Rocket City Rednecks

Get ready to blow up some stereotypes when Neil deGrasse Tyson meets aerospace engineer and Rocket City Redneck Travis S. Taylor. Co-hosted by Chuck Nice and guest starring Bill Nye the Science Guy.

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.

• 0:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I also serve as Director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History. And I got with me today Chuck Nice. Hey Neil. Chuck Nice Comic. That's right. That's your Twitter thing, everything. Everything. Chuck Nice Comic. All right. Thanks. Love you on the show. Thanks for coming, showing up for these things. Always my pleasure. And we have a special expert guest today. Yes, we do. He's sitting over to my side here. Yeah. He undid his tie, his bow tie. It is the one, the only Sir William Nice. Sir William Nice. I gave him the, it's my personal sir for him. I don't know if the Queen said that, but I. That's a matter of time. That's gonna happen. Thanks for coming.

• 0:58Bill Nye?

  Oh, no. No, no. It is I who must thank you. No, it's great to be here, you guys. Today we're talking rockets.

• 1:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It is rockets all the way because today we're gonna talk about the Rocket City Rednecks. And we have, who visited me in my office, Travis Taylor, one of the stars of Rocket City Rednecks. He's like, what the, what? Rockets. Now, by the way, this was a TV show that went two seasons on the National Geographic Channel, then got canceled. Oh. But it's in heavy reruns right now, and so maybe we can get this thing back. Yeah, a little revival. Rocket City revival.

• 1:37Bill Nye?

  Well, these guys that blow stuff up. What's not to love?

• 1:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find.

• 1:41Bill Nye?

  No, that's the premise of the bit.

• 1:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the premise is, they're these, so rednecks is now a term of endearment, I think, ever since the Redneck Comedy Tour. Right. And Jeff Foxworthy. And you know you're a redneck. Bill Enval. Right. And none of that was racist or anything. It was fun, self poke, you know, poking self fun. Exactly. So that, I think that gave the word redneck a little different kind of currency than when I grew up. Right.

• 2:07Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you guys might have a different view.

• 2:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, a little bit of a different.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A little different view, but that's okay. You know, times move on.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  Y'all ain't from around here, are you?

• 2:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it features people. Now Rocket City, Rocket City is Huntsville, Alabama. I don't know how many other people know that. That's where the Saturn V rocket was like designed and built for going to the moon.

• 2:32Bill Nye?

  You can take a train track from there to Cape Canaveral.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Straight, straight in. So that's where they bring the supplies. Cape Canaveral, Florida. So here we have some engineers who are home, homeboys, homebred, and now they just want to have fun. And, and Bill, yeah, it was a reality show for geeky southern rockets scientist engineers.

• 2:55Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 2:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a premise.

• 2:57Chuck Nice?

  Well, the, the thing is, it's a reality show. When you say geeky redneck scientist engineers, that totally smacks of fantasy.

• 3:08Bill Nye?

  Well, just we all have this perception. Now, look, my, I have family. I got family in Appalachia. I can, my nephew, this guy's my flesh and blood. I cannot understand him when he talks. With that said, we have a perception that people with southern accents are not rocket scientists.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the stick of the show.

• 3:28Bill Nye?

  But here they are.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Otherwise, you'd just be called Huntsville, Huntsville engineers, but it's Rocket City.

• 3:32Bill Nye?

  Ooh, Huntsville engineers. Man, turn it up loud.

• 3:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's go, let's go to our first clip. Travis Taylor, visiting me at the planetarium in my office.

• 3:42Speaker 03

  The production company was asking, well, what would we call it? And I said, well, we're in the Rocket City. It's gotta be Rocket City something. A lot of people in the country do not know that the rockets that went to the moon, like this Saturn V you've got over here in your office, was built in Huntsville, Alabama. And, and I said, you know, I've got it. We ought to call it Rocket City Rednecks. He says, well, I don't know if we can do that because people think redneck is a bad thing to call people. I said, well, no, no. Let me go through the historical origin of the phrase. I've found through historical analysis, at least three origins of the word redneck. But where it's pertinent to us is the southeastern United States, sharecroppers, farmers.

• 4:17Speaker 03

  All of the resources that they had on this farm and and they had to keep it going. Their family was there. If something went wrong, they had to fix it themselves with only the things they had available. On the spot, in situ. That's right. Out of the garage. That's exactly right, or the barn, in that case. And they had rednecks and farmer's tans, right? And so they became known as rednecks. And then, when we took the German rocket scientists from Pinamunda after World War II, they needed a place to go. They didn't really like white sands in New Mexico, and Werner von Braun saw. The Werner von Braun. The Werner von Braun saw North Alabama and said it reminded him of home. And they said, let's move here to the Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. You know, that Saturn V right

• 4:58Speaker 03

  there had something like 2 million parts. About 100 Germans came over for the rocket program. 100 guys are not going to build 2 million parts. It took 100 German rocket scientists and North Alabama full of rednecks to put that together, and that's where Rocket City rednecks came from. So we got to the moon on the sweat equity of rednecks. That's exactly right. That's exactly what I'm saying.

• 5:19Bill Nye?

  Wow.

• 5:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 5:23Bill Nye?

  There you have it, mate. See, look, notice that you guys are right into, you're playing right into it. There you go. Well, you can't help but talk like that. I say you guys, I meant y'all. Y'all, y'all.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're right. So Bill, that is the stick. I mean, you don't expect it, and they're that, and so there it is. I mean, that's how they.

• 5:39Bill Nye?

  So I, I used to work in an oil patch. I don't know if you know this. An oil patch? In the oil, in the oil field. Right. And there was a perception of my bosses in Seattle that people with southern accents weren't that sharp. That turns out not to be entirely accurate. Well, yes.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's the whole point of all this.

• 5:55Bill Nye?

  Have you guys ever been victimized by generalizations or? (laughing). Has that ever happened to you? Let me think. I'm gonna have to go back a little bit. For those listeners who are unfamiliar.

• 6:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we got Werner von Braun coming to.

• 6:08Bill Nye?

  Who's not African American.

• 6:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Simply the United States.

• 6:11Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 6:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But Alabama.

• 6:13Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 6:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To build, I mean, this, this could only happen in America, right? We have someone who was making V2 rockets.

• 6:19Bill Nye?

  The vengeance rocket.

• 6:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The vengeance to, vengeance rocket.

• 6:24Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For.

• 6:26Bill Nye?

  That's your, that's your German right there.

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's my German accent.

• 6:28Bill Nye?

  Vengeance.

• 6:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he leads this program. By the way, at the time, they knew that these kind of rockets would get you to the moon, or get you, if they get you off of Earth, wherever else they would take you. And so, we have, so a German rocket pioneer.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who was fought with the German army with his brain, comes over to the United States, is put in Alabama with the seat of the civil rights movement.

• 6:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then makes the Saturn V rocket for the United States to go to the moon ahead of Russia. America, what a country.

• 6:59Bill Nye?

  It is, no, it is remarkable. Say what else, you say what else, but that is remarkable.

• 7:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a country. Let's go to my next clip and find out what, is this, is it all in the family? What is it? Let's find out what, what his lineage goes.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  My daddy was a machinist for Warner Von Braun for, I think about six to eight years.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he's got stories.

• 7:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, oh, he's always got stories about.

• 7:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, folks like that got stories.

• 7:23Speaker 03

  Oh, he's got stories about mornings where Von Braun would come by and hand him blueprints and they would build something and they'd come back and lock them up at the safe at the end of the day. And there's one famous picture of Von Braun and a bunch of other famous scientists of the time and some politicians, and Von Braun's got a stick and he's pointing at parts of the Saturn V. And if you look in the very top right corner of the picture, there's a young twenty something year old guy, and it was my dad, and the reason my dad got to be in that meeting was because he built the model that Von Braun was using for the demo.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this, this is like fam- family lineage right here.

• 7:57Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know?

• 7:58Chuck Nice?

  I mean, well, that, I suppose that that becomes the family business.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the culture.

• 8:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the culture.

• 8:03Chuck Nice?

  Because, you know, it's a rocket town.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, the first time, did I tell you I'm like an adopted son of Huntsville? Did I, did I tell you that?

• 8:09Chuck Nice?

  Of Huntsville, Alabama?

• 8:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, I'll get back to that.

• 8:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll tell you.

• 8:13Bill Nye?

  You have a key to the city or something?

• 8:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'll tell you about that.

• 8:15Bill Nye?

  Do you have a valve to the rocket fuel? What have you got there?

• 8:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, because when, when Warner Von Braun came to Huntsville, which is just a, you know, sleepy southern town, it changed the town. It was, it, it transformed it into like an engineering center in the south.

• 8:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when I first visited Huntsville and I came off the airplane and I see the ads in the airport and it's aerospace and, and I said, this is, this is not, I'm not in Kansas.

• 8:40Bill Nye?

  They're not just selling cotton here.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's get a little more about that culture that he, that he experiences down there growing up with his pappy in Alabama.

• 8:50Speaker 03

  I actually built a phase switching interferometer when I was in the 11th grade.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were a redneck geek?

• 8:58Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, very much so. A phase switching interferometer is a radio telescope, like the type at the very large array out in New Mexico.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one that Jodie Foster?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, the one in Contact, right?

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To listen to aliens.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  And the idea there is you take multiple antennas and put them together to make a larger sort of antenna. And it won, you know, state level competitions and took me to national level competitions and...

• 9:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you just make it or did you actually do something with it?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  No, no, no. I built it and then if you're gonna build it, you gotta use it.

• 9:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, you didn't say what you used it for.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, I looked at Taurus A and at Cassiopeia A and Sagittarius.

• 9:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these are the remnants of...

• 9:29Speaker 03

  Supernova remnants and possibly, possibly black holes in some of those, you know?

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At age what?

• 9:34Speaker 03

  I was 15.

• 9:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you were destined.

• 9:36Speaker 03

  Well, I don't know about that.

• 9:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I gotta ask, if you were redneck geek at age 15, are you embraced by your friends, by... Or you slammed into the locker by the football quarterback? What is the plight of a redneck geek?

• 9:51Speaker 03

  You know, I think that's a lot to the benefit or whatever the right exact word is, but to speak very well about the North Alabama culture. When the production company asked me about what we're gonna do, and I told them we're gonna do a show in North Alabama about really smart people, they really laughed, you know? They gave me a hard time about that. So then they started doing some research and they started finding out that North Alabama, particularly around the Huntsville, Decatur area, the Rocket City area, has the highest average IQ of any other place in the country. Nobody gave me a whole bunch of crap. Our high school football coach, he actually was a member of the Beta Club.

• 10:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the legacy was already established?

• 10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was already there. When I was working on my first PhD in physics, there was a girl in the physics department working on her...

• 10:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How many people get to even start a sentence that way?

• 10:33Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For my first PhD?

• 10:36Speaker 03

  There was a girl that was studying with us and she was working on her PhD in astrophysics. She paid her bills by working at Hooters.

• 10:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It pays the bills?

• 10:44Speaker 03

  The waiters and waitresses at the time, they were going through school and no telling what you would be talking about at a restaurant. You might be talking about how you're gonna solve this problem, whatever, and somebody else in the room would have some smart input.

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Add to it?

• 10:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 10:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even the Hooters waitress?

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Even the Hooters waitress, believe it or not.

• 11:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 11:04Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Yeah. So this is a town where Hooters wait, everyone's so smart that even the Hooters waitresses are smart.

• 11:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  It's like, I could have been a doctor, but I'm surrounded by so many smart people, I could only get a job at Hooters.

• 11:21Bill Nye?

  No, she was working at Hooters, putting herself through school.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, she was through school. Travis Taylor himself has three master's degrees and two PhDs. And he had no, he's self-admitted redneck, and we can all definitely call him a geek. He's a card-carrying geek.

• 11:35Chuck Nice?

  I love it, man. This is so cool. I just get a, I just get a sense of like, see, when I hear his voice, like, he's like, working on a rocket with overalls and no shirt. And with a Budweiser in his hand, you know?

• 11:49Bill Nye?

  And, uh, white gloves from the clean room.

• 11:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drinking his Budweiser with the, with the white, with the white gloves.

• 11:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, like, when you, when you walk into the lab, there's a sign out front that says, "No shirt, no shoes, no science." You know what I mean? It's like, it's pretty cool.

• 12:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, let's hear a little more of this clip and just flesh out the complete stereotype of the redneck culture.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Everybody does have guns. We drink a lot of beer. We have pickup trucks.

• 12:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  We watch football on Saturdays and Sundays.

• 12:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Checking each one of those boxes, right?

• 12:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, right, right. But the real essence of it is what we call the "Stay With It" attitude. And no matter how hard something becomes, we've learned that we just stay with it. The plow broke down, or something. They had to get the field plowed, you know? So they figured out a way, they stayed with the problem until they solved the problem. My buddy Rog on the show, he has a saying that we use. He says, "We don't believe we've bit off more than we can chew, we just have to learn to chew harder."

• 12:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  And that's sort of the philosophy that we live in, that's sort of the way everybody is in the local community. And that's the essence of it, right there. It's not giving up and rolling over.

• 12:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you don't give up, it means you have to keep being ingenious about how you solve the problem.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Rog, my buddy's next-door neighbor, is one of the production assistants on the show. But one day we were filming, and they wanted to do this real fancy shot where they rented this huge jib boom. And that's this thing that's on a lever arm, it's like a giant seesaw, and it puts the camera on the end, and it keeps the camera level no matter what angle you tilt the seesaw. They were paying something like $5,000 a day to rent that thing.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's expensive stuff. Yeah, yeah.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Well... The PA is, you know, one of our neighbors. Production assistant. Yeah, production assistant. He went over and he found an old piece of gutter drainpipe off of his house that had fallen off. Got some old weight set that he had and some concrete blocks and a grocery cart. And he rigged up a jib boom that worked exactly as good as the one that we were renting for $5,000 a day. I can't believe one of the parts was something that fell off the house. Well, he wasn't using it. The house doesn't need it anymore. I believe that Yoda was completely right when he said, there is no try. There's only do or do not. Yeah, that's right. And, but what I tell people is sometimes there are do nots along the way to do it. Now, wait a minute. How many rednecks quote Yoda? Oh, almost all of us.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  We have a thing that we say around there all the time. It's may the force be with y'all.

• 14:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's the culture right there.

• 14:15Bill Nye?

  I like that.

• 14:16Chuck Nice?

  I do too.

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what that, so like I said, the show ran two seasons and this, it was canceled for this current season, but it's in re, it's in reruns. I mean, it's all there on the internet and then you can find it and National Geographic is still airing it. And so I kinda like, I've, I've saw the show. It was, it was fun watching scrappy, off the seat of the pants ingenuity folded together with these PhDs and masters and, and it just, Bill, you're an engineer, right?

• 14:43Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 14:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You gotta feel this.

• 14:45Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's saying his, okay.

• 14:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill's having a hard time forming a sentence at this moment.

• 14:53Bill Nye?

  No, he's not. He's listening. He's listening to you guys.

• 14:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So here's what I want.

• 14:56Bill Nye?

  Trying to be respectful.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:58Chuck Nice?

  Here's what I'd like to know, especially since you said from your origins in Appalachia. And this was at one point a farming town. Do you think it's more of a farmer's mentality? Like when people lived on a farm, like you have to make things work. You don't have a choice. You know, when people.

• 15:18Bill Nye?

  You can't call anybody. That's the difference.

• 15:20Chuck Nice?

  When people went west, you, you know, here we are. We're living in the middle of this place. Our nearest neighbor is God knows how far.

• 15:26Bill Nye?

  And he doesn't know what he's doing either.

• 15:29Bill Nye?

  So we gotta figure it out.

• 15:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can't just call the handyman.

• 15:31Bill Nye?

  Yeah. You gotta figure it out. Like, uh, these guys, if you've been to Huntsville, they still grow cotton everywhere. And there's a lot of machinery involved in that.

• 15:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 15:41Bill Nye?

  And so these, this is just part of the deal. You just, you get used to being around machines, what to expect from machines, what maintenance machines need.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, in Huntsville, Alabama, remember I said earlier in the broadcast, I'm kind of an adopted son?

• 15:53Bill Nye?

  Yes, you were, yeah.

• 15:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, cuz I, I, there's a rocket, a, a scale model of the Saturn V rocket in my office. It's about five feet tall. And it's not just like plastic. It's, I mean, it may be plastic, but it's engineers.

• 16:05Bill Nye?

  It's beautiful.

• 16:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, it's, it's a, it's be, it, it's beautiful.

• 16:08Bill Nye?

  Details, details.

• 16:08Chuck Nice?

  It's a detailed scale model.

• 16:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gift from the, the, the, the Rocket Center down there, because they have a Saturn V that's in captivity. Well, they have two Saturn V's. One is visible from everywhere.

• 16:19Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 16:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I suppose you can like point your.

• 16:22Bill Nye?

  Driving by, there it is.

• 16:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is. There it is.

• 16:24Bill Nye?

  Giant thing, three hundred feet tall.

• 16:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a thing sticking up out of the ground.

• 16:27Bill Nye?

  Hundred meters straight up.

• 16:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they have another Saturn V in captivity in the Huntsville Space and Rocket Center.

• 16:32Bill Nye?

  Now, in captivity, does this thing have a tendency to escape?

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well.

• 16:36Bill Nye?

  Does somebody gonna light the fuse?

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's got actual.

• 16:39Bill Nye?

  It's kept.

• 16:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flight-tested parts.

• 16:41Bill Nye?

  It's kept under a roof.

• 16:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would have flown in Apollo eighteen.

• 16:45Bill Nye?

  Flight spares, as we say.

• 16:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Flight spar, spares, exactly. So they have it sort of an exploded view, so you can see the different segments of it, and you walk the length of it. And I said this is.

• 16:55Bill Nye?

  It's huge.

• 16:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's huge. It's huge. One of the five nozzles at the back, you can hold a tea party for five. In each one of the five nozzles, that's, that's how big this thing was.

• 17:04Bill Nye?

  We're throwing money at it.

• 17:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we went to the moon. That, okay. So, so I was on a committee for ABC News.

• 17:10Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 17:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To select a, a list that would become the seven wonders of the United States.

• 17:17Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 17:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I said, you gotta put this, you gotta put this, you gotta put this in there. You gotta, you gotta do that. And I was fighting other things, people wanted, and, but I finally won.

• 17:26Bill Nye?

  Right.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Won to get my one out of the seven in there. And so that Saturn V rocket in captivity is now one of the seven wonders of the United States. And they loved it down there, and ABC News went down there and broadcast live from the center. And since then, I got like certificates and stuff, so I feel like I'm an adopted.

• 17:43Bill Nye?

  You're a son, you're a son of Huntsville.

• 17:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're a Huntsville hero.

• 17:46Bill Nye?

  I'm a brother Neil.

• 17:48Chuck Nice?

  Testify.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Huntsville hero. We are listening to StarTalk Radio. When we come back, more of my interview with Travis Taylor. He's one of the stars of the reality show Rocket City Rednecks.

• 18:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back on StarTalk Radio. We're on the internet at StarTalkRadio.net and we tweet at StarTalkRadio. And my two guests, Chuck Nice.

• 18:26Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir.

• 18:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He tweets at StarTalk.

• 18:29Chuck Nice?

  I do retweet StarTalkRadio.

• 18:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're tweeting at Chuck Nice Comic.

• 18:33Chuck Nice?

  Chuck Nice Comic.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've got the one and only who now lives in town in New York. Now I'm gonna like exploit that fact.

• 18:38Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 18:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He was out of my arms reach in LA. Now he lives in New York. Bill Knight, the Science Guy. The Science Guy is your Twitter handle. And I'll do some retweeting of the StarTalk. Yeah. So it's The Science Guy or Science Guy? The Science Guy. All in the Twitter handle. He's got it.

• 18:53Chuck Nice?

  The Science Guy.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're talking about Rocket City Rednecks. Rocket City Rednecks. A TV show, which is a reality show. A TV show. A reality show on engineers. National Geographic. Yeah, for a National Geographic channel. Engineers who live in Rocket City, which is Huntsville.

• 19:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where they built. PhDs in physics. Designed and built the Saturn V rocket. PhDs and masters degrees and they're engineers and the family affairs. And they just do weird stuff, applying their. They blow stuff up. Engineering intellect. What's not to love? To it. And it comes down to, you know, building stuff. You use physics to make things happen, make things go, run or happen. That's our business. Did you have a garage growing up, Bill? No, but we had a basement.

• 19:40Chuck Nice?

  Did you blow things up?

• 19:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you blow stuff up? Yes, yes. Okay, so out of control. But no, not out of control. Blowin' stuff up. What you wanna do is blow stuff up without injuring yourself. That's key. I don't think anyone who injures themselves had planned to do so at any time. Well, you gotta take it seriously. That's all I'm saying. Let's go to my first clip with Travis Taylor, one of the stars of that reality show. See what he says.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  We did build a rocket that was man capable for under $10,000, but we didn't return our crash chest dummy back very safely. Well, it was supposed to, but the avionics we used failed. Was this a human crash chest dummy? Well, it was a human sized. We had a mannequin in there and we named him Yuri because our idea was he was going to bail out like Yuri Gagarin had to. He didn't actually ride his capsule all the way down. He bailed out. And so we were going to do the same thing and we sent him up to a mile and we turned over and the avionics didn't fire the pyro. So he was stuck in there and he rode it all the way back down to the ground. We missed the fourth tee off spot of one of the local golf courses by about 10 feet. They don't let us play golf there. None of us played golf anyway. What's your favorite explosive? My favorite explosive?

• 20:48Speaker 03

  No, no. Favorite household explosive? Oh, favorite. Otherwise you can just go to get some TNT, right? Right, right. I like them all, but they all have different applications. Right? They all have different applications. So that's a book waiting to be written. What to do with the different explosives? Yeah, the FBI would show up at your house the next day if you did that, I think. But yeah, we actually had an episode where we played around with homemade explosives. My nephew's boss had a barn that was about to fall down out in his field and he was wanting to put cows out in that field and he was afraid the barn was going to fall on his cows if they bumped up against it. So you take out the barn first? Well, we had so much rain, you couldn't get in there with construction equipment back in the spring. And my nephew's like, I'm going to have to pull that thing apart, bored at the time. He said, well, let's don't pull it apart. Let's blow it apart. If it's going to be taken now anyway?

• 21:30Speaker 03

  That's right. So we had a little competition of who could come up with the best explosives out of stuff that we could find in daddy's garage. We ended up using a mixture of gasoline and kerosene, black powder and map gas. Well, everything with us is sort of a competition. And so we divided into teams. And in this particular situation, my nephew Michael, my buddy Raj, who are more of our technicians, they wanted to be on a team because they figured they could do it better than the eggheads. And so me and my brother-in-law Pete, who is also a PhD physicist, we were a team. You're the eggheads, okay. Yeah, we're the eggheads. And daddy was going to be the judge, right? So two of the guys who worked for my nephew, my nephew called them up and had them go build two outhouses. Okay, so these are the test?

• 22:12Speaker 03

  They were the test stands, that's exactly right. And so we each had our own outhouse to blow up. So Michael and Rog, they decided they were gonna do just like the old pirate movies. They just went and got all the gunpowder that daddy had in the shop, and we're gonna pile it up in the middle and run a trail out and spark it and let it do, just like in the movies, right? And there it goes. And it's completely unconfined, it's just laid out in a pile in there. And then they went and drank beer the rest of the day while me and Pete were off working and figuring out a way to make this work. So we're at the chalkboard calculating the volume of the outhouse and how much explosive power we're gonna need in the pressure waves and all this stuff. And we ended up creating this MacGyver device where it's a tube that we put a charge behind a gas canister from a gas torch. And we blow the charge and it slams the tube into a pointing spike.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  It makes all the gas fly out at once. And it happens fast enough that there's still some residue sparks from the gunpowder. It ignites the gas and boom, blows up all at once. So there you have a gas explosion. We have a confined gas explosion, much more effective. It's a fuel air bomb at that point, right? When we go and we set the thing off, the black powder smokes and blows the door open and that's about it. And then they were very disappointed. And we blew ours up and it blew the top off and the walls out and it fell over and we're like, this is our idea. And so we went from there and we started blowing up the barn. The first time we didn't use enough oomph. And the barn was still there and so then we... That's a good barn. Yeah, it was a pretty good barn. So we upped the ante and added enough. More power.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  And when we did, people called 911 from two miles away. Oh. Fortunately, we knew the fire marshal and he was hanging out with us when we did it, so. Drinking beer. Yeah, well, afterwards, afterwards.

• 23:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're gonna build stuff in your garage, you know, like the X Prize, one of the principles is we don't... We want to democratize who has access to this.

• 24:01Bill Nye?

  To explosive, no, wait.

• 24:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, what is a rocket if not a controlled explosion to take you somewhere different?

• 24:07Bill Nye?

  You heard he's dropped the word "unconfined."

• 24:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 24:09Bill Nye?

  Yeah. And the other thing I just love about those people is they up talking. At the end of the sentence is a question.

• 24:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. That's called uptalking?

• 24:17Bill Nye?

  Yeah. With some MAP gas.

• 24:22Bill Nye?

  And, uh, they did. MAP gas, if you're scoring along with us, methane, acetylene, acetylene, propane mixture, just right.

• 24:28Chuck Nice?

  Just right.

• 24:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just wrong, but just right.

• 24:30Bill Nye?

  No, you, there's been trials.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's called what gas?

• 24:33Bill Nye?

  MAP.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  MAP gas.

• 24:34Bill Nye?

  Guys, the freaking city slickers right here.

• 24:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know.

• 24:36Bill Nye?

  You've never had to sweat a pipe.

• 24:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 24:38Bill Nye?

  You've never sweat a pipe?

• 24:39Chuck Nice?

  No, you don't. And you know what else you never do? You never, uh, create an explosion that has mushroom cloud in the city.

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know what else we don't do? We don't build outhouses to test for that.

• 24:50Chuck Nice?

  However, I gotta say, I have blown up a few bathrooms in my life, so.

• 24:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We will not go there.

• 24:56Chuck Nice?

  Really?

• 24:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 24:58Bill Nye?

  From Zerbidio? So, anyway, the guy's an enthusiast.

• 25:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's an enthusiast.

• 25:02Bill Nye?

  And they thought they'd have fun knocking this barn down.

• 25:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  On StarTalk, we interviewed Peter Diamandis, who founded the X Prize, who wants people to build rockets in the garage to take him to the moon. We also interviewed the Mythbusters, who also talk a lot about blowing stuff up.

• 25:15Bill Nye?

  Yeah, I'm all for it.

• 25:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, Bill, what's this about blowing stuff up?

• 25:17Bill Nye?

  It's charming, it's compelling, it's power.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is this what budding engineers do? It's, it's power.

• 25:22Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah. It's controlling nature. It's taking advantage of these chemicals and making them do work for you. Now, notice.

• 25:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And making FBI's list.

• 25:29Bill Nye?

  Yeah, so, to me, if you got something coming down near the fourth tee of the golf course.

• 25:35Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 25:35Bill Nye?

  And you happen not to kill anybody, that's charming and kinda redneck in aspect, but I think that's sorta, you've done something wrong when you get that close to knocking somebody's head off.

• 25:46Chuck Nice?

  Yes, when you get that close to humanity, period. However, so, is this it, since, like, you know, you're an engineer, just like these guys, and...

• 25:53Bill Nye?

  Oh, just like them, yeah.

• 25:54Chuck Nice?

  Well, you, you are.

• 25:55Bill Nye?

  Kinda.

• 25:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you are.

• 25:57Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 25:57Chuck Nice?

  So, here's the thing. Does it start off, like, when you first get intrigued and you're first starting off, does it start off like, wow, man, just blowing stuff, this is so cool, and then you get bored with just seeing stuff blow up, and then you're like, we gotta do something with this? Like, or, or is it a noble endeavor from the beginning?

• 26:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you're saying, is it a drug that they constantly need more of?

• 26:20Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 26:22Bill Nye?

  So, I just wanted, before we go too far along, I just want to eschew, avoid the expression bored. If you're bored in this world, you're boring. That's all I'm saying. So what happens is escalation. Uh, to your, to your, uh, point about, yes. Or as we call it, tolerance. Yes. So you start with paper airplanes and that's pretty cool. Then it gets to be dark. Wouldn't they look better if they were on fire? Yeah, cool.

• 26:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, I would have gotten some flashlights and pointed to the thing.

• 26:51Bill Nye?

  Well, the flashlights require batteries and interacting with the grownups and things.

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I have never had that thought.

• 26:57Bill Nye?

  Well, and you get a little older, Neil, see more of the world. Uh, so if you go to Huntsville, maybe you'll feel it. And then you get the rubber band powered plane. Right. And it's going okay. Then you get it where you can steer it by bending the vertical tail a little bit. Then you think, wow, man. If we were to tape firecrackers to that and have two other guys light the fuses while we throw it, that'd be cool. And where do you, where do you get firecrackers?

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Bill, when did they let you out?

• 27:23Bill Nye?

  Somewhere in Alabama. That's where you get them. Pretty much everywhere in Alabama. Bill, when, when did they let you out? Uh, some time ago and they're very happy about it because it was trouble. No, but this is, you'll guys, you'll find it's quite, it's quite compelling. It's, how many people watch fireworks?

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's find out. Let's, Travis, I, I asked Travis Taylor all these questions. So let's find out. What was the like most inventive thing he ever built?

• 27:45Bill Nye?

  Okay.

• 27:47Speaker 03

  Our most imaginative thing, we built an Iron Man suit out of junkyard car parts.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  And, uh, we did that in two weekends with less than $2,000.

• 27:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Minus the energy source.

• 27:57Speaker 03

  We used car batteries. So I had two batteries on my back. Now the whole suit weighed about 250 pounds. You know, I was actually able, it enhanced my strength enough. I could curl a full beer keg with one arm. That's an important task that somebody needs to be able to do.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what powers did this Iron Man suit have other than just to probably look cool?

• 28:14Speaker 03

  It was bulletproof from head to toe.

• 28:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. That's a start. Yeah, that's an important start.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  That's pretty important.

• 28:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You probably couldn't fly yet.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  No, you, we actually did some tests with some mannequins and, and they didn't turn out well.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  But no, it enhanced strength, mostly the upper body strength. It allowed you to walk with all this weight mechanically.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Without feeling the

• 28:34Speaker 03

  Without, without, well, you know, it felt like you were walking with a pack on. But the whole suit, like I said, weighs 250 pounds or so.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 28:40Speaker 03

  It had sensors, it had a rocket launch platform on it.

• 28:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could launch a rocket out of your

• 28:44Speaker 03

  Well, I had it mounted right here on my shoulder, on my left shoulder. And I had sensors in my helmet and joysticks that I could look through the camera sensors and it would tell me where the rockets were pointed.

• 28:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just in case.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, you never know.

• 28:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Alright, why are we still using battery technology that's been around since the 1800s? And why are we still using internal combustion engine cars? It seems to me, we should be well past this.

• 29:08Speaker 03

  Well, you're a physicist, so you realize that batteries, we've pushed them about as far as we can push battery technology. We're going to have to invent something else to store energy.

• 29:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rather than just

• 29:16Speaker 03

  Rather than just improve batteries, because batteries are not going to go much further than they are. It's like rockets aren't going to go much faster than that.

• 29:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So to go Using chemical

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Using chemical fuels. We'll have to invent warp drive, we won't go to another star system, right? So the internal combustion engine, the reason why we're still using it is because it's very cost effective, right? We've got plenty of oil around that we've been using for the last century and we've learned how to use that oil efficiently in the car. So it's been cheap. It's the mother of necessity sort of thing, right? We have to invent something when we need it. And right now, we just haven't been forced to invent it.

• 29:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the day, the last drop of oil comes out of the ground, we're all going to your place. What's next?

• 29:53Speaker 03

  I think the next generation of technology is going to be something that we haven't discovered yet, probably based on quantum vacuum energy fluctuations.

• 30:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's wishful, I think, yeah?

• 30:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, I'm a futureist, kind of wishful thinking kind of guy.

• 30:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm sorry, while I was listening to that, all I could think of was if a foreign invader wants to sort of do a landfall on the United States and start taking Heaven help them, they come across.

• 30:20Chuck Nice?

  This guy with his car batteries on his back, he can lift a beer keg.

• 30:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lift, curl a beer keg with his one arm.

• 30:26Chuck Nice?

  Now, did they run tests on the bulletproof?

• 30:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could shoot rockets off his shoulder, you know.

• 30:31Chuck Nice?

  And so you'll hear that thing, there's a word that we have in English, it should.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It should, it should.

• 30:36Chuck Nice?

  It should fly, that guy, the mannequin should have.

• 30:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, yeah, should have, it's a should have too.

• 30:40Chuck Nice?

  But then it sort of should have, didn't work.

• 30:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause I'm thinking of that movie Red Dawn. I'm, yeah, no, I'm sorry, yeah, you know, if, anybody try to invade the United States.

• 30:48Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's why nobody will ever invade the United States. For that reason right there, that, and there are other rednecks that don't need an Iron Man suit. And those are the guys I'm really relying on. Cause you can believe me, you know, when Bubba sees the pinko commie coming over the hill, he's not gonna need a red, an Iron Man suit to take care of that.

• 31:08Bill Nye?

  Now, gentlemen, let me just say, what if, this gentleman is called Bubba?

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  Yes, my Bubba, my friend Bubba.

• 31:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know you had a friend named Bubba.

• 31:16Chuck Nice?

  I, I've.

• 31:17Bill Nye?

  What happens if Bubba encounters somebody dressed in a way that he or she does not approve of? That's when you get in trouble.

• 31:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not, that's not what I'm talking about, I'm talking about we get invaded by.

• 31:27Chuck Nice?

  Conventional land forces.

• 31:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, conventional land forces.

• 31:31Bill Nye?

  The, uh, the, uh, the, the, the, the light, the landing craft, just the, the front gate dropped down. And they're from running ashore.

• 31:38Chuck Nice?

  By the way, they would never get there, do you know why? Because Bubba and his buddies would have a fleet of.

• 31:45Bill Nye?

  Rocket slams.

• 31:46Chuck Nice?

  No, little fishing boats that are just.

• 31:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I saw that movie.

• 31:51Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 31:52Bill Nye?

  Alright, so by the way, I gotta say, uh, Taylor, Travis, Travis, Mr. Taylor, Dr. Taylor. Uh, I disagree that batteries have come as far as they can go.

• 32:01Chuck Nice?

  Oh, really?

• 32:02Bill Nye?

  Gotta say, gotta disagree.

• 32:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I like, I like the controversy.

• 32:04Bill Nye?

  Contrast the battery you had a kid.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Engineer Kefite.

• 32:07Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you had, you had big flashlights when you were a kid, you made a reference moments ago, the batteries leaked.

• 32:12Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I remember that.

• 32:13Bill Nye?

  Same carbon batteries.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, yeah.

• 32:14Bill Nye?

  Even the alkaline battery will leak a little bit.

• 32:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Bill Nye?

  Very seldom does a battery in your cellphone leak.

• 32:20Chuck Nice?

  That is true.

• 32:20Bill Nye?

  Very seldom, look how small the thing is.

• 32:23Chuck Nice?

  And it's very powerful now.

• 32:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're talking about improving it beyond this, so, so what do you have?

• 32:27Bill Nye?

  Uh, well, we're talking about, and I'm not joking, the bipolar battery where we got. Layers that hold the lead.

• 32:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, that's your cue. Now, you just let us all, you just let the universe down on that one.

• 32:39Chuck Nice?

  You know why? Because I had like three lithium jokes that popped into my head and I went.

• 32:42Bill Nye?

  Lithiums, we hope to not be involved anymore.

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 32:46Bill Nye?

  So lithium's, that's a hilarious chemistry joke right there, everybody. That is hilarious pharmaceutical comedy right there.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We have lithium ion batteries.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  That was the whole point.

• 32:56Bill Nye?

  You get that and then we also take lithium if you're a little bit crazy.

• 33:01Bill Nye?

  Do you have a bipolar ex-girlfriend?

• 33:03Chuck Nice?

  No, I, I was that bipolar ex-girlfriend.

• 33:07Bill Nye?

  So, uh, so what we'll do is get that lithium out there, have the lead held up in another way and then we could, dare I say it, change the world. And so if we had a better battery, if you're out there listening, chemical engineer, material scientist, venture capitalist, attorney who enables patents to be effective with regard to the new battery, you will get rich and dare I say it, change the world.

• 33:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so that means this is vaporware here because if he knew how to do it, he'd be doing it.

• 33:35Bill Nye?

  Yeah. I'm, look at the guy.

• 33:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, don't tell me that you know how to make.

• 33:39Bill Nye?

  No, no, you gotta be 25. You gotta be fresh out of school, able to do chem draw in your sleep.

• 33:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't tell me that we've reached the top of battery technology when you don't have the answer and you're soliciting it from the listeners.

• 33:50Bill Nye?

  That's my job. I'm science educator Bill. I'm not.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not battery maker Bill.

• 33:55Bill Nye?

  Exactly.

• 33:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not battery maker Bill. I'm science educator Bill.

• 33:59Bill Nye?

  Yes. Peoples.

• 34:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. How about quantum vacuum fluctuation?

• 34:02Bill Nye?

  I'd ask you astrophysicist. I think it's a little, not around the corner.

• 34:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, definitely.

• 34:07Bill Nye?

  And you know, it's, this is this kind of magical thinking, but however, I will give him this, thinking big and thinking in terms of physics.

• 34:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a good thing.

• 34:16Chuck Nice?

  That's the way to go.

• 34:17Bill Nye?

  Excellent.

• 34:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're listening to StarTalk Radio. We're talking about Rocket City Rednecks with Bill Nye, Chuck Nice. We'll be right back.

• 34:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back. Starbuck Radio. Chuck Nice, Bill Nye. Yes. My peeps. Yes. My geeky peeps. Yes.

• 34:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And my backup singers.

• 34:50Bill Nye?

  Well, that's the sound of the whooshing rocket as it gets hot in the Altria.

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is Starbuck. We, I interviewed Travis Taylor from Rocket City Rednecks. Rocket City is Huntsville, Alabama. Came to my office, Abe Blantaram.

• 35:01Bill Nye?

  So you're talking about him and you affect the accent?

• 35:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep. So, well, we, you got an issue with that? Sue me.

• 35:09Bill Nye?

  No, it's all good. It's all good.

• 35:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's, he's a kindred soul. Because the geek.

• 35:15Bill Nye?

  He's got a P, two PhDs in physics.

• 35:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got two.

• 35:18Bill Nye?

  And you have just the one.

• 35:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they, so they make rockets.

• 35:24Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry.

• 35:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're killing my, my comedic co-host here. So, uh.

• 35:30Bill Nye?

  I've just never been in a room where people can actually argue about who has more or better PhDs.

• 35:39Bill Nye?

  I was careful to avoid any.

• 35:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. So, he, apparently he ma, he made a rocket for Jay Leno. And I didn't, I didn't know anything about this. Find out.

• 35:47Bill Nye?

  His mother, his mother, his father made one for Werner von Braun.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he made one for, oh, let's see where this goes.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  We built a thing for Jay Leno, cause we'd been on his show. He's a big car guy and he called us up and said, come build me something. And so we went and got to stay for a week in his garage.

• 36:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, man.

• 36:06Speaker 03

  And he let us use his tools.

• 36:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So did he try to get you to like work on his cars? What was it?

• 36:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. The, the deal was, we'd gone and done a science demo on his show a couple of times and he said.

• 36:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You blew something up?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we blew something up on stage the first time. He said, oh, come back and do it again, right? And he liked that. And he called us up and said, guys, why don't y'all, uh, come see me? And so we get out there. He says, well, guys, I really like those steam catapults on the aircraft carrier that throws the airplanes off the deck.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 36:30Speaker 03

  Said, build me one of those that we could launch a car with. And we're like, that sounds like fun. Yeah. We, he said, well, go on out there in my backyard and look at the junk I've got and see if there's anything that you can use. And he had an old dune buggy out there. So we took the engine off of it and used the frame because it had good brakes, good steering. And then we rigged up a reservoir to store steam in. And then we built a piston that we connected to that car. And it's kind of like those stomp cars that have the air thing that you stomp on it and shoots the car. Yeah, yeah. Well, that's kind of our idea. Except instead of stomping it, we had a valve, we had a tank full of high steam pressure. Throw the valve and it would launch the car. And I calculated it was going to create several Gs when we took off. And I told Jay, I said, Jay, you want to ride in this thing with me?

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Can we test pilot it? And he says, absolutely. I want to ride in it. And so what? Talk show host dies. Well, that's what my dad told me aside. He said, son. You cannot kill this man. You cannot kill this man. Well, so I said, Jay, do you have any health issues that we ought to know about? Because we're liable to pull some heavy Gs when we launch on this thing. And he says, well, about three weeks ago, I didn't blackout until I pulled about seven point three Gs when I was riding with the Blue Angels. And I said, you're fine. It's good. So we get in the car and we get ready and we count down and I'm driving and he's going to push the button. And when he pushes that button, we went from zero to forty in eight feet.

• 37:53Speaker 03

  Forget the time. Yeah. Eight feet. Eight feet. Yeah, go try that in your, in your sports car. And I calculated we pulled about six and a half Gs. Mmm. And it was a nice little thump. Man. I actually chipped a tooth. So Leno came limping in the next day. He loved it. He thought it was great. And actually he got up and he said, well, I got a show in Vegas in a couple of hours. And he went over to get in his plane and took off.

• 38:18Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. Six point five Gs. Jay Leno's chin even got bigger.

• 38:25Bill Nye?

  Hey, let me ask you something.

• 38:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that? What were you calculating there, Bill?

• 38:28Bill Nye?

  I was just working, so he said forty miles per hour. How many in ancient English units, which you're still fond of, for whatever reason?

• 38:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When the times are right, when you need it, you use it.

• 38:36Bill Nye?

  So here's one. What's eighty-eight feet per second?

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Eighty-eight feet per second?

• 38:41Bill Nye?

  Sixty miles an hour is eighty-eight feet per second.

• 38:43Chuck Nice?

  Eighty feet per second. I was gonna go, uh, the speed necessary to actually get the flux capacitor to take me back.

• 38:49Bill Nye?

  Well, I saw what it is.

• 38:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's eighty-eight miles per hour.

• 38:51Chuck Nice?

  That's eighty-eight miles per hour.

• 38:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, that's eighty-eight.

• 38:53Bill Nye?

  So I just, when I hear that eight feet thing in there, I'm thinking that he's working with an eighty-eight feet per second, and the eleven would be, you'd take half of that, because it gets a little... Can I, can I drop the word?

• 39:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it.

• 39:05Bill Nye?

  Average. But there's another word I like to slip in there, calculus.

• 39:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go for it.

• 39:10Bill Nye?

  Calculus. You can do a little calculus.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:12Bill Nye?

  It gets to be a factor too, but I was scribbling fast, as you saw, because it's irresistible.

• 39:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if you, so Chuck, in the break, you mentioned something about a cult, the culture of this. What were you saying?

• 39:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was saying, like, as I listen to him, and it seems like where he grew up in this culture, it's a cult, Rocket City, it's a culture of science. It's like, when everybody is a maker, or around makers, or around science, and it's just ever-present, then...

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You do something different with your idle mind.

• 39:40Chuck Nice?

  Right, exactly. You can't help but become a part of that. And, you know, there's gotta be a way to actually do that nationally, where we make America Rocket Country, instead of just Huntsville, Alabama, Rocket City.

• 39:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we go from a sleepy country to an innovation nation?

• 39:58Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 39:59Bill Nye?

  And this is Neil deGrasse Tyson's big theme, and also a theme here at the Planetary Society. Uh, if we had...

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disclosure, that man who just uttered those words is the CEO of the Planetary Society. Disclosure, I serve on the board of the Planetary Society. Disclosure, Chuck has no relation at all to the Planetary Society.

• 40:16Chuck Nice?

  Not yet. Exactly.

• 40:17Bill Nye?

  Not yet. So the thing is, uh, if we had, if the United States, if the world, had this culture of exploration, and this is, everybody's going wild for Philly, that came off of Rosetta, catching up with Comet sixty-seven P, CP.

• 40:33Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 40:33Bill Nye?

  Uh, this brought out the best in us. When you go to make things, you solve problems that have never been solved before, great things happen. And this is the maker culture you're talking about.

• 40:43Chuck Nice?

  This is the maker culture I'm talking about. I mean, it's really fascinating to see it in action.

• 40:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's watch another example of that in this next clip.

• 40:52Speaker 03

  I had the idea, one night, looking through my telescope at the moon, that craters looked very parabolic, meaning they look like dishes, like your satellite dish, right? Or like a radio telescope. And then I got to looking, I thought, well, you know, in the visible, we can see the moon. And so I started looking up the albedo numbers on it, which is how reflective it is. And it's on the order of somewhere between 5 and 15% reflective, depending on what part you look at.

• 41:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like tire sidewalls. It's very low reflective.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  But it's still reflective. It's not zero, right? And so I thought, you know, it costs a lot of money if we went back to the moon to carry a big dish. The bigger your dish, the more data you can send, right? Think about your internet connection. The bigger the antenna, the higher the bandwidth. The more stuff you can download quickly. If we looked at one of those big, half-mile-wide craters, that's very parabolic, could you just use the dirt as the dish? And just put your feed horn at the focus, and would that work? I got my nephew to dig us a crater in the hillside there by where my dad lives. And we got some satellite dish feed horns that just happened to work at the right frequency that we needed, and some electronics and hooked it up.

• 41:57Speaker 03

  And we actually picked up radio waves from outer space with nothing but dirt as our reflective dish.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So where'd that quote come from? The idle mind is the playground for the devil? But except in Huntsville, where the idle mind is the playground for...

• 42:12Speaker 03

  Radio telescopes.

• 42:13Bill Nye?

  So back up one. He got his nephew to dig him a crater in the hillside.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the hillside.

• 42:19Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm. That's amazing.

• 42:21Bill Nye?

  That is amazing. How big? I mean, dude, that's an extraordinary thing.

• 42:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, no, so, forget the fact that he even did it. It's that he even thought it up.

• 42:30Bill Nye?

  It's pretty cool.

• 42:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's pretty cool. That's half the effort. It's thinking that up.

• 42:34Bill Nye?

  That's, see, that's what I always say about engineers. I know we have so many scientists on this program. Engineers use science to make things and solve problems. He had a problem. Can I get radio waves from space? Well, I know, I'll dig a crater. And that's just cool.

• 42:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you just use the dirt as your reflective.

• 42:56Bill Nye?

  And you know, he had some feed horns. He had some feed horns that you have, you know, in your.

• 43:00Chuck Nice?

  Cause everybody has those.

• 43:01Bill Nye?

  Closet. Anyway, these are wave guides. You down with wave guides? So, uh, when you use just a wire, it becomes an antenna. But if you use a hollow thing, it soaks up things that when the wavelength is short enough. It's not magic. It's.

• 43:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Science.

• 43:15Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 43:16Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 43:16Bill Nye?

  And so, uh, this is an extraordinary thing. So could it be that people go to the moon and just, uh, excavate a crater a little bit, rig up a feed horn?

• 43:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just tighten up the, the parabolic shape a bit, yeah?

• 43:28Bill Nye?

  You've been to Aracibo, everybody out there.

• 43:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, this is, there's a city in Puerto Rico called Aracibo.

• 43:35Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 43:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You like my accent?

• 43:36Bill Nye?

  It's Trisha Mall, yeah.

• 43:38Chuck Nice?

  Muy bueno, muy bueno.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what we did was we, I mean,

• 43:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  there was, there was a natural crater in the ground. And said, hey, let's use that as the, the place we will mount a dish.

• 43:50Bill Nye?

  Turned a whole valley into a radio dish.

• 43:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the largest telescope in the world.

• 43:55Bill Nye?

  And, uh.

• 43:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It still is.

• 43:56Bill Nye?

  That was, by the way, it was Dale Corson, uh, Cornelian who rigged that up. And so this was, I think during the good old days.

• 44:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disclosure, Bill Nye is a Cornelian.

• 44:05Bill Nye?

  There's a clerical error over there, but the, uh, the, the thing that's amazing, they said they were listening for the ionosphere. But I think they're really listening for Soviet, uh, nuclear tests.

• 44:18Chuck Nice?

  I kinda get it.

• 44:18Bill Nye?

  And so, uh, the thing turns out to be.

• 44:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whispering that.

• 44:21Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 44:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause he thinks we're still.

• 44:24Bill Nye?

  I don't, I don't want people to think that I'm revealing secrets. But it is a remarkable thing when you have the dish and you, you can't point the dish cause it's the crater. The dish, the crater is unmovable.

• 44:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you can't aim it to different parts in the sky.

• 44:36Bill Nye?

  So what it end up with is, uh, the focus is not a point, it's a line. And you get that in your daughter's math class.

• 44:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 44:45Bill Nye?

  She's in 10th grade, right?

• 44:46Chuck Nice?

  She's in 10th grade?

• 44:47Bill Nye?

  These are my people.

• 44:48Chuck Nice?

  Those, right. This is where, this is where the, uh, rubber meets the road for you is the 10th grade.

• 44:53Bill Nye?

  Uh.

• 44:54Chuck Nice?

  Chem student.

• 44:55Bill Nye?

  The 10th grade's important. They're all important. You think about the influence of teachers. They change the world. And so we've, uh, we've got to pay them. Did you get a chance to ask, uh, Travis Taylor about any of his education?

• 45:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I asked him, uh, I, what I did ask him is, he likes making rockets, but does he ever want to go into space? Let's find out where, where that, where that lands go.

• 45:18Speaker 03

  I've written about 14 science fiction novels. A lot of them are bestsellers.

• 45:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ooh.

• 45:23Speaker 03

  And I've written two textbooks. One is used in a lot of colleges across the country.

• 45:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's that one called?

• 45:27Speaker 03

  It's called Introduction to Rocket Science and Engineering.

• 45:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice.

• 45:30Speaker 03

  And, uh, so my friends always tease me about, I wrote the book on rocket science. And then I've written a few non-fiction books. And my newest one came out in November. It's called A New American Space Planet. The book is about how we've got to get the next generation of rocket scientists going, what we need to do to do it as a nation from the ground up. And hopefully it'll spark some folks into wanting to do this again. I want America to realize that our best days aren't behind us. Our smartest days aren't behind us. You know, we've been to the moon.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause we keep saying that.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  But that's not true. We just need to learn how to chew a little harder. Right? We need to keep moving forward like Walt Disney would say.

• 46:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 46:05Speaker 03

  I've always wanted to be an astronaut. I have an idea of a thing that we could use on the space station. And who knows? Somebody wants to pay for the ride, I would love to go with it and test it out.

• 46:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just a thing you want to test?

• 46:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, and go to space too.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause you just have to test it.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, you've got to test it in space. Cause it's an idea for something to make astronauts' lives easier.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have to be the one to test it?

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Oh, well, I'm the expert on the thing, right?

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. That's only 20 million dollars.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, that's right. I mean, you know, God needs a good sponsor, you know?

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, we'll get you. We'll, we'll start the movement.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, right.

• 46:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, you know, I'm a little torn because had we been on our way to Mars now, all y'all would have been employed doing that and you wouldn't be doing a show on television.

• 46:44Chuck Nice?

  It's like you got all these clever rocket guys doing a TV show when you should be making a Mars rocket.

• 46:50Speaker 03

  Well, I'd much rather be making the Mars rocket, but we'd be doing that on TV too. So, maybe we'll do it anyway. Rednecks on a red planet. We actually had an episode where we-

• 46:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that's a TV sitcom!

• 46:59Speaker 03

  We actually, we actually had an episode where we simulated a Mars mission using an RV as our rocket ship and we couldn't go outside the RV without wearing spacesuits.

• 47:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This'll be like the Beverly Hillbillies of the future.

• 47:09Speaker 03

  So they loaded up their truck and moved to Elysium Planitia.

• 47:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Valles Marineris.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Valles Marineris, there you go.

• 47:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's some fun guys.

• 47:23Bill Nye?

  I love it.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 47:25Bill Nye?

  Uh, everything's good. I wish you'd asked him about the beer can problem.

• 47:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The beer can problem. Can you say that in 30 seconds?

• 47:31Bill Nye?

  Yeah, so the problem is, uh, you look at a rocket, typically it weighs about as much compared with its fuel as the can of weighs compared with the beer inside.

• 47:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So very low.

• 47:42Bill Nye?

  It's mostly beer. It's mostly rocket.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mostly fuel.

• 47:45Bill Nye?

  So if we have this plane that's gonna skip off the atmosphere, this rocket plane, it needs to be very lightweight materials. Material scientists out there, get it, get going. Let's change the world.

• 47:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once again, he's commanding other people. Like, he's Field Marshal General here. It's Bill Nye's minions, taking over and changing the world.

• 48:04Bill Nye?

  I'm just a messenger. It's an opportunity. It's just, uh, you might go into genetics or something, but I'm hoping somebody goes into material science.

• 48:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me thank Travis Taylor for agreeing to be interviewed for StarTalk, and I hope National Geographic Channel might, you know, think differently again and bring the show back. But it is, you can find it on reruns, and they're, they're a hoot, as they say. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. Chuck Nice, thanks for being with me as always. Bill Nye, now that you're in town, I'm gonna call you again. You moved to New York.

• 48:33Bill Nye?

  Bring it on.

• 48:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you handle it?

• 48:34Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 48:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. You've been listening to StarTalk Radio, and an episode brought to you in part by Grant from the Sloan Foundation. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, once again, bidding you to keep looking up.