NASA’s Vision for Space with Charles Bolden

How important is space exploration? What’s next? Mars? Europa? Find out when Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews NASA Administrator Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden. Neil is joined in studio by astrophysicist Dr. Michael Shara and Bill Nye.

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.

• 0:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tonight, I have a very special guest host. The one, the only, the inimitable Bill Nye the Science Guy. I'm here to help. Yeah, thank you. Well, tonight, we're featuring my interview with Charlie Bolden. General Charles Bolden. Call me Charlie. The head, the administrator, which in government speak means you're the highest ranking person, of NASA. Charlie Bolden. I went to Washington. I got the interview in NASA headquarters. And we talked about everything. Past, present, future NASA. He was an astronaut himself. And one of his missions, he repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. He drove the ship, the shuttle. Yeah, yeah. And I know you're a space guy, but I wanted more. So I comb the landscape.

• 1:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And happens to be in my department, the Department of Astrophysics, here in the Rose Center for Earth and Space, we find Mike Shara. Mike Shara, curator of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Thanks for joining StarTalk.

• 1:14Speaker 01

  Absolutely my pleasure.

• 1:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  Glad to be here.

• 1:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now, why would we have two astrophysicists in the same place at the same time? I was gonna ask that. Is there some disruption in the spacetime continuum? I'm skeptical. So Mike Shara actually worked for 17 years at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute. You were eyewitness to the telescope going up and its trials and tribulations. So the first day Hubble was put in orbit, April 1990.

• 1:44Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That first day was not a good day for Hubble. And so here I am, sitting with the head of NASA, who deployed the telescope himself. And so I had to get... The bottom line of how all that went down on that first day. Let's check it out.

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Nothing went right that day.

• 1:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Well, after we finally got it out of the payload bay, we deployed the high gain antenna, two of them on either side, boom, boom, boom, they went down, no sweat. First.

• 2:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We got antennas, antennas. You can't deploy an antenna, go, go home.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  Well, everything worked.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 2:14Speaker 02

  But we thought, if you can't deploy a solar array, go home. And we almost had to do that. So we deployed the first solar array. Second solar array started out, I don't know, maybe 16 inches and stopped. And we went, that's not supposed to happen.

• 2:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So these solar panels unfurl?

• 2:29Speaker 02

  We had to do two things. We had to unfold the drums. And then when we activated them, they had this, it was incredible. They had a ribbon that, that pushed out and as it pushed out, it formed itself into a rod. And so that was the, two of them on either side of the solar array and they.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is clever engineering design.

• 2:50Speaker 02

  Incredible clever engineering design, except the second one got about 16 inches out and went and stopped and we went, oh my goodness, what's going on? Long story short, when we could not get the solar array to work, before they determined that it was a tension monitoring module, they made the decision that, okay, we've got to get this, we're running out of power. Because you remember, Hubble was on batteries right now. It didn't have any solar arrays to get power from the sun. And so it, batteries were running low. The team down in Houston and Goddard said, we got to get it off the arm. We got to get it out of here. And so they said, take Bruce and Kathy, put them in the airlock, suit them up and they'll go out. They both were veteran spacewalkers. And so they were anxious to go out anyway and bask in the sun and save Hubble.

• 3:31Speaker 02

  So I got them in the airlock and the only person not excited about them going out was me. Because as the IV crew member, your job is to make sure they stay alive. And, and so once again, my heart started beating.

• 3:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want that, that on your conscience.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  I did not want that on my conscience.

• 3:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because, because that's one of the most cinematic things to show. Is a spacewalking person drifting away.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  You don't want that to happen.

• 3:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, this is, that, every sci fi movie shows that.

• 3:58Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 3:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 3:59Speaker 02

  So I got them all suited up. We got the airlock depressed and we got down to vacuum and we were probably five minutes from them opening the hatch and going out and the ground said, stop. We got a young engineer down here that thinks he knows what the solution is. And we're gonna try it, last chance. And so Lauren got the vehicle in position and they said, you know, let it go. And we went three, two, one, go. And Bruce and Kathy were locked up in the airlock at vacuum, trying to look through a little hole. And they couldn't see anything except the payload bay. So they hate me to this day.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's funny, to be that, I put him in the vacuum. You know, that's just really cool. If you're in control of what the ship is doing. So was everyone at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute at the time aware of these little problems of deploying the telescope?

• 4:47Speaker 01

  We were terrifyingly aware.

• 4:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Terrifying because...

• 4:49Speaker 01

  We knew exactly what was going on.

• 4:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  This was for all of us, life and death. Many of us had been working on the telescope for seven, 10, 12 years. This was our careers, this was our passion. If it didn't work...

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The telescope was not off the shelf.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  It was a one of a kind object. Nobody had ever done anything like this.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except for the military ones that look like that, but that's a different show.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  That's right, but they were looking down, not up.

• 5:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They were looking down.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  We were gonna look out.

• 5:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So everyone is pins and needles. And because you not only care for the telescope, you care for your job security, I guess. Is that part of it?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  There's a little bit of that.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You work at an entire institute designed to serve the data that comes from that telescope.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  There are 500 people who have decided that they are gonna devote their professional lives to advancing astronomy a century in the space of 10 years. Every one of us had put our hearts and soul into this. And we cared, I think, more than anyone, except maybe the astronauts and the other builders, how this thing went. It had to go well.

• 5:46Bill Nye?

  Hey, what did the young engineer do to shake loose the spring-loaded rods?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  I would like to say that all he wanted to do was just baff it with a hammer, but...

• 5:56Bill Nye?

  A nice hammer, a really expensive hammer.

• 5:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, as the story goes, the engineer said, "Don't believe the sensor."

• 6:01Bill Nye?

  Uh huh.

• 6:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Occasionally the sensor, because you don't want major things to fail. But if your sensor fails, that tells you that something did fail and didn't, then you gotta ignore the sensor and somebody's gotta make that call.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  And sure enough, the panels unfurled and electricity started to flow. And instead of that...

• 6:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Electricity derived from sunlight.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  From the solar panels. And instead of that, instead of, "Oh my God, we're going down the toilet", suddenly it started coming back up again.

• 6:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh. And he was saying that we were running on battery power at the time.

• 6:30Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so you had to get those... The solar panels deployed.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  That's right, and if you didn't, and they were semi-deployed or partially deployed, you were gonna ditch the telescope because you weren't gonna risk the lives of the astronauts.

• 6:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa.

• 6:43Bill Nye?

  Well, not just that, you can't just, I know it seems intuitive if you pick something up on Earth, but you can't just go out in space and shake something because you'll be the shakie.

• 6:54Speaker 01

  That is correct.

• 6:54Bill Nye?

  And the thing has a tremendous amount of inertia, and it has to be oriented with

• 6:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So wait, so wait, so the point you make is, I can sit here and shake this microphone,

• 7:01Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 7:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and I'm not moving anywhere.

• 7:02Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 7:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In space.

• 7:04Bill Nye?

  With a thing that would, has a mass of several tons.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Fifteen tons.

• 7:07Bill Nye?

  Yeah, fifteen tons.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  You're gonna shake right back.

• 7:09Bill Nye?

  Yeah, you're gonna be the shakie.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:11Bill Nye?

  So, it's not that simple, plus the thing has extraordinary aiming or pointing capability, right?

• 7:17Speaker 01

  We hadn't turned that on yet. We've got little telescopes looking out the side, little interferometers.

• 7:22Bill Nye?

  How, how, how big is a cute little telescope in this case?

• 7:25Speaker 01

  This one is one and a half times the size of a city bus, weighs fifteen and a half tons.

• 7:30Bill Nye?

  That's huge.

• 7:31Speaker 01

  A human being could fit right down it. It's a, it's a very respectable telescope even on Earth.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The first time I saw it, because I wasn't, I wasn't the astronaut, right? So I visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they've got a mock-up of the Hubble telescope there, and I said, "That can't be it, this is too big."

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Beautiful one-to-one mock-up.

• 7:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 7:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the biggest, you can't even, what?

• 7:53Bill Nye?

  Don't even.

• 7:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't even.

• 7:54Bill Nye?

  So, the bigger it is, the more light it gathers, right?

• 7:57Speaker 01

  It's the diameter, the primary mirror.

• 7:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give us like astronomy 101 with Hubble.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 8:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why, tell us why we all would like Hubble.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  The size of the mirror is great, it's important. It's two point, two and a half meters across, that's wonderful, but that doesn't make it

• 8:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The diameter of the main collecting surface, okay?

• 8:13Speaker 01

  That's correct. And at the time, that was oh, about ten percent of the collecting surface of the biggest telescopes on Earth.

• 8:20Bill Nye?

  But it was in space.

• 8:21Speaker 01

  But that's the point.

• 8:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I would've said so.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  So is right.

• 8:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  But once you're above the atmosphere, all of that blurriness goes away, and all of that ultraviolet-absorbing oxygen and ozone goes away.

• 8:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what you're saying is, the song "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, how I wonder what you are" is the boon to all modern astronomy.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  It is.

• 8:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because the twinkle is atmospherically derived.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  twinkling is horrible.

• 8:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  you get above that, you get the sharpest images there ever was.

• 8:48Speaker 01

  suddenly you can see in the ultraviolet and you can see details 20, 30, 40 times finer than anything you can see from the ground.

• 8:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  so 30 times the resolution means 30 times more detail.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  that's correct.

• 8:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  for any given spatch on the sky.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  think of it as going from an optical microscope to an electron microscope.

• 9:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and we've all seen pictures from electron microscopes.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  so suddenly you're not, you're not just seeing the bacteria, the viruses pop into view, all new sorts of things you can see, all sorts of ability to resolve what's going on in the centers of galaxies.

• 9:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  so what you're saying is Hubble, arguably the most productive scientific instrument there ever was.

• 9:27Speaker 01

  not arguably, you cannot argue it, it is true.

• 9:30Bill Nye?

  I can argue, what about microscope, but go on.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  more so, no, you can't point to any one microscope that is as productive as that one telescope. am I right? do I get amen?

• 9:41Speaker 01

  you get double amen, sir.

• 9:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  double amen.

• 9:43Bill Nye?

  amen, amen.

• 9:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  amen, amen, but one tiny flaw nearly doomed the entire project. that story is next on StarTalk.

• 10:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  we're back on StarTalk. that's Bill Nye, in case you don't otherwise recognize him. Bill Nye, thanks for being my co-host.

• 10:09Bill Nye?

  it is I who must thank you.

• 10:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  and we've got my friend and colleague, Mike Chara, fellow astrophysicist, astrophysic extraordinaire.

• 10:17Speaker 01

  totally pleasure to be here.

• 10:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but prolific, and we got you on here because you have firsthand information about the deployment and success of Hubble. and about, how much of your research would you say has pivoted on Hubble?

• 10:29Speaker 01

  since the Hubble telescope was launched in 1990, probably two thirds of the papers that I've written.

• 10:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of the research, of your referee.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  of the research, referee papers have been Hubble.

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  okay, so you.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  it's been the core of my career.

• 10:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  it's the core of your career.

• 10:40Bill Nye?

  compare that to other astrophysicists, other people, has everybody's research been affected that much?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  I would say the average astrophysicist is a third to a half. Only a third, only a half of everything you do all day from this one instrument. That's why there's no argument. It is the telescope. It is the thing that has transformed astrophysics.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when it was deployed, deployed by the head of NASA back when he was only a shuttle astronaut.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  And a general. Shuttle pilot, commander.

• 11:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's when he was only that.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  Mirror guy.

• 11:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, we're, we're learning that things didn't go smoothly. We have this multi-billion dollar instrument, and things are not going smoothly.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  That is really the understatement of the last two decades. It was a complete mess up.

• 11:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A complete mess up.

• 11:23Speaker 01

  A mess up? Watch your mouth, young man.

• 11:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, we'll, we'll get your point of view on this in a minute. You were on Earth. Let's find out what it looked like from space.

• 11:32Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 11:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charlie Bolden.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  We were all apprehensive about doing something that might damage Hubble. Hubble was huge, and you know that. Uh, 25,000 pounds.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, it's the size of a school bus.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  It's the size of a school bus and a half.

• 11:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  In length. And, and it was almost 15 feet in diameter in a 15-foot diameter payload bay. And I remember the day before we were supposed to launch, uh, the first time, going out to the payload chain, to the, to the pad, and sticking my fist in, and my fist could just fit in between the side of Hubble and the longeron on the shuttle.

• 12:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The, the clearance.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  That's the clearance between the, the circumference, the outer diameter of Hubble and the shuttle itself. And so, Steve Hawley.

• 12:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The payload of the shuttle.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  That's it. And Steve Hawley was, was the prime arm operator. And it had been through all kinds of analysis. We had carried, you know, classified things before, and everything said, this is gonna work. All you gotta do is lift it out. And so Steve and I had trained for that for about a year. But when we started lifting it out, when Steve started for his motion, I was reading off the, the attitude and, and position numbers, and I said, Steve, stop. All of a sudden, the telescope was starting to twist and tilt, which was not good, because there's not a lot of room, you know, to twist and tilt. And so we-

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't want to break it pulling it out of the box.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  We did.

• 12:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be bad.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  That's really bad.

• 12:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be bad.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  And so, we began what turned into, what was supposed to take about 10 to 15 minutes, we began what became about an hour-long, arduous task of constantly tweaking the joints on the arm. Steve did an incredible job, I mean, moving joint by joint to lift Hubble out. But, after the flight, weeks later, when we heard that there was a problem, he and I just, we kind of pondered, because we didn't know whether we had bumped, or had caused something, and so-

• 13:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That little period of time-

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was, there was great, there was great relief when someone used this term that I'd never heard before, spherical aberration.

• 13:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Spherical aberration.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  And so it was a design flaw. And, not a design flaw, a production flaw. And, so we went, "Whew."

• 13:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so he's off the hook. There's something wrong with the mirror, but they deployed the telescope correctly.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  They did 100% fabulous, wonderful job. The problem is that a couple of years before, a little washer, literally a little washer, just a half a millimeter thick, had been put upside down, inside a measuring device, a little interferometer, and the washer wasn't the same this way as that way. That spaced two mirrors wrong, and so the Hubble mirror got polished perfectly, smoothly, but to the wrong shape. Which meant that we could never focus Hubble perfectly.

• 14:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when they went through the first focusing test, what happened? How did you feel? I'll be like Oprah, "How did that feel?"

• 14:36Speaker 01

  They went from the most negative focus position to the most positive focus position.

• 14:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As anyone would do when you're trying to focus something. Because you don't know if you can get a better focus, keep going, so you keep going. And then you go through the exact focus and you come back-

• 14:48Bill Nye?

  Whoa, there it goes, back up, whoa, too far, wait. It's like trying to get the temperature in the shower.

• 14:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And you were always being scalded. There was not a damn thing you could do, you were always going to be out of focus. It was horrible.

• 15:01Bill Nye?

  This, we didn't we test it on Earth.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  We

• 15:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Says the engineer, Bill Nye's a professional engineer here.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  We tested many aspects of Hubble. We did not do a complete end-to-end test because there wasn't enough budget.

• 15:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you can't test everything.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  You can never test everything, but you sure as hell can test it from end to end.

• 15:25Bill Nye?

  So what, uh, what features of your telescope do you have? Well, we have some electronics and we have some little maneuvering. Is there a mirror? Yes, as a matter of fact, there is.

• 15:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's an Apollo 13 moment. Fix this.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Two of my colleagues at Space Telescope get up, the chief engineer, Jim Crocker, Holland Ford, colleague astrophysicist, and they proposed the most elegant thing I had ever heard.

• 15:47Bill Nye?

  How long did it take them to do this?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  Uh, they worked on this for a couple of months.

• 15:51Bill Nye?

  Couple of months. And what they did was?

• 15:52Speaker 01

  What they said was, listen, the beam is converging and it's supposed to converge to a little spot, perfect focus, but it doesn't quite get there. But if we could make the beam length a little bit longer, then in that extra path that the beam would follow, it would converge.

• 16:13Bill Nye?

  This is two microns or something.

• 16:15Speaker 01

  Well, what we're gonna do is we're gonna take a little mirror and put it into the path.

• 16:20Bill Nye?

  The cutest little mirror.

• 16:21Speaker 01

  Only the size of a US quarter, and we're gonna stick it in the path of that converging light and we're gonna make that light bounce. That's gonna redirect the light onto the camera.

• 16:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so this, so these are corrective lenses?

• 16:37Speaker 01

  Corrective mirror.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mirror. So now you fix it. So did it work after you fixed it?

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Well, we take it up there. The next shuttle mission, uh, at that time goes up there. The astronauts dock with the telescope, grab the telescope, and they deploy these little mirrors. And we take that first picture and nobody's breathing. Everyone in the room is turning blue as that picture comes down and it's Perfect.

• 17:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Perfect.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  It's absolutely perfect.

• 17:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Beautiful.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Suddenly you saw tiny little points. And hundreds of new stars that had been blurred out by all the other bright stars popped into view.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The universe came into focus.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  It was as if you were...

• 17:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was good, right?

• 17:20Bill Nye?

  It was good, that was really good.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  As if you'd never been able to see and you put on your glasses and bang, you could see as sharp as day.

• 17:27Bill Nye?

  Uh, is it gonna wear out?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  It'll wear out in the sense that if we don't send astronauts to it and there are no plans and no hardware and no technology that currently exists because the shuttle program is over, it's actually going to either fail, one of the key components is gonna fail, or it's gonna re-enter the Earth's atmosphere four, five, six years from now and burn up.

• 17:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It'll re-enter the atmosphere no matter what at some point.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  Unless we do something to boost it and there are no plans to do that.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you want to plunk it into the big toilet bowl of space, which is the Pacific Ocean.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  That's what's gonna happen.

• 18:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. A reminder that we are featuring my interview with the head of NASA, General Charles Bolden, and we'll find out what's next for NASA when StarTalk returns.

• 18:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. Bill Nye, who else could this man be but Bill Nye? I call him Sir W. Sir William.

• 18:33Bill Nye?

  Thank you, brother Neil.

• 18:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Don't let anybody else call you that but me.

• 18:36Bill Nye?

  So what am I supposed to like mess him up if somebody calls me Sir W? You supposed to push him down?

• 18:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's been in New York too long, "I'll mess you up."

• 18:44Bill Nye?

  And I went with mess, actually there's other verbs.

• 18:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're featuring my interview with, uh, the head of NASA, General Charles Bolden. And as head of NASA, he's overseeing NASA's plans to go to Mars.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's check it out.

• 19:01Speaker 02

  People have always dreamed of going to Mars, always. You know, as long as I can remember, even before we had airplanes. Given the budget we have today, uh, we are on a path that will get us to Mars in the 2030s.

• 19:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if I write you another check for another eighteen and a half billion, you can speed that up, perhaps? Tighten it up?

• 19:18Speaker 02

  Maybe. We can, I can guarantee you with more certainty that 2030, we're gonna have humans on Mars. I, I, you know, you're, you're, you're trying to get me to presuppose and...

• 19:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, I'm, I'm, I'm writing the checks for you.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  I know you're writing the checks. I mean, write them, please do, by all means, and, you know, and, and your friends in Congress. Please write those checks. And I am going to be able, or whoever's sitting in this chair as the NASA administrator is gonna be able to say, "With greater and greater and greater certainty, you know, we're gonna be on Mars with humans in the 2030s." They will be able to say with great certainty, greater certainty as you buy down more risk. There's risk in everything we do. Risk is never, ever going away.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Risk is never going away. So in the exhibit, you, you... When did you predict we'd be on Mars?

• 20:05Speaker 01

  We didn't predict the date because we didn't know what the budget was or will be. Uh, frankly, I think that we are not as brave as we should be, as you well know.

• 20:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, Mike.

• 20:16Bill Nye?

  Exactly.

• 20:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, stop, stop. Mike, you're gonna tell me you curated an exhibit that could've said, "We could be on Mars by a certain date," but since you didn't know if there was money available, you withheld such predictions?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  No, we certainly...

• 20:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If we felt that way in the 1960s, we wouldn't have built the World Fair.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  We didn't have a cold, we had a cold war. We said that we could be there in the 2030s, just like Charlie Bolden said. But if you doubled spending, which this country sure as hell should do, because we're spending half of 1% of our national budget, eighteen billion out of three and a half trillion, frankly, is an embarrassment. We should be spending thirty-six billion a year on the space program.

• 20:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah, Neil, you should be spending, write the check. You said, you said to the guy...

• 21:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Planetary Society, what's the posture there?

• 21:04Bill Nye?

  Well, Planetary Society, we advance space exploration and space science, and we think, uh, the sooner the better on all this stuff. Now...

• 21:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the deepest answer you can give me?

• 21:14Bill Nye?

  No, hang on. So people say, "Why send humans?" Because the robots are so successful. Spirit and Opportunity Rover, the Curiosity Rover are fantastic. By the way, you guys... Uh, Curiosity Rover now is was sort of going on two billion Spirit and Opportunity. They're about a billion. You're into like three and a half billion dollars for these three rovers and they're not even locked. Anybody could just on Mars could just walk up to them, drive them away. But the thing is, nobody does because uh, they're, they're isolated. So people say, why send humans? Humans, you have to feed them, you have

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just to be clear, the price you cited for them is over their entire mission, right?

• 21:57Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not just in any given budget year.

• 21:59Bill Nye?

  The whole thing.

• 22:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You divide it into a budget year, it's, it's

• 22:02Bill Nye?

  So yeah, the Opportunity Rover is still driving. It'd be like, uh, it's been going on 11 years. It would be like buying a car with a three-year warranty, not changing the tires, not rotating the tires, not changing the oil, not doing, and having it running 120 years later. That's pretty good, man. That's a bargain. But uh, putting humans there is extraordinarily difficult. But the reason to do it is humans would make discoveries. It's estimates vary about 10,000 times faster than what a typical, very good robot does in a week, a human geologist or astrobiologist could do in about a minute.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  The key to going to Mars, the single thing that we're going to be able to do is answer that question with certainty. Is there life on our nearest planet? Cause we're gonna drill down.

• 22:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not our nearest planet.

• 22:53Bill Nye?

  Oh, you wanna get into thing about Venus?

• 22:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  He's, he's right.

• 22:58Bill Nye?

  So by the way, you're at the nearest, you know, Venus is really hell.

• 23:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just being, I'm sorry. Sorry to interrupt. I just gotta

• 23:03Speaker 01

  The man's right. We're gonna get to Mars, we're gonna drill down, and we're gonna hit water. There's water on Mars. We know that for sure. There's no sterile water on Earth, except in a pharmacy. You drill down on Earth, you hit water, there's always viruses, bacteria, protists.

• 23:20Bill Nye?

  Everywhere you go.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Everywhere you go. The first time you hit

• 23:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Everywhere on Earth.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  Everywhere on Earth. The first time you drill down on Mars and you hit water, you're either gonna find bacteria, or viruses, or critters of some sort, or you're not. If the water is utterly The first time you drill down on Mars, then Mars is dead as a doorknob. It may not always have been, and your drill will be micro-sampling, looking for fossils all the way down. But if you get down there and there's nothing, then Mars is completely sterile. I don't think it's gonna happen. And terraform Mars with a clear conscience. But if there is life there, what kind of DNA?

• 23:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right. Is it like us? Is it a whole nother? Is it like something totally like my old boss?

• 24:04Speaker 01

  What is it?

• 24:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I always wondered about it. Alright, so, we got to even the position of having this conversation because of what was known as the space race. Soviet Union, United States, who's ahead of whom? Now, we're in a different world, where other countries are rising in their presence on the space frontier. We should be curious what NASA's plans are in a world where we are not the only player in town. More on that when StarTalk continues.

• 24:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about space from the whole of the universe of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. It's cool. This is where you got inspired as a kid, yeah? That's where I went, age nine. So what we have, we have entered a new era. Other countries are putting things into space. Even countries like India. India. What do you mean even India? India, because when we think of India, do we think frontier space? Look at the American hubris that we carry coming out of the 20th century. We have our deep understanding of what we think the rest of the world is, and then what it actually is is different. Such as India, where they launched an uncrewed vehicle into orbit. Which is the first step before you put people into orbit. Absolutely.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I went to Charlie. I said, Charlie. Charlie, I said. I said, Charlie. The whole world is now kinda doing what NASA's been doing. There's some competition out there. Isn't that a great thing? And I asked him, "Do you, do you, does this feel like competition to you?" Let's find out what he told him.

• 25:44Speaker 02

  We teach people, we act as a model for how people of different cultures, different races, different nationalities can in fact work together. There are now five other nations, at least five, who are sitting on the surface of Mars roaming around for the first time ever, because there's only been one nation, one nation in the history of humankind that has ever successfully landed a vehicle on the surface of Mars that has functioned, and that's the United States, you know that.

• 26:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Merka.

• 26:11Speaker 02

  However, Merka, if you want to put it that way. But, but right now, there are other nations...

• 26:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'd lost count, thanks for reminding me of that.

• 26:19Speaker 02

  Many...

• 26:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that the model going forward?

• 26:21Speaker 02

  The chant, international cooperation? Without question. If you look at the space launch system, or international space station, no doubt, that's my champ, that's my championship model.

• 26:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is the largest collaboration of nations outside of warfare that there is. So Bill, is this state of the moving frontier, is that gonna take us to the world of Star Trek?

• 26:49Bill Nye?

  That's it, where there's a Russian guy sitting next to a Japanese guy, and they're all in it together?

• 26:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that, exactly that.

• 26:56Bill Nye?

  With an optimistic view of the future? And then when we get to Mars, just...

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's, no, more broadly, not that, that, it may be that science is what people turn to to lead the way for international cooperation. On a level far more potent and effective than anything the UN itself could possibly accomplish.

• 27:16Bill Nye?

  It would be a wonderful thing if we all got this thing in our heads that we're gonna find out whether or not we're alone in the universe, and we're all gonna work together.

• 27:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and...

• 27:24Bill Nye?

  Fantastic.

• 27:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And in doing...

• 27:26Bill Nye?

  By the way, right over Kirk's, Captain Kirk's shoulder is the science officer, not the military firing officer, it was a cool optimist, it is a cool optimistic view of the future.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But they can still fire torpedoes.

• 27:36Bill Nye?

  Well, if they're photons.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  Those photon torpedoes will ruin your day.

• 27:40Bill Nye?

  Yeah, well, if you're on the wrong side of them, and the S.H.I.E.L.D. four, man, there's always trouble.

• 27:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that right, Shield Four?

• 27:48Bill Nye?

  Oh, man, this is always buckling.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I didn't know that.

• 27:50Bill Nye?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I gotta go back and check that out.

• 27:52Bill Nye?

  It's a design issue, we're working on it.

• 27:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you still have to get to that point.

• 27:57Bill Nye?

  Yes, and I want...

• 27:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have engineering challenges.

• 28:00Bill Nye?

  Yes, you want me to solve them?

• 28:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Perhaps the highest challenges of them all...

• 28:04Bill Nye?

  Is money.

• 28:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are political.

• 28:05Bill Nye?

  Yeah, absolutely. The technical challenges are solvable, everybody.

• 28:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let us find out what General Charles Bolden, head of NASA, has to say about NASA and politics.

• 28:13Bill Nye?

  Alright, it's a worldwide thing.

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Everybody looks for, um, what do we call it? The return on investment.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ROI.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  ROI. Everybody looking at this show knows what ROI is. You know, what am I gonna get back from this? What we are going to get back as a nation, what we are gonna get back as a people, is the incredible satisfaction of knowing that we have finally accomplished something that humanity has been trying to seek for millennia. We have left this planet, we have gone to another planet, and we're on our way, you know, farther out into the solar system, and maybe one of these days, but it is a long, long, long, long way off. You know, we're gonna turn even more science fiction into science fact, but maybe following Voyager and leaving this solar system.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the unstated fact here is, you need a vision statement that is bipartisan-supported.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Got to have it.

• 29:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because timescales for NASA to plan and execute are longer than reelection cycles.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  Way so much longer.

• 29:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so you need a substrate.

• 29:20Speaker 02

  And Neil, you know, and you're a big person on NASA needs more money. NASA, NASA needs, needs more public will, more national will.

• 29:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Mike, how do, how do we do that? I mean, NASA wants to plan something, if you wanna go to the stars, that takes decades, but you reelect people every two years, four years. How do we get around that?

• 29:42Speaker 01

  Well, the political system in the US for funding NASA is, in many ways, broken.

• 29:48Bill Nye?

  That's why you join the Planetary Society.

• 29:51Speaker 01

  And, and the way to fix the system is to get so many people yelling, not yelling... But speaking loudly to Congress through the Planetary Society, through the American Astronomical Society, to your congressman, to the White House, saying, "This is damned important." The return on investment, every dollar you spend in space, you get a hundred bucks back. Maybe a generation later, in new technology, in planetary defenses, and in discoveries, you can't even begin to imagine what they are.

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But plus, there's another twist here. Because now, if you just come up with a couple million dollars, you start a private space company.

• 30:31Bill Nye?

  Oh, yeah. It's more than a couple million, but still.

• 30:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than a couple million.

• 30:35Bill Nye?

  Yeah.

• 30:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, less than NASA's budget.

• 30:37Bill Nye?

  Considerably.

• 30:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, these might be game changers, perhaps. Now, you know I asked that of the head of NASA. I just wanted to know, what did he feel about private companies sort of getting in the game? We will find out when StarTalk returns.

• 31:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're talking about space, featuring my interview with General Charles Bolden, the head of NASA. The NASA Administrator, as they're called. Bill Nye, Mike Chara, friend and colleague. You guys are helping me through this, thank you. We're now talking about private space exploration.

• 31:21Bill Nye?

  I know, they're popping up like corn.

• 31:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like mushrooms, yeah.

• 31:23Bill Nye?

  Mushrooms.

• 31:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah, so, does corn pop up? I don't know, I don't know corn, but mushrooms I've seen.

• 31:29Bill Nye?

  Corn pops, Neil, you've seen.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, corn pop in a popper?

• 31:32Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 31:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  And they're gonna grab the whole market.

• 31:36Bill Nye?

  They're gonna grab the market?

• 31:37Speaker 01

  They're gonna grab the market.

• 31:38Bill Nye?

  Who's the buyer?

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Everybody who wants to launch any kind of commercial vehicle, like a weather satellite, like a communications satellite, if you want to.

• 31:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you've got SpaceX, you've got Orbital Sciences, you've got, uh, who else?

• 31:50Bill Nye?

  There's a difference, though.

• 31:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the difference?

• 31:53Bill Nye?

  When Columbus left Spain, he was government funded.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he was.

• 31:57Bill Nye?

  Magellan was government funded.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, he was.

• 31:59Bill Nye?

  Lewis and Clark were government funded.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, they were.

• 32:01Bill Nye?

  You're not gonna go to Mars and look for life for kicks.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  You're not going to initially, but you may go look to capture an asteroid, not for kicks, but for profit. As soon as people start making money in space, in near earth space, then you're gonna see lots of people jump on the bandwagon.

• 32:20Bill Nye?

  People sell weather data, to be sure.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  And imaging data and spy data.

• 32:24Bill Nye?

  Imaging data, exactly.

• 32:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, let's find out what Charlie Bolden has to say about this infusion of private enterprise into this new game.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  Private space ventures are absolutely essential for us to be successful with exploration. We, you know, we took a gamble. We said, "We believe," and the president said, "We believe that we should allow NASA to free itself of requirements to get things, people and things to low earth orbit." So Orbital Sciences and SpaceX have been carrying cargo back and forth to the International Space Station for two years.

• 33:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not that NASA has never partnered with industry before.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  We always have.

• 33:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always have.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. The reason I tell our employees and our family, the NASA family, which to me includes the contractors, that anytime anybody asks them what they do, they should stick their chest out proudly and say, "I work, you know, for or with NASA. I work with the space program." Because we have always had this unbreakable partnership with American industry.

• 33:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But is the difference...

• 33:29Speaker 02

  In every spacecraft we've done. This time, we are not controlling, we are not owning.

• 33:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the difference.

• 33:34Speaker 02

  We are not operating. So the ownership, the operation, everything, right up until they get to the International Space Station. When they get in the box, then it's mine. And we will take over and maneuver it into the box, let it dock. It'll belong to us.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The lamb descending on the moon didn't say Grumman on the side, it said NASA.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  It said US.

• 33:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  US.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  It didn't say NASA.

• 34:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Didn't even say NASA.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  It said USA.

• 34:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thanks for correcting that. And whereas today, it's their spaceship going up. So it's gonna say SpaceX.

• 34:07Speaker 02

  And it's gonna have a US flag on the side, and it's gonna say US. But it'll also say SpaceX, maybe. You know, I don't know whether they'll put it on the side or not. Hopefully, but hopefully there'll be a big US flag there. But that's gonna be the mode of transportation of US and partner astronauts to the International Space Station. Because a nation like the United States...

• 34:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a new business model.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  It's a brand new business model.

• 34:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  New business model. Let's do it. But we are reminded every now and then how dangerous this activity is.

• 34:36Bill Nye?

  Yeah, but I just want to remind, we send people in space, we're talking about adventure. We're gonna make discoveries, but it's gonna be an adventure.

• 34:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we need two motivations. One, yes, we want to do some science, and maybe that's best done with robots. But if you send people, it doesn't have to be about science, it's about adventure.

• 34:52Bill Nye?

  And discovery, we're gonna just find stuff, I guarantee you, we'll find things we didn't ever think of.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  And those humans are adaptable. They get there, they get to the surface of Mars, something doesn't go quite right. They see it right away.

• 35:04Bill Nye?

  Not all the humans are adaptable. Some of them are pretty stupid.

• 35:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not the ones we're gonna send to Mars. Right, okay. So, so, alright, so you ready to do this? Are you gonna sign up to go to Mars?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  I would go to Mars, uh, probably in a heartbeat, uh, but not...

• 35:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be in a seventieth of a second.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  Not just for the adventure, I'd really wanna go if I was carrying the equipment to go do that drilling.

• 35:26Bill Nye?

  To look for life.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  To hit the water, and I'd want the microscopes and the DNA analyzers coming along with me, 'cause I wanna make that discovery. That's the point of going.

• 35:35Bill Nye?

  By the way, that's why these guys are all hot for bringing a sample back from Mars, 'cause they can't get all those instruments up there.

• 35:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, if you could get all the instruments there, you don't have to bring the sample back.

• 35:43Bill Nye?

  Cha.

• 35:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Study it in situ.

• 35:44Bill Nye?

  Yes.

• 35:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Forget all this landing on Mars stuff and terraforming. At the end of my interview with the administrator of NASA, I had to ask him the burning question that's on all of our minds. Where are the flying cars? When is that gonna happen? That's what I asked him, coming up on StarTalk.

• 36:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk is back, we're talking about space. And this is the part of the show where I normally, like, throw to Bill, lost somewhere in New York, but I've got Bill Knight, like, right here. Give us that gesture that will bring your clip up.

• 36:23Bill Nye?

  Let's, let's roll that tape.

• 36:30Bill Nye?

  For decades, we've explored the near reaches of outer space. We've flown vehicles like this up into the icy blackness just to see what's out there. But missions like this are just a first step. It's early in the 21st century. I hope in the next 100 years, we will have explored under the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, looking for signs of life. In the next 100 years, we'll probably know whether there was, or even is, life on Mars. If we were to discover life on another world, it would change everybody's perception of life on this one. Everybody's perception of what it means to be a living thing on a planet in space would change.

• 37:14Bill Nye?

  I hope in the coming decades, we commit to explore farther and deeper into space, so that people everywhere will know the cosmos and our place within it. So that people everywhere on Earth share a vision of our place in space.

• 37:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You look kinda manic there. I was kinda worried about you.

• 37:36Bill Nye?

  Guys, he's wound up.

• 37:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Mike, what is your... What do you want the future of space exploration to hold?

• 37:42Bill Nye?

  Yeah, man, what do you want?

• 37:43Speaker 01

  What do I really want? What do guys really want? I wanna know, A, if there's life on Mars. I think that's the single most important question in all of science right now, not just biology, not just astrophysics.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And allow me to broaden that to say, we wanna know if there's life anywhere other than Earth.

• 37:59Speaker 01

  Of course. But the place to go to answer the question utterly definitively is Mars. At least, we can get a confirmed sure, yes or no, in much less than 20 years. And we don't need to send astronauts. This can be done 100% robotically. I wanna know what the dark energy is. And I wanna know what the dark matter is.

• 38:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the future of science, but I'm talking about going places in space.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  If we're gonna explore the solar system, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto are obvious places.

• 38:30Bill Nye?

  Europa has twice the seawater of the Earth.

• 38:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moon.

• 38:33Bill Nye?

  It could be more than that.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  And what's the fishing like there?

• 38:35Bill Nye?

  I know. Are there Europanians swimming around under the ice?

• 38:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I asked the head of NASA. I...

• 38:43Bill Nye?

  Charlie, you said.

• 38:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charlie. I said, Charlie, what are NASA's greatest accomplishments? And what do you see for the future of this all? Let's find out.

• 38:53Speaker 02

  Why I feel so good about this agency today is because I honestly believe-

• 38:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You kind of have to because you're running it.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 38:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not gonna say, "Why, this agency sucks."

• 39:01Speaker 02

  Well, we do suck in some terms. There's some things we don't do as well as we should do.

• 39:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Even under your watch.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Even under my watch. But in terms of technological achievement, nobody can match us. In terms of achievement and exploration. We are on Mars. We are on the moon. You know, when Voyager left the solar system-

• 39:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Page one story.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  For the first time in the history of humanity, not only had we visited every single planet in the solar system with some NASA instrument, but for the first time in the history of humanity, we had a man-made vehicle that had left our solar system. That's a big deal.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Charlie, I don't care what else your agency is doing, when are you gonna give us the flying cars?

• 39:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Come on, come on. We've been one of those for decades.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  We are trying to enable industry to do that. We're already collaborating with companies, I won't give them any advertisement or stuff, on autonomous automobiles. Whether they're gonna fly or not, I don't know. But we're learning, we're collaborating with them because what they're learning about autonomous vehicles, we're trying to apply to autonomous flight of unmanned aerial systems. You know, how do we make airplanes more efficient? So there's a lot of collaboration going on. So it won't be NASA that brings us flying cars, but industry, hopefully one of these days, may develop it as a result of the collaboration with us.

• 40:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so I'll stop writing you letters about that.

• 40:24Speaker 02

  No, no, don't stop writing me letters. I mean, it's important, that's the way we determine what the public wants.

• 40:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We'll start with the hoverboard, maybe the hoverboard. I'll accept that first, and then we'll move on.

• 40:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, I think there's an important little bit of information there. We think of NASA as planting flags, and in there, we get a taste of the infusion of NASA's energy, money, and intellectual capital in creating technologies.

• 40:55Bill Nye?

  Oh, this is a big deal. See, this is the difference between your good old days and what's going on now. NASA's involved- No, seriously.

• 41:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What?

• 41:04Bill Nye?

  The good old days, NASA led the world, and I'm not busting your chops. I mean, it was a different era.

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But what it means is perhaps we need to think of NASA more as an engineering- As an agency that inspires engineering solutions to our greatest problems.

• 41:21Bill Nye?

  Uh, sure. And the greatest problem's gonna be climate change, and that's gonna require some space, uh, space assets, things flying around in space.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  But even in those good old days in the 1960s, when, yep, there was this huge singular focus on going to the moon, there was lots of planning going on for the Hubble Space Telescope, people were already working on it, for the International Ultraviolet Explorer, for astronomical missions, for lots of other kinds of science. So NASA has always had this multifaceted approach. Yep, there's always this one huge thing that they're doing on.

• 41:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do we need the one thing to get to rally? You can't rally around 100 things.

• 41:59Bill Nye?

  Or to not, that's the trouble. Where do you spend money? Let me ask you this. Didn't we find out the age of the Earth by rocks, with rocks on the moon?

• 42:06Speaker 01

  We determined where the Earth and the moon came from, more important, where the moon came from, because we found that the oxygen...

• 42:13Bill Nye?

  It wasn't like Arkansas or something.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  No, no, no. The oxygen isotope ratios in the lunar and the Earth rocks are basically the same, which meant common origin. Once you knew that, the giant impactor theory was just an idea ready to be born.

• 42:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I get that, but you and I are astrophysicists, so we care deeply about things like the origin of the moon, and what the rocks are made of, and all of this. But at the end of the day, somebody's gotta write a check.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 42:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gonna come out of a congress, out of a community of people, elected by the country.

• 42:43Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm not confident that just telling them to spend money on an agency that employs us in our activities is sufficient enough for them to write that check.

• 42:54Speaker 01

  But we have to tell them at the same time that we are their life insurance policy. Because if they ignore us, and if we ignore those space rocks out there, for example, then one of them is...

• 43:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The beginning of the sentence sounds like, "If you don't..."

• 43:08Bill Nye?

  I'm in a fashion to you, man.

• 43:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is a diabolical scientist.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  I'm a pragmatist. Guys, you wanna ignore those big rocks out there, ignore them at your peril, just like the dinosaurs ignored them, and you're gonna go the same way. But there's 100 other reasons, because we do all this other cool stuff for you.

• 43:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I cannot top that comment. We will end. StarTalk. On that comment, you've been watching StarTalk. And I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. From the whole of the universe, I bid you to keep looking up.