Cosmic Queries– Space Junk! with Moriba Jah

What do we do with all this space junk? On this episode, Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice answer questions about the stuff we put into orbit with astrodynamicist and space environmentalist, Dr. Moriba Jah.

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.

• 0:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today, we're going to talk about the space environment in which business, surveillance, travel, all takes place. It's like from Earth's surface up to the top of the atmosphere. That's something we haven't talked about. Chuck, that's where we're going today.

• 0:40Chuck Nice?

  Yes, that's right. I like, I like space junk better than...

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  See, you said it all fancy. I just like to say space junk.

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space junk.

• 0:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I almost hear like Quincy Jones in the back.

• 1:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sanford and Son in space, that'll be the next.

• 1:07Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I've got, I've got one of the world's, if not the world's expert on this very subject, right here with StarTalk. And his name is Moriba Ja. Moriba, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Thank you so much. It's an honor and a pleasure to be here with all of you.

• 1:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so you're an astrodynamicsist and space environmentalist. That sounds like if no one knew what that was, you would have to invent it just because the world needs it. Right? Is that, is that a fair way to describe what you do?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

• 1:43Chuck Nice?

  You know what, though? I gotta tell you, that, that means that there was a time...

• 1:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When there wasn't.

• 1:50Chuck Nice?

  Where we didn't need you. So this is not a good thing that you exist because, you know, it's like, it's like social media manager. You know what I mean? Like, there was a time that meant that you had somebody, but you were clearly a person who socialized with the media quite a bit, and you know, you needed somebody to handle that. It didn't mean what it means now.

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 2:11Chuck Nice?

  It's a bad thing that we have to have.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a bad, it's a bad thing that you exist. I'm sorry, I've got to say that.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  No, no, no, I agree with all of you, full heartedly. You know, after, after about 1957, with the launch of Sputnik, my, my, the need for me to exist began to grow.

• 2:29Chuck Nice?

  Right. So now Sputnik.

• 2:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let me finish with the man's resume.

• 2:33Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I forgot. I'm sorry.

• 2:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can get all in it.

• 2:39Chuck Nice?

  I'm ready to talk to him because he's got some fascinating stuff. I'm sorry.

• 2:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's got some fascinating stuff. So he's a professor and researcher at UT Austin at the Cockrell School of Engineering. And so let me just give the list here because every one of these could be like an entire StarTalk. Non-gravitational astrodynamics, I love that. But I don't know what in the universe is moving without the influence of gravity. Advanced nonlinear multisensor object tracking. Sounds like the Pentagon needs you. Prediction and information fusion with a space object detection. This man is like, okay, if we're gonna have a space war, I want him on our side.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Tell me about it.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But on top of that, and we'll get to it in a later segment, but I want to put it up front right here. Eyes on the Sky Mixed Reality Experience. That's not with the Engineering Department. What is that?

• 3:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. So interestingly enough, we have some faculty that are in the fine arts and they've created something called Texas Immersive. And it's really trying to combine digital and physical experience for storytelling.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. Okay. So this would, this would increase the impact of any kind of science that you do.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Yeah. A hundred and 10% because one of the things that I've seen is just going to talk to scientists, it's like the echo chamber and, you know, the self licking ice cream cone, not so, not so useful. So I need to be able to reach, reach people and the storytelling with mixed reality seems to be something that could really help.

• 4:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. And the website is eyes on the sky.org. So that's good. So Chuck, what I keep interrupting?

• 4:20Chuck Nice?

  No, I was just gonna say, I just want to be a self licking ice cream cone now. That sounds awesome. That just sounds like the happiest thing in the world.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but I think there's a limit, though. I think that's part of the problem here. It's like, like the snake eating its tail.

• 4:36Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 4:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's a point where that doesn't really work out.

• 4:39Chuck Nice?

  For the snake or the tail.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  That's right. That's right.

• 4:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we're actually going to turn this into a Cosmic Queries where we've actually solicited questions from our fan base. Chuck, I think you have those questions, right?

• 4:52Chuck Nice?

  I hope so.

• 4:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 4:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me the other Chuck.

• 5:00Chuck Nice?

  Where's the Chuck that has the question?

• 5:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But before we get there, while Chuck is finding his questions,

• 5:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Moriba, you wrote something recently, just towards the end of May, which seemed to me to be a kind of a self-reflection autobiographical sort of memoir. Sort of, it's an arc of life from your beginnings to where you are right now. And I just want to ask, what compelled you to write that? Because it is a highly unusual story. And between you and me, every interesting person I know and have ever met has had an unusual background. It wasn't just that linear, go to college, go to graduate school, get the degree, get the degree. And then boom, no, the most interesting people are the ones who've lived a little. And often that living involves stress, trauma, failures, as well as achievements.

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what can you tell us about that?

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, look, I mean, I grew up in Venezuela and, you know, I went to military school for high school and a lot of trial and tribulation going through that. I enlisted in the US military when I graduated and I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Watched plenty of Top Gun when I was a teenager, so that was like my dream. I never thought that space would have a place for me. And, um, and yeah, basically as a security guard guarding nukes in Montana, that's when I started noticing dots going across the sky that disappeared in the middle of the sky. And I'm like, is it just me seeing this? Like, is this a UFO? Like, what is this, right? I just, I was completely ignorant. And when I found-

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just to be clear, it most definitely was a UFO because you didn't know what you were looking at.

• 6:46Speaker 02

  Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was, it was definitely UFO for me, right? And so-

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Definitely, for others, for me, others, it would have been an IFO. That night, for you, it was a UFO, okay?

• 6:57Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So, yeah, so basically, uh, you know, when I, when I was able to figure out that, um, these things were human-made objects reflecting sunlight and going through earth's shadow, that really-

• 7:10Speaker 02

  That really crystallized this curiosity for me to want to know more about that. And that's where I think my path towards astrodynamics and motion stuff in space started.

• 7:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, you see what happens when you look up sometimes? See what happens? Now, by you in Philadelphia, I don't know where you've been looking.

• 7:27Chuck Nice?

  When we looked up, when I looked up, what I saw was a ceiling.

• 7:33Chuck Nice?

  So, not quite the same.

• 7:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, you have to not only look up, you have to be curious about what you see.

• 7:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 7:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly what Moriba was doing. Okay, so how, were you American born in Venezuela and not Venezuelan? Otherwise, you couldn't just join the US military.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  No, that's good for you to notice that. So, I was born here in the US, in San Francisco, actually. My mom's from Haiti, my father from Sierra Leone. They got divorced when I was very young. My mom met this guy from Venezuela, so we moved to Venezuela when I was seven years old.

• 8:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, okay. And tell me about your life in terms of discipline. Because to be a faculty member at a major university specializing in the fields you do requires discipline. So, how do you go from my reading your tract, basically no discipline to discipline? Because if that's a secret you can let out.

• 8:30Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, that should be your new job. Teaching people that.

• 8:37Chuck Nice?

  Want to talk about getting paid?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  Nice, nice. Yeah, absolutely. So, look, I think when I was a teenager and kind of having some moments of self-reflection and going through some very low points in my life, and I think that I kind of discovered I want my life to serve a purpose for humanity, for other people. And I think the discipline came as a function of my inner commitment to that inner clarion call of thou shalt do something that's useful for humanity and don't let other people's opinion become your reality, sort of thing. I think that's where that came from.

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, but that takes a level of maturity, particularly growing up, to even realize that.

• 9:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, um, having gone through military school, I think that was being forced to grow up faster than a regular teenager would have, and then doing four years in the military at a nuclear missile base in Montana, that was also something that instilled some hard knocks discipline into, into me as well.

• 9:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, if that doesn't, I don't know what will. Here's the nukes. You're on watch.

• 10:00Speaker 02

  Right, yeah.

• 10:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it's kinda hard to screw that up and then you can't get out of it with them. My bad.

• 10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My bad, that doesn't work.

• 10:12Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 10:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're eating a sandwich and you sit back on the control board and bam, you pop the button.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's my, my bad for a lot of people.

• 10:23Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 10:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, everybody's bad. So, before we get to our Q and A, could you give me some sense, give us all, some sense of the magnitude of the problem of space junk right now?

• 10:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, so in 1957, we launched Sputnik, one, one satellite that, you know, didn't, didn't live in orbit too long, but since 1957, we've been launching hundreds, thousands of things, and it turns out that now we track almost 30,000 individual objects in, you know, in orbit around the earth, ranging in size from cellphone all the way to the space station. These things are in different orbital highways, going at very fast speeds, as you know, and so when two things meet at the same place at the same time and the speeds are quite different, bad things happen and they become smaller pieces and they, those collisions

• 11:23Speaker 02

  generate more garbage and that sort of thing. So, and we don't have any sort of space traffic rules, protocols, practices that people say, "Hey, yeah, you know, if, if I'm gonna head towards you, uh, and you're headed towards me, we'll both turn left or do this," or there, there are no rules of thumb, uh, you know, in, in earth orbit, which makes things a little bit worse.

• 11:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You mentioned things smaller, the size of a cellphone, but you don't mean actual cellphones are in space, do you?

• 11:51Speaker 02

  Well, yeah. So, actual cell, to the best of my knowledge, we don't have actual cellphones in Earth orbit, but it wouldn't be, it wouldn't be a surprise to me if an astronaut went on a spacewalk and decided to pop this thing out and, you know, they left it like they've left wrenches and these sorts of things and people just don't talk about it, sort of.

• 12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I thought they fell out of people's pockets.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 12:14Chuck Nice?

  It also wouldn't surprise me if, if somebody has my carrier, which I won't disparage publicly, but they actually were just trying to get some service.

• 12:26Chuck Nice?

  And that's how far they had to go to try and get a damn signal.

• 12:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can you hear me now?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  I think that's what they needed to do for the commercial, man, is actually like, go up to the space station and see, see how well that worked.

• 12:46Chuck Nice?

  Actually, that's a good advertisement. I'll buy that.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Right?

• 12:49Chuck Nice?

  That's the carrier I'm going with.

• 12:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, so I love your expertise. Let's see how our fanbase, where they come from with regard to your expertise and their curiosity. So Chuck, what do you have?

• 13:01Chuck Nice?

  All right, for Dr. Morbajah, we have questions that come from our Patreon patrons, which is how we solicit our questions now. It used to be that we gleaned them from the various iterations that we find ourselves on the internet, but now, if you want, you just support us on patreon.com and, and then we'll, we'll read your question. Here's the deal.

• 13:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right.

• 13:24Chuck Nice?

  Jeff Johnson of Salt Lake City, Utah, says, "Dr. Ja, can you please give us some insight into China's recent space station, Sina Fu? Were they irresponsible or was there really little to no danger to Earth's inhabitants?"

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or did they do it on purpose?

• 13:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, right.

• 13:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, so this, this, this, uh, is with a rocket booster from one of the stages. And it just, they didn't know where it was gonna fall. And I thought, when you launch something that big, you put little retro-rockets or something on it, and you guide the thing into the, the great toilet bowl of space, the Pacific Ocean. So what, what went wrong here, or what was not in the planning from the beginning?

• 14:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think you got it, uh, as they say, tickety-boo, uh, there, Neil, in, in that the responsible thing would have been to outfit this rocket with, uh, you know, propellant and thrusters to force it in to maximize the chance of the thing not surviving re-entry. But, you know, when you, when you leave it to Mother Nature to clean up the mess, uh, hard to predict what Mother Nature's gonna do sometimes. And so, I think that's where the, the increased risk, uh, is. And, you know, until China, uh, actually puts on these thrusters for subsequent rocket bodies, it's, it's a problem.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  And, and it, it's, it's really bad news to make the world, uh, you know, spin up on, you know, is this guy actually gonna fall on me today? And, uh,

• 14:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so it sounds like the Wild West. It, it, aren't we overdue for some rules and regulations? A treaty that everyone, a treaty for what you do with your trash? It's a trash treaty. Right? All right? Everybody gets together, here's how you dispose of the recyclables, the, the smelly trash, the, the, the burnable trash. Why don't we have that?

• 15:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the interesting thing is that we do have a United Nations Convention on Liability and Damage, and it specifically states, uh, that, you know, the, the, the parties to, to the treaty should avoid harmful interference. I would say that a big rocket body falling on top of your head would constitute harmful interference. Uh, but the thing is, it's so loosely interpreted that perhaps China's saying, well, we don't necessarily consider that harmful. Harmful interference is not really defined, and I think that's the major issue.

• 15:56Chuck Nice?

  So, from a sheerly, uh, uh, litigious standpoint, they were not

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that a word? Is that a? Is that a word, Chuck? Sheerly?

• 16:07Chuck Nice?

  I don't know. It is now.

• 16:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sheerly?

• 16:10Chuck Nice?

  Sheerly. Uh, no, from a sheer, uh, larynx standpoint.

• 16:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of like or pertaining to sheer?

• 16:16Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 16:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sheerly.

• 16:17Chuck Nice?

  Right. There you go. So they, they are, I told you it's a word now.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In the Chuck dictionary.

• 16:25Speaker 02

  I love it.

• 16:26Chuck Nice?

  Look, let me tell you something. There's three dictionaries, all right? Uh, you got Webster's, you got Oxford, and you got Chuck.

• 16:32Speaker 02

  Chuck.

• 16:33Chuck Nice?

  There you go. So, uh, but, so i- if you're looking technically by the law, they're not irresponsible. But then, if you wanted to attach morals to this, then yes, they would be irresponsible.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely, right? And I think, uh, you know, most of the world agrees that this is not behavior that they want to see, uh, carry, carry on, carried forward. And they should do something responsible about it, just like Neil said, uh, finding a way to purposely de-orbit this thing so that at least there's some intent with how the thing might, uh, re-enter and hopefully, you know, burn up.

• 17:13Chuck Nice?

  All right, that bet's the next question.

• 17:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it from Patreon or is it from you?

• 17:17Chuck Nice?

  Nah, it's from me, yeah.

• 17:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I told you, you want to ask a question, you go.

• 17:20Chuck Nice?

  I just joined Patreon!

• 17:24Chuck Nice?

  I just joined while we were here!

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, all right.

• 17:27Chuck Nice?

  I wouldn't know.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, go.

• 17:29Chuck Nice?

  Has the United States ever done this?

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we will get to that after the break, all right? Yeah, so it's one thing to point your finger, if, if, you know, he who is without sin casts the first stone. We will get back to that when StarTalk returns. Space Junk, be there.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Hey, I'm Roy Hill Percival, and I support StarTalk on Patreon, bringing the universe down to earth. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk. Got special guest, Maura Bajah, who's a professor of, was it astrodynamics? Did I get that right?

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astrodynamics, I love it. I love it. At the University of Texas, at Austin, is in their School of Engineering. And I have Chuck.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Before the break, Chuck asked a great question, and even though he's not on Patreon, I'll let him ask this question. It was, here we are pointing our fingers at China for dropping one of their boosters, who knows where, right? Well, we know where, but they didn't know where until it hit. So are we without guilt in this game of lost boosters?

• 19:09Speaker 02

  No, we're not. In fact, I would say in low Earth orbit, where you can think of low Earth orbit going from about, I don't know, roughly 100 kilometer altitude to about, you know, 1,200 kilometer altitude, there's probably about 2,000 dead rocket bodies, derelict rocket bodies. Of the 2,000, probably about 1,300 belong to Russia, launched from the Soviet Union era and all that stuff.

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, still there.

• 19:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, still there. And, and the remain, out of the remaining 700, I'm thinking that somewhere about 350 of those are Chinese and the rest are American. So, so the US has quite a few hundred dead rocket bodies that are kind of like ticking time bombs. And, um, yeah.

• 19:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And none of them have, have, have, will have a controlled reentry?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 20:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you're telling us?

• 20:03Speaker 02

  That's what I'm telling you.

• 20:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh. Okay, so of all the non-controlled reentries going forward, based on your statistics, half will be old Russia. Half of the half that remains is China and then what remains is going to be us. So watch that space. Plus Skylab, we didn't have that. Seems like enough people went in and out of Skylab, we should have known where that would have fallen and we didn't at the time. I was alive and around and ready for that. And I remembered Baskin Robbins, the ice cream store, said, "If you get hit with a Skylab part, you will get an ice cream cone that has every one of their flavors stacked on top of it."

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Wow, what a prize, right?

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What a prize for being dead, yes.

• 20:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me, what happened with Skylab, America's first Skylab laboratory?

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, as you said, that thing re-entered and people were pretty freaked out about that. I remember the Mir space station, that's the one that I remember was Mir, and even that was a very scary experience.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Russian space station. Alright, so we are not without guilt. So we just have to, it'd be nicer if we weren't, pretend we were high and mighty, as we point out.

• 21:20Chuck Nice?

  Well, that kind of brings further to bear the point that you made about having international rules, actual rules, you know, then everybody would have to follow them.

• 21:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah. Chuck, give me some more questions.

• 21:32Chuck Nice?

  Alright, here we go. This is Robert Weaver and he says, "Hey, would it be possible to use the Lagrange point to make a giant pile of space debris? Seems like that would be easier than bringing it all back to Earth and much more ethical than just flinging it out into space. Also, in the future, we could use it like an auto junkyard. And when we want components or metals or stuff like that, we could just go to that to build in space instead of recycling."

• 22:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow. So Maura, tell us first about Lagrange points.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically, these are points in a three-body system where you have some stable and some unstable points, places where this gravitational influence in that system is, let's say, kind of null, things cancel each other out. But yeah, out of the five points, out of the five Lagrange points, I believe two of them are stable and the other three are unstable. And so, I would say this, we need to find ways of not creating orbital landfills. So the thing is, sending stuff to a Lagrange point while you might be able, and oh, by the way, even when you send stuff there, it doesn't mean it just stays there forever.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  Like, you know, eventually, the thing's gonna drift out just due to perturbations that are non-gravitational, mostly in that sort of stuff. Plus, as Neil, you clearly know this, there's more than just a few bodies in the universe, and so eventually, you know, the curvature of spacetime will force these things out if they're uncontrolled. So, it's not a good answer, and it's not a viable solution, and we should avoid trying to find a place in space to just send garbage to.

• 23:23Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah, and so, basically, let me just see if I got this right. He's asking whether or not we could create a celestial equivalent of our ocean's great garbage patch.

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Yeah!

• 23:39Chuck Nice?

  Which is where the currents come together and create a stillness.

• 23:43Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 23:44Chuck Nice?

  And then that's still... And let's do that in space! And we'll just do that in space.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we don't want to do that, Chuck.

• 23:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so just let me throw some astrophysics in here, okay? One of the attractive Lagrange points, in the Jupiter orbit, the Jupiter-sun orbit, there's a leading Lagrange point and a trailing Lagrange point. If you look there, there are asteroids that have collected there.

• 24:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they're called the Trojan asteroids. And so it's fascinating. And we knew to look there because we said, here's a place where all the gravitational forces cancel out. So there's got to be something. Anything that sort of drifts in won't have a reason to drift out very quickly or at all.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we actually find these places that are repositories. But I'd like the trash heap example. And I think a Sanford and Son space in space. We should do that.

• 24:40Speaker 02

  Well, sure. If we do do that, it should have the theme song that goes along with it.

• 24:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It should have.

• 24:47Chuck Nice?

  Without doubt.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We agree.

• 24:52Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, every time you drop something off in that great junkyard in the sky, you should hear, shut up, dummy.

• 25:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Give me some more.

• 25:06Chuck Nice?

  All right. Here we go. This is Chris Newberry. And Chris says, hey, Chuck, bet you don't get my last name correct on the first try. Aw, man. That, see, I should read these first. I'm going to say Newbry instead of Newberry. But anyway, because it's N E W B R Y. Dr. Tyson, just love you and love your Cosmic Queries book. SpaceX, the idea that put 42,000 satellites into orbit for optimal internet around the world. That being said, does that put a lot of junk into orbit?

• 25:47Chuck Nice?

  How much does that increase the risk of future endeavors of this rock having such a net surrounding it?

• 25:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so let me reshape that slightly. So more of a, if we have functioning satellites, then they're not junk. But if you have thousands and thousands of functioning satellites, isn't there still a risk that they could collide with each other?

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so, and so I would say this, low Earth orbit is already building itself up to be this place with these functioning satellites, like you said, owned by different companies. But there isn't a space traffic coordination entity, right? So the thing is, people are making decisions about how to maneuver and go, you know, how they want their satellites to behave, but they're doing that in the absence of coordinating with other people that are also making decisions. And so that does increase the risk of things, you know, bumping into each other in the night, so to speak.

• 26:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And it's not, and space isn't just so supremely empty that we shouldn't worry about it?

• 26:56Speaker 02

  No, because we have very specific orbital highways where we put these satellites, given the purpose that we want. And right now, for instance, you know, with SpaceX and the Starlinks, which, oh, by the way, you know, out of the nearly 30,000 objects that we track, about 3,500 are working satellites and Elon owns about, you know, 1,500 of those. So it's already quite a bit, but...

• 27:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so Chuck, Elon is going to become Skynet.

• 27:26Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God. Oh, yes. Look at that.

• 27:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Skynet's going to be, achieve consciousness.

• 27:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then control the robots.

• 27:35Chuck Nice?

  And by the way, Neil, he's your friend.

• 27:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I do count him as a friend.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just, you say that like, okay, I'm also to blame just because I know the guy, right?

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Well, hold on a second. So I'm not saying that Elon is at fault for anything. What I am saying is that he owns most of the working satellites in Earth orbit. He will continue to own most of them, as I see now, given the fact that he's got licenses to launch. And so, pretty much, if you want to go beyond 500 kilometer altitude, you've got to coordinate with Elon because you've got to go through his layer of Starlink satellites. So the coordination piece is really important and that has not become manifest yet. So that is an issue.

• 28:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I got this Elon is the next James Bond. So he's 008 and they say...

• 28:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Licensed to launch.

• 28:37Chuck Nice?

  Right. Licensed to launch. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Licensed to launch.

• 28:40Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's the next thing.

• 28:42Chuck Nice?

  Right. Oh, my God. Well, first of all, that sounds ominous.

• 28:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, right, right?

• 28:47Chuck Nice?

  Because that guy may be on his way to being the, uh, the first, uh, real supervillain.

• 28:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you heard how quickly Morbid backpedaled on pulling out his name. Let me say something nice about it before you go to the next topic. I didn't mean he's bad. No, no, no, he's good. Nothing wrong with Helo.

• 29:10Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we all know that Jeff Bezos is really the bad one. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He's the villain.

• 29:15Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, he's bald like, like Lex Luthor.

• 29:18Chuck Nice?

  He, he actually does make for the perfect, like.

• 29:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lex Luthor.

• 29:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, he's gonna be the world's first trillionaire, probably, because he'll be the one that will land on an asteroid and mine it for all of his present.

• 29:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 29:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. Right. All right, cool, let's go to, uh.

• 29:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keeping going.

• 29:33Chuck Nice?

  Avneesh Joshi, and Avneesh says this. Hi, Dr. Tyson, Mr. Nice, and Dr. Ja. I am 10 years old, and I want to be an astrophysicist. My parents gifted me with the StarTalk subscription on my birthday, and this makes me super, super excited.

• 29:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn, now we can't potty mouth on the show. Now, we, damn.

• 29:56Chuck Nice?

  So, he says this. I read my, I read that space debris is causing the night sky to be much brighter. Why does this happen if it does? And will it not make stargazing that much more difficult? How can we overcome it? Wow.

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 30:12Chuck Nice?

  Look at this kid.

• 30:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man, what were you doing when you were 10?

• 30:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. One thing. It wasn't that.

• 30:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It wasn't that?

• 30:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good answer, Morbid. I don't know the answer, but that is the answer.

• 30:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I was writing letters like, Dear Santa Claus. People are like, "You're still believing in Santa?" Anyway, go ahead.

• 30:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what about night sky observing? What's going on there?

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I will say this, right? I'm actually working with the astronomy community to try to quantify the effects and impacts of, you know, these pieces of human stuff, you know, orbiting the earth, and they do reflect sunlight. So, so in a sense, it's light pollution coming from the skies towards the ground, towards large pieces of glass. And yeah, when you look at the night sky, if you're in a place dark enough, you're gonna see more dots going across the sky than you did a decade ago. That, that, that's happening now, and it's not gonna get any better. So I would say to you, a ten-year-old, what's his name again? Abnesh. Abnesh. So I'll say to you, Abnesh,

• 31:18Speaker 02

  it's, the skies are not going to get less polluted with time, because we're gonna keep on launching satellites. And so the night skies are gonna be changing. And I would love it if you could, you know, be part of the group of folks trying to find, you know, solutions to the, to the problem.

• 31:36Chuck Nice?

  So how about this?

• 31:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Once again, we're admitting we messed up everything. And we got, we can't wait till the next generation get older and fix it. That's all.

• 31:44Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, the real sorry, Abnesh. Uh, yeah, you're screwed, and we did it. Basically, that's the answer.

• 31:54Chuck Nice?

  So sorry, Abnesh, you're screwed, and we, and we are responsible.

• 31:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're responsible.

• 31:58Chuck Nice?

  We're responsible, buddy.

• 31:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You'll find us in the Bahamas. You'll fix the world.

• 32:02Chuck Nice?

  By the way, you fix the world, I'll be in Tahiti spending your inheritance. So let me ask you-

• 32:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What'd you say, Mora?

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, so basically, I was just saying, what Chuck had said is that, you know, basically, I'm trying to quantify the problem for Abnesh's generation to try to do something about it, I guess.

• 32:21Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's great. I mean, it's, you're really kind of a voice crying in the wilderness right now, my friend. You are indeed the John DeBaptiste of space junk, because nobody is really paying attention to this. So it's important work to kind of wake people up about this issue, you know?

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a second religious reference here.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I really appreciate that, but I know how John's story ends.

• 32:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Exactly.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I was about to say.

• 32:47Chuck Nice?

  That was great. That was very funny. Okay. All right. Let me ask you this. All right.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so for the atheists out there.

• 32:54Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, John the Baptist had his head served to, is it Salome?

• 32:57Chuck Nice?

  Yes, absolutely.

• 32:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ordered up his head.

• 33:00Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 33:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Uh, let me ask you this. In terms of all this.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, you're not. No, I'm on Patreon question. No, no, one per segment. Okay, go.

• 33:09Chuck Nice?

  Here we go. Here we go. Here's the next one. This is from, uh, uh, Sima- Simaya Cosmica. Okay. And she says, which is the cosmic seed. Are there noticeable effects caused by space junk in the scientific astrophotography that interfere with ground-based observatories? This is kind of like what Abne- Abneesh was talking about, but more on the more professional level. When we look up into the sky, uh, is there any research? Is there any, uh, discovery that is being hindered because of all this junk in space?

• 33:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we got to do that when we come back from this next break. We'll find out, uh, all the ways that space junk may be harming the professional community, uh, even if it's just another interesting object to watch from the, uh, from your backyard. So on StarTalk, stay tuned.

• 34:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk, and we're talking about space to be, space junk, and it's the cosmic queries, just trying to find out how, what's going on and how and why. And we left off, Chuck, with the question, and who is it from?

• 34:42Chuck Nice?

  Terrasina is her name, but she calls herself the cosmic seed.

• 34:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The cosmic seed. Oh, very nice. So, uh, I, I know at least this much, Moriba, that these satellites that reflect sunlight and you can see them streaking across the sky, that's primarily.

• 35:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In twilight, when you're deep in twilight, but once all of the sky above you is Earth's shadow in space, then they don't, the satellites above you don't see sunlight and so they don't reflect. So can you think of another cost to night sky observing? If you can't otherwise see them because they're deep in Earth's shadow?

• 35:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. Um, so these, these objects in space, uh, they're getting, they're, they're getting heated up by, by, uh, you know, the solar, solar, uh, radiation and also thermal, thermal radiation from, from, from the Earth, if they're sufficiently low, uh, gets to where the satellites are as well. And so when these things go in a shadow, they're radiating heat. And so from, from an infrared, uh, you know, wavelengths.

• 35:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very important band that we use in modern astrophysics. Cause not everything just gives visible light. So with, yeah, we want to be sensitive to infrared. Okay, go on.

• 35:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so that's where these things are now emitters of, of, of, uh, you know, infrared, uh, radiation that, that then pollutes, uh, the folks that are doing IR, uh, imaging from astronomy.

• 36:12Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 36:13Speaker 02

  Observatories.

• 36:14Chuck Nice?

  That is first fascinating, but just something you really wouldn't think about because we, we tend to think about everything in terms of visible light, which is.

• 36:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Geordi on Star Trek would have seen it.

• 36:26Chuck Nice?

  Right away, right? Yeah.

• 36:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Cause he's got full spectrum vision.

• 36:30Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 36:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 36:31Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Wow. That is so cool. All right. So now there's another segment.

• 36:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give me, and, and this, this is the same, I'm, you're allowed one.

• 36:37Chuck Nice?

  Now I get to ask the question. Okay.

• 36:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 36:39Chuck Nice?

  All right. So one of the, uh, one of the reasons why we have all this stuff in space is because they forget just the replenishment of, uh, outdated, uh, you know, equipment, like still new satellites. They're doing something for us, like GPS or geosynchronous, like they're, they're all doing some communications, weather, they're all doing something for us. What if?

• 37:06Chuck Nice?

  Would it help if there were like a giant relay station? So you wouldn't put your satellite up into space. You would connect to that satellite relay station that would serve as your satellite here on Earth. And you know, so a geosynchronous.

• 37:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Satellite hub.

• 37:30Chuck Nice?

  A satellite hub. Thank you, Neil. So a geosynchronous satellite hub that would allow you to through like lasers to connect anywhere on Earth. So the satellite hub is all connected and then on Earth you would connect to that satellite hub instead of throwing a piece of equipment in the sky. I'm making this up as an idea that I just want to know, could that work?

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Chuck, I would tell you once I tell you thousand times, stay off the drug.

• 38:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a line from, from Coming to America, actually. But, yeah, so Morrie, but what, what, what do you think of that? That concept, here's everybody doing independent things. Well, maybe a lot of people want to do the same thing.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  Right. So, so I want to say that there's merit to your idea, Chuck. Absolutely.

• 38:22Chuck Nice?

  Oh, man, that was the best blow off I've received in a long time. He didn't even have to finish. He didn't have to finish. He went with, there's merit to your idea. In other words, that is the dumbest crap I've ever heard.

• 38:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would you let the man be polite and be polite on, on the show?

• 38:38Speaker 02

  No, so look, I think, I think it's a great idea if you could get enough people to buy into it, right? But the thing is, nobody's, nobody's been able to kind of assemble this sort of consortium mentality behind doing something like that. Everybody wants to, they have their own investors. They want to do their own thing. They want sovereignty, full independence, yada, yada, yada. So people have thought about doing this for Mars, actually. A Mars relay.

• 39:02Chuck Nice?

  A Mars relay. So, so, oh my God, now you've just opened up a whole new perspective on space junk for me just now. Which is, it is emblematic of our greater problematic disposition here on Earth, which is.

• 39:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's emblematic of our problematic.

• 39:21Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Disposition.

• 39:23Chuck Nice?

  Which is.

• 39:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You, you had a sentence with those three words in it.

• 39:27Chuck Nice?

  What's wrong with that?

• 39:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Emblematic of a problematic disposition.

• 39:32Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 39:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:33Chuck Nice?

  Is that?

• 39:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. I'm just trying to follow you here.

• 39:36Chuck Nice?

  Huh?

• 39:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 39:37Speaker 02

  I'm picking up what you're putting down.

• 39:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, go on.

• 39:39Chuck Nice?

  I mean, here's the deal. The deal is this. You know, we can't, we don't really cooperate. I mean, scientists do. But other than that, let's be for real. Outside of like scientists on this earth, we are effed. Nobody gets together and says, hey, guys, do you got, do you want to do this? Or hey, guys?

• 40:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There are four things, just to be clear, there are four things. There's science.

• 40:03Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Olympics.

• 40:04Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 40:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The World Cup.

• 40:06Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And the waging of war. These are the only things that nations coordinate for.

• 40:11Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna eliminate one of those, Neil, for I think obvious reasons.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, I'm just saying.

• 40:16Chuck Nice?

  But you know what I'm saying? Like, that's so weird. Like, this problem in the sky, from what you just, you know, said to us, is the fact that we're not together. We can't get together.

• 40:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we did it with the space station, space station, except we kicked China out of it for,

• 40:32Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 40:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they made their own damn space station.

• 40:34Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. Putting more junk in the sky. Well, space station is not really junk, though. Okay. Wow.

• 40:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the size of a football field.

• 40:43Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, that's, that's really cool, man. All right, here we go.

• 40:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, you got your damn question. Now, let's go back to Patreon.

• 40:49Chuck Nice?

  All right, this is, uh, Terracina Rojas again, who says this, because I like her questions. Is there a plan underway to remove this dog on Earth junk, I mean, space junk orbiting Earth? If so, I imagine it must be really expensive. Or is there a way to put together a plan so that someone could yield a great profit? Ah.

• 41:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  So she's tapping into the real deal, which is, how do we make money off of the space junk? Because once you start doing that, everybody will race to remove space junk.

• 41:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, that's how you motivate people. So, yeah, any plans?

• 41:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More about it? Because it sounds pretty hopeless.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  Well, so, so in order to like monetize the whole, uh, you know, space garbage cleaning thing, a couple of things have to happen first. For one, I think we need sustainability metrics like being able to say, look, here's this orbit highway. This is the carrying capacity for the orbit. It's saturated or it's going to be exceeded. And so in order to get capacity back, we need to remove some stuff, right? And then we could actually hire somebody, just like, you know, tow truck. Maybe, you know, when you see a piece of, you know, some car on the side of the freeway, you can't just go into it and pull it off the road, right? We have tow trucks that come by and do that.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  And so we could have the equivalent, you know, orbital tow truck company that, you know, gets paid to provide capacity back to an orbit. But without that metric, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense because there's no rhyme or reason, like, what's the benefit of removing this object versus that one, right?

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got it. You create a space tax and that tax supports the cleanup, the beautification of the highways, right? And that way, every launch, there's a little bit of money there that'll help get your ass back out of orbit in case you, you go dead.

• 42:47Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. How about drones? Is there any way that we would be able to dispatch drones that would attach themselves to whatever? I know these things are moving at incredibly fast speeds, but that would be able to safely de-orbit them? So the drone and whatever it is together, the drone would just drag it down to a place where.

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, normally drones have propeller blades which require.

• 43:14Chuck Nice?

  No, no, these are jet powered drones.

• 43:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jet drones, jet powered drones, jetpack drones.

• 43:18Chuck Nice?

  Jetpack drones, yeah. They wouldn't be, you know, but they would only fire, they would be dispatched, but they would only fire to drag the piece back down to where the gravity would then take over.

• 43:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got it.

• 43:32Chuck Nice?

  What about, what about something like that?

• 43:34Speaker 02

  Well, so here's the thing, Chuck. I mean, gravity is always doing its thing. So it's always there. The things are always falling, right? Towards something. But yeah, I mean, basically, you know, if, if you could have a satellite that attaches to something to bring it back down. There's several companies that have proposed something like that. I think AstroScale out of Japan is one of them.

• 43:57Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow. Okay. All right.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, you do have some good, I'm getting on your case, but these are some good ideas.

• 44:02Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right. It's not bad. All right. Okay, here we go. Uh, hey, this is Gary Marmal. And Gary Marmal says, hey, Neil and Dr. Ja, if light photons can push and pull a spacecraft, why not bring the laser for a ride? So he's looking at like solar sails. Why can't we do something like a solar sail on the pieces that are floating up there as junk?

• 44:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. So you have, you have an orbiting laser that you aim and knock satellites back down in a controlled way for them to re-enter and burn out.

• 44:45Chuck Nice?

  And cooler, and the coolest thing about it is when the laser fires, it goes

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The space laser.

• 44:55Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 44:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we have the sound effects already here. You heard it on StarTalk.

• 44:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. No, so, so look, certainly there are a couple of groups of people that are trying to do something like that from the ground as a kind of like a risk reduction, a demonstration of the ability of lasers to effectively remove some objects from orbit. People in Australia and Canberra are doing that. Some folks in Germany, you know, Stuttgart and that sort of thing. So people are already looking at applying these lasers, at least from the ground, to test that out. But yeah, here's the problem, Chuck, is that when you put the laser in space to do that, people from a space security perspective start having concerns because a threat is something that has the opportunity, capability, and intent

• 45:44Speaker 02

  to cause harm. And so with a laser, you clearly have an opportunity and capability to harm something. Then the question is, how do you rule in or out the intent of this? If you can use it to push junk out of the way, then maybe you could do some damage to a working satellite. And how would you know? And that sort of thing. So it gets a bit contentious.

• 46:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting.

• 46:05Chuck Nice?

  And interestingly enough that you said that about the threat. Uh, who's to say that you won't use it to push my working satellite? That's right. And disrupt my communications? Yeah, yeah, right. Right, right.

• 46:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or maybe you did have good intent and then someone else takes control that you don't have control over.

• 46:23Chuck Nice?

  Right, right.

• 46:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, it's like someone steals your gun and then they commit a crime.

• 46:28Chuck Nice?

  Yep.

• 46:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it was your gun.

• 46:29Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 46:32Chuck Nice?

  Interesting. Oh, man.

• 46:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Damn.

• 46:33Chuck Nice?

  This is really a, this is quite the perplexing little problem that you.

• 46:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's the Wild West.

• 46:39Chuck Nice?

  It's crazy.

• 46:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Except it's space.

• 46:42Chuck Nice?

  It really is. That's right. Oh, my God. Okay, all right, well, let's, uh.

• 46:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Cowboys versus Aliens.

• 46:48Chuck Nice?

  Cowboys versus Aliens. I saw that movie.

• 46:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So did I. I didn't quite know what to make of it, but.

• 46:53Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I didn't really like it that much, but, you know, except for the scenes where the aliens were doing, um, probing the humans. That was cool.

• 47:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, the weird thing is, they, they were mining Earth.

• 47:04Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For natural resources. Way easier to mine an asteroid.

• 47:10Chuck Nice?

  Right. Why would you come, why would you come all the way here?

• 47:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? It's like, Earth is not your best supply.

• 47:16Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right.

• 47:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of rare ingredients.

• 47:19Chuck Nice?

  It's like passing by like thirty gas stations just because, you know, you, you want.

• 47:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You heard somebody, Joey filled up a, a, a handheld tank.

• 47:28Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. That's crazy. Okay, all right. Uh, I'm really glad we debunked that movie. It doesn't, it doesn't deserve anything. There you go.

• 47:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, there's another one. I heard, I heard a radio play of, of aliens who came to Earth sucking up the water because they needed the hydrogen in the water for them to survive.

• 47:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that person probably had only just learned that water molecule is H2O.

• 47:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's a, they probably just learned that, but didn't learn anything else.

• 47:52Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? That the universe is ninety percent hydrogen.

• 47:55Chuck Nice?

  Right, right. Yeah, this, right, exactly.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have to.

• 48:01Chuck Nice?

  Let me find a compensative way to get the hydrogen, right? Exactly, exactly. That's so funny. Yeah. It'd be like creating a big giant tank that allows you to breathe air.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  Right.

• 48:14Chuck Nice?

  Right here, on the surface.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 48:18Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go.

• 48:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, I think it's time for just one more question.

• 48:21Chuck Nice?

  Okay, let me give you this one. We know Violetta. Violetta is the 12 and a half year old.

• 48:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh oh, that's Violetta.

• 48:27Chuck Nice?

  This is Violetta.

• 48:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brace yourself.

• 48:29Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we got a close show out with 12 year old Violetta, uh, who is also gonna be an astrophysicist. All right, love that at 12, she knows this. And she says this, "I only ever hear space junk described as being a negative thing." So, this may be kind of a weird question, but I'd like to think on the bright side a little bit. Is there any possible upside to this space junk? Like, even any way to turn trash into treasure? And then she goes, "Ha ha." So. Clearly, that's a 12 year old's joke.

• 49:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 49:07Chuck Nice?

  But go ahead.

• 49:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, more about what you have.

• 49:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay, so, so to Violetta, this is, um, very, very good, uh, question. In fact, one of the things that I've been proposing to NASA and other people is, let's use the space garbage as a sensor. And what I mean by that is this, right? So, uh, you know, Neil had, had raised this thing about non-gravitational astrodynamics at, at the beginning. And basically, there's like four things that motivate motion of stuff in space. There's gravity, and then there's everything else. Everything else is like radiation, electromagnetic type stuff, particles bombarding different surfaces. And so, space environment, space weather, just like with earth, earth weather, is, uh, very complex. But the thing is, just like we can tell

• 49:53Speaker 02

  how global circulation of, of water, uh, behaves based on following where the junk goes, like Chuck had brought up earlier, we could understand what the space weather is doing by following how it influences where the junk goes. And so, we could actually try to solve the inverse problem of, given the behavior of the junk, what's our interpretation of the space weather? And use that for space weather science. Call me crazy.

• 50:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, these are, these are proxy for like, weather balloons, almost? Or some, or, or weather buoys?

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 50:31Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, that's...

• 50:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but just to be clear, when you say space weather, it's particles from the sun that create what we could say solar wind.

• 50:38Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So the space environment

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 50:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  has been, by, of recent decades, has been known as space weather.

• 50:44Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 50:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so, wow, so they are all just, just quarks on the waves.

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 50:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As they, as they bob back and forth.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I'd like to use them in that, in that way, but, uh, you know, no, nobody's giving me any funding for that yet, so we'll see.

• 50:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right after they hear this show.

• 51:02Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 51:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  After we edit out the Chuck part.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 51:06Chuck Nice?

  By the way, now that you said that, I take back everything I said about Jeff Bezos. I love you, Jeff. I love you.

• 51:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cool. Well, it's, we gotta end it there, but let me ask, so Moriba, what's your social media presence?

• 51:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, so basically, if you go to like flow page, uh, forward slash Moriba, you'll find all my stuff there. I'm on Instagram, Twitter, Moriba Jah, and, uh, you know, also on Facebook and everywhere else. And so, yeah, I'm easy to find.

• 51:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Moriba Jah, M-O-R-I-B-A, so it's pronounced as it's spelled, spelled as it's pronounced, and Jah, J-A-H. All right, and Chuck, you on social media?

• 51:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes, sir. At Chuck Nice Comic. There you go.

• 51:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and I, and I do, uh, I don't officially follow you. I have you on a list, so...

• 51:52Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow.

• 51:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or maybe I do follow you. Wait, what's the...

• 51:55Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, well, you better start.

• 51:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I track, I track you. I don't know if I officially follow you, but I do track you.

• 52:02Chuck Nice?

  How do you not follow me? This is so disappointing on so many levels. My god, I'm, I've never been more in.

• 52:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 52:10Chuck Nice?

  I'm so in.

• 52:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tonight, I will follow you, okay? All right, Chuck. I think I already do follow you, though. I follow Pee Wee Herman.

• 52:17Chuck Nice?

  And not me?

• 52:20Chuck Nice?

  Are you kidding me?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Nice. Yowza, yowza.

• 52:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thank you.

• 52:24Chuck Nice?

  I'll, I'll get on a bar and I'll dance in some big shoes. Maybe that will change your mind.

• 52:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go.

• 52:30Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 52:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, we gotta call it quits there. Moriba, thanks for this. Uh, you know, as more things fall out of the sky, can we think of you?

• 52:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So, so here's what I want people to do, right? I want people to go to eyes on the sky dot org, check it out, see what we're doing, make a contribution if you're so inclined, and let's keep, let's keep the, the, the love on, on being environmentalists for the sky alive and, and well.

• 52:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you can't love what you don't know.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 52:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or you can't love it as deeply as you ever knew you could, until you have some kind of emotional, psychological relationship with the cause. So, it's all good. And continued success down there in Austin.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 53:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. So I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. As always, bidding you, keep working out.