The New Space Race with Jeff Thornburg

What will the future of space look like? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comic co-host Chuck Nice explore the engineering challenges and scientific questions shaping the next era of aerospace with aerospace engineer Jeff Thornburg.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, we need more engineers on the show.

• 0:02Chuck Nice?

  Always.

• 0:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always, especially aerospace engineers.

• 0:06Chuck Nice?

  That would be very cool.

• 0:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think personally, I think that's the best kind.

• 0:09Chuck Nice?

  You would.

• 0:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They'll take us where we are to where we want to go.

• 0:11Chuck Nice?

  Yes. So Elon Musk is coming?

• 0:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 0:14Chuck Nice?

  So this guy's not a jerk?

• 0:17Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 0:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, the future of aerospace on Earth and in the heavens. Check it out.

• 0:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. I got Chuck Nice with me. Chuck, baby, how you doing?

• 0:46Chuck Nice?

  Hey Neil, what's happening?

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. We got a good show today. Oh my God.

• 0:49Chuck Nice?

  Ah, what's on tap?

• 0:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The future of the space industry.

• 0:52Chuck Nice?

  Oh, and you say that's a good show?

• 0:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, oh yeah, oh yeah.

• 0:56Chuck Nice?

  You think there's a good future for the space industry?

• 0:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want to get off this earth, you better think it's good.

• 1:01Chuck Nice?

  Okay. Well, you know, I, I don't, I do want to get off this earth. I'm just afraid of who might be driving.

• 1:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, there you go. There you go. Did I tell you, people say, you want to go into space? You want to go in this guy's rocket and Bezos' rocket? I said, yeah, but I want him to fly his mother first.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then I'm, then I'm cool.

• 1:22Chuck Nice?

  Right, then I'm cool.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then maybe I'll step on the ship. So I, I love this field.

• 1:27Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I have no specific engineering expertise.

• 1:30Chuck Nice?

  All right.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So we combed the land.

• 1:32Chuck Nice?

  Ah, yes.

• 1:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To find somebody who's been in and out, in and out, and in that whole field.

• 1:37Chuck Nice?

  Oh, wow, right on.

• 1:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we got a man right here.

• 1:39Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 1:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Where he right here, sitting right here. Sir! Neil. Welcome to StarTalk. Jeff, did I pronounce your last name correctly? Thornburg. That's correct. There you go. Jeff Thornburg.

• 1:51Chuck Nice?

  There was a very popular like nighttime soap opera called The Thornburg.

• 1:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Thorn's Birds.

• 1:58Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Well, slightly off.

• 2:02Chuck Nice?

  As you could tell, I was a huge fan of this show.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  You would be surprised, Chuck, how many kids in school equated Thornbirds with Thornburg. So you're in great company.

• 2:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You should be embarrassed that you corrected someone on a soap opera name. What else are you doing? Is that what you're doing during the daytime when you should be building rockets?

• 2:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, everybody has a side hustle.

• 2:25Chuck Nice?

  Very good.

• 2:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you are currently CEO of Portal Space Systems.

• 2:29Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 2:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I love that. I love that. Aerospace engineer. We need more of those.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you have a background with the Air Force. That might have been the Space Force if it had been now. NASA, Aerojet.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 2:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Love Aerojet. SpaceX and more. So you've been around.

• 2:45Speaker 02

  I've been around.

• 2:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But it sounds like you can't hold down a job.

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, well.

• 2:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the difference between everyone wanting you and everyone firing you?

• 2:52Chuck Nice?

  Don't shame my success with this drinking problem.

• 2:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the difference?

• 2:58Chuck Nice?

  Look at, look at the success I have achieved while holding down the drinking problem.

• 3:03Speaker 02

  My best, my best answer to that, Neil, is I grew up like I think you and others did and aspired for this science fiction world that we all would like to see. And I would go work at these places and be like, not moving fast enough, not moving fast enough, not moving fast enough.

• 3:20Chuck Nice?

  Very cool.

• 3:21Speaker 02

  And so.

• 3:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then you said, then you decided to take it in your own hands.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  Yes, sir.

• 3:25Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 3:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's, you know, that's audacious.

• 3:28Chuck Nice?

  I love that.

• 3:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's bodacious.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  I have a very loving wife who has been very patient with my 30-year career as well.

• 3:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need one of those in that situation.

• 3:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I need one of those.

• 3:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me what is Portal Space Systems and why that's different from what you've seen before.

• 3:45Speaker 02

  Portal is building the most rapidly maneuverable spacecraft that's ever been built. And that's important because we're doing it with a lot of payload flexibility. So what that means is we can accomplish a lot of missions for defense and commercial customers. We can do it with speed. The problem with movement on space is you can't get anywhere very fast right now, especially with satellites and, and defense systems. So I got frustrated and I said, this is a solvable engineering problem. Why aren't we doing more about it? Okay, if no one's going to do anything about it, I'm going to go do something about it.

• 4:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Engineers just love problems.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  They do. They do. And they love developing new types of spacecraft.

• 4:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when you say get somewhere faster, you want to get to, nine months is not fast enough for you to get to Mars?

• 4:32Speaker 02

  No, I want to do, no, absolutely not.

• 4:35Chuck Nice?

  Look at that.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  So I think my, my vision, my long-term vision is nuclear thermal propulsion, I think, is a key thing in my lifetime.

• 4:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As would be, that's anyone, you dreamt that last night.

• 4:46Chuck Nice?

  Are you kidding me? That's how I came in this world. My first words after they slapped me on my ass was, we getting to nuclear thermal.

• 4:55Speaker 02

  Thank you, thank you Chuck, exactly. That's what I've been saying three years now.

• 5:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so you're talking about, how nimble can you be in the space, in the 3D space environment?

• 5:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, so our current, our current spacecraft platform can move from mid-Earth orbit to low Earth orbit in less than three hours. It can move from mid-Earth orbit to GEO in less than a day. It can go from low Earth orbit to GEO station orbit in a day. So those types of time.

• 5:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not fast enough for you?

• 5:24Speaker 02

  That is fast enough for me. It's just not possible with frequency now, unless you're using a rocket to do it.

• 5:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not a routine thing.

• 5:31Speaker 02

  It's not a routine thing.

• 5:32Chuck Nice?

  Right, okay. So you're basically, you're like, I'm gonna turn commercial space into trucking.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Could you have more romantic terms than that?

• 5:43Chuck Nice?

  No, but because like, that's like, very understandable.

• 5:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is it the Amazon of delivery system?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Or the FedEx.

• 5:52Chuck Nice?

  At one point, you know, when, once we had containers coming in and container shipping, like, the trucking industry boomed because somebody had to figure out a way to get these containers where they had to go, you know, and quickly. And so like, you're doing that, which is.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Our customers don't care about how cool the tech is.

• 6:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  They just want speed.

• 6:12Chuck Nice?

  They just want speed.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  They want it now. If, if there's something going on in the world they need to be looking after, they want to do it now. If they've got a spacecraft in trouble, they want to see it now. They don't want to agonize over, well, if I move it, maybe I'll never get to move this spacecraft again.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. You know, I didn't even know that was a problem, until you just said it right now. And let me not even think of it as a problem, let me think of it as an unrealized need. That you are fulfilling. Very nice. So Chuck, we'll get back to that, but tell me, because you had, your whole life is in this, and we're probably about the same age, so I'm feeling your enthusiasm and your disappointments with what we've seen out there.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  My long-lost brother in space. Yes, I'm feeling that.

• 6:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what are some things that you have worked on that you could tell us about?

• 7:01Speaker 02

  One of the most exciting projects I got was when I was a young engineer with the Air Force Research Lab, and I got to develop a brand-new type of rocket engine called a full-flow-stage combustion engine. That's a fancy name for saying the highest-performing rocket engine ever made.

• 7:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to be clear, Air Force Research Lab, that's not just another lab on the street corner. That's an FFRDC, if I remember correctly, or not?

• 7:25Speaker 02

  It's a federal, it's a government lab.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  There are contractors like Aerospace that support in an FFRDC way. What does that mean, please? FFRDC?

• 7:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stay with us, Chuck.

• 7:36Chuck Nice?

  Trying to keep up here, you know, but you guys are like rocketing off.

• 7:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Federally-funded research and development operation, where it's a way for the government to get, get a piece of a pie that's being baked that corporations wouldn't otherwise do, because it's a little risky, it's a little kind of off the thing, but...

• 7:54Speaker 02

  No business case, no profit margin.

• 7:57Chuck Nice?

  I am doing that now with Nvidia.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Right. So I got to work on that, that rocket engine program, and it formed a kernel of several kernels of technology that seeded the propulsion industry for years to come. So I got to work on that program between 1999 and 2004, and then that seeded engine programs like J2X that were part of the Ares Rocket Program. It seeded things like what Stoke is doing with their full-flow engine. It seeded what, what I did with Raptor later on at SpaceX, because I developed and architected the Raptor engine system for Starship.

• 8:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when SpaceX rose up out of the din of rocket corporations, were you cherry-picked? Did they cherry-pick you from your previous location?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  I don't know that I can, I ever got the full, full story, but... This is a true story is that Elon called me at home in Huntsville and said, I got a project. I think you might be interested.

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That counts as being cherry picked.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  I think so.

• 8:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, when the guy who owns the thing calls you personally, he's stealing you.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  So shortly after I left NASA in Huntsville and went to SpaceX.

• 9:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's Huntsville, Alabama.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And of course, we just learned that the headquarters for the Space Force is moving from Colorado Springs to Huntsville, Alabama. It was a little weird because the president said, and from now on will be named Rocket City, but it's always called Rocket City.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's always been Rocket City.

• 9:25Chuck Nice?

  Well, you know, he does that. Let me ask you both this then before, I don't know, because you brought up these FFRDCs.

• 9:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:34Chuck Nice?

  Is that still necessary now that there's so much commercial activity in space travel? And is it still necessary for the government to seed money into things so that we can then go forward in discovery?

• 9:48Speaker 02

  I love your question because what I've been watching happening in the quote new space industry is venture capital and businesses chase things that add value or add to the stock price or add to profit. The government and the FFRDCs focus on necessary technology that there's no business case for.

• 10:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So business case at the time they're funding it.

• 10:09Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 10:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who knows what will happen after?

• 10:10Speaker 02

  So I feel that FFRDC should definitely be seeding new technologies like the ones we're developing at Portal for this rapid movement because no one else is going to do it. So NASA and the Air Force have done a great job over the years of developing technology that then they later put next to the Ark of the Covenant in the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  And I've been fortunate enough on a few different occasions to go back into the warehouse and pull some of these things that the government has developed.

• 10:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're so beautiful.

• 10:43Chuck Nice?

  That's excellent.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  So, yes, I think the need is definitely there.

• 10:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And when I Your face didn't melt when you reopened the arc.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  But when I was in the, in the Air Force specifically, the issue, one of the biggest issues is that nobody has that foresight to know all of the ways that technology will be applied.

• 11:02Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 11:03Speaker 02

  And that's why

• 11:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nobody has that.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Right. So that's why it's so important to keep the government involved in pushing that boundary. And I think that's where the government should be spending their money. Unfortunately, those government budgets are shrinking because I think some people think, well, private industry is just going to do it. So why do we have to fund it anymore? But what they don't understand is VCs in private industry are chasing value creation and stock price and profit. And that may not be in the same wheelhouse as the technologies we need to actually get humans to Mars, to get humans to the moon, and to exploit the solar system.

• 11:35Chuck Nice?

  And that's where China enters the picture.

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Then there was China.

• 11:40Chuck Nice?

  And then there was China.

• 11:51Speaker 03

  I'm Ali Khan Hemraj, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 12:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me about Aerojet. What'd you do there?

• 12:08Speaker 02

  I worked as an engineering manager and director on liquid rocket engine technology development, did a lot of turbopump, pump development for liquid rocket engines while I was there.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What, what, I mean, we've had liquid fuel forever, I mean, since Goddard, right? So what, what new was, thing was necessary?

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Getting weight out of the system.

• 12:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Every ounce matters.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Every ounce matters. And combining components, bringing in technologies like additive manufacturing to reduce part count.

• 12:37Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  And figure out how to qualify systems to do that.

• 12:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you reduce part count.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 12:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That reduces the error, the, the points of failure.

• 12:48Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 12:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That could take place.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Reliability goes up as part count goes down.

• 12:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I remember when the shuttle first came out. Okay. And there was this headline that sounded like it was bragging, and I said, "That's not a brag." It said, "The space shuttle is the most complex rocket ever to be launched." And I was like, "You don't want that."

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Am I right? I mean, you're the engineer.

• 13:11Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's like, "Don't tell me that."

• 13:13Speaker 02

  Well, in fact, they couldn't reuse it the way they wanted to because of that fact. You know, the shuttles were gonna launch 25 times.

• 13:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, every couple of weeks.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Every couple of weeks. And then they're like, "Oh, these engines aren't as easy to refurbish as we thought. We've actually have to rebuild them after every flight." "Oh, we got wiring issues that we hadn't accounted for." "Oh, we've got..."

• 13:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so...

• 13:33Speaker 02

  Tiles.

• 13:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tiles, right, that'll fall off. So, so when, when the shuttle was retired, we didn't have a way to get to space?

• 13:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 13:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so what we, I guess we used, with Russia, I mean, they were our friends back then. Who knows what they are today? But, but they had the Soyuz capsule. The Soyuz capsule had like 10 parts to it or something? It's, it's kind of a blunt instrument that works every single time.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Works every...

• 13:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Tell me about the Soyuz.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  Well, the Russian...

• 14:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you testified about that, so give me, catch up on that.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  I mean, the Russian development of rocket technology is interesting because you have to go all the way back to the end of World War II. We cherry picked rocket scientists. The US grabbed their lot, including Von Braun.

• 14:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Werner Von Braun, yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Russians grabbed their lot. And what happened was, the Russian lot of German rocket scientists really ended up focusing on reliability and part count and manufacturability. Von Braun and his team, and what later became the bulk of NASA, focused on performance and perfection. And, and so there was two completely different thought processes between Russian rocketry and American rocketry at that point that can trace themselves all the way back to the end of the Cold War.

• 14:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that persisted, and so to this day, the Soyuz, isn't it the most reliable?

• 14:53Speaker 02

  It is, and it has, had heritage dating all the way back to the 50s because they've never changed it.

• 14:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh huh.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  And there's some...

• 14:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's still got a compass?

• 15:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Or the Flintstones, you know, you look at the legs are running underneath the gun.

• 15:07Speaker 02

  And I mean, and their technology, there was so much elegance in their manufacturing that we ended up buying a lot of their engines at the end of the Cold War because we didn't want the Russian rocket scientists going to Iran and North Korea and other places.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That was part of our relationship with the space station to make, bring them on, give them something to do. In the day, everything that NASA launched said NASA on it, even if it was built by Boeing or Lockheed Martin or whoever else. But private enterprise is now putting things on the shelf that NASA then selects off the shelf, and that all has the name of the companies on it. So this is a shift. Could you take us through that shift from the old days into what's actually happening now?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, so about the time, the early 2000s is when Blue Origin and SpaceX were incorporated. And then over the next 10 years, they started to develop capabilities to launch things that were interesting to NASA. When I was at SpaceX and we were developing Falcon 9, they didn't believe that we could do those things at those price points. So they kind of patted us on the head and said, "That's cute. Let us know when it works." And then it did work. And then that's when the real interest came forward because now for 60 million a launch, you could do a lot of cool things that you couldn't do with the space shuttle program. And then the race was on.

• 16:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Space shuttle was a billion a launch or something. It turned out huge. Oh, yeah. Yeah, part of it was because there weren't as many launches in a year to amortize the cost of the marching army to keep all that going. With more launches than the less per launch, the effective cost is. But if you bring the cost down to that, that's another ballgame.

• 16:56Speaker 02

  It's a whole other ballgame. And then, and that's what got NASA excited about, the shuttle retiring because the race was on to get Dragon on a Falcon 9 as fast as possible and get astronauts to the station and get American astronauts again to orbit. And we put all the NASA logos and everything, and they're a great partner and all that. But, you know, it was weird because people would come up to us and say, "Does NASA exist anymore?" Because SpaceX seems to be launching everything.

• 17:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's get the animal straight here. So the Dragon is the capsule.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 17:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Falcon.

• 17:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nine or the Falcon Heavy, Falcon is the rocket, the launch system.

• 17:32Speaker 02

  First and second stage.

• 17:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stages of the system, good, just get the animal, if you would.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you, you had, you were up with the animals there?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we, didn't we go to SpaceX and we, I think you said it's the number of?

• 17:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, it looked like it, is it true?

• 17:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 17:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Falcon nine has nine engines on the bottom.

• 17:49Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 17:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, because we visited the headquarters and it was one, we had, StarTalk goes to SpaceX.

• 17:54Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I think it's online.

• 17:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 17:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we were just chilling and looking at the rocket and, yes, the one that, it's the first stage that comes back.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 18:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, and you see it with the tripod.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 18:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A big one mounted outside.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  And we had to put that engine in the center to help facilitate the landing burn.

• 18:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask you that, let me ask you, if you're gonna bring the stage back, that means you are using weight for fuel to guide the thing back for a soft landing, but I want that weight for my payload. So where do you, as an engineer, connect, where do those two lines cross?

• 18:33Speaker 02

  So, the elegance in the engineering is that Falcon nine, basically, we actually pushed that vehicle to its absolute limit before anybody ever saw it do its thing. And we did that because we didn't want any excess fuel on that vehicle when it landed back. So, then what we did, the company did, the business people did, is they said, "Look, we're gonna sell you an expendable stage or a reusable stage, and if you do the reusable, you'll save some money."

• 19:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so then the buyer makes that decision?

• 19:07Speaker 02

  That's right, then the market, the market chooses.

• 19:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Brilliant, brilliant.

• 19:10Speaker 02

  What did the market choose? They chose the reusable version because it made the most financial sense.

• 19:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 19:16Speaker 02

  But, so there's two things, there's a business model.

• 19:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm glad to hear that, that puts a lot in context for me.

• 19:20Speaker 02

  Right, as an engineer, I have to make that system as efficient as possible, meaning there should be no unused fuel when it lands, and then let the buyer and the market choose that configuration because it makes the most financial sense, and then everybody wins.

• 19:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Occasionally, you need the payload, which, if memory serves, they needed that extra weight for the Europa Clipper mission. I think the first stage did not return smoothly.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  I think that's right.

• 19:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That got dropped into the ocean. They needed that.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  You've got to have all the Delta V available to go to Europa.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, Europa is when the Jupiter's moon.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the Europa Clipper will loop around.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 19:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Make radar measurements beneath the ice.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  And they'll sell that, but I think the business case people should understand is, if you buy an expendable version, now that hardware can never be used again. And there's value associated with that hardware. So you're going to pay to basically use it all in one shot.

• 20:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 20:14Speaker 02

  And so that's another way to drive market value that's a good business case as well.

• 20:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So at the risk of asking the obvious, all these places you've worked, presumably there's a lot of wisdom you have gleaned from that that you bring to your current job. Is that a fair statement?

• 20:29Speaker 02

  I've seen a lot, yes. I think that's a fair statement. That's definitely true. But I think more-

• 20:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've seen the mountaintop.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  I think more importantly, though, is I got to work with these gray beards at NASA and the Air Force. I got to work with some great people in industry.

• 20:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you say gray beards?

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Gray beards, yes.

• 20:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Do they have beards in the Air Force? I thought they make you shave.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, the civil servants have beards.

• 20:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. That's a pretty lax military if they're working with a beard.

• 20:55Speaker 02

  So I tried to be a very good student of those older folks that had seen a lot more things than I had in my career, so.

• 21:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Give us a minute. We don't always have engineers on the show. It's mostly scientists. And for what it's worth, anytime people say to me, "You guys are doing great things in space." I say, "Look, we know what we want to do, but we don't know how to build this stuff." There are engineers who you never come interview, who enabled the James Webb Space Telescope, who enabled the Hubble Telescope. And so I just want to, on record, give a shout out to nameless engineers who-

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Are responsible for the success of everything.

• 21:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Of everything, and make the scientists look good. But you only see the scientists get interviewed because they're talking about the results of the experiment.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 21:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And whereas the engineer is not in that loop, so.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  I think that's awesome that you're doing that. And two, that's the best part of my job. It's like, I know engineers that got degrees that never really became engineers. Because they never got to actually experience an idea that you actually have to go build, and it needs to work. And then I work with people every day, some of which, that don't understand that engineering is sometimes an art form because- You don't know all the things. You have to design around the uncertainty. Like, if you came to me with a new spacecraft system, I'd say, "Yeah, that's theoretically possible. Now, let's go see what we can actually build, and how accurate I could build it."

• 22:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like a warp drive.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Right. We could totally work on that, Neil.

• 22:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, get to what are you doing here? Get back to work on that.

• 22:31Chuck Nice?

  So, so. So you guys are like the workman that comes in your home, the contractor, and he's like, "Yeah, we're not gonna know anything until we open up these walls."

• 22:42Speaker 02

  I do have.

• 22:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Gotta tell ya, could be a lot of problems back there. I mean, this could be a $200 job, or it could be a $20,000 job. We don't know.

• 22:53Speaker 02

  That sounds just like my engineers when I'm pricing a program. So you're hitting it right on the head.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I just want to highlight for our audience, which is primarily a science-leaning audience rather than engineering-leaning. Tell me the value of failure. Let's just start there.

• 23:13Speaker 02

  I'll answer that with a quick story, which is, a lot of legacy government and NASA programs have this failure is not an option moniker to them. And what that means is, to have infinitely low risk requires infinitely high cost.

• 23:29Chuck Nice?

  Hmm.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  And so, that's not how a lot of commercial startups and businesses have formed in the last decade or so. Because instead, there's a different approach in engineering where we want to actually break it. Because we want to see where the design fails, and what we don't know yet, and what we need to fix. And I think a lot of the legacy NASA programs have suffered at times because they've had to try to get everything right on the first go. And that's a pretty tall order. That's why these aerospace programs have taken so much longer than anybody ever wanted from a schedule-wise, or from a cost standpoint.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And Elon, in the early days, was very visible with his rocket failures.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 24:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And he made, he made a very important point at every turn. "We're gonna learn, learn something from this." Although, it sounded a little too euphemistic at times, where the rocket blows up, and it's, "No, no, no, that was not a failure. That was an experiment rich in data."

• 24:27Speaker 02

  And it's true to a certain extent, but not all failures are planned and most of them aren't. And but the value is if you if your company or organizational culture accepts failure, then you will actually get to the end product much faster.

• 24:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's there it is right there. That's it.

• 24:46Chuck Nice?

  But also, it's kind of a public perception problem for NASA because there's never been a movie made about SpaceX or Elon Musk, you know, but the whole idea behind the whole Apollo missions and everything that NASA does is triumph, we did it. And then the one time something goes wrong, it's global headlines of how badly they failed and what an incredible tragedy it is. If NASA blew up 100 rockets, there'd be no more tax dollars going to NASA, whereas Elon Musk can blow up as many rockets as he wants.

• 25:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, but as Neil knows as well, look at the history of the Mercury Gemini Apollo program. We blew up a ton of stuff. Those young men and women were in their 20s. They looked like SpaceX looked a few years ago.

• 25:40Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  And so NASA used to operate exactly in that mold, but somewhere along the way, politics took over and it got different for them. So I think NASA should focus on the programs that aren't viable as a business, that are pushing technology forward, because I think that's what they do really well at. I don't think they do well in big rocket programs.

• 26:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, this is my reply. I'm asked it often, as you can imagine. We said it earlier, with private enterprise coming in, why do we need NASA? Because there are things that private enterprise would never engage on the frontier, where there's either risk that they would not take or return on investment that does not exist.

• 26:23Speaker 02

  And I don't think nation states should rely on CEOs to be their only hope in achieving certain national goals. I just think that's a bad idea.

• 26:34Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I wonder where the...

• 26:36Speaker 02

  I could be wrong, but I mean, that's just one person's opinion.

• 26:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you know, when like when a leader of a nation breaks up with the CEO, like it can get ugly, you know what I mean? And like, who gets the cat? Like, you know?

• 26:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you want people to be more comfortable with failure. Because that's how you proceed. Not failure from blunder, but failure from something you had not seen coming. It's a different kind of failure, right?

• 27:04Speaker 02

  People think, I think people think engineers just know, and therefore, when we fail, oh, we're stupid, or we're a bad engineer. And they don't understand the art of engineering is, is designing a system around unknowns. And that we don't always know the first time it's going to be successful. So I think-

• 27:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which would include the unknown unknowns.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Correct. I think that's the, that's the unlock for people to know failure is a good thing. Because you've now given engineers a gift, because now they have all of the information. So that's why failure is so important to engineering. Because now you've pushed the design all the way up to the line. You don't have to guess about it anymore. So now you've gone from that initial phase of engineering of engineering around the margins you don't know, which normally means it's heavier, or carries more fuel, or less efficient in some way, because you're just trying to get it to work. And when you fail it, now you can totally isolate that to what it needs to be. And that's why things like the Falcon 9 first stage land the way they do. Because we failed so many of those

• 28:12Speaker 02

  as the gag reel has shown over the years.

• 28:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, back when you were at SpaceX. Yeah, yeah.

• 28:17Chuck Nice?

  I'm gonna start looking at my life differently. I'm just an engineer.

• 28:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All the failures.

• 28:22Chuck Nice?

  Who knew?

• 28:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me take you somewhere, because this comes up. And I want to hear it. I've spoken of it as a scientist, but I want to hear an engineer speak of this. Let's say there's some disaster. NASA disaster. Okay?

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Always, somebody digs up an engineer's memo that said you shouldn't launch because this might fail. And then others say, "Why didn't you pay attention to that?" And nobody looks to all the successful launches to dig up the very same letters that say you shouldn't launch because that's gonna fail, and it doesn't fail. So how do you square how NASA or any company should respond to the claims that you didn't heed advice, when presumably, I'm thinking, there are memos like that every single launch?

• 29:19Speaker 02

  So there's a failure in leadership there that I personally believe in, that I operate differently in my organizations over the years and my company now. You're always gonna have somebody say, "I'm worried about this," before you launch, or before you field a spacecraft on orbit. And so what I do is, we have what's called active risk management, which is a NASA term, but we look at all those risks before we fly. And every organization, there needs to be a person that signs off on the final risk posture for whatever mission you're flying. And that person, it's okay for them to take risk, but they need to document why they're taking that risk and why it's acceptable. So when I get, when I build flight hardware, we do a final risk review before it flies.

• 30:03Speaker 02

  We look at all of the key risks, and if people feel really strongly that they're worried about something, then I say, "I'm taking that risk away from you. You don't have to stress about that anymore. I'm going to say it's okay, and I'm gonna justify it because of this."

• 30:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now, something goes bad, now the press comes and they see that memo. And they say, "Why didn't you heed the advice of that memo?"

• 30:25Speaker 02

  And I had already addressed that in the documentation that said, "I thought this was an acceptable risk because of X, Y, and Z, and I know I have to stand by that, whether it fails or not."

• 30:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so now you, now they put you in front of the bereaved relatives.

• 30:39Chuck Nice?

  Now you're standing on a jet, and the, the door has blown off mid-flight. How do you, how do you get around it?

• 30:50Speaker 02

  Well, but that's-

• 30:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That can never happen.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  I think, I think there's incompetence and there's acceptable risk documentation. I guess that's what I was getting at.

• 30:59Chuck Nice?

  That's what you're saying.

• 31:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a good point.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  I make it a point to have acceptable risk documentation, so if the worst happens, I can at least explain myself on why I thought that was okay.

• 31:08Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 31:09Speaker 02

  And then I'm also fine saying I was wrong.

• 31:11Chuck Nice?

  It's like a pharmaceutical disclaimer, you know, side effects may include, and they're highly unlikely, but they list even the most unlikely of side effects, but they, but they say, you know, hey, listen, the chances of this happening are so slim that this is deemed safe. But, but there's a very, very slim chance that this could happen.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  In space, there's never a guarantee. That's the thing.

• 31:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, such thing is safe in space.

• 31:34Speaker 02

  There's no such thing.

• 31:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's just the risk that you accept.

• 31:36Speaker 02

  I think companies get in trouble when management takes that authority away from engineering and says, we don't care what you guys think, we're doing this anyway.

• 31:44Chuck Nice?

  That's when you've got a problem.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  That's when you got a problem. And so when you're talking about, you know, door hatches blowing off, or submarines failing when they shouldn't have been designed the way they were, or whatever, that's a failure in leadership.

• 31:55Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 31:56Speaker 02

  And so I think there's, you're still gonna have failures, and I'm just saying, let's avoid the failure in leadership piece of that.

• 32:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not enough attention is given to where the leadership matters versus the engineering declarations of what the risk factors are.

• 32:10Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 32:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Because people just wanna get to the end.

• 32:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so how about, just since we're here, the Hubble telescope, the mirror has a perfect shape, the secondary mirror has a perfect shape, but they don't play in a sandbox together, and they were not tested together. So is that leadership?

• 32:26Speaker 02

  That's a failure in system engineering, in my opinion, because you didn't have an adequate test program.

• 32:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How big was system engineering as a thing at the time? We're talking about the late 80s.

• 32:36Speaker 02

  We're talking about NASA. This is system engineering haven.

• 32:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what it is. You're right.

• 32:40Speaker 02

  So of all the other...

• 32:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But I don't think, I don't think system engineering was taught in schools as a branch of engineering until later than it should've. Am I right there?

• 32:48Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I've seen evidence in the shuttle program that they had very robust system engineering back in that timeframe.

• 32:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, in the 80s then.

• 32:55Speaker 02

  You know, maybe NASA didn't equivalently apply it all over the different centers and programs, but there is no better price for systems engineering execution than NASA.

• 33:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a blunder. Somebody...

• 33:06Speaker 02

  It's a failure of imagination to be like, should we test these systems before they fly maybe?

• 33:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. All right, one more. Let's go back to the Mars reconnaissance orbiter, I think it was. Where it never got into orbit because the scientists were using metric and you engineers were still on imperial units of of force.

• 33:32Chuck Nice?

  I remember you tell me that.

• 33:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's up with that?

• 33:34Speaker 02

  That's such a classic story and true. What's up with that is we've carried mixed units in the United States for way.

• 33:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, be blaming the country. All right, blame it. You are the engineering people. You know, you're talking to scientists. You know.

• 33:48Speaker 02

  Well, here's.

• 33:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You want the scientists to be using pounds and ounces?

• 33:51Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna make.

• 33:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Would not.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  I'm not gonna make excuses.

• 33:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right, you better not.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  But I will tell you why it's happened, in my opinion.

• 33:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  A lot of the engineering tools for spacecraft and launch vehicles were all written in imperial units. And so they've been very slow, the community at large, to change those tools to a metric standard.

• 34:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  And so engineers get lazy because they want to stay in the units they're comfortable with.

• 34:19Chuck Nice?

  Well, did that scenario cause them to make the change? Or are they still doing the same?

• 34:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're still being dumb ass.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  I think they're.

• 34:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's your word, you say it.

• 34:28Chuck Nice?

  Are they still being dumb ass?

• 34:29Speaker 02

  I think Chuck, there's still pockets of dumbassery going on.

• 34:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's a Chuckism right there.

• 34:36Chuck Nice?

  There we go. It's fantastic.

• 34:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The dumbassitude of the system doesn't. So we've seen in recent months a move to cut costs at NASA. Cut costs in many ways, including the science budget, I think, got the biggest cut. And there's some attrition, people leaving and not being replaced, early retirement. And so it seems like we're losing some legacy wisdom with that shift. Could you reflect on what you think might be the future consequences of this?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely. What comes to my mind, there's two things that I actually worry about now, which is we're watching our scientists walk over to other countries. Because there's no funding for them here.

• 35:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I know, I have two colleagues, not in astrophysics, but in other physical sciences. They said they got a phone call from France.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They say.

• 35:29Chuck Nice?

  Hello?

• 35:31Chuck Nice?

  What are you doing right now? I hear you are being fired. Perhaps we'd like to come to France. And make a bugger rocket.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Be tasty.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That would be funny. Rocket in the shape of a baguette.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  But, but like, so you've got the scientists vacating and then you've got NASA engineers and folks that will not be doing the fundamental research. We've been robbing R and D from the United States for, my career has spanned 30 years at this point. I can't talk to all the things that happened before me, but I can talk to all the things that happened in 30 years in my experience. And it was bad when I started my career. It's even worse now 30 years later. I think current events are going to have ramifications for America as a leader in science and technology for decades to come because of what's happening now.

• 36:28Chuck Nice?

  We're plundering our own intellectual treasure is what we're doing.

• 36:33Speaker 02

  Because you don't know which experiments are going to work. You have to fund a lot of different science and technology areas, hoping that one out of 10 or 15 are going to be winners.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why don't they know this?

• 36:45Speaker 02

  I don't know. I guess that's why I'm here. Let's get the word out.

• 36:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, you should be on a podcast.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  I should.

• 36:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's work on that.

• 37:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Speaking as an academic, if I come up with a great idea and I publish it and then all my colleagues see it, they can judge it, see if there's a flaw, or use it as a stepstone to reach a next goal. That's the openness that is fundamental to the progress of science. You're in a competitive industry. If you make some discovery, would you be resistant to patent it because then other people would see it? How does intellectual property work in your business?

• 37:45Speaker 02

  There is a strong desire to hide things that are unique because it becomes intellectual property and IP of the business that can actually add to its value.

• 37:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me things you're hiding now.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  So, I, I, sure, I'm happy.

• 38:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, no.

• 38:01Chuck Nice?

  Remember that warp engine you talked about?

• 38:07Speaker 02

  So, one of the things as a CEO of a space startup that I think about a lot is integrity. And so, to your, kind of what you're scratching at a little bit is, if there was something so great that could benefit humanity, I learned a lot from Paul Allen when I worked for him, because one of the things I took-

• 38:24Chuck Nice?

  Microsoft Paul Allen.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Microsoft Paul Allen. And one of the things I took away from Paul was, technology for the benefit of humanity. So that's one of our kind of cultural touchstones at Portal Space Systems. So if we had something so great and so beneficial to humanity, I wouldn't want to hide that. But that's just my take on integrity.

• 38:46Chuck Nice?

  And what does your wife feel about this?

• 38:47Speaker 02

  Well, we should talk to her about that. It's only gonna come down to the value and the dollar. I think she'd rather have a husband with integrity than without. It's what I think she'd probably say.

• 38:57Chuck Nice?

  There you go. That's a great answer.

• 38:58Speaker 02

  But, we don't have enough integrity in the business right now, is a personal observation. Because the push to make money, the push to grow a business and satisfy investors, sometimes compromises people's value systems in ways that aren't great.

• 39:17Chuck Nice?

  So, how could that, because it seems to me like what you're doing is either, comes down to, this works or it doesn't. So, I'm sure there are people who feel like, well what do I need integrity for? Because it either works, or it doesn't. You know, so what difference does it make? Where exactly does a lack of integrity hurt the business and then subsequently...

• 39:44Speaker 02

  I think lying about the progress of your product.

• 39:47Chuck Nice?

  Ah, to keep the money coming.

• 39:49Speaker 02

  That's where I see it the most.

• 39:50Chuck Nice?

  I see.

• 39:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vaporware.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Businesses are trying to drive for that next fundraise-

• 39:55Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha.

• 39:56Speaker 02

  -that next investor, and they lie their asses off to get to the next step.

• 40:00Chuck Nice?

  Ah, okay.

• 40:01Speaker 02

  And that's where I see it the most.

• 40:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Vaporware. That's what that is.

• 40:05Chuck Nice?

  I don't know what vaporware is.

• 40:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, there's software.

• 40:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, vaporware!

• 40:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's hardware.

• 40:10Chuck Nice?

  Oh!

• 40:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's wetware.

• 40:12Chuck Nice?

  Wetware, yeah.

• 40:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which is the brain. And then there's vaporware.

• 40:14Chuck Nice?

  And vaporware.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's just vapor. There's nothing behind the idea.

• 40:17Chuck Nice?

  That is my Uncle Jimmy at a cookout. Vaporware.

• 40:22Chuck Nice?

  Yes, I didn't have a name for it until now.

• 40:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so take me back to the billionaire boy's space race. I mean, the billionaires and they had the cash. How does that work compared with someone who has a brilliant idea and just gets VC money to come in and help them?

• 40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, with Elon, it was he had that money from PayPal to start Tesla and SpaceX. So he had a hundred million dollar head start that most people don't have.

• 40:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, VCs will come up with a hundred million dollars. You can get that.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  I mean, you have to work at it. It doesn't happen that fast.

• 40:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  I mean, normally you still end up going through a process where you're going to raise a pre-seed round of a few million and then a seed of maybe 10 or 20 million and then blah, blah, blah.

• 41:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus you owe the VC at the end, where if Elon is spending his own money, he just owes himself.

• 41:11Speaker 02

  You're diluting your business every time you raise money.

• 41:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  And Elon didn't have to do that because it was his own money.

• 41:16Chuck Nice?

  It's his own money. So let me ask you, because I'm just fascinated by this whole thing right now. How does a VC know anything about thermal nuclear propulsion? I mean, seriously, like, I need 30 million dollars.

• 41:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is where he's got to be a salesman.

• 41:32Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I mean, you know.

• 41:34Speaker 02

  So when we started the company four years ago, we decided to pursue solar thermal propulsion because it was a stepping stone to get to nuclear propulsion later. But nobody knew what that was or how it could translate into getting you faster movement on orbit. So you're right, the CEO has to be a salesman first. And then you have to start proving that you can build this hardware. And then you start building hardware, you start doing testing, you start showing people.

• 42:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Plus, you're going to assemble a board of some kind who's looking over your shoulder.

• 42:05Speaker 02

  I've started to do that now, yeah, with.

• 42:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, he hadn't do that.

• 42:09Chuck Nice?

  You didn't need to. Now, now you made him actually say it publicly.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  I have a board, but it's a small board.

• 42:17Speaker 02

  But.

• 42:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  His mom is on the board. You're doing so well, son.

• 42:23Speaker 02

  That's a good idea. That's a good idea, Neil. I hadn't thought about that. That's funny.

• 42:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need some skeptical physicists on your board to know what's possible and what isn't.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  That's, that's true. I can always use good skeptics on the board.

• 42:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 42:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, but the, the investors typically don't know anything about the technology, to your question. And they hire people.

• 42:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's not unique to space, right? Almost all the high-tech frontier companies, you know, VCs just maybe dislike the idea.

• 42:49Speaker 02

  So, one of the things we did at Portal was we started working with the Space Force and the Air Force on small business innovative research contracts, so that we can show people that knew things about space, that knew the technology, that investors could then get confidence on that we were on the right track of things. So, there's just a lot of steps you gotta take to try to convince people something's real.

• 43:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hmm.

• 43:12Speaker 02

  And I wanted to do that with data as much as salesmanship, because I didn't want to be vaporware.

• 43:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So, could you give us a kind of overview on the history of propulsion? And how the ideas have landed, what's working, what has underperformed relative to predictions, what has overperformed? What we do know is that we don't really have flying cars. We have these flying drones, okay? They wanna call them flying taxis, but they're, they're helicopter drones, right? So, in the old days, there was just simple Goddard liquid propulsion that you can throttle, I guess. It's chemical energy.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 43:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're still using chemical energy.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  We are.

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what's up with that?

• 44:03Speaker 02

  Well, to get out of Earth's gravity, well, you want a lot of thrust, and liquid rocket engines are still the best way to get off the ground and into orbit. Where, where technology has now started to evolve is, once you're in orbit, now what do you do? I would argue that liquid rocket engines aren't the best way to get you around. Once you're on orbit. Now, we're still using that to take upper stages, third stages, second stages, to take you to higher orbits and stuff, but that's not the most efficient way to go. And so they started to see this with-

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there are these regimes.

• 44:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 44:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There's acceleration regime, delta V regimes-

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 44:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That don't call for the same solutions.

• 44:46Speaker 02

  Correct. There's more solutions available than what we've typically used before.

• 44:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  So the electric propulsion came on the scene a while back.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And told me how that works?

• 44:56Speaker 02

  So typically, you're talking about a hall thruster type system, so you're creating ions that you're accelerating out the back of an electric motor or engine.

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why isn't that an ion engine?

• 45:06Speaker 02

  It's an ion engine.

• 45:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Okay, okay. I thought something different, but it's not.

• 45:12Speaker 02

  Electric propulsion ion engines are in the same family. They're very efficient, but they don't have a lot of thrust.

• 45:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  So you don't, because you're not creating the acceleration, because you don't have a lot of thrust, you don't get anywhere very fast. So satellites said, okay, that's cool. If it takes us weeks or months to get to an orbit where we're selling electrons for broadband internet or TV or whatever, that's fine. But then our adversaries started developing spacecraft that could move a lot faster with higher thrust. And then they started doing things on orbit that threaten some of our critical infrastructure. And now we have no way to kind of maneuver around that.

• 45:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So there's strategic value-

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  -to this.

• 45:52Speaker 02

  Maneuverability is a key ingredient of warfare on land, sea- And space now. And now space.

• 46:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You think? So, chemical rockets, we are removing energy that was built into the molecules that are in the fuel tank. That energy gets released.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You have, you expel mass out one end, the rocket recoils by going the opposite direction. Newton's law.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Yep. Accelerate those particles in the thrust chamber as fast as possible.

• 46:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With very high mass, high speed coming out the back. Once you are in place, you now kick out ions which have very low mass, but high efficiency, and so it'll move you if you're patient.

• 46:38Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And so these are two different needs.

• 46:42Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Clearly, okay.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  And now there's a new need, which is we don't have that patience any longer.

• 46:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it.

• 46:49Chuck Nice?

  Now, what are, what are, I'll say, our adversaries, what are they using for maneuverability?

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Well, if you look at, if you look at what China's done, as they've grown the amount of mass they can throw with their Long March launch vehicles, they're just making bigger and bigger spacecraft with bigger and bigger tanks and bigger and bigger thrusters.

• 47:07Chuck Nice?

  So they're brute forcing it?

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Yes, sir. That's correct.

• 47:10Chuck Nice?

  That's what they're doing.

• 47:11Speaker 02

  And, and we like to be more elegant. Remember my story about the Russian rocket?

• 47:16Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:16Speaker 02

  This is American. We always want to think about everything.

• 47:19Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  As my wife often tells me, I'm in my head too much. That's very much an American.

• 47:24Chuck Nice?

  But you know what? I kind of feel like precision and elegance wins out in the long term if you can get past the short term.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  And commercially, yes.

• 47:33Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 47:33Speaker 02

  Because you deem that elegance to hit a price point that's going to make you both commercially viable and viable for the defense industry.

• 47:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  As well.

• 47:40Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, and unlike America, they, they spend as much money as they want on anything that they want.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Well, and China's completely aligned in their military industrial complex.

• 47:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  I mean, there's only one chain of command and one person that makes those decisions.

• 47:52Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. And that's what I want here. That kind of efficiency.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He channels Trump. It's, he can't.

• 48:00Chuck Nice?

  Donald J. is my name.

• 48:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He can't help it. He can't help it.

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, is there anything you could testify in Congress today that's reminiscent of what you testified in back in 2015?

• 48:13Chuck Nice?

  That would let them know.

• 48:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Needs.

• 48:15Chuck Nice?

  And, and to let them know.

• 48:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Transition of our needs.

• 48:17Chuck Nice?

  What kind of dumbasses they are. Because they are dumb asses.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  So the

• 48:23Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry, I did, I'm sorry.

• 48:25Speaker 02

  The interesting

• 48:25Chuck Nice?

  We can cut that out, please don't cut that out.

• 48:28Speaker 02

  The interesting thing about all of that is that when I testified before Congress in 2015, it was about, why are we sending all this money to Russia and buying their engines when we've got engineers we need to train in the United States and we have commercial companies that can do the job? And that was my argument. And I said, hey, Falcon 9, Falcon Heavy, Starship Raptor are coming, it's going to be a thing. Fortunately, I was right on all of that. What I would say today to different committees before Congress is, our adversaries are coming for us and we are cutting R and D spending, we're cutting engineering, we're cutting science, we're cutting all the things we need to be competitive.

• 49:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're also spooking immigrants.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who could have expertise, as they've always had.

• 49:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 49:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I mean, when I was in graduate school, half of my fellow graduate students were foreign nationals, half of them.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  And

• 49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And now they're all spooked because they don't know what's gonna happen.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, and China's made no bones about, they want to be the preeminent superpower in the world. So I don't know why we kind of have our heads in the sand about this.

• 49:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it's the head of our ass. Say it right.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  Okay, sure, head of our ass.

• 49:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a darker place than in the sand.

• 49:36Speaker 02

  So if I was testifying before Congress to your question, I would be hitting those points really hard because we need to be accelerating capabilities that are gonna preserve, I want to preserve low Earth orbit, mid Earth orbit, LEO, cis lunar, around the moon, for commercial opportunities in the future. And so my thesis is, if I don't do my part to protect and defend it with the Department of Defense, there's not gonna be a spot to make money commercially in the future. And that's how it's been, so we started sailing wooden ships, the pirates were there, it's gonna be no different on orbit. So what are we gonna do about it?

• 50:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and so let me describe what I think is going on in space and you either say I've got it right or modify it as necessary. When people hear Space Force, they say, "Oh, there's gonna be weapons and bombs in space." And it's not really what's happening there. What's happening there is our assets that enable what we think of as modern life and civilization are fundamentally pivoted on what we have orbiting this earth with the satellites, the GPS especially, our other communication satellites. And so if you have a military, it's not, "Oh, defend this border, take this hill." No, it's defend our assets. And our assets are bare-assed in space.

• 50:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And an adversary who wanted to take us out, blind us, they would go to our communication satellites and take us out.

• 51:03Chuck Nice?

  Just like Independence.

• 51:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It was the Independence Day, you remembered that.

• 51:07Chuck Nice?

  That's right.

• 51:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The aliens came and took out all of our satellites.

• 51:09Speaker 02

  Leave the world behind on Netflix.

• 51:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's another one.

• 51:12Chuck Nice?

  That's a great one.

• 51:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leave the world behind. It was a tech warfare.

• 51:16Chuck Nice?

  Do not watch that movie with me, by the way.

• 51:19Speaker 02

  Oh, I think that'd be fun.

• 51:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 51:21Speaker 02

  No?

• 51:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Leave the world behind. That was actually, I think the Obamas were executive producers on that project. A terrifying movie, actually. Leave the world behind.

• 51:30Speaker 02

  So your question to me.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, so did I, have I, would you agree with how I've characterized it?

• 51:35Speaker 02

  I loved how you characterized it, because that's the same message that I try to send when I'm talking to, "Why should the average citizen care about this?" They should care because they, when they go to the gas pump, it's not gonna work, because GPS does the timing for the gas pump. When they go to get cash from the ATM, it's not gonna work, because GPS does the timing for the ATM. We've selectively tied our financial systems to GPS, and we did that, we made a choice. We said, "Oh, this is cool, let's do this, this is handy." China did not do that. They have other ways they do timing for their banking and financial assets.

• 52:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My money's in my mattress, so.

• 52:09Speaker 02

  And not just China, but other countries, right? So we made fundamental decisions with our space technology that have made us vulnerable, to your point, which is why people should care so much about this problem.

• 52:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And we have battleships and Marines that could do 100 push-ups and launch silos, and any country that's smart is not gonna attack us on those grounds.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gonna find, you're just gonna find a weakness. That's how any war unfolds.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Well, and guess what? All those assets up there right now? Can they move when they're threatened? Can they defend themselves in any meaningful way? I would argue probably not.

• 52:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I also heard, and I haven't confirmed this, but I heard and you would know, that some adversaries will have satellites that'll nestle up next to our satellites and just basically harass them, either with an electromagnetic field or something. And so we then have to move our satellite away from them to maintain operability, but that uses fuel that we otherwise need to station keep. And so that will reduce the lifespan of some of our satellites because of this. And no, did it fire weapon at us? No. Did it destroy us? No. It's just-

• 53:26Chuck Nice?

  It just cyber bullied us.

• 53:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's, ooh, yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  This seems like a very reasonable hypothesis to me.

• 53:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I heard that and I-

• 53:34Chuck Nice?

  It was very diplomatic.

• 53:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's another way to mess. So Space Force is not-

• 53:38Chuck Nice?

  Jeff did not answer that question.

• 53:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's protect our assets.

• 53:41Chuck Nice?

  Did you see what he just did there?

• 53:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What did he say?

• 53:42Chuck Nice?

  He was just like, "That seems like a very reasonable hypothesis", which is like, "Oh, man, that's exactly what is happening."

• 53:50Speaker 02

  I was trying to channel my inner Neil.

• 53:53Chuck Nice?

  No, that was good. That was good. That's why I had to point it out. That was excellent.

• 53:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in your current capacity as CEO of, give me the full name again?

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Portal Space Systems.

• 54:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Portal Space Systems.

• 54:04Speaker 02

  You'll have to ask me how about the name of the company at some point.

• 54:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Ask it now. How'd you get Portal Space Systems?

• 54:10Speaker 02

  I used to watch Rick and Morty with my daughter.

• 54:11Chuck Nice?

  Excellent.

• 54:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There it is.

• 54:13Speaker 02

  And so half of the story is the portal gun from Rick and Rick and Morty, because that's what I used to watch with my daughter.

• 54:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Rick and Morty is just Back to the Future relationship all over again. It's Doc and Marty.

• 54:25Chuck Nice?

  Yes, that's right.

• 54:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rick and Morty, Doc and Marty. And he's got the same kind of, "Hey, Morty, come on."

• 54:30Chuck Nice?

  That's right, Morty.

• 54:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  "We gotta go."

• 54:33Speaker 02

  Same, same.

• 54:34Chuck Nice?

  That's very cool.

• 54:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So tell me what some of the coolest, what's the coolest thing you're working on in your company right now?

• 54:39Speaker 02

  So Supernova has been like-

• 54:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Supernova?

• 54:42Speaker 02

  The flagship-

• 54:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You took one of my words.

• 54:44Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 54:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  My people.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  Well-

• 54:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's our word, just so you know.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  Well, I wanted to be close to your people.

• 54:48Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 54:50Speaker 02

  But we kind of have a star theme with our products at the company.

• 54:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know I'm gonna love that.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  I knew you'd love that, because I love Cosmos, so I mean- With Supernova, it's about- That rapid movement and it's supernova because we're using concentrated solar energy. And we've innovated around a heat exchanger. So we don't have to combust any liquid propellants with our system. So like a nuclear.

• 55:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But this is in what, towards what end?

• 55:19Speaker 02

  This is so I can carry twice as much fuel. And I have a thermal engine cycle where I'm not using combustion. So I can have fewer parts, more efficiency, higher thrust and twice as much fuel. Cause I'm not carrying an oxidizer, so I don't have to burn anything. And I really wanted to do nuclear thermal, but I can't buy a nuclear reactor at Lowe's. And there's not enough of them to buy right now.

• 55:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  10 to 24 gigawatts. Gigawatts. You can't get one of those at Lowe's?

• 55:49Speaker 02

  I want.

• 55:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At Lowe's Depot?

• 55:50Speaker 02

  I joke about this all the time because the thermal engine is a lot like Mr. Fusion from the second Back to the Future movie. Because we, we use ammonia as our propellant now, but we could use.

• 56:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mr. Fusion was in the first.

• 56:03Speaker 02

  Okay. Yeah. At the end.

• 56:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  At the end.

• 56:05Speaker 02

  At the end. Yes.

• 56:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Get, get you to the second movie.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Get you to the second. You're right.

• 56:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. You don't, just, just don't with me here.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  I like this. I like, I like this battle of the trivia. So the thermal engine is a lot like Mr. Fusion because we can use ammonia, which is our baseline fuel. Cause it's very storable on orbit and we have a multi-year life of our spacecraft. But if I want to start moving out to Mars and I want to use methane in the future, I want to use hydrogen, I want to use other things, I can use other fuels in a thermal engine system.

• 56:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 56:36Speaker 02

  So this.

• 56:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As versatility.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  As versatility because I'm very much a live off the land kind of guy when it comes to space. If we're taking everything with us, we failed as engineers.

• 56:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, could you tell NASA that that's what they should call it instead of in-situ resource utilization?

• 56:51Chuck Nice?

  Living off the land.

• 56:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's, let's, from now on, NASA, are you watching?

• 56:58Chuck Nice?

  L O T L. Okay.

• 57:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Living off the land.

• 57:01Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 57:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is way more marketable than in-situ resource utilization.

• 57:05Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I S R U. That's a big branch of NASA.

• 57:08Speaker 02

  It is NASA.

• 57:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 57:10Chuck Nice?

  There's a cool company down in Florida, I'll give them a shout out, they're called Admin and they are an additive manufacturing company. And that's what they, that's what they're, that's what they work with on all the space people that they work with.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  Right. Because if I'm going to Mars, I don't, I won't think of all the things I need to live. But I want a print machine that can print any tool I need.

• 57:30Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 57:31Speaker 02

  Once I'm there.

• 57:31Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 57:32Speaker 02

  But anyway, so with Supernova, it's about propulsion, but it's about payload flexibility. So what that means is software definable power, which means you have a payload, you have a camera, you have a robot arm, you have whatever you want to do whatever mission. It's like a Lego brick onto the front of the payload deck, perform your mission. I'm selling, I'll get you there as fast as you need to be, and I'll give you a platform that's very versatile over multiple years.

• 57:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not to stupidly simplify it, but are you saying you have a warehouse and I have a need, and I say, I wanna put this object on Mars and do some things, and you say, yeah, get two rockets from aisle A and two boosters from aisle B, and then we assemble what it is that will serve my needs?

• 58:19Speaker 02

  Well, from a spacecraft standpoint, yes.

• 58:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  So I am gonna build you the spacecraft, and whatever you need on that spacecraft to perform a mission, whether that's a camera or a telescope or whatever, I can supply power and data to that.

• 58:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That is engineering heaven right there.

• 58:34Chuck Nice?

  That's wild.

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Because that's one of the biggest problems with satellites right now is everything's bespoke. So you wanna have a telecom satellite, oh, I'm gonna build the whole thing, including the telecom payload.

• 58:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that's way more expensive.

• 58:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The one-off. It's a one-off.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  And if your customers don't show up and want it, then your business fails.

• 58:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

• 58:53Speaker 02

  I can't predict everything the customer needs, so I didn't wanna try. I just wanted to give them a spacecraft that could meet all their needs.

• 58:59Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 59:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so when are we having warp drives?

• 59:03Chuck Nice?

  And when, and how do we get in on the ground floor of your company?

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Let's talk afterwards.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  Talk on the side. We can make that happen.

• 59:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's on our doorstep? What is, remains only in the dream states of engineers?

• 59:23Speaker 02

  I think two things. If I was king of American engineering for a day, for space, I'd accelerate AI and machine learning and get more robots and AI out there doing the heavy lifting for us.

• 59:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's called Skynet. You know.

• 59:38Speaker 02

  I get that, but I think you could. I think we-

• 59:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Accelerate AI and make more robots.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  And make more robots.

• 59:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a different starting phrase.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  But let me tell you why I said that. We spend so much time and money trying to keep humans alive, that it slows our pace of exploration on orbit.

• 59:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Slows everything.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  So let's get AI and ML out there on spacecraft, exploring the solar system and teaching us what we don't know yet.

• 1:00:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  ML, machine learning.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yes, machine learning. So that then we can engineer the systems that keep people alive and get it right the first time. And so, and we can get more exploration done faster, because we're not spending all this money to keep people alive right now. Let's go learn what we need to learn to keep people alive.

• 1:00:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You better not name the robots, because then people will feel for them. And if you don't bring them back, then you killed a robot.

• 1:00:26Chuck Nice?

  I'm okay with that.

• 1:00:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I haven't made up my mind.

• 1:00:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, there's a whole ethical frontier there. About feelings for things that have feel.

• 1:00:39Chuck Nice?

  There's actually an ethical society that has come up around the treatment of robots.

• 1:00:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Treatment of robots.

• 1:00:45Speaker 02

  I guess I would tell those people, it's easier for me to keep your robot alive than a human alive in space.

• 1:00:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's worse than that.

• 1:00:50Chuck Nice?

  You got my vote with that one.

• 1:00:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There you go, there you go.

• 1:00:53Speaker 02

  And then, on the propulsion side, I think what we're learning in quantum physics, this is where I'm gonna carefully delve into your universe for a hot second. I am not the expert in quantum physics, but I do read a lot, because I'm super interested in what we're learning there. But I think there's elements of the quantum world that are gonna unlock propulsion technologies that might look similar to a warp drive. But I think we need to unlock some more understanding of the quantum universe to do that. I think that's gonna be the linchpin in giving us sci-fi geeks the warp drive we want.

• 1:01:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So a quantum FFRDC would be a cool thing.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  That would be an awesome thing.

• 1:01:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, it's just everything quantum.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  And you could probably get that funded, because there's a lot of defense applications for quantum as well.

• 1:01:41Chuck Nice?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:01:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so give me an actual date where we're gonna have a warp drive. So I can put that on my calendar. We know when the warp drive gets invented. It's 2063.

• 1:01:54Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 1:01:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Star Trek.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:01:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So those are your marching orders.

• 1:01:58Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:01:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  I think we can do that.

• 1:02:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You've got 40 years.

• 1:02:01Speaker 02

  We're moving fast in quantum.

• 1:02:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's via the quantum.

• 1:02:04Speaker 02

  Via the quantum.

• 1:02:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 1:02:05Speaker 02

  I think that's our best path right now.

• 1:02:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, because if you, you know, at least even in Back to the Future Part Two, they predicted that the Cubs would win the World Series.

• 1:02:14Speaker 02

  And they did.

• 1:02:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they did, yes.

• 1:02:17Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, even a broken clock is.

• 1:02:21Speaker 02

  It's true. What did it say? A blind sal finds an acorn every once in a while.

• 1:02:23Chuck Nice?

  There you go.

• 1:02:25Speaker 02

  But I think that with warp drive, it's not about this propulsive thing that we're all mentally geared to. It's how do we leverage quantum to manipulate the fabric of spacetime?

• 1:02:35Chuck Nice?

  So quantized gravity and things of that nature.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  You have to really, you're gonna have to figure out how to fold spacetime.

• 1:02:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You need a new understanding of the fabric of the spacetime continuum. Manipulate that, it's not even about propulsion.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:02:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  That's, that's Thornburg's theory, anyway, for whatever that's worth.

• 1:02:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. So Jeff, we gotta land this plane, but Chuck, do you have any last questions for the man?

• 1:02:55Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I'm just interested, like, what would be the ultimate achievement in commercial space travel or the Holy Grail? What's, what's, what is it that everybody wants?

• 1:03:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna tell you what I want, and then we'll go to him.

• 1:03:08Chuck Nice?

  Go ahead.

• 1:03:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I want to go suborbital to any, between any two points on Earth. So that I'm 45 minutes, I'm no more than 45 minutes away from lunch in Tokyo and then fly back.

• 1:03:19Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 1:03:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that would require rockets, not planes.

• 1:03:22Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because orbit is 90 minutes.

• 1:03:24Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 1:03:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if you're suborbital at half of that, you just go the other way, whatever. You, you can go anywhere in the world. And I think about that every time I go to Washington. I go to Washington, like, for lunch meeting and then come back and I'm home for dinner. And if you told that to our founding fathers, get the horse ready.

• 1:03:41Chuck Nice?

  Right. That would be an impossibility.

• 1:03:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, they can't even think that way. So, pick that up. Where, what, what's, what awaits us?

• 1:03:50Speaker 02

  For me, my Holy Grail is that humans can go to any orbit between here and the moon or the moon that isn't a significant emotional event. It's just a standard.

• 1:04:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Go to the moon, I'll see you on Tuesday.

• 1:04:02Chuck Nice?

  Exactly. That's wild.

• 1:04:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's what you want.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  That's what I want.

• 1:04:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that so In my lifetime. Sis lunar space becomes our backyard, not even worthy of comment. Correct.

• 1:04:12Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. That's very cool. It's like saying, I'm going to Poughkeepsie. I'm going to the moon. It's all the same.

• 1:04:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's all the same.

• 1:04:20Chuck Nice?

  All the same.

• 1:04:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a, that's a, that's a worthy goal. I like that. So let me perhaps offer a cosmic perspective on this. I'm a scientist. I think sciency things about the world. And at no time am I asking, how would one accomplish this? How would one build it? How would one pay for it? How much ingenuity does it require? Do I have to invent something that has never before existed? Just to solve the problem I have posed? I don't really have to think about that. And we have this community of engineers that walk among us.

• 1:05:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who live for that. They live for it. You know what else they live for? Constraints on what it is they need to do. That, that, that was the most impressive feature of how engineers function. It, the last thing an engineer wants to hear is, here, go build this. There's no timeframe. There's no money limit and there's no constraints. They're going to be staring at their navel to not knowing what to do. But if I say, I got three months, I got $2 million. I, these are the specs and this is the requirements. Go.

• 1:05:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Their ingenuity derives from figuring stuff out within those constraints. That's how we make discoveries, not scientific discoveries. Discoveries about how stuff works around us. That so many of us, myself included, take for granted. So.

• 1:06:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There is no future of civilization without happy engineers. Engineers that are given problems to solve. And maybe it's up to the rest of us to give them the kinds of problems we need solved. Energy, housing, climate. Scientists can't solve those problems. We can characterize them, but we need engineers to step in the ring. And this is an appeal, I suppose, to a few. Not everyone can be an engineer. We don't want that. Engineers don't even want that. But engineers as a demographic of society that'll lead us into the future. There is no civilization without them.

• 1:06:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And for me, that is a cosmic perspective. Chuck, thanks. Thanks for being here. Always a pleasure. And Jeff Thornburg, thanks for being on StarTalk. My pleasure. Coming all this way for us. Absolutely. This has been another installment of StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, bidding you to keep looking up.