private sector going, going to low Earth orbit.

• 32:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As imagined in the film 2001. All, there was Howard Johnson's up there, Pan Am ran the shuttle. Pan Am, for those of the younger of our audience.

• 32:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A former airline company.

• 32:26Chuck Nice?

  It's the, it's the virgin America before America was a virgin.

• 32:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, that's good. Basically what it was.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  If you really, if you really get underneath that, NASA spends about $3 billion a year on the International Space Station. And if we want to send humans to Mars, we want to take that $3 billion and start, start building what will be the Mars transfer vehicle, what humans will go in on that journey to Mars. If, if they have to keep spending it on the space station, there's not going to be no money to go, to go beyond low Earth orbit.

• 32:56Chuck Nice?

  Can we just have another $3 billion?

• 32:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's our look ahead.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  That would be a great solution, wouldn't it? Then we wouldn't have to worry about this. But as it is, there's not enough money to do both right now. There is not. So NASA's budget plans for moving humans to Mars count on the space station budget. Declining through the mid 2020s and zeroing out in the late 2020s.

• 33:18Chuck Nice?

  So now, because, and, okay, I'm sorry, I have to ask this. Since you were there, and this all sounds highly political to me because you're talking about budgetary issues, but isn't there a way to take the billions of dollars that are going into Lockheed Martin, making a fighter jet that we do not need, or tanks that we are building that the government, that the, I'm sorry, the military has said, "We do not want them," but yet because it's a jobs program, we have to make them anyway.

• 33:55Chuck Nice?

  Couldn't we just find a way to shift this money over to NASA so that, I mean, it, there's clearly inherent benefits and discovery and technological advances that will be wrought from going to Mars as opposed to a tank that we're never going to use because we're never going to fight conventional warfare again. We now have nuclear wars. Anybody we're going to fight is going to have a nuclear warhead too, so we're not going to do that. So why can't we just find a way to politically get the senator or the congressman to say, "Hey, look, we'll give you the money, you just got to build whatever you're going to build over in my district." Chuck Nice, 2020.

• 34:36Speaker 02

  I was going to say, are you ready to go up there and make America appreciate science more again? I can't remember your, uh...

• 34:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make America smart again.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  There we go, there we go.

• 34:49Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, but, I mean, what is the process at NASA to, to, to talk to these people?

• 34:53Speaker 02

  Well, you know, NASA can't lobby Congress. That's not actually allowed. So outside supporters can talk to NASA.

• 35:02Chuck Nice?

  I am flabbergasted.

• 35:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  NASA can't even advertise.

• 35:05Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, no, that's not, that's not allowed.

• 35:07Chuck Nice?

  You guys are killing me. Are you kidding me?

• 35:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, just to be clear. What the military does...

• 35:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When they have TV commercials during the Super Bowl is not, that's not technically marketing. They're recruiting. Yeah, they're recruiting.

• 35:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 35:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what happened was, when I was on one of my commissions, we were approached by an ad agency that wanted to create sort of public service spots for NASA to recruit.

• 35:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To recruit scientists and engineers, in the spirit of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines recruiting.

• 35:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that way you can justify commercial time for it. And there's some of the most beautiful commercials I've ever seen, and it was just, the tradition to do that is just not there.

• 35:51Chuck Nice?

  God.

• 35:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, yeah.

• 35:53Chuck Nice?

  That is so sad. It's almost as if our government has stacked the debt against what we should be doing.

• 35:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, it, but, it, it sounds good the way it is, but imagine that in a limit where it's out of control. Because, all it says is, "We taxpayers elect officials who then establish budgets for agencies." The agency can't then market itself. To ask for more budget. To ask for more budget.

• 36:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 36:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because it's a completely external activity from it.

• 36:24Chuck Nice?

  I understand that.

• 36:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's, that's why.

• 36:26Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense.

• 36:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And while it won't feel good that NASA should be able to do it, in the limit, you don't really want that happening.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Okay, I got you.

• 36:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In my government, that's all.

• 36:33Chuck Nice?

  No, that makes sense. Because, yeah, I don't want, I don't want the Agriculture Department doing the same thing.

• 36:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want just NASA to do it.

• 36:40Chuck Nice?

  Right. I only want NASA to be able to do it.

• 36:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're gonna take a quick break. When we come back, more Cosmic Queries in the "Let's Make America Smart Again" edition of StarTalk. We'll be back with Ellen Stofan, former chief scientist at NASA. Not the lowly scientist, we're talking about the chief. The chief, that's the chief. When we return.

• 37:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. I serve as the Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City, if you didn't otherwise know that. In any case, I'm your personal astrophysicist. We've been talking with Ellen Stofan, former Chief Scientist of NASA, very just former.

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Just former.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, minutes ago practically.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Six months.

• 37:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Six months ago.

• 37:41Speaker 02

  Six minutes between.

• 37:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Between, on a cosmic scale, it's yesterday. And I got Chuck Nice, of course, doing cosmic queries.

• 37:48Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 37:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we're thinking about the future of NASA in this "Let's Make America Smart Again" edition of StarTalk. So, what do you have?

• 37:56Chuck Nice?

  Alright, so this is, um, L. I. H., I think. L. I. H., okay? Right.

• 38:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck!

• 38:08Chuck Nice?

  God! I think these people are making these names up and just sending them in to screw me, man. Alright, L...

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Not everybody can be named Chuck.

• 38:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, this is true.

• 38:18Chuck Nice?

  Monosyllabic, it's super simple.

• 38:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck!

• 38:23Chuck Nice?

  Um, anyway, um, who will get to Mars first? Who will get a human to Mars first? That's, that's all they want to know, is, because clearly...

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Earthlings.

• 38:35Chuck Nice?

  Earthlings. It's a great question.

• 38:40Speaker 02

  You know, I...

• 38:41Chuck Nice?

  Here's, here's the real question. Has it become like a space race? Have we started a space race again?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  No, I don't think we have. And, and you know, again, I think people like to have a rhetoric around there being a space race, but, but I don't think there is. So, for Mars, again, Mars is hard. It's not easy, it's not impossible, but it's hard. So, I think when we get humans to Mars, you're gonna see it, you're gonna have people from multiple space agencies, you're gonna have public-private partnerships involved. Now, you could turn that question around for the moon, and that, I think, is a valid question, because there's a lot of talk about bases on the moon, commercial exploitation of the moon, and whether that happens or not, boy, I'm curious about that. Is it going to be China putting humans on the moon? Is it going to be Russia finally putting humans on the moon? Is it going to be a private company? And I'm leaning towards a private

• 39:31Speaker 02

  company doing it. And so, I think that's a debatable question. Mars, it's going to be an international coalition with, hopefully, NASA taking the lead.

• 39:39Chuck Nice?

  So, does it help to, because everybody talks about a moon base, does it help us get to Mars? Is it easier for us to get to Mars from the moon than it is for us to get to Mars from here? So, in other words, could the moon be a staging place to launch, to go to Mars?

• 39:59Speaker 02

  It's a great staging place, because if you think about it, you're going to need a multiple module vehicle to get to Mars, because you want to always have multiple modules in case something goes wrong with one of the modules. You can seal it off and still have a safe place to retreat to. So, it's going to be something big that you're going to have to assemble on orbit. Why not do that out in orbit around the moon, where you can use a lunar gravity assist to get you ready to go to Mars? So, staging from lunar orbit makes sense from a gravitational assist point of view, as well as just, you're going to have to stage somewhere, why not do it there?

• 40:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear, you're not talking about staging from the lunar surface, which requires landing and then ascending again?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah. Staging from the lunar surface really doesn't make any sense, because it's different technology to land on the moon. Moon doesn't have an atmosphere, so you'd have to develop all these technologies specifically to land on the moon, because frankly, all those things we developed for Apollo are basically gone at this point. We'd have to sort of start all over again. So, that's a whole lot of money.

• 41:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's hilarious. They closed down the soundstage.

• 41:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so I agree with you, but for different reasons. I think we need to remind ourselves what it is to leave low Earth orbit. And the moon becomes a very easy target that you can get to in a news cycle, right? There's just a few days. How you doing? Good. You don't get bored with the trip. Everybody there, how you doing? You land in four days. You come back for dinner Sunday night. And so this, I think we have to remind ourselves what that's like.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And without that, to just say, we haven't been out of low Earth orbit in forty years, now let's go to Mars. That doesn't sound wise to me, that's all.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  It's not wise. And it also takes us out into what we call a mixed field radiation environment where we really don't have a lot of experience. You're getting solar radiation from the sun, and you're getting galactic cosmic radiation.

• 41:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Normally shielded when we stay near to the Earth.

• 42:02Speaker 02

  Exactly. Exactly. So to have a couple of years out in that mixed field radiation environment where we can do some experiments with tissues, with cells, with model organisms like fruit flies to make sure, let's make sure we really understand the effects before we send humans all the way to Mars, eight months exposed to that radiation on the way there, eight months on the way back.

• 42:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah. So it reminds me of a joke by Dick Gregory that he told back in the sixties. Back in the sixties. It was hilarious. On the point of what effect does this radiation have on biological tissue? Right. He said, when the chimp came back from space? Right. And everyone was cheering? Right. And they said, no, I wasn't cheering, because I know that that was an actual astronaut they sent up.

• 42:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what happened. When you go into space, you come out looking like a chimp.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  Well, you know, when we first sent things up into space, we had no idea what the effects would be. After all this experience on the space station, we now know, and we've worked on the ISS, you know, people say, what are those astronauts doing up there? They're actually helping us find ways to keep humans healthy for that journey to Mars, the journey back to Mars. But the one thing we still have a lot of worries about is this radiation issue. And it's not, it's not something we can't, we can't work with, but we still need to know more about it.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah. And to the people who say, oh, we will never go to Mars because of the radiation, all I'm gonna say is, Mars is not as big of a challenge to us today.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As the moon was in nineteen sixty.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 43:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, think about that.

• 43:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's true, because we went to the moon basically with the computing power of a Texas instrument calculator.

• 43:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Less than that.

• 43:42Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:43Chuck Nice?

  I was making a joke.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 43:45Chuck Nice?

  No, I was for real.

• 43:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's like, like, a singing greeting card or something.

• 43:49Chuck Nice?

  You're kidding me.

• 43:50Speaker 02

  Nah, someone was saying the other day, this flipped me out, that the Voyager spacecraft has about as much computer smarts as something in your pocket. Your car key.

• 44:00Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  Because everyone instantly thinks your cellphone.

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  Your cellphone, right, but it's your car key. You're kidding me.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The key fob on your, of your car.

• 44:08Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my god.

• 44:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:09Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, that's, now that is fascinating, that is mind blowing right there. All right, here's John Cates from Facebook, thank you, John, for having a simple name.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's just helping, yeah.

• 44:20Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, right, I'm sure.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  He changed his name.

• 44:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He changed it just for you.

• 44:25Chuck Nice?

  John wants to know this, does NASA have any space capable drones?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Space capable drones?

• 44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  These would be drone rockets, I guess.

• 44:33Chuck Nice?

  Drone rockets.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All drones we know require air for buoyancy.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  Right, and all our spacecraft are robotically controlled.

• 44:41Chuck Nice?

  So they're drones anyway.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  So they're all kind of drones anyway.

• 44:44Chuck Nice?

  Good answer.

• 44:45Speaker 02

  Most of what we do is robotically remotely controlled.

• 44:48Chuck Nice?

  So pretty much all of NASA is space capable drones?

• 44:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So drone is the, is everyone else's first encounter with a remote controlled autonomous thing.

• 45:01Speaker 02

  Now, what he may be asking about, and I'm going to make his question into maybe not the question he wanted, was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory is working on a helicopter for Mars that you can think of as being like a drone that would, would fly here on Earth, and a group from the Applied Physics Lab has, has proposed to one of the NASA mission programs to send a, basically a quadcopter to Titan, Saturn's moon.

• 45:28Speaker 02

  So people have been proposing to use drone like, you know, what we would think of for drones here in Earth's atmospheres to go explore planets with atmospheres.

• 45:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if you send a remote control helicopter to Mars, first it would need really big rotor blades because the atmosphere is so thin. But now you want to remote control it, you got issues. What are the issues?

• 45:46Speaker 02

  The big issue is there's about a 20, it depends on how far away Earth and Mars are, but you have an inherent, relative to each other, but we have an inherent up to kind of 20 minute to a half hour one-way trip time for a command.

• 45:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  So you send a command, yeah, it's just, nothing can be done about it. I have audiences all the time saying, can you fix that? Um, no. And then they'll say, no, really? Can't you fix it?

• 46:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  No, it's called the speed of light. No, I can't fix that.

• 46:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not just a good idea, it's the law.

• 46:15Speaker 02

  Exactly. Can't fix that. So you have to have basically computer program sequences to command it. There's no real time joystick.

• 46:23Chuck Nice?

  And this is where AI comes into play.

• 46:26Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:26Chuck Nice?

  Because you would have to equip the drone with the capability of recognizing terrain and situations and then be capable of making decisions on its own.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  AI gets to Mars and you say, um, do you need my help? No, we got this.

• 46:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, because they're really...

• 46:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm good, I'm good. We good, right, we good, we good.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  So think of it for humans, because now all of a sudden, Houston, we have a problem, and you're gonna wait 20 minutes and you'll hear back, what? Or, you know, can you clarify? There's no, there's none of that. So you really do need AI. You need friendly how, as I call it.

• 47:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'd be twice 20 minutes, right?

• 47:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, yeah.

• 47:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's 20 minutes there, 20 minutes there, so it's a 45 minute.

• 47:06Chuck Nice?

  So basically, AI is, Houston, we had a problem, but it's all taken care of.

• 47:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, we solved it.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. And just think of that, though, on the other side, for human mental health. You haven't seen your family in seven months and you call your spouse and you say, honey, how are you doing? And 20 minutes later, you hear, or sorry, 40 minutes later, you hear, what?

• 47:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh no, that's my marriage right now.

• 47:28Chuck Nice?

  I ain't got a way to go to Mars. That's about my household. Every morning.

• 47:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's no witty repartee when you're

• 47:36Speaker 02

  They're not ignoring you. They're just focused on something else.

• 47:39Chuck Nice?

  And there is nothing, right, and like you say, that's the speed of light. So there, there is no subspace communicate. That's why people ask you, can you fix it? They're all Star Trek fans like myself and they want to know, how do I get subspace communications where I can talk to somebody in real time across a galaxy?

• 47:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's no episode of Star Trek where there's a time delay between communication.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  No, there's not.

• 48:00Chuck Nice?

  Right. Okay.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  That always makes me nervous.

• 48:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  One more question.

• 48:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay. All right. All right. All right. With all the buzz about Mars, because we've been talking about it, you're open and enceladus. Does NASA have any interest in looking towards the inner planets like Mercury or Venus? And I know you used to study Venus.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Oh, man, yeah. Dr. Funky Spoon and I are old Venus pals.

• 48:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Funky Spoon, one of our, our Star Trek All-Stars.

• 48:21Speaker 02

  So Venus is the Earth gone bad. A lot of the times we refer to it as the Earth's evil twin.

• 48:28Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  So made of about the same material.

• 48:31Chuck Nice?

  What's wrong with you? I just fell in love with Venus. It's like Venus is the Earth gone bad. You stay with Venus.

• 48:39Chuck Nice?

  But I love Venus. I can't stay with Venus.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  You sound like David.

• 48:46Speaker 02

  So the, the problem is here you've got this planet that again, started out in about the same place in the solar system, made of the same stuff. It's like you put two chocolate cake mixes in the oven and one came out chocolate and one came out lemon in the end. Now, this is important because you could say, well, who cares that Venus went down this alternate path where it's 900 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface, there's a runaway greenhouse. Well, we're starting, you know, in the last couple of years, we found over 3,000 planets around other stars with our Kepler Space Telescope. And what we're looking for is Earth 2.0, this habitable planet around another star. So this makes us even more curious about Venus. You had kind of multiple chances in our solar system at habitable planets. Only the Earth was able to maintain long-term habitability.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  Venus might've had an early ocean, lost it. All the, its CO2 is in its atmosphere. It has a runaway greenhouse. Why? How hard is it to make Earth 2.0? Venus can help us figure that out.

• 49:42Chuck Nice?

  Amen. That's pretty damn cool, I gotta say. God.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  Venus is way cool. It's the ignored planet of our solar system.

• 49:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, love me some Venus. It's beautiful in the evening and morning sky.

• 49:54Speaker 02

  It is.

• 49:55Chuck Nice?

  Jason Degusman wants to know this. What NASA project that is canceled that you wish would be revived? Damn good question, Jason!

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Easy, easy. My Titan boat proposal. I proposed to send a floating probe to a sea at the north pole of one of Saturn's moons to find out is there anything living in that alien sea. Someday it will fly.

• 50:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is an ocean of liquid methane.

• 50:19Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 50:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Methane, the gas that comes out of a household stove.

• 50:23Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 50:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And...

• 50:24Chuck Nice?

  If you say so.

• 50:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Comes out of other places.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  Other places.

• 50:30Chuck Nice?

  We'll go with stove.

• 50:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll go with stove.

• 50:32Chuck Nice?

  We'll go with stove.

• 50:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the suburbs, it might be propane, but typically in cities, it's methane.

• 50:36Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 50:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The simplest of the hydrocarbons, if I remember correctly.

• 50:39Speaker 02

  CH4.

• 50:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  CH4. And it's got an H in four directions. It's a beautiful molecule, actually.

• 50:46Chuck Nice?

  Only you would say that.

• 50:50Chuck Nice?

  This is when I know I am hanging with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now, that's a beautiful molecule, I must say. Then he turns the magazine long and pulls down another panel. And it's like, oh, look at that CH4. Oh, yeah.

• 51:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, but it's normally, it's gaseous in our lives, but if you drop the temperature, you liquefy it.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 51:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, and so...

• 51:16Speaker 02

  So it's basically seas of liquid gasoline and totally exotic, very cold. We don't know if there could be life. It wouldn't probably be life like life here on Earth.

• 51:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because maybe life doesn't require liquid water. Maybe it just requires liquid.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, and Titan's the place to go to answer that question.

• 51:33Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 51:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it got, wait, but it got canceled, so...

• 51:36Speaker 02

  It didn't get selected. We were one of the final three missions for a Discovery selection, and they instead picked a mission to Mars called the Insight, which will launch next year, which will land a seismometer on the surface.

• 51:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's, it's, it's still out, I mean, the idea is still floating?

• 51:52Speaker 02

  The idea is, the idea is still floating. The problem is complicated, but it's basically dark at Titan's poles during Titan winter, and the sea, the big seas are all at the north pole. It'll be dark at the North Pole from about the mid 2020s to the early 2030s. So there's no point in going in the dark.

• 52:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you lost your window?

• 52:11Speaker 02

  We lost our window.

• 52:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. All right. Oh, well. Don't keep.

• 52:15Speaker 02

  Oh, well.

• 52:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's still gonna be there.

• 52:16Speaker 02

  It'll be there.

• 52:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll be there.

• 52:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll be too old, but you know, it'll be there.

• 52:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's all right. But we'll know it was your dream when it happens.

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 52:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And if we continue to train the next generation of people to become scientists and engineers, or as a minimum, to embrace what scientists and engineers do, then this is a recipe to assure that America will become smart once again. Yes. Well, let's, let's please hope. No, no, no, hope. Hope is what you have when you've confessed you have no impact on the outcome. Right. Well, there you go. That's a, no, that's very good. Right, right, right. Okay. Right. Hope and prayer, that's what you do when you're not in control. Exactly. Okay, so I'm saying, let's get in control, then no, you don't have to hope, you don't have to pray. There you go.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  And when you look at all the people who've been shut out of STEM for so long, and that if we now can get those kids involved in STEM, we're gonna have a much larger, more innovative, more creative STEM workforce than we've ever had before.

• 53:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science, technology, engineering, and math. There you go. You got it. STEM. You've been watching, and possibly only listening, to StarTalk, Let's Make America Smart Again Edition with Cosmic Queries, and I've had Ellen Stolten. Thank you, Ellen, multiple times on StarTalk. And always great to have you, get your insider insights into past, present, and future of NASA.

• 53:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Welcome. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and today, we're gonna talk about... Interstellar space travel and what it's like to settle on an exoplanet. And we're inspired by the YouTube series Origin, which does just that. Except they have a badass planet that they go to. But anyhow, to think about this problem meaningfully, we have Shayna Gifford. Shayna, welcome.

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Thank you, Neil.

• 54:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, an astronaut on Earth who actually experimented under conditions that would resemble a colony settlement on Mars.

• 54:31Speaker 03

  Potentially, potentially, although hopefully with more people.

• 54:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With more people than just a few that you did. We'll get to that in a minute. We'll make sure I introduce Chuck. Nice.

• 54:38Chuck Nice?

  Hey, that's right.

• 54:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for coming, Chuck.

• 54:40Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure to be here.

• 54:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 54:41Chuck Nice?

  We think about things meaningfully with Shayna and we think about things frivolously.

• 54:47Speaker 03

  With Chuck.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With Chuck. So Shayna is our lever of gravity. Chuck is our lever of levity.

• 54:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh, all of you can make me sound that poetic.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  But you're the fulcrum. You're in the wrong spot.

• 55:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, the fulcrum between the gravity and the levity. So we want to make sure we explore what it is to survive long space voyages. What is it to, do you bring stuff to your planet? Do you use the resources? What's it like to survive there physically, emotionally?

• 55:18Speaker 03

  Psychologically.

• 55:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Psychologically, yeah.

• 55:21Chuck Nice?

  Out of my head.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  It's crowded, man. I'm staying here.

• 55:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All of this. So tell me about Hi-C's four. What is that? I see your patch, it's right there.

• 55:31Speaker 03

  Yes, one of the, this is a beautiful patch designed by my very talented crewmate Tristan.

• 55:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is beautiful.

• 55:36Speaker 03

  It is, it is gorgeous. The Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation.

• 55:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I see the flags of participating countries?

• 55:44Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 55:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the UK, I guess, and United States.

• 55:48Speaker 03

  France and Germany.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  France and Germany. Very nice. Yeah, okay. So what, what, what happened there?

• 55:53Speaker 03

  Well, I'll tell you what didn't happen.

• 55:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you survive? Did you die?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  We didn't die. That's exactly what did not happen. Importantly, the same six people came out as went in. Very important. The same six.

• 56:03Chuck Nice?

  Worst Thunderdome ever. Six people entered.

• 56:06Speaker 03

  Same, same six.

• 56:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, they tell you, one of my favorite Dick Gregory jokes, back in the 60s when the space program was first coming along, one of the Mercury capsules came back with the chimp.

• 56:18Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 56:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he said, what NASA wasn't telling anybody is that that went up as an astronaut. Came back as a chip. So six humans go in, six humans come out. Very good to know.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Right.

• 56:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, what, so what else happened?

• 56:31Speaker 03

  The same six.

• 56:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And where was this?

• 56:34Speaker 03

  On the slopes of Mount Aloa, a sacred volcano on the, on the big island of Hawaii.

• 56:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And is that one of those slopes that's very rocky and it's, it looks like the surface of Mars?

• 56:43Speaker 03

  Quite a lot, yes.

• 56:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about the challenges.

• 56:46Speaker 03

  Of being locked in a dome with five other people, seeing no one else for a year, speaking to no one else for a year.

• 56:52Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like a pretty cool reality show.

• 56:56Chuck Nice?

  Let's see what happens when we put five people in a biosphere and see what, when they get real.

• 57:02Speaker 03

  Pretty much from minute two, minute one, it was really quiet. Minute two, the dance party started.

• 57:07Chuck Nice?

  Cool.

• 57:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what happened? So you, is all the food, you have to grow your own food or?

• 57:11Speaker 03

  We did a little bit of that. There was not enough space to grow food.

• 57:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The cheetos come in through a, through a hatch?

• 57:16Speaker 03

  Please, Pringles.

• 57:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pringles.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yes, space is at a premium in space. Sadly, we did not have enough space to grow all our own food. I actually cultured it. I made the cheese and the yogurt.

• 57:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. So that means you brought in bacteria?

• 57:30Speaker 03

  We did.

• 57:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You were not alone. There was six of you.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  We were very much not alone. Plus everything that was in the bathrooms.

• 57:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Trillions of bacteria.

• 57:39Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right. Sounds like you guys needed a maid.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  This is where artificial intelligence comes in. No sentient being wants to clean those bathrooms.

• 57:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Some for breathe.

• 57:50Speaker 03

  Indeed.

• 57:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this was to simulate what? What, what are you trying to do there?

• 57:55Speaker 03

  Life on Mars. Part of the 21 month round trip. You're going to go there for nine months. You're going to spend some time. You spend nine months coming back.

• 58:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, but you still have earth gravity. So you're really simulating a trip anywhere of that length.

• 58:07Speaker 03

  Well, anywhere of that length with earth gravity and earth air pressure. But the air pressure and the gravity were beside the point. The point was how did we psychologically deal with the isolation and the confinement? That was the point.

• 58:17Chuck Nice?

  So now for the, for the entire experiment here on the, on the slope of this volcano, the, the people were alone? Like they never had any outside contact?

• 58:25Speaker 03

  Just us. Anytime we wanted to call home, phone home, 20 minute delay on the way to home, 20 minute delay on the way back. World's most boring Skype conversation.

• 58:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No witty repartee. Yeah, so the light travel time.

• 58:38Chuck Nice?

  So you can't be in love, like, you know?

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Oh, no, no.

• 58:41Chuck Nice?

  No, I love you.

• 58:42Speaker 03

  Oh, that, that was actually me and, that was me and my husband for 366 days. No, I love you more. No.

• 58:50Speaker 03

  The next day, no.

• 58:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they artificially put in the time delay that you would experience being on Mars?

• 58:55Speaker 03

  That you would experience, kind of at the longest, 20, 22 minutes is the long, well, technically infinite is the longest when Mars goes on the other side of the sun and blacks out for a little while, but the longest you would functionally have would be around 20 minutes.

• 59:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, so really you got for any meaningful, intense conversation is with your other five folk.

• 59:13Speaker 03

  Well, my husband and I did our best with video. You do your best.

• 59:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Video.

• 59:17Speaker 03

  But, yeah, the true life experience.

• 59:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, Chuck.

• 59:19Speaker 03

  No, Chuck, no, no, no, no.

• 59:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come down, Chuck.

• 59:23Chuck Nice?

  All right, okay. You're killing me. You are killing me.

• 59:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, so let's get back to the interpersonal psychological dimension of this.

• 59:35Speaker 03

  Sure, sure.

• 59:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, did people start going crazy after a while? How long was this episode?

• 59:41Speaker 03

  366 day long episode.

• 59:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 59:44Chuck Nice?

  So, in origin, what is more important when you compare it to your experiment? More important to have people get along, or like in terms of personality meshing?

• 59:55Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 59:55Chuck Nice?

  Or to have something to do? Because they were trying to solve a mystery. So everybody was focused on this mystery that they had to solve.

• 1:00:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's no longer interpersonal, it's just a common other goal?

• 1:00:06Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. We all have a goal now. Is what's more important? Is it better to have people that, personality wise, get along, or better to keep everybody busy?

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  Well, I think the mission makes people get along.

• 1:00:18Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 1:00:19Speaker 03

  You know, one drives the other. So you're all there with a common goal, makes things happen, the common goal, survive, solve the mystery, whatever interpersonal stuff you had going on before that, tends to fade away because you got to solve the mystery.

• 1:00:30Chuck Nice?

  Interesting.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  Got to get in the kitchen.

• 1:00:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a restoring force to the interpersonal dynamic.

• 1:00:36Speaker 03

  It's a catalyzing force.

• 1:00:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Catalyzing.

• 1:00:38Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:00:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very nice.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  A sustaining force.

• 1:00:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you have a common enemy. The common enemy is the things that wants to kill you all.

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  That would be space.

• 1:00:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:45Speaker 03

  And everything in it.

• 1:00:48Chuck Nice?

  I've got to tell you, you are not a good advertising for interstellar travel.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  Only the strong Chuck.

• 1:00:56Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:00:56Speaker 03

  Only the strong. Antarctica. That, you know, it's not, it's not giving you a warm hug.

• 1:01:01Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:01:01Speaker 03

  Right? You're rolling in there with your tools and your homies. You're making it happen.

• 1:01:04Chuck Nice?

  See, I'm going to interstellar travel when they have a W that as doubles as a spaceship.

• 1:01:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A W hotel.

• 1:01:12Chuck Nice?

  A W hotel that doubles as a spaceship and you wake up at noon and have pancakes.

• 1:01:16Speaker 03

  Chuck is going to space only when room service is available. Bigelow is building a hotel for you Chuck.

• 1:01:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these distances are quite large. So if I understand, say, five light years.

• 1:01:28Chuck Nice?

  Five light years from Earth.

• 1:01:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So if you go at the speed of the very fastest spaceships we've ever launched, it would take you 70,000 years to get there. Yeah. So it is incommensurate with human physiology.

• 1:01:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay, so.

• 1:01:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so let's try to go faster now. So tell me about solar, solar, solar sails.

• 1:01:50Speaker 03

  Solar sails will look great when you're near a star.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  So when. Yes. And the interstellar bit, it can get a bit hairy. You might want some other form of propulsion along for the ride.

• 1:02:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or you'd have to be really fertile.

• 1:02:07Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:02:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because they'd be a generational ship.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  As you go.

• 1:02:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:02:11Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah.

• 1:02:12Chuck Nice?

  Now.

• 1:02:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd be pissed off if I were born and they said, you're just here to carry on to the, till you die.

• 1:02:18Speaker 03

  You're generation number 20.

• 1:02:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know.

• 1:02:20Speaker 03

  And we're going to generation 5000.

• 1:02:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If I learn that. I'd be hurting somebody on the ship.

• 1:02:26Chuck Nice?

  Wait a minute. You mean I'm a placeholder?

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 1:02:28Chuck Nice?

  Until we get where we're going.

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  You're a cog in the machine.

• 1:02:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Until someone else gets where this is supposed to go.

• 1:02:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:02:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So these are challenges.

• 1:02:34Speaker 03

  They are.

• 1:02:35Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you this then. So they were using solar sails and they also had some kind of propulsion system as well.

• 1:02:41Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 1:02:42Chuck Nice?

  But what if you were, that that propulsion system got you towards, close to the speed of light?

• 1:02:50Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:02:51Chuck Nice?

  Okay. And then now you're just looking at basically five years, but would you still not age at that, at that point?

• 1:03:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. If you do, if you do the math, it's five years for us watching you go there, but it's not five years for you.

• 1:03:06Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:03:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's much less time.

• 1:03:08Chuck Nice?

  Much less time.

• 1:03:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Depending on how close to the speed of light you hit. You go 90% the speed of light. I'd have to run the math, but you could end up living three years or two years rather than five.

• 1:03:18Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 1:03:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, and you do it at near the speed of light? Takes you a couple hours.

• 1:03:24Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:03:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, but the problem is, by the time you come back, you know, you're maybe a year older and everyone else is twenty years older, thirty years old, and everyone would have forgotten about you.

• 1:03:36Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we also care that the planet is in a Goldilocks zone.

• 1:03:39Chuck Nice?

  It is.

• 1:03:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, but, you don't have to actually be in a Goldilocks zone.

• 1:03:44Chuck Nice?

  True.

• 1:03:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay? Goldilocks zone where you're not too close.

• 1:03:47Chuck Nice?

  To the sun and not too far away.

• 1:03:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Water evaporates, not too far away, it freezes, because a programmed greenhouse effect.

• 1:03:54Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:03:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can heat your planet, even though you would otherwise be farther away than the Goldilocks zone. You trap your heat. The Goldilocks zone is a calculation.

• 1:04:03Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:04:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Assuming that you sort of radiate all the energy that hits you.

• 1:04:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:04:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you trap some of that energy, you can boost your temperature a little higher.

• 1:04:14Chuck Nice?

  Right, so, okay, so you wouldn't, you don't have to exactly be in the, in the space that is just right.

• 1:04:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a nice ref- it's a reference.

• 1:04:20Chuck Nice?

  It's a reference.

• 1:04:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a reference standard, yeah.

• 1:04:22Speaker 03

  There's a buffer on, on either side.

• 1:04:23Chuck Nice?

  Right. So now, here's the thing. This Thia, the, which is the planet, right, is, um, I, I, I would say, think of, um, think of Fiji or Tahiti.

• 1:04:35Speaker 03

  It's the Caribbean.

• 1:04:36Chuck Nice?

  It's the Caribbean.

• 1:04:37Speaker 03

  Of the extrasolar planet.

• 1:04:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes, solar planet. It's the Caribbean exoplanet, alright? It's gorgeous. So like, uh, where would that be in the Goldilocks zone? Or would it make a difference?

• 1:04:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Smack dabbing.

• 1:04:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what, what you also wanna know is, it's one thing for a planet to be there, but other things affect your climate. Like, what is the tip of the axis of the planet? What is the shape of the orbit? Oh, does it spend time very close to the host star, very far away? So how elliptical is the orbit? All of this factors in. When you factor all that in for Earth, you get an ice ages.

• 1:05:12Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:05:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called the Malinkovich.

• 1:05:14Chuck Nice?

  The Malinkovich, that's right, yeah.

• 1:05:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so, uh, in fact, civilization on Earth, as we've come to know it and love it, rose up at relatively stable climatic, uh, conduct for, for Earth over the last ten thousand years. Relatively stable. There had been an ice age the whole time.

• 1:05:33Chuck Nice?

  But, but, but, but we, you know, that, that means nothing for us. We're human beings. We don't care. You know what I mean? We kill something and put it around our bodies and say, all right, forget winter.

• 1:05:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's the thing. Here's, here's what I can imagine a future. Here's a future I want. Ready? It doesn't matter what the exoplanet is. You just bring in the machines that terraform it. Whatever the hell you want it to be. You want the Caribbean? There it is.

• 1:05:56Speaker 03

  You got the Caribbean?

• 1:05:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got the Caribbean.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  You like New York City?

• 1:05:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got, you want New York? Make it New York. The, the climate or the, you want the Sahara because you want to like, you know, make it the Sahara. And what would be cool is if you could do that on a short timescale, so then your planet is your playpen.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  You want tailor-made universe?

• 1:06:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tailor-made planets. I'm liking it now.

• 1:06:15Chuck Nice?

  Very, very cool.

• 1:06:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go into business.

• 1:06:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forget the holodeck from Star Trek. We get the real deck, right?

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  We're gonna leave this life of science and crime and go make planets.

• 1:06:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, uh, solar sails, can they get you there in a short amount of time? The acceleration is not very...

• 1:06:33Speaker 03

  They'll help you speed up and possibly slow down, but they, they alone will not get you there in a short amount of time. No.

• 1:06:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. It takes a long time to speed up.

• 1:06:39Speaker 03

  What you could do is, is put out your solar sail and then use lasers to, to speed up. The way that the Starshot program wants to do.

• 1:06:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but the lasers can't be on your ship, otherwise they...

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  No, they, these would be fired from Earth or Moon or some, something else.

• 1:06:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw a cartoon when I was a kid and the, the, just the character was in a sailboat. The sailboat wasn't going anywhere, so he just pulled out a fan and then boom.

• 1:07:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I thought to myself, no, I, I, even though I hadn't taken physics yet, I said, something's not right there. If that were, if that could work?

• 1:07:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Holy, whoa.

• 1:07:11Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly. If that could work, the world would have been discovered a long time.

• 1:07:14Speaker 03

  There's, there is, there is a slight version of that that might work. If you, if, as you're going through space, you pull matter in the front of your ship and spit it out the back, that will also...

• 1:07:22Chuck Nice?

  Warp engine though, right?

• 1:07:23Speaker 03

  That's called, no.

• 1:07:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's...

• 1:07:24Speaker 03

  Ion propulsion. Ion propulsion, so you...

• 1:07:26Chuck Nice?

  Space and time is warp.

• 1:07:27Speaker 03

  You pull matter in the front, you stick it out the back and, so yeah. Use what you find in C2 resource utilization.

• 1:07:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about that now. So, uh, ISRU. Uh, you can't guarantee that every planet's gonna have everything you need.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 1:07:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you gotta bring the Cheetos with you.

• 1:07:40Speaker 03

  You definitely don't want to leave home without those.

• 1:07:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you have to be picky as you pick your plant.

• 1:07:47Speaker 03

  Make sure there's water. You need to breathe. You need ah, you need fuel.

• 1:07:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oxygen.

• 1:07:51Speaker 03

  You need to feed the plants. Yeah, it's a good starting point.

• 1:07:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  H2O and O2. Right.

• 1:07:55Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To, that's a good starting point.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  At a bare minimum. Plus, anything you can put in a 3D printer that will make more stuff, that stuff is good too.

• 1:08:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So here's how you do it. You'd rank your needs based on how quickly you would die without it.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  So.

• 1:08:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good, I like that. So oxygen, you're dead in 10 minutes. Okay, we'd need that. You need that. That's number one. Water, you're dead in a week. Okay. Okay. I'm gonna make that number two. Food, you're dead in a month, two months. All right. Right, unless you were really fat and then you just sort of worked that out. Right. Hey, I'm down on my target weight. Thank goodness. This trip has been very successful. So it seems to me that's how you might prioritize that.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  You might. You also just might prioritize where you can talk back to Earth from. I mean, do you want to go away and never speak to anyone you've ever known again?

• 1:08:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like that, yes.

• 1:08:43Speaker 03

  You do. That's one of your major, major motivating factors. Okay, very good. Yeah, I mean, closer the better, right?

• 1:08:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, I suppose, but that's if, but I would think people who want to leave don't want to come back and don't care about who they left behind. When I think of the European explorers, they, and, and, and, uh, uh. The pilgrims. Pilgrims, that, do they care? What the hell's going back? I don't, back at home? I don't think so.

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  I mean, I think, I think.

• 1:09:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Many of them were persecuted. They just got the hell out.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  Many of them, including people to whom I was related. I think actually the point was to go make a place better inhabitable for the people you loved and left behind and bring them too. I mean, that's.

• 1:09:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The good old immigrant model. I was gonna say, we call that America.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  We do. And, and, and who, who make the best colonists, really? Are, are people who can go long distance, happy with not a lot of stuff, work really hard for not a lot of money, make life comfortable on not a lot.

• 1:09:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Those are the space colonists you want. And that's the point. There's a difference between astronauts who are professionals, who function in a very highly regulated environment, and we are trained to function in just that environment, and colonists who are there to build a world.

• 1:09:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they have to function in any environment that gets thrown at them.

• 1:09:54Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 1:09:57Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:09:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta end it there. Whoa, this is good.

• 1:10:01Speaker 03

  This is serious.

• 1:10:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like this. Can we like bring you back again for some stuff?

• 1:10:05Speaker 03

  Twist my arm, Chuck.

• 1:10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm twisting it. Oh!

• 1:10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very cool. I love talking to people who like try to like live in space because space kills you.

• 1:10:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anyway, this has been StarTalk and I've been your host Neil deGrasse Tyson. Thanks to Shayna Gifford. Thank you.

• 1:10:24Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:10:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. Chuck nice. Always a pleasure. As always, and I bid you to keep looking up.