Pod Insights StarTalk Podcast The Future of Commercial Spaceflight with Lauren Lyons About this episode What technology can we look forward to in commercial spaceflight? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice discover SpaceX, other space startups, and what is going on in the commercial space industry with engineer and executive Lauren Lyons.
Transcript 10,170 words · 5 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Coming up on StarTalk, we're going to explore the future of commercial space with engineer and aerospace executive Lauren Lyons, who will get us dreaming about our future, not on Earth. Coming up.
0:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.
0:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is StarTalk. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I'm here with my co-host, Chuck Knight. Chuck, a baby.
0:38 Chuck Nice? What's happening, Neil?
0:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
0:40 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
0:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You know what we're gonna talk about today?
0:42 Chuck Nice? Um, I don't.
0:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, commercial spaceflight.
0:46 Chuck Nice? Oh, really?
0:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, we haven't tackled that subject in a while. So what we want to do is bring in some expertise.
0:52 Chuck Nice? Absolutely.
0:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To help. I know a little bit about it, but I'm not like in it.
0:55 Chuck Nice? Right?
0:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I could talk about it like stratospherically, because in the last decade, there's been a major advances in commercial aerospace.
1:03 Chuck Nice? Yeah, yeah. You got Elon Musk, you got Sir Richard Branson, you got the bald dude that's one day gonna rule the entire world.
1:11 Speaker 02 Yes, billions, billions of dollars.
1:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hey, Todd, you know, I hadn't thought about it. He could be a Bond villain. That's right.
1:19 Chuck Nice? Are you kidding me? There's never been a better candidate for a real-life Bond villain than Jeff Bezos. Okay? Like, you just see him, you know, just, they're gonna name him like Scorpion. That's gonna be a new name.
1:33 Speaker 02 It's me, Scorpion.
1:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So guess who we found? We found the one and only Lauren Lyons.
1:40 Chuck Nice? Wow.
1:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Lauren Lyons, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you. So I was looking at your profile. Oh, my God. So, so in college, you majored in aerospace engineering, and then, then you went on to study, was it business and government or something on top of that? I did, yes. Yeah, wow, I remember that. So I got here, like, you worked for Firefly Aerospace. Yes. Uh, and you were in the engineering leadership at Blue Origin, and the Blue Origin is Jeff Bezos.
2:06 Chuck Nice? That's Bezos.
2:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And a senior engineer and technical program manager at SpaceX.
2:10 Chuck Nice? Nice.
2:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Ticking all the boxes.
2:12 Chuck Nice? That's all the boxes, man.
2:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All the boxes. And while at SpaceX, you worked on Starlink?
2:17 Chuck Nice? Wow.
2:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which we, people complain about Starlink. Do we blame you? We'll find out in a minute.
2:22 Speaker 03 It's all my fault.
2:23 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
2:23 Speaker 03 It's definitely not.
2:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We're gonna totally find out if that's your fault. The Alpha Rocket, uh, Blue Moon, and the Falcon 9. We would, we would just add.
2:31 Chuck Nice? We would just add to.
2:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, we would just.
2:33 Chuck Nice? Falcon 9.
2:33 Speaker 03 You're at the Booster Memorial.
2:34 Chuck Nice? We're at the Booster Memorial.
2:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, yeah, the Falcon 9 that's.
2:36 Chuck Nice? Don't call it a memorial.
2:37 Speaker 03 That's what it's called.
2:38 Chuck Nice? Oh, my God, what a morbid name.
2:39 Speaker 03 Oh, no, Monument, Monument.
2:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, okay, nigga.
2:41 Speaker 03 Monument, yeah.
2:42 Chuck Nice? Hey, big difference.
2:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, good point. It was the first one we ever landed.
2:46 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
2:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, no, she said, "Not the first one ever flown." The first one ever landed, no, ever, ever landed softly.
2:52 Speaker 03 Yes.
2:52 Chuck Nice? That's why you gotta pour a little beer out of your old, old. For the boosters that aren't here.
2:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, if you have all the ones that gave their lives.
3:01 Chuck Nice? The ones that came before.
3:02 Speaker 03 That's true.
3:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, it's right there. It's out in the open L.A. sky.
3:06 Speaker 03 You can see it from air, from the airplane. When you're coming into LAX, you look out the left side of, of the plane, and there you see it every single time.
3:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
3:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's pretty cool.
3:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, it's interesting that she said that because that means the wind patterns over LAX hardly ever change. Usually it was look out the left side, like, because if winds ever change, then you'd be looking out the right side, right? So, what a statement about the, how the regularity of air patterns.
3:29 Speaker 03 Wow. I would not have put that together.
3:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I'm just saying. Well, if you're on the ocean, typically winds tend to come in offshore, typically. It can reverse, but.
3:39 Chuck Nice? He's overcome.
3:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And if it does reverse, they just take them off the other way. But they rarely come at an angle to that. And most airports have to have an angle, a, a runway on an angle to do that. But what did you do for the Falcon? You worked on the Falcon 9?
3:51 Speaker 03 I worked in, so it was like the very first job I had at SpaceX. I came in being what they call a mission manager. And you're basically the systems engineer that's responsible for saying, "Hey, we're gonna make sure that the customer's satellite, that the payload gets integrated onto the rocket safely." And so, that's everything from managing all of the sort of integrated analysis that has to happen, like thermal analysis, mechanical structures analysis, down to actually being at the launch site during the launch.
4:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, my God, so were all these launches from Cape Canaveral?
4:21 Speaker 03 So, no, uh, Vandenberg Air Force Base, just a couple of hours north of L.A. That's where I had my very first launch campaign, my very first mission. But most of, at the time, most of, this is back in 2015, most of the launches were going out of the Cape. And we were launching out of Vandy maybe like once a year.
4:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Vandy, you get that?
4:37 Speaker 03 Vandy.
4:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's been a first name basis.
4:38 Speaker 03 Oh, yeah.
4:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Vandy, okay, excuse me, we're not, we're not at that level.
4:43 Chuck Nice? I know, I'm, I'm not nearly aerospacey enough.
4:46 Speaker 03 Call it Vandy.
4:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, well, we're with you, though. Okay, Vandy.
4:50 Speaker 03 Vandy.
4:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh huh. But just to be clear, there's a, I think of Vandenberg, I think of Air Force Base.
4:56 Speaker 03 Yes.
4:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is there a, a civil portion of that launch?
5:00 Speaker 03 No. So you are on the, now it's the Space Force, but you are on the base. So you have to get like, go through all the military checks, you got the little badge for the base.
5:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I didn't know that. So it's not just some side?
5:13 Speaker 03 No.
5:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Platform that you can launch.
5:14 Speaker 03 No, absolutely not.
5:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're entering secure space.
5:17 Speaker 03 Yes. As opposed to the Cape, there's the Kennedy Space Center side, and then there's the Cape Canaveral Air Force, well, Space Force Station side. At least it was the last time I was doing launches. And so I don't know if that's changed, but you used to be able to go, you can go to the Kennedy side, or you can go to the, the Air Force side. But at Vandy, it's a working base. They have, you know, Space Force.
5:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do you know the area code of Cape Canaveral?
5:41 Speaker 03 Uh, I do not. What is it?
5:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Three, two, one.
5:44 Speaker 03 Ah, you didn't know that? I totally should know that.
5:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You totally should have known that.
5:49 Speaker 03 Dialing those numbers.
5:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Three, two, one. So tell me exactly, okay, so the integration of the payload?
5:57 Speaker 03 Yes.
5:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To the rocket service that you're providing?
6:00 Speaker 03 Correct.
6:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. And so you have to check for safety, or that it's not going to jiggle the thing out of operation?
6:06 Speaker 03 All of those things. So, so basically if someone says, I want to launch a satellite, and I'm talking like, not those sort of missions where SpaceX throws like, you know, 50 small satellites, but if someone comes with like, a big satellite, and they've paid, you know, a billion dollars, or a hundred million dollars, or 50 million dollars for this thing, they show up.
6:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I don't want you messing that up.
6:23 Speaker 03 You can't mess it up. So they hire people like me to be that kind of go-between.
6:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So some of your compensation comes from the company that wants to launch the satellite? Because they need your assurance?
6:31 Speaker 03 Uh, no, not necessarily. Sorry, let me be more clear. What, what happens is, I, I was working for SpaceX, and you can't just have this customer show up, and they're like, I want to talk to all the engineers, and I want to know if, if, am I going to vibrate off the, you know, the attachment, and, you know?
6:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right. They, they need to know what, what could harm their?
6:49 Speaker 03 Exactly.
6:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Precious payload?
6:50 Speaker 03 Yes.
6:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Based on the parameters of the launch?
6:52 Speaker 03 Correct. And so what they do is they give you a set of requirements. They say, this is the trajectory I want to fly, this, these are the loads that the satellite can withstand, a series of things across the entire sort of spectrum.
7:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Please affirm for me, is there no greater? Love of an engineer than a set of requirements.
7:11 Speaker 03 No, no, actually, let me be real. So I come from like the commercial space world where requirements are obnoxious.
7:16 Chuck Nice? I was gonna say, oh, I thought. For you, it's the no green M and Ms in the green room. It's a.
7:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wait, so I thought the engineer loves being inventive with the constraints placed upon them from the outside. Is that not true?
7:32 Speaker 03 So, you know, there's.
7:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Was that just mythology?
7:35 Chuck Nice? Not when you're the person who has to actually make the mission work.
7:40 Chuck Nice? When you're, when you're just somebody who's given the challenge, right? And you just want to design something, then it's great because who cares? Like, I want a stairwell, I want a stairway to nowhere, and I don't want to see any supports underneath of it. Oh, okay, that sounds awesome, right? But you tell a carpenter that, and he's like, F you.
8:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so what are things? So it's vibration tolerance?
8:04 Speaker 03 Vibration.
8:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Acceleration, surely? What else?
8:06 Speaker 03 Acoustics. And so you want to make sure that while the satellite's in there, and as you're ascending with that rocket, you're not gonna like introduce all this acoustic noise.
8:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Shake, rattle and roll.
8:15 Speaker 03 Exactly. So many think environmental controls, temperature, airflow, you want to make sure you don't get condensation, that you don't reach dew point inside of that fairing.
8:25 Chuck Nice? So now these specifications change for every single flight?
8:28 Speaker 03 Not necessarily. So the way.
8:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which is a quick point. Your dew point is more likely to be hit in Florida, where the humidity is high.
8:35 Speaker 03 Exactly. So you're constantly.
8:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Remind us what dew point is.
8:37 Speaker 03 It is the temperature at which like water vapor will condense and become liquid.
8:43 Chuck Nice? In the atmosphere.
8:44 Speaker 03 And so imagine you.
8:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a temperature that you drop to.
8:47 Speaker 03 Yes.
8:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
8:48 Speaker 03 Yes. So the reason it becomes an issue is like water in of itself, in some cases, if you have something that's not hermetically sealed, that obviously becomes a problem in cases where things are sensitive to that. But okay, even when you're not talking about electronics and things like that, where imagine you're in a situation or in this room, and it's not super clean, and there's like particles in the air. There are. There's like particles all in.
9:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We don't have to imagine that.
9:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's like.
9:12 Chuck Nice? Cause it's happening right now.
9:13 Speaker 03 It's everywhere, right?
9:14 Chuck Nice? I'm telling you, yeah.
9:14 Speaker 03 And so now, if you reach dew point, that water catches those particles. So I worked on, let me give you a specific example. I worked the first. Launch that I signed up to work on, which is the reason I went to SpaceX was to launch TESS, the transiting exoplanet, survey satellite. Um, amazing.
9:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's one of my people.
9:32 Speaker 03 I figured you would love TESS.
9:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, yeah, TESS, we all love TESS. TESS was basically the follow-on to Kepler.
9:39 Chuck Nice? Right.
9:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The transiting exoplanet, these are planets orbiting other stars that pass in front of the host star and dim the star.
9:46 Chuck Nice? Right.
9:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And so, yeah, it's adding to our catalog. We're rising through 6,000 exoplanets right now. And growing now. Okay, so you, so you're.
9:53 Speaker 03 It's amazing. I love TESS.
9:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're in the club, you're.
9:54 Speaker 03 Oh, that's why I went. I was like, I want to launch this. I was like, I don't have the skills to contribute to this mission.
9:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, so you're one of us.
10:00 Speaker 03 But I want to like launch this satellite.
10:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're one of my people, okay.
10:02 Speaker 03 I love it. I love it.
10:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
10:05 Speaker 03 So TESS had four cameras.
10:07 Chuck Nice? Now, wait, do you ever, before, do you ever, like, when we discover an exoplanet, do you ever just take your phone and go, "I did that"?
10:13 Speaker 03 Uh, not anymore, because it happens so often.
10:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, no, it's happening every couple of days. It's boring.
10:19 Chuck Nice? It's super boring now, right?
10:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
10:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, you're just like, let's, yeah, just keep it up, keep it up, TESS, let's keep finding more and more and more. Yeah.
10:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so exactly, what did you do?
10:27 Speaker 03 So, yeah, so TESS, TESS has four cameras that, they had four cameras that, in the fairing, well, sitting inside of the fairing, which is the shroud over the payload, they're just looking straight up, and there were no covers on them or anything. And so, imagine if you reach dew point, and you got all of that particulate then settled down.
10:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Inside the fairing.
10:46 Speaker 03 In the fairing, on those four upper-facing cameras.
10:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You have some pissed-off astrophysicists.
10:51 Speaker 03 One of the people that I worked with, uh, she used to say, she used to tell the engineers who were like in charge of contamination control, she goes, "If you mess this up, we won't find any aliens." No aliens. So you got to make sure that you, and it became this.
11:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a perfect plot for a movie, for someone who doesn't want to find aliens.
11:05 Speaker 03 Yes.
11:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Make sure it does condense.
11:06 Speaker 03 Keep it nice and dirty.
11:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
11:08 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I'd forgotten that.
11:09 Chuck Nice? Can we get a lens wipe over here, guys?
11:11 Speaker 03 Oh, and they were uncleanable on top of that, too.
11:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
11:13 Speaker 03 Because they were so delicate.
11:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
11:15 Speaker 03 You couldn't clean them.
11:16 Chuck Nice? Oh.
11:16 Speaker 03 Yeah.
11:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, lenses are typically coated with, uh, anti-reflection, but that might have different reasons, but in general, the lens is not just glass, there's stuff on top of it as well.
11:26 Chuck Nice? Wow.
11:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you start wiping it, you start wiping off the protective coating.
11:29 Chuck Nice? Damn.
11:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
11:30 Chuck Nice? That is.
11:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's not protective coating, it's, it prevents reflections of light, because at every surface you cross. There's light that reflects back and that part some goes through. And there's a way to cancel out those reflections. So that you have a perfectly transparent glass. And so, yeah, you don't want to, you don't want to rub that off.
11:51 Chuck Nice? Wow.
11:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But I had not appreciated until you said it moments ago that when you hit dew point, it's not just water condensing.
11:58 Chuck Nice? Right.
11:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The water's grabbing whatever.
12:00 Chuck Nice? Any particulate that's in there.
12:01 Speaker 03 And then, and then when that water evaporates, that stuff oftentimes get left behind. And it's just sitting there.
12:05 Chuck Nice? So let me ask you.
12:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But did she finish? Okay, I'm finished.
12:08 Chuck Nice? Oh, sorry.
12:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so tell.
12:10 Chuck Nice? Oh, yes.
12:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So what happened with Tess? What did you do for Tess?
12:12 Speaker 03 So I was, the role was called mission integration engineer. And I was, you know, when NASA came to us and they're just like, here's this crazy contamination control requirement, which is one of the strictest we've ever seen. It was my job to work with our engineers in-house to make sure that we were taking the precautions in terms of environmental control in the fairing, environmental control in the clean room in order to make that, to meet those requirements.
12:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And where was Tess made?
12:35 Speaker 03 Tess was a Goddard and MIT collaboration.
12:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
12:39 Speaker 03 Um, with, um, I think Goddard made, who made the bus? The bus was Orbital. Yes, Goddard Space Flight Center on the science side. Uh, also MIT made the cameras. And, uh, the spacecraft bus itself was made by Orbital ATK at the time, now Northrop Grumman.
12:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Tess, Tess is flying high right now.
12:58 Speaker 03 It's doing great.
12:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Thank you for your service.
13:00 Speaker 03 You know?
13:01 Neil deGrasse Tyson? On that.
13:01 Speaker 03 It was an honor.
13:02 Chuck Nice? When you're dealing with all of these highly sensitive apparatus, do you, is there an insurance policy attached to this? Because.
13:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, let's get, let's get to that. That's right. So, so the risk factors.
13:17 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
13:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a whole other thing.
13:19 Speaker 03 Yeah.
13:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Launch failures. Does someone get blamed for that?
13:23 Speaker 03 Absolutely.
13:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or do you say this is an occasion where we will learn a great deal?
13:28 Chuck Nice? Hmm.
13:29 Speaker 03 You kind of have to do that last one anyway. Like it always is a learning because if you knew it, you wouldn't have ended up in that situation. And so there's a ton of learning that happens in it. Um, but, you know, I worked multiple launch failure investigations. I worked them at SpaceX and I led the failure investigation for Firefly for our first rocket, which exploded in spectacular fashion on our very first launch, which is like not unheard of for the first launch to not be successful.
13:56 Chuck Nice? Right.
13:56 Speaker 03 But they've had.
13:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, because when rockets fail, they don't just sort of fall over.
13:59 Chuck Nice? No.
13:59 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's.
14:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They're basically bombs. Right.
14:02 Speaker 03 It's generally spectacular.
14:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it's, it's you reminded that when you're. Taking off, it's a highly controlled bomb.
14:09 Speaker 03 Right.
14:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're in control of the bomb. If you're not in control of the bomb, it's it's an explosion.
14:15 Speaker 03 Yes, exactly.
14:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So how do you get data from that if everything if the evidence has been blowed up?
14:20 Speaker 03 So interestingly, it's rarely completely gone. Even in the case of the the mission, it was F nine twenty, I believe it was, the twentieth Falcon nine flight.
14:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? F nine twenty.
14:31 Speaker 03 We lost Dragon over the water. We still, even though everything exploded and ended up in the ocean, we still were able to collect some data, some physical evidence, but.
14:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just to get the parts right, so that the the Falcon is the booster.
14:43 Speaker 03 Correct.
14:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the Dragon is the spacecraft on top.
14:46 Speaker 03 Yes.
14:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
14:47 Speaker 03 Yes.
14:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So all these names, they're just bandied about.
14:49 Speaker 03 Good point, yeah.
14:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I just want to make sure that we we got the.
14:52 Speaker 03 Yeah, let's explain them. Yeah, so.
14:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So like in the old, because I'm old school, the Saturn five rocket, on top of that was the command module, right? So and that had a name.
15:03 Speaker 03 Yes.
15:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, so this is the corresponding.
15:06 Speaker 03 Good point, yes.
15:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Argument here, I guess. Okay, so I interrupted, go on.
15:09 Speaker 03 No, no, that was a good clarification. So there's the physical evidence side, but I will speak to early flights, like early missions. For when you first build a vehicle, you want to collect as much data as you possibly can. So I was, you know, speaking around the Firefly incident, by the way, they've had a hundred percent mission success for the next missions that they had, they killed it. But that first one.
15:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a good thing.
15:33 Speaker 03 And a good thing. I was like crushed. Are there any like positive words that don't like mean like destroy? They crushed it, I killed it.
15:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? They killed it, that meant it was a success.
15:42 Speaker 03 Knocked it out of the park.
15:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Stay with the lingo.
15:44 Speaker 03 So violent.
15:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, I'm an old man on a porch. You know, these youngins, what they vocabulary.
15:49 Speaker 03 They did good.
15:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
15:51 Speaker 03 So, see, what you do is you end up, and it's not even just the early missions, definitely on the early missions, but even later on, what you do is you instrument the heck out of those vehicles. Like you've got thermal couples, you've got accelerometers, you've got. Every kind of instrumentation.
16:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Sources of data.
16:08 Speaker 03 Yes. And there are those who, you know, there are a lot of folks, for example, there's a lot of launch vehicles out there, by the way, and other spacecraft that don't really have a lot of like cameras on their vehicles. At SpaceX, we had them everywhere. But a lot of people didn't have them because they believe that that data is more useful. I personally am of the opinion that both are incredibly useful and the data, I probably prefer data over video, frankly. But if you've got video, like it's tremendously helpful even just for correlating to an event that happens during an accident or anomaly. So yeah, you, even if you don't have all the physical evidence.
16:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Anomaly, that's the code word. Or messed up.
16:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, something anomalous.
16:53 Chuck Nice? Yes, an anomalous.
16:54 Speaker 03 Yes.
16:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Anomalous condition.
16:56 Speaker 03 You know, the word is mishap.
16:57 Chuck Nice? A mishap?
16:58 Speaker 03 Yes, this is the word the FAA uses.
17:00 Chuck Nice? A mishap, oh, well, what a lovely euphemism. I believe we've had a terrible mishap. I'm going to need a new pair of underwear.
17:09 Speaker 03 Well, you know, if it's a really bad thing that happens, there's like levels of bad with these investigations. If it's really bad, it's an accident.
17:21 Chuck Nice? Wow.
17:22 Speaker 03 Yeah. So a mishap, I've done mishaps.
17:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You just dust it, dust it on the rug and keep going.
17:39 Speaker 04 I'm Nicholas Costella and I'm a proud supporter of StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.
17:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Before we go to our fan base set of questions, because we're going to turn this to a little bit of a cosmic queries, so I want to get from you, I just want to help our audience and us understand the fundamental differences between.
18:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The government putting things into space, into orbit, and private enterprise. Do you have a different tolerance for error than the government does?
18:20 Speaker 03 It's a complex question because it depends on how error or failure is defined.
18:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so a hundred million dollars.
18:29 Speaker 03 Yes.
18:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Down a tube for whatever reason.
18:31 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm.
18:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The government can say, "All right, we're gonna try not to have that happen again." But an investor doesn't lose money.
18:38 Speaker 03 Gotcha. Uh, yeah, and in some cases, a hundred million dollars is all you got. And if you're in a private enterprise and you have a failure like that, you could be done. You could be completely done.
18:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that's the end of your...
18:49 Speaker 03 It's the end of your company.
18:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Literally.
18:51 Speaker 03 Your company is gone.
18:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
18:52 Speaker 03 That's your runway because you don't have another hundred million dollars in the bank. That you could go, or you can't go to Congress and apologize.
18:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so there could have been ten other launch companies that came and went for just those reasons.
19:01 Speaker 03 There were.
19:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, okay.
19:03 Speaker 03 A lot of people had tried this stuff. And, you know, Elon likes to say all the time, he got really close. Like, that last Falcon 1 launch, that company would have gone, SpaceX would have gone bankrupt had that one not been successful.
19:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The one that worked.
19:15 Speaker 03 The one that worked.
19:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's on display.
19:17 Chuck Nice? Right.
19:17 Speaker 03 Uh, Falcon 1.
19:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Falcon 1.
19:19 Speaker 03 Falcon 1, yeah. Um, and so he tells that story all the time. I mean, it was down to the wire.
19:24 Chuck Nice? This makes sense because the people who are the leaders in the industry are all billionaires.
19:32 Speaker 03 Depends on how you define leader, but some, there are, there are some...
19:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How do you define a billionaire?
19:37 Speaker 03 There are some that are billionaires and there are many, many more who are not. And the billionaires are the ones who get all the attention.
19:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Attention.
19:44 Speaker 03 They get all the attention.
19:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
19:45 Speaker 03 They're the ones people love to talk about.
19:46 Chuck Nice? That's fair.
19:47 Speaker 03 But there's a lot of people executing in the corners.
19:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
19:50 Speaker 03 Crushing it.
19:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, all right, good.
19:52 Chuck Nice? Right?
19:53 Speaker 03 In the corners, and people don't know their names, people don't know what's going on. And, and I think, like, that's kind of one of the things that always kind of frustrates me a little bit with the billionaire space race narrative. By the way, like, I'm not one of these people who's gonna be like, "This is all false. We should not criticize this." I don't fall into that camp. Like, I think there's some, like, valid...
20:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You're safe here. You're in a safe space.
20:11 Speaker 03 Yeah, and I, I'm not gonna be those people that just defends anybody just because I'm in the space.
20:17 Chuck Nice? Right.
20:17 Speaker 03 Um, but I do think that one of the things that kind of frustrates me about that narrative is it, it kind of ignores the fact, let's just take... You know, Blue Origin, for example, I believe there's like 11,000 people there at this point.
20:30 Chuck Nice? Right.
20:30 Speaker 03 Either seven or 11, I don't know. Some, lot of people.
20:33 Chuck Nice? Lot of people.
20:34 Speaker 03 And whatever, you know, criticism you want to hurl at Jeff, like, he is but this much of that company. That company is made out of, you know, 11,000 hardworking people who care very deeply about the work that they're doing. And
20:47 Chuck Nice? And let's be honest, just because you're the pockets of an organization, doesn't mean that you are the impetus for success.
20:56 Speaker 03 Correct.
20:56 Chuck Nice? Because, I'm sorry, the guy may be smart, and PayPal was wonderful and all.
21:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Are you talking about Elon here?
21:03 Chuck Nice? I'm sorry, both of them, all three of them. But I defy any of them to sit down and tell me how to put something into space. Can they really do that? Seriously?
21:15 Speaker 03 At least one of them can like, give you a little bit of a run for your money. I've been pleasantly surprised by like, how much Elon can like, go head to head.
21:23 Chuck Nice? Head to head?
21:23 Speaker 03 On a lot of things.
21:24 Chuck Nice? Wow.
21:24 Speaker 03 Yeah, he studies pretty hard, and he's pretty like, read up on stuff.
21:28 Chuck Nice? Okay.
21:28 Speaker 03 And he's very, at least he was in the past. I'm not there now, so I don't know how hands-on he is anymore. But he was quite hands-on. And so
21:36 Chuck Nice? After what he did with Twitter, I'm a little scared.
21:42 Speaker 03 Because like, to your point, like
21:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a different kind of, that's social engineering. That's different from
21:47 Chuck Nice? Different, different.
21:49 Speaker 03 To your point, it's these, like, these hardworking engineers who are there, you know, pulling the all-nighters.
21:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I've always felt that, when people say, oh, Neil Armstrong was the first person on the moon. And I'd say, it was Neil Armstrong plus 10,000 scientists and engineers.
22:02 Speaker 03 Correct, exactly.
22:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I say that all the time.
22:04 Speaker 03 Thank you for that. Thank you. Thank you.
22:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Plus, a little-known fact, the mission patch for Apollo 11 did not contain the names of the astronauts.
22:14 Speaker 03 It didn't?
22:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, it did not. It's just the eagle coming for a touchdown on the moon.
22:19 Speaker 03 I love that.
22:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There was a nice touch. I
22:22 Speaker 03 I love that.
22:22 Chuck Nice? It's like the Yankees. They don't put the names at the back of their jerseys.
22:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, they didn't. Right, right. Well, they were the first to ever have numbers on their jerseys.
22:28 Chuck Nice? Right.
22:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, that was just the batting sequence.
22:31 Chuck Nice? Exactly.
22:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But, all right, let's go to what I, see what our fanbase has to say.
22:34 Chuck Nice? All right, let's do it.
22:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right.
22:35 Chuck Nice? This is Cameron Bellamy, and Cameron says, greetings from Baltimore to Neil, Chuck, and Lauren. What are a few of the current and biggest unsolved challenges in the field of human commercial space travel?
22:49 Speaker 03 Hmm, that's a good question.
22:52 Speaker 03 Uh, I think the biggest one, the single biggest one, is expensive. It's incredibly costly.
22:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But I thought that's the whole point of SpaceX, trying to drop the price. So they haven't dropped it enough, is what you're saying.
23:03 Speaker 03 Not remotely so. Um, so, like, it depends on, you know, if you want to talk about, you know, making it accessible to not just governments or billionaires.
23:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
23:13 Speaker 03 Um, we got a ways to go. And...
23:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Can you quantify ways?
23:17 Speaker 03 So, I will say...
23:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so Elon put some people in orbit.
23:22 Speaker 03 Yes.
23:22 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right. That was how much per person?
23:25 Speaker 03 So I believe NASA pays 88 million a seat, or something like that?
23:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's a hundred million dollars!
23:30 Speaker 03 Well, that's less than a lot of other options, the other two options that they have.
23:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
23:35 Speaker 03 I believe so, and I can't really...
23:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So if I'm a billionaire, that's okay, but most people aren't that. So, what price do we have to get that down to? And will it ever get there? Or is it gonna asymptote at some level that no one is ever gonna reach? And it's gonna end the whole, the whole effort?
23:49 Speaker 03 I think we'll get there, and the way that cost comes down is not just through reusing boosters. I mean, like, that helps, for sure, but it's still not where it needs to be. Um, Falcon 9 can only do so much in its current... I mean, it's, it does what it does. Well, this is why they're developing Starship.
24:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it helps it get to orbit, and then it comes back?
24:08 Speaker 03 Correct.
24:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
24:09 Speaker 03 But so, this is why they have Starship, right? You gotta push those boundaries. And so, what Starship enables is to drastically reduce that cost, uh, for launch, and so...
24:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is it because of how many people?
24:22 Speaker 03 So, the cost per person? The cost per person, the cost per launch, the cost of materials, the cost of fuel, like, everything. It's, they're dropping those costs. And it's such a large vehicle as well, that it can carry much more mass to orbit. So, currently, the way you think about mass, for every sort of kilogram that you put in space, like, that's what we talk about, cost of launch, you think about it...
24:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Kilogram is 2.2 pounds.
24:43 Chuck Nice? Mm, thank you.
24:44 Speaker 03 You got that one?
24:45 Chuck Nice? I used to sell drugs, so I'm pretty much aware.
24:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? He's fluent, okay, good, good.
24:49 Speaker 03 You sell kilograms of drugs?
24:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? High roller.
24:54 Speaker 03 High roller.
24:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We don't do the small stuff.
24:58 Speaker 03 Yeah.
24:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you have numbers there for the cost?
25:01 Speaker 03 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So the Saturn V, it cost $54,000 per kilogram launched to low Earth orbit.
25:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow. Okay.
25:09 Speaker 03 The space shuttle was $65,000.
25:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Even more.
25:13 Speaker 03 Per kilogram.
25:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And that was supposed to bring costs down.
25:15 Speaker 03 I know, that did not work out.
25:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That did not work out. There's your government working for you.
25:19 Speaker 03 So then you've got the Falcon 9, which is currently at, if you're gonna get a dedicated Falcon 9 just to yourself, $2,600 per kilogram.
25:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's half. It's 26,000.
25:30 Speaker 03 2,600.
25:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? 26,000? That's huge. Okay, that's a factor of 20. That's insane. A factor of 20 from the Saturn V.
25:40 Speaker 03 It's amazing.
25:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, all right, so, all right, so that brings in many more customers.
25:45 Speaker 03 Yes.
25:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who would have orbital things they want to do.
25:48 Speaker 03 Yes.
25:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
25:49 Speaker 03 Exactly, and so like, right now, if you wanted to launch.
25:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, how many kilograms do you weigh? Let me see. What would it cost to throw your ass into orbit?
25:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What would it cost? Well, are humans considered payload?
26:03 Speaker 03 Uh, yes.
26:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
26:04 Speaker 03 Yes.
26:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So.
26:05 Speaker 03 So like, okay, so when we started really thinking about human spaceflight and not just kind of circling the Earth, because it's like, great, cool.
26:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Boldly going where hundreds have gone before.
26:13 Speaker 03 Like to actually go further, right? Every, I mean, I don't know the exact numbers on this, but you gotta keep these people alive. They need food, they need water, they need air. They don't got that in space.
26:25 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You have to keep the people alive. Exactly.
26:27 Speaker 03 And it's expensive. And so, and it requires a lot of mass. So if you're gonna carry.
26:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Mass beyond you.
26:33 Speaker 03 Mass beyond you. So the environmental control systems and life support systems, there's a lot of effort. So getting back to that question, there's a lot of effort that's going into figuring out how to have closed-loop systems, and so that you don't have to have all these excess consumables.
26:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's code for drinking your own pee.
26:48 Speaker 03 Yes, precisely. And growing plants, and then using the fertilizer from yourself to like, grow the next ones.
26:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We saw that movie.
26:57 Speaker 03 Yes, yes, you did a whole thing on this.
26:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, we did.
27:00 Speaker 03 Um, so, you know, figuring out that question as well, and regardless, like, you're gonna still need to bring consumables with you, so you're gonna, it's gonna require mass, and you need a big rocket. But you also need that rocket to not be crazy expensive, right? And so, that's that sort of balance that kind of needs to happen to make that work.
27:20 Speaker 03 And then the other thing that I think-
27:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So is this a matter of time?
27:24 Speaker 03 I think it's a matter of time. I really do.
27:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If we showed the Falcon 9 to the Wright brothers, they would have an aneurysm, right? And die on the spot. On the spot, right? So how far away is this?
27:36 Speaker 03 I think we are-
27:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Given what we've accomplished thus far.
27:38 Speaker 03 So, I mean, what is it? Like, later on this decade, you know, SpaceX is supposed to be launching our astronauts to the, uh, to the moon. So that's gonna happen. Uh, they've actually sold the first starship launch to a guy named Jared Isaacman. And Jared is supposed to launch himself and a crew of three others, at least three others, I believe, with him. For what? Just to go? They just going.
28:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Jared, don't come back.
28:07 Speaker 03 Well, he's also doing like a bunch of like research and stuff. It's up there in science and things too, right? I thought it was a joyride. So, yeah, I think, um, those folks that are able to pay for these experiences, we're just not quite at a point yet. And it was like, oh, the space economy is so big, it's doing great. And it's just like, ah, is it? Because these markets don't actually exist yet. There isn't a market that exists that allows this sort of real economy to come up. And so similar to when you think about the arts and engineering and technical things back in the 1600s and even before then, who used to pay for that stuff?
28:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Rich people.
28:44 Speaker 03 It was rich people.
28:45 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
28:46 Speaker 03 And so this is just the same-
28:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So we shouldn't have any unique discomfort with this fact?
28:50 Speaker 03 This is how it is.
28:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is how it works.
28:51 Speaker 03 And how, and how, and thank God that there are people who have this hunger to do this crazy stuff.
28:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or capitalism.
28:57 Speaker 03 Yeah, there's that. There's that.
28:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or mercantilism, as it was in the, with the Medici.
29:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so give me, I want you to be quantitative.
29:05 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? How many years from now? 10 years? 20 years? Where, where a family can save up- And instead of, we gonna get Disney World or we gonna go to space?
29:15 Chuck Nice? I think it's 20.
29:17 Speaker 03 I think it's 20.
29:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? 20 years?
29:19 Speaker 03 Maybe 15, but probably 20.
29:21 Chuck Nice? That's really close.
29:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's very encouraging.
29:23 Speaker 03 And I don't mean to Mars, I mean like go and do a little circle around. There's also a company, there's two companies, there's a worldview and space perspective, and they're doing these balloon flights. And those are supposed to be coming on in the next couple of years.
29:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But balloon launches don't have the same appeal as a rocket launch.
29:38 Speaker 03 They do not, but it's way more chill. You're not on a bomb, you just kinda like slowly go up.
29:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Still, I remember Oz floating away on his balloon, that was just not as exciting as a rocket launch. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
29:47 Speaker 03 You wouldn't do it though?
29:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Uh, no.
29:49 Chuck Nice? What, on a balloon?
29:50 Speaker 03 Would you do it?
29:50 Chuck Nice? Uh, I don't know, I mean.
29:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Up, up and away.
29:54 Chuck Nice? Yeah, I don't know, probably, I probably would.
29:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
29:57 Chuck Nice? Uh, it can't, it's not like a rocket, rockets blow up.
30:00 Speaker 03 Exactly. Now, what if you could get the orbital perspective? Like you could get that sort of overview effect without being on a bomb?
30:09 Chuck Nice? Yeah, yeah.
30:09 Speaker 03 It's not a, it's not a bad idea. It takes a little longer though.
30:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I did the math on the balloon.
30:14 Speaker 03 Yeah, what do you think?
30:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, it goes to a schoolroom globe, it goes up the height of the thickness of a dime. So I, I'm not counting that as an overview.
30:22 Speaker 03 Okay.
30:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, no, you can't see national borders, but neither can you from an airplane, okay? So I'm not, me and balloons, I'm not.
30:30 Speaker 03 Ah, so you don't think it's it.
30:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I did the math on that, right.
30:32 Speaker 03 Got it, okay.
30:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Chuck, give me another one.
30:34 Chuck Nice? All right, here we go, this is Alex.
30:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We luxuriously answered that question.
30:37 Chuck Nice? We did, but who cares? Um, this is Alexander Harvey, and he says, hello there, Dr. Tyson and Chuck. This is Alex from Denver, Colorado, reporting in. What are the biggest limitations on constructing?
30:56 Chuck Nice? Now, listen, as he's going out there, a floating human colony in space? And how might we overcome those limitations? My man is like, I want a colony living in space.
31:08 Speaker 03 I wouldn't use the word colony.
31:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, colony is different from colonize. That's true.
31:16 Speaker 03 It's true, but it's still, like, it's too subtle.
31:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It still carries baggage.
31:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a word with baggage. Right.
31:23 Speaker 03 Yes.
31:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So there are two kinds of colonies we can think of. One is like on a surface of someplace. Right. Like the moon.
31:29 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That sounded like a free-floating colony. He wants, he wants.
31:31 Speaker 03 He wants an O'Neill cylinder.
31:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah. O'Neill cylinder.
31:35 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So Gerard O'Neill, he had fantastical ideas about our future, uh, living in space with farms and. Right.
31:41 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you said Gerard, what's a Gerard cylinder?
31:45 Speaker 03 Or the O'Neill cylinder.
31:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
31:47 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, I'm not an expert on these things, but like the sort of self-contained environments that are just in space, where people are living and thriving and working and there's grass and water and there's these closed ecosystems.
31:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? If you saw the movie Elysium.
31:59 Speaker 03 Elysium, but hopefully without the classism, just like a little.
32:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. Exactly.
32:03 Speaker 03 Yeah, that would be great.
32:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, these need to be rotating, so you have a centrifugal gravity.
32:07 Speaker 03 So you have, yes, and you can have gravity, yeah.
32:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, it's so cool. Okay, so how far away are we from that?
32:11 Speaker 03 We're very, very, very, very, very, very far from that. Um, like, okay, so to the question of what do we need to do to get there?
32:19 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah.
32:20 Speaker 03 So first, uh, in the last few years, there've been a number of new companies that have spun up in order to build commercial space stations. We currently don't have any of those, and so let's start there, like, let's start.
32:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So the current space stations are national?
32:34 Speaker 03 Correct.
32:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like Chinese and.
32:35 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the ISS, right, okay.
32:37 Speaker 03 And NASA has already said, you know, we'd like to partner with commercial industry to do this, so they have done some sort of small awards to some companies to do some early design work on that. And so there are companies out there that are trying to do this, but you know what? These things cost billions of dollars a year just to operate, and the logistics money associated.
32:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Pay or play.
32:56 Speaker 03 Yes.
32:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is a.
32:57 Speaker 03 It's, it's crazy, and then just like, and one of the biggest chunks of that cost is just in the process of getting things and people to and from it.
33:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hmm.
33:06 Speaker 03 So. Launch costs needs to come down.
33:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
33:09 Speaker 03 Additionally, you start thinking about it and you're like, really? Are we gonna just build these massive structures with stuff from Earth? That's silly. So then we have to start thinking, how can we actually get materials from the moon? From asteroids? How can we assemble materials?
33:26 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or just print them.
33:26 Speaker 03 Print them, bring them all material.
33:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, you need the raw material. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
33:29 Speaker 03 And assemble things in space. So there's this whole sort of field that's come about.
33:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So it's cheaper to move something from an asteroid to your space platform?
33:36 Speaker 03 Not yet.
33:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Than from Earth to the platform?
33:40 Speaker 03 The idea will be, once we figure out the whole asteroid mining thing, which is still quite a ways away, then that starts to make more sense for these mega-structures.
33:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because it costs nothing to launch from an asteroid. You've got hardly any gravity.
33:52 Speaker 03 Right.
33:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, and you've got a lot of raw materials.
33:55 Speaker 03 Lot of raw materials.
33:56 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So just, I'll get it from an asteroid, forget Earth.
33:58 Speaker 03 Yes.
33:58 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right?
33:59 Speaker 03 Yes.
33:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow.
34:00 Speaker 03 So that would unlock, like, in-space manufacturing, using materials from in-space.
34:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? What's the company that's trying to do that?
34:07 Speaker 03 There's a few, yeah, which one are you thinking?
34:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The one that's wanted to make money mining asteroids.
34:11 Speaker 03 There's, yeah, there's a company called Astroforge.
34:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's what I was thinking.
34:15 Speaker 03 There's one called Carmen Plus.
34:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Keep going.
34:17 Speaker 03 There's a couple that no longer exist.
34:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Maybe.
34:21 Speaker 03 Lovely people, but they...
34:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Space Resources? That was a company.
34:26 Speaker 03 There's Planetary Resources.
34:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Maybe that one.
34:28 Speaker 03 And then there was Deep Space Industries.
34:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
34:30 Speaker 03 These were two that founded by wonderful humans.
34:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? These are dreamers.
34:33 Speaker 03 They were dreamers, they were just a little early, I think. And, and now that resurgence is coming back and, yeah.
34:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? All right, so again, we're in the decades, not centuries.
34:42 Speaker 03 We're in the decades. Uh, well, in the case of O'Neill cylinders, I don't know, man. That's one where there's, there's a lot that needs to happen to make that.
34:49 Chuck Nice? Well, you know, what's going to help that along is that we're gonna need them.
34:54 Chuck Nice? See, that's the problem. The way we're treating the planet, you know, we're gonna actually need to go someplace for a little while to allow Earth to recover.
35:02 Speaker 03 Or we can stop messing it up.
35:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, we can, I mean, listen. Would, would you go to one and live there and leave Earth behind? One of these O'Neill cylinders?
35:11 Speaker 03 Depends on how nice it is. If it was a two-way ticket.
35:15 Chuck Nice? Let's say it's, uh, let's say it's the Ritz-Carlton of O'Neill cylinders.
35:18 Speaker 03 Oh dang, and what is it orbiting?
35:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, damn, she's getting all particular.
35:24 Chuck Nice? She still has requirements.
35:26 Speaker 03 Are we in the Saturn system? Like, where are we? Wouldn't that be cool?
35:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That'd be beautiful.
35:31 Speaker 03 Wouldn't it be beautiful, like that scene in Interstellar? I cry whenever I see it. When he gets there and there's like the rings of Saturn. Oh my god, it's so beautiful. Oh my god. So I'm getting, I'm thinking about it.
35:41 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Getting verklempt.
35:42 Speaker 03 Yes.
35:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
35:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Give me another one, Chuck.
35:58 Chuck Nice? Let's hear we go.
35:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Time for just a couple more.
36:00 Chuck Nice? This is Alex Pilon and, uh, he says, hello Chuck and hello Neil, hello Lauren. This is Alex Pilon, Chuck, it's pronounced, and then he spells Alex phonetically.
36:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cause Chuck, Chuck has issued problems pronouncing people's names.
36:13 Chuck Nice? Not that, not that bad. My problems aren't that bad.
36:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And not with Alex, right, right?
36:19 Chuck Nice? Alex?
36:20 Speaker 03 Alex.
36:21 Chuck Nice? Alex.
36:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Alex.
36:22 Chuck Nice? Yes, yes, yeah.
36:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
36:25 Chuck Nice? Anyway, he says, uh, hey, calling here from, uh, Bethesda, Maryland. Thanks for taking my question. Lauren, what new and exciting technology are you most excited about that we don't know about?
36:38 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh.
36:39 Speaker 03 Ooh.
36:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is it in propulsion? Is it in material science?
36:45 Speaker 03 I am really excited for, and it's gonna, you already know about it though. People already know about it.
36:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, maybe not everybody, try it.
36:54 Speaker 03 Is, is re, fully reusable rockets. I'm talking the first stage, the second stage, and that they can fly once a day.
37:01 Chuck Nice? Stem to stern. Up and back, up and back. Like the way we take planes.
37:05 Speaker 03 Exactly.
37:05 Chuck Nice? Like when you get off your plane, your plane isn't sitting there waiting for you to come back. It goes on to another destination, or it goes back to where it came from, taking more people back there.
37:16 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, but Chuck, I can fly a plane to a destination, and it can refuel at that destination. So if you're gonna have a rocket that's empty of its fuel when it gets to where it's going, you need a filling station on orbit.
37:26 Speaker 03 So that's another thing that gets me excited, is exactly that. So the way Starship works, as an example, they can launch all that mass to orbit, but if they're gonna get to the moon, they need to refuel on the way there. So refueling technology, I think, enables us to go deeper and deeper into the solar system.
37:43 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you need cargo ships carrying fuel to depots.
37:45 Speaker 03 Yes, you need fuel depots, absolutely. Or...
37:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Which sounds weird, but somebody had to do that when cars were invented.
37:52 Speaker 03 Exactly.
37:52 Chuck Nice? They're still doing it.
37:53 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And they're still doing it. I wanna drive there.
37:55 Chuck Nice? Yeah.
37:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, there's no gas station. Well, somebody says, "I will put a gas station, so you will drive there, you pay me."
38:00 Speaker 03 There's a company called Orbit Fab. Their tagline is "Gas stations in space", and that's entirely what they're trying to do.
38:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a whole, a whole industry community.
38:11 Speaker 03 Yes, Northrop Grumman is working on this. There's a company called Astroscale that's working on this. SpaceX, there's so many companies. It's a key part of the architecture if you really want to like go further.
38:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I'm glad you all are doing that.
38:22 Speaker 03 Yeah.
38:23 Chuck Nice? This is pretty exciting, actually.
38:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? While the rest of us are fighting over the meaning of words on our social media postings.
38:29 Chuck Nice? Right.
38:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, there's some people still thinking about a future.
38:32 Speaker 03 No, it's incredible. And then like to even push that even further, because I'm a big fan, like I am obsessed with like my favorite thing in the solar system is Europa, like obsessed. Cannot wait for Europa Clipper. But I would love...
38:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Europa Clipper, that's not gonna dig, is it? It's just gonna orbit?
38:46 Speaker 03 No, it's just an orbiter. It's gonna do flybys, so it's orbiting Jupiter.
38:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Why can't you just not wait until the one that digs?
38:52 Speaker 03 Uh, ask NASA that question, and it's "Come on, hee."
38:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, yeah, I don't think it... I think it's on paper, but it's nothing funded to do that.
38:59 Speaker 03 Correct, yeah. They were like kinda working on a study, and they just didn't quite make it to the next level.
39:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Europa is the one that's got icy outer surface.
39:06 Chuck Nice? Surface that you have, and ocean underneath.
39:08 Speaker 03 Global liquid water, Enceladus.
39:11 Chuck Nice? I thought there's a, uh, a plan to fly through some of the plumes of Enceladus.
39:16 Speaker 03 There is, and with Europa. Europa Clipper is gonna fly through. We believe that there are plumes on Europa as well. Not the 101 crazy things that you get out of Enceladus, but Europa, we believe there are plumes. And so my understanding is Clipper is gonna go through and kinda taste the, taste the plumes and look for organics.
39:34 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Do some chemical analysis of that. Very nice.
39:36 Chuck Nice? Cosmic taste the rainbow.
39:37 Speaker 03 It's cosmic taste, yes! Exactly.
39:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And if we find life on Europa.
39:41 Speaker 03 Oh, my god.
39:42 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I, you know, because there's water there. Many places we water there's life.
39:45 Speaker 03 Wherever there's water, there's life.
39:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So I, that's something we can all imagine, okay?
39:49 Speaker 03 Yes.
39:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We want to know something secret that nobody knows, that you know, because you're in the biz. That when you, when you reveal it, we say, whoa.
39:59 Speaker 03 Man, I just, I don't know if I got one of those.
40:04 Speaker 03 I.
40:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? See, the right answer here would be, I'm not authorized to tell you.
40:07 Speaker 03 Yes, uh, if I had to, if I told you, I would have to.
40:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
40:10 Speaker 03 Kill you.
40:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right.
40:11 Speaker 03 I wouldn't do that, though. Um, so I'm just not going to tell you. But like one, for me, I'm, I'm just so interested in the going further question. We have to be able to go further, and right now, we can't. And there.
40:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The we is people.
40:28 Speaker 03 People.
40:29 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because we have robots out the edge of the solar system.
40:31 Speaker 03 Yeah, and like, I don't, what are you going to do if somebody is like, you know,
40:36 Speaker 03 thirty, forty, fifty years together? It's nuts, right? So actually, uh, there, I'm a part of the X Prizes Brain Trust for the space sector that we've got, where we think up X prizes that are space-related. And one of the finalists this year.
40:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So X prizes are, you put up money for an audacious goal, and then everybody puts in their money to do it, to hope to get the prize.
40:59 Speaker 03 Right.
41:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And the total amount of money everyone spends is more than the prize money that someone wins. And so you get the benefit of this creativity.
41:06 Speaker 03 Yeah, and you're like spurring this industry.
41:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? To decide this?
41:08 Speaker 03 I am, I am, for the space, or.
41:11 Neil deGrasse Tyson? The space sector.
41:11 Speaker 03 Space sector, right.
41:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, because X prizes in the, is biology.
41:14 Speaker 03 Right, healthcare, education, all these things. And, and so one of the, the finalists this year was this idea, it was called Sleep Like a Teenager. And this biologist brought it forward, and she's a medical doctor, and she, and she said, hey, you know, we need to learn from the animals about hibernation. And hibernation doesn't necessarily mean going into like the little pod and, you know, like, being knocked out for, you know, a hundred years.
41:39 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Like in the movies.
41:39 Speaker 03 Like in the movies. Hibernation could be simply just lowering your metabolic rate to the point where you don't consume as many resources. That's what animal hibernation is. Sometimes bears are like actually awake in there, they're just like moving a little slower. All right, and so. Like, how can you lower a human's metabolic rate enough such that they, to that point about mass, require fewer consumables? What if they were only working, you know, maybe three to six hours during the day and they slept the rest of the time? Like, you could actually, that could actually work. And so, uh, so maybe that answers this question of, you know, it's not something a lot of people are talking about, but it's something-
42:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's a feature that would be folded into this exercise. So this is for long-duration missions?
42:18 Speaker 03 For long-duration space life.
42:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, so, you know, my reply to that question is? Invent a wormhole. Then all missions take minutes.
42:26 Speaker 03 Oh my god, did you just guess the secret technology that no-
42:30 Neil deGrasse Tyson? This is what she was not gonna talk about.
42:33 Chuck Nice? If he had that secret, believe me, we would not be sitting here. He'd be trying to share it with the world, and I'd be like, "No, sir, we gotta make this money."
42:43 Chuck Nice? "I must share this with the world, Chuck." "It will revolutionize travel."
42:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? A last, fast question about the Falcon 9, because we were visiting the one out on the street corner. Uh, I noticed nine, nine rocket motor nozzles at the bottom. Is that why it's called Falcon 9?
42:59 Speaker 03 That is why it's called Falcon 9.
43:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So did Falcon 1 only have one nozzle?
43:02 Speaker 03 It did have one nozzle.
43:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay.
43:03 Chuck Nice? Look at that.
43:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just verifying.
43:05 Chuck Nice? I'm waiting for Falcon 50.
43:08 Speaker 03 I'm also like not convinced that it was called Falcon 1 because it had one, it was probably just because it was the first one.
43:14 Chuck Nice? Yeah, it kinda makes sense.
43:15 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just checking that. So what's in store for you? What, what are your, I, I understand you're moving to Paris? What's that about?
43:21 Speaker 03 Yeah.
43:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Who wants you here?
43:22 Speaker 03 Aw, I come back and forth all the time.
43:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, here.
43:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We need you.
43:28 Chuck Nice? Are you working, are you working with, like, the French space program over there?
43:32 Speaker 03 No, I'm just doing my thing. So I've been consulting with US companies and, and so-
43:37 Chuck Nice? Just doing it for-
43:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So they come to you to get what from you?
43:39 Speaker 03 So my expertise-
43:40 Chuck Nice? You took that pandemic remote work and thing too.
43:44 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you have these multiple companies on your resume now.
43:49 Speaker 03 Yes.
43:49 Neil deGrasse Tyson? With all this various experience.
43:51 Speaker 03 Right.
43:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And now you're, now you're turning that into an independent operation.
43:54 Speaker 03 Yes.
43:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And you're CEO of this operation.
43:57 Speaker 03 I am.
43:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And what's it called?
43:58 Speaker 03 It's called VDOT Labs.
44:00 Neil deGrasse Tyson? VDOT Labs?
44:01 Speaker 03 VDOT for acceleration.
44:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh!
44:04 Speaker 03 It's very nerd. See, look at you.
44:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Did not catch that!
44:07 Speaker 03 But you got it there.
44:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh!
44:08 Speaker 03 Because some people just look at me like,
44:09 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, I got it.
44:10 Speaker 03 Virginia Department of Transportation.
44:12 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, you know, you know, VDOT. Okay. So, um, the rate of change of your position.
44:20 Chuck Nice? Right.
44:21 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Is called your speed.
44:23 Chuck Nice? Okay.
44:23 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay?
44:24 Chuck Nice? Right.
44:24 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And your velocity. The rate of change of your velocity is called your acceleration.
44:30 Chuck Nice? Okay.
44:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Isaac Newton developed a system of nomenclature and notation to represent the rate of change of your position relative to time. And the rate of change of your velocity relative to time. And it's called dot. Okay?
44:50 Chuck Nice? Dot.
44:50 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes.
44:51 Chuck Nice? Got you.
44:51 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay. If I'm correct.
44:53 Speaker 03 That's correct, yeah.
44:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Okay, okay. So, VDOT is basically the first derivative of your velocity, which is your acceleration. And, and you only really go in places if you can accelerate.
45:05 Chuck Nice? Right.
45:06 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Just to be clear.
45:07 Speaker 03 And that's what we do.
45:08 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's so geeky.
45:09 Speaker 03 We have, and oh, it's 100% intended to be.
45:13 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That's so completely geeky.
45:14 Speaker 03 Yes.
45:14 Neil deGrasse Tyson? And it was entirely Isaac Newton. He invented the dot, the dot notation.
45:18 Chuck Nice? Nice.
45:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? For derivatives.
45:19 Chuck Nice? And the company is VDOT what?
45:21 Speaker 03 Labs.
45:22 Chuck Nice? VDOT Labs.
45:22 Speaker 03 But yeah, so that's exactly what we do is we help startups go fast. Help them do really hard things.
45:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Accelerate startups.
45:29 Speaker 03 Help accelerate their technical and operational capacity.
45:32 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because it's not just materials or just the traditional what we think of as engineering. I'm impressed to learn that engineering in modern times, in modern decade, recent decades, is making stuff work. Systems of systems.
45:46 Speaker 03 Yes. Oh, I nerd out on that so much. No, it is. It's so good. It's so good. It's my favorite thing.
45:55 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Hey, get a room.
45:57 Speaker 03 It's like, I was like, ooh, the systems of the system.
46:03 Neil deGrasse Tyson? I could play it on a loop.
46:04 Speaker 03 Let me tell you about the systems, this is good, y'all.
46:07 Neil deGrasse Tyson? We hit the spot right there.
46:08 Speaker 03 Yes, you did. Uh, no, it's, it's, you know, people look at some of these like incredibly, so I study high performing organizations and I'm in the process of writing a book on this, looking at what are the trends and things that we can see between organizations that build hardware and what are the, what is the algorithm around that? And I think a lot of companies, they, they're constantly in search for it. They're always looking for this. And it's not simply like, how good are your processes and how good your engineers are. It's the way in which you structure and build the organization to remove as many barriers from execution as you can.
46:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Are you to space companies what McKinsey is to sort of ordinary corporations where the corporation doesn't have the internal expertise to how to run their business better? And so they go to a consulting company that says, fire these people, hire those people, and accelerate your progress. Is that what you are for space companies?
47:04 Speaker 03 In some ways. And what we like to do is get like very much embedded with the organization. Because my team and the folks that work with me are people who have been boots on the ground. They're not, you know, career consultants who've only kind of looked at it from the top.
47:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, but they just got out of Harvard Business School.
47:20 Speaker 03 Right. Nothing against that. Love HBS, love HBS. Uh, but what it, it's people who were in those roles.
47:27 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But just to be clear, the, the rowing team for Harvard Business School at the tip of their oars is a dollar sign. Oh, wow. Okay, just they don't.
47:35 Speaker 03 Is this real?
47:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yes, it is real.
47:37 Speaker 03 Oh, my.
47:37 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, that's their, that's their, you know, others just have like colors for the flag of their school or the, it is a dollar sign.
47:44 Speaker 03 I mean, it's not inaccurate, like in terms of what happens.
47:47 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Does it make the boat go faster?
47:51 Speaker 03 I don't know.
47:52 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Does the water say, "Hey, I loved scooping off of dollar signs."
47:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? But anyhow, yeah, I mean, if the, I like your reference to boots on the ground. That's an important reality.
48:02 Speaker 03 Yeah.
48:02 Neil deGrasse Tyson? That brings a certain level of trust.
48:04 Speaker 03 Yes, and, and to be able to see a problem and to go, oh, my God, I've lived through this. I feel like so many times I work with these companies, I go, oh, there was that one time. Let me tell you, we did this and here's what we did and here's how we got through it. Cause I feel like there's so much tribal knowledge in this space and it pains me. This work is so important that we're doing in order to accelerate humanity's future in space. I don't think we can afford to be treating everything like, you know, ah, don't look at it. Don't look at his mind.
48:33 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Otherwise, you all go off the cliff together.
48:35 Speaker 03 Exactly.
48:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Right, right, cause you knew something that they didn't. They needed to know so they didn't fail.
48:40 Speaker 03 And just like repeating the same mistakes over and over again. And frankly, if like your success hinges on, you know, someone else just making a mistake, I don't know if that's like true. And so how, my goal and my passion with this industry is to be like, how can I sort of bridge those gaps? How can I remove those barriers, the things that, those tribal knowledge blocks and help others just leapfrog the stupid stuff?
49:05 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So, so in order for you to be really effective, typically you're working with a smaller company.
49:09 Speaker 03 Yes, yes.
49:10 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Because smaller companies are more nimble than big companies.
49:12 Speaker 03 They are, and they're, they tend to be like more hungry for change.
49:18 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, oh, the change factor.
49:20 Speaker 03 Yes.
49:20 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Cause big companies, they don't want change.
49:22 Speaker 03 Yeah, and even if they do, it's like, it's hard. It's really hard, but I think also what you see is there's now existence proof.
49:28 Neil deGrasse Tyson? It's hard.
49:29 Speaker 03 It's difficult. I've been in those companies and, but you know, that now there's existence proof. You can look at a SpaceX.
49:36 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Tell Chuck what an existence proof is.
49:37 Speaker 03 Like, it's there, like, we don't have to like imagine, imagine a world where, like, no, like, there is a company called SpaceX. But it's okay. That.
49:46 Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, no, no, it's, it's. You don't have to figure out whether it is true or can happen if there's an example of it having already happened. Right, it's there, right. So in math, in math, it's actually an existence proof. Oh. It comes from math. Okay.
50:02 Speaker 03 You asked me about Europe and like France, right?
50:04 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Yeah, yeah.
50:05 Speaker 03 What is so interesting is Europe is about 10 to 15 years behind the US in terms of like commercial space. And so they have this opportunity now that they have, there's existence proof. They're like, wow, it's been done. What are we going to do?
50:17 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Now bring an American over and show them how to do it.
50:19 Speaker 03 Not so much, but just, you know, bring some of those lessons learned and what is it, it's gonna look different there because it's inherently different ecosystem. But it is fascinating because it is ripe, it's brand new, it's fresh.
50:31 Neil deGrasse Tyson? So you're going where the opportunities are.
50:32 Speaker 03 There's a lot of opportunity there. There's a lot of opportunity.
50:35 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Wow, that sounds really exciting. Well, you have to report back. Good for you.
50:39 Speaker 03 I shall.
50:40 Neil deGrasse Tyson? You have to come back and see how your predictions are going. Right. Decadal, decadal predictions for the O'Neill Cylinder. Yes, so she's probably gonna have her own room on it and her own little house.
50:52 Speaker 03 I wanna be the mayor of one. That'd be great.
50:57 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Well, well, Hornet, this has been a delight. And give us, take us out with some I'm space mayor. ... of wisdom for a next generation.
51:04 Speaker 03 Ooh, yeah, okay. I'll get very serious here. I believe that if you have the capability to do something good in the world, whether it's I'm smart or I'm talented, maybe both, or whatever that is, I believe that we all have the obligation to use that talent in a way that benefits humanity. And there's a variety of ways in which you can define that. Don't let anybody define it for you. But if you are gifted and blessed with capacity, please, please put it towards good.
51:48 Neil deGrasse Tyson? There you go. Mic drop. That's it. That's wonderful. There it is. That's it. We had music after that or something. I don't know. Is there a button here? Nicki Minaj?
51:59 Neil deGrasse Tyson? Oh, that's hilarious. All right. This has been another episode of StarTalk with a little bit of cosmic queries sprinkled in. Yeah. On the future of commercial space with Lauren Lyons. All right, Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. All right. This has been StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal Asher. As always, keep looking up.
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