Unmanned: Drone Racing and Tech

Is it an Esport? Is it a “real” sport? Or is it a bit of both? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice investigate drone racing and technology with world champion Paul “Nurk” Nurkkala and drone engineer Justin Pearce.

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

• 0:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson. You're a personal astrophysicist as host. It is a sports edition of StarTalk where we are going to talk about drone racing. That's even a thing. And I got with me Gary Riley. Gary.

• 0:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Hey.

• 0:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're the sports guy.

• 0:34Gary O'Reilly?

  I am.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because you were ex-pro footballer.

• 0:38Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you. Yes.

• 0:40Chuck Nice?

  He still is an ex-pro.

• 0:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess not. You are a present tense ex-football player.

• 0:46Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes, I am.

• 0:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Football as in soccer.

• 0:48Gary O'Reilly?

  As in soccer.

• 0:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. Chuck. Hey, man. Love you, man. Love you, too. And we slipped some guy. Who's this guy?

• 0:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. This is Nerk.

• 0:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nerk.

• 0:59Gary O'Reilly?

  Paul Nerkler, known only as Nerk. This is the 2018 Drone Racing League Champion and a man with his own YouTube channel.

• 1:08Chuck Nice?

  Fantastic.

• 1:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait. First, that's all a thing?

• 1:11Chuck Nice?

  That's all a thing, yeah.

• 1:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a thing.

• 1:13Gary O'Reilly?

  It is.

• 1:14Chuck Nice?

  Didn't I tell you like Nerk is a little too close to narc? I don't know if I would.

• 1:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, it feels like nerd to me.

• 1:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, well, see, but nerd is a good thing.

• 1:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because I don't do drugs the way you do, so it sounds like nerd to me. Sounds like narc to you.

• 1:25Gary O'Reilly?

  I no longer do drugs.

• 1:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No longer ex-drug dealer.

• 1:28Chuck Nice?

  Let's stick with nerd.

• 1:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, I've graduated. You were so fluent in metric, I thought.

• 1:34Gary O'Reilly?

  Aren't you glad you came?

• 1:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Absolutely.

• 1:36Gary O'Reilly?

  Good.

• 1:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nerk, nerd. All right, so tell me about your guest here. What do you got?

• 1:40Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so Paul is one of these guys that has a passion. And his passion has brought itself into drone flying. Now, it's an easy, it's a sort of split off of the esports universe. These aren't guys who just sat on a sofa with a control panel, surrounded by cans of Red Bull. Some of these guys are actual athletes. And when you get to fly one of these things, you realize they're going at. Ninety and probably more than that miles per hour. They're racing on three D courses. They're not racing against the clock, they're racing against other pilots.

• 2:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. And the clock.

• 2:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, I mean, if they're in the front, they can strategize, just like you would do in a Formula One race.

• 2:21Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 2:22Gary O'Reilly?

  So there's all sorts of things. So this guy actually now becomes an athlete, becomes a racer. And we like the idea of the fact there's so much tech involved in what he does. It's another way to explore the world of science and sports.

• 2:39Chuck Nice?

  Well, I did, I gotta tell you this. So I know about your world, Paul or Nerk. It's, which one is it?

• 2:45Speaker 03

  Both are fine.

• 2:46Chuck Nice?

  Okay, all right. So I used to come home from doing comedy. ESPN used to have these races on, drone, actual drone races. They would be inside of like a warehouse with a set. There were like certain hazards that you had to navigate. They were racing against you. And, you know, I couldn't sleep and I'm watching and I gotta tell you, it's super hype. You get sucked in and I realized I should not come home and watch this crap and then try to go to sleep because you'd be so adrenaline filled from watching it, you would have trouble sleeping afterwards. So how is it racing?

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, so there's a temptation when you're looking at something like this, like a robotic sport. As like, like, like you're saying, like it's just a bunch of guys that sit around and drink Red Bull. Like, I don't particularly look like an athlete. I know, I recognize that.

• 3:30Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  But.

• 3:34Chuck Nice?

  God, I don't have to break the news to you.

• 3:36Speaker 03

  All right, that's it.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  But I, I look at it like a precision sport. So you look at precision sports, that's racing, that's bowling, that's archery, that's, you know, Olympic level sports are these things where it's about repeatability.

• 3:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did you have bowling in the same sentence as Olympic level?

• 3:51Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 3:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Did he put those?

• 3:52Speaker 03

  I meant archery as the Olympic level thing, but you know, but like, but it's all about repeatability. It's all about measuring what you can do to do better. It's about gathering, you know, analyzing how your performance was so that you can take it out and do it the next time. And so, you know, we're athletes of the mind as much as anything else. And that's allowing us to compete at the highest level, building, you know, three D courses in some of the coolest places in the world.

• 4:14Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. And when you say of the mind, it's definitely gotta be, you gotta be pretty mentally tough to. To navigate these things and races.

• 4:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, just to be clear, when you say racing, I'm thinking, who can get from A to B the fastest? But that's not what's going on here.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  It's more like A to B to C to D to.

• 4:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a navigational task.

• 4:33Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 4:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  More than it is, how fast can you go? You're not like Usain Bolt here. You're just, you're, you are going around obstacles, I guess, and this sort of thing.

• 4:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's in the drone racing league especially is spec racing. So we're all flying the exact same drone. So we've got a smorgasbord of drones here in front of us, but when we are at a race, the DRL brings 600 identical drones.

• 4:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's, NASCAR tries to be something like that. There's a lot of specs that they satisfy, including right on down to the weight of the car.

• 4:59Gary O'Reilly?

  But this is first person viewing, which means you have sat there with a visor, with goggles, with a headset, and there's broadcast quality cameras attached to your drone.

• 5:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 5:12Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're not flying it from stood somewhere here, watching it with your eyesight.

• 5:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Watching it, oh yeah.

• 5:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah, you're doing it like that. So you're really involved.

• 5:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, did he give you permission to pick that up off the table?

• 5:21Chuck Nice?

  Nope.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  Please do.

• 5:22Chuck Nice?

  No, he did not. But this is, so these are, look like VR headsets.

• 5:28Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 5:28Chuck Nice?

  And when you are looking through the VR headset, you're what tethered to the camera on the drone?

• 5:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, so we see as if we're onboard the drone. So like you, when you're flying it, when you're riding along, it, you feel like you're a bird or Superman.

• 5:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like you're just right there, like you're there.

• 5:43Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 5:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hang gliding off the bottom, off, inside the drone.

• 5:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like, for example, when I tell people that, when I'm flying, like, it feels like an out of body experience, right?

• 5:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Can I pick this up?

• 5:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, please, absolutely. Like, there's moments I've had and I still have where I'm flying around outside, getting some practice in, and I see somebody sitting in the corner. I'm like, who's that? Oh, that's me. You know, I was like, because I forget that I'm not onboard the drone.

• 6:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so you have an out of body experience?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 6:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that's really cool.

• 6:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I see two cameras. It is like a simple GoPro up here, and then there's another lens down here.

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So which one are you?

• 6:12Speaker 03

  So I'm the one on the bottom, the lower lens. It's, that transmits the information at a much lower response rate. So we, there's only like 25 milliseconds of delay between that camera and what I see.

• 6:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Millisecond's a thousandth of a second.

• 6:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and it's important to have that as low as possible.

• 6:28Chuck Nice?

  Right, yeah.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that you every.

• 6:29Chuck Nice?

  You want to be able to.

• 6:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Respond to whatever you're seeing.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 6:32Chuck Nice?

  See, then the angle of the camera is important.

• 6:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna ask you that.

• 6:35Chuck Nice?

  Alright.

• 6:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if this is hanging like this, then the fan blades will just keep it buoyant. But you want to move forward, you're gonna have to tilt that.

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 6:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that it pulls it forward.

• 6:44Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 6:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But now you're looking down at the ground.

• 6:45Speaker 03

  Correct. So we tilt the camera and leave it tilted at the beginning to about forty-five, fifty degrees.

• 6:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  So that when we're

• 6:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you do.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  When we're flying straight and level, according to what we're seeing, it's really tilted fifty degrees forward. To go forward. To go forward. And that's what allows us to go a hundred miles an hour. Alright.

• 7:01Chuck Nice?

  Wow. Is that the actual speed?

• 7:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so these top, so these drones can top out around a hundred, hundred and twenty. Um, for the show, they top at about eighty and they go zero to sixty in less than a second.

• 7:12Chuck Nice?

  So how much do these cost?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Zero to sixty in less than a second.

• 7:16Chuck Nice?

  Wow. That's pretty wild.

• 7:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, so, does the FAA know about this?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  That, that part they don't, they're, they're not worried about.

• 7:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  Well, we fly inside, we fly with all of the licensure and stuff that we need, absolutely.

• 7:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:28Chuck Nice?

  So now

• 7:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but if you ever go outside, then you can't tell the FAA?

• 7:31Speaker 03

  Then we stop at ninety-nine.

• 7:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Stop, okay.

• 7:34Chuck Nice?

  Oh, why? Is there a regulation about a hundred miles?

• 7:35Speaker 03

  There is.

• 7:36Chuck Nice?

  Oh, and what would that regulation be so that we can make sure that no one ever breaks it?

• 7:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He can never, he never flies higher than a hundred miles.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  No, never.

• 7:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 7:45Chuck Nice?

  So now, when you guys are flying, because I've seen these, man, sometimes you hit things. And these drones, they are no more.

• 7:54Speaker 03

  They're, well, they're a lot of pieces, yeah.

• 7:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, how much do these things cost? Because then

• 8:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And this looks very homespun.

• 8:01Chuck Nice?

  And are they yours? Because in the next race, the guy who crashed, he's still back in the race. I mean, they still have a drone.

• 8:08Speaker 03

  So, so there's a little give and take there. So when we're flying for the league, the league brings all of the drones for us. They bring six hundred identical to each race and they say, go as fast as you want. You know, if you crash it, no hard feelings. That being said, you know, I know all the tech guys, the, like, the guys that build all the drones, like, they're the heroes of the show, they're my favorite people. But I don't want to crash too many of them because I don't want them to be like after the race, like, what are you doing, man?

• 8:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But you could, if you crash, you're allowed to just grab another one, is that right?

• 8:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 8:32Chuck Nice?

  But you could, you could build this yourself.

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So this, the drone that we've got here, um, I have built myself, um, uh, with individual components set aside. Uh, it's a called a, that one's called the Shen Drone Squirt. It's just a tiny little, uh, you know, it's a squirt, it's a tiny little guy and we use it to film and fly inside. It's a little bit slower, but it's very safe and protected.

• 8:52Gary O'Reilly?

  How important is it for you?

• 8:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, a squishy.

• 8:56Gary O'Reilly?

  Ducks.

• 8:56Speaker 03

  Ducks.

• 8:57Gary O'Reilly?

  Ducks. How important is it for you as a racer to be able to build and understand every single part of your drone?

• 9:04Speaker 03

  Thank you. Being able to build an, uh, like, so when, if, if you don't know how to assemble the drone, every time you crash, every time you break something, you're gonna have to get a whole new one or go to someone else. You know, so if you have learned how to build it from the ground up, when something fails, you can swap it yourself in just a couple minutes. So when I'm out in the...

• 9:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, but, okay, fine. I get that, if it breaks. But if it's not broken and you're racing, does your knowledge of every single thing about that inform your strategic actions?

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. So I, you can pick and choose different kinds of components to suit different needs, right? Do I want it to be super durable? Do I want it to be extremely fragile but extremely fast? Do I want to find some kind of balance? Um, and that informs the kinds of decisions that I make when I'm on the workbench assembling the drone.

• 9:47Gary O'Reilly?

  So you've got three blades in your propellers?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 9:51Gary O'Reilly?

  But you can vary that...

• 9:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a three.

• 9:53Gary O'Reilly?

  Three props.

• 9:53Speaker 03

  A tri-blade.

• 9:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Tri-blade, right. So you can go from two to three to four?

• 9:58Speaker 03

  To four to five to six.

• 9:59Gary O'Reilly?

  And it does what? Different, in terms of, in terms of what you're doing here?

• 10:02Speaker 03

  So, we like to kind of...

• 10:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in other words, what's the advantage? Cause you see some, some airplanes only have two propellers, right? And you spin them and then three, four. Why, why, why have one number of propellers relative to another?

• 10:15Speaker 03

  So changing out different kinds of propellers, adding or removing blades allows you to change depending on whether you want higher performance, higher speed, higher efficiency. You kind of pick and choose which of those you want and use that to decide what, what kind of...

• 10:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in general, the more blades, the what?

• 10:31Speaker 03

  The better, uh, maneuverability.

• 10:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, but it's, it weighs more.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  It weighs more and the motors are working harder to spin the prop, so you have a little bit less efficiency. There's a little bit more surface area, so it's a little bit less top speed. Um, but if you go all the way down to like a single blade prop where like, it's like counterbalanced weights and stuff, it, you know, it starts to get much more, uh, efficient.

• 10:51Chuck Nice?

  So if they are determining that each drone is going to be identical, when you're practicing... Do you try to match that? Or is there something that you can do that gives you an advantage when practicing? Like swinging a heavier bat in practice? And then going to a lighter bat in the game?

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 11:11Chuck Nice?

  Because you can get a faster whip around?

• 11:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, so that's that's exactly right on the money. We so when we're practicing, DRL sends us enough drones to get ready for the next race. And all the parts that we need because we'll go and fix them. And then actually, a lot of people will actually strap two batteries to it and only leave one plugged in. So that it is a little bit heavier and it's a little bit more doggy. So that you can kind of refine your racing line.

• 11:34Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 11:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, how do you, why are you so drone fluent?

• 11:38Chuck Nice?

  What's that?

• 11:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 11:39Chuck Nice?

  I'm drone curious. What can I say? I'm just drone curious. Oh, dear.

• 11:46Chuck Nice?

  No, I mean, first of all, if you've ever seen it, uh, well, one, when drones first came out years ago. I, oh, God, why am I even telling this? I'm opening myself up for more abuse. Okay, so when drones first came out years ago, I tried flying drones. And it is very difficult. I'm not talking about.

• 12:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't have the first time I saw a drone come at my.

• 12:13Chuck Nice?

  You have a drone baseball bat? You have a dedicated bat for drones.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  Dedicated for drones.

• 12:18Chuck Nice?

  He got notches on the bat. My dedicated drone bat.

• 12:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just, just, just, just.

• 12:23Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 12:23Chuck Nice?

  So the fun of flying a drone is.

• 12:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I wouldn't do it to your drone.

• 12:26Speaker 03

  You'd try to earlier.

• 12:30Chuck Nice?

  But the fun of flying a drone is not like what you would think, which is, you know, just lift off, forward, back. I mean, okay, that's going to get boring really, really quick. So the fun of flying the drone is finding something that you can maneuver. It's like going around stuff and through stuff and over and under. And that's when it becomes very difficult.

• 12:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I would add, there are shots that you never would have gotten cinematically.

• 12:54Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 12:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So for example, when we filmed Cosmos, we went to the largest telescope in the world. Which is a non-steering telescope in a crater in the ground in China.

• 13:02Chuck Nice?

  Sweet.

• 13:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, and we brought drones. And because it's just too big to get, if you're up.

• 13:08Chuck Nice?

  Upon it, you can't, you can't see it.

• 13:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't, you can't.

• 13:10Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's too big.

• 13:11Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can't grasp it. So we had a drone and it just lifted straight up and I saw the monitor, it was like, whoa. That was that, that was a money shot right there. So, yeah, so I think it's not just the maneuverability, it's point of view.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah. And for me, like, that's one of the things that I like the most about it is it offers not only a a unique perspective on like what's around you, but one of the things that's really cool about drones and the hobby and the the passion of drones is that everybody is the same, right? You all have had this shared like collection of experiences. So I've traveled to to China, to Taiwan, to Germany and gone and flown with people and we don't have to share a language to share a language.

• 13:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  And so not only does it offer a new perspective on the world, but also on people. And that's one of the things I like the most.

• 13:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So at the moment, we've got piloted drones, but we are adventuring into the world of autonomous drones.

• 14:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 14:01Gary O'Reilly?

  And at the moment, they don't stand a chance against a human pilot.

• 14:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No.

• 14:04Chuck Nice?

  What?

• 14:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh, at the moment.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  At the moment.

• 14:06Gary O'Reilly?

  At the moment.

• 14:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only at the moment.

• 14:08Speaker 03

  For now.

• 14:08Gary O'Reilly?

  That's.

• 14:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I, I know me some future where that's going and you ain't.

• 14:11Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excuse me.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  I, I for one, welcome our robot overlords.

• 14:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes. You will succumb like the rest of us.

• 14:18Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're.

• 14:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To our AI overlords.

• 14:21Gary O'Reilly?

  You, you're in there pushing triple digits and at the moment.

• 14:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Triple digit speeds.

• 14:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 14:25Gary O'Reilly?

  At the moment, the winner of the autonomous drone competition was at 5.6 miles per hour.

• 14:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 14:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Navigating a course.

• 14:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yep.

• 14:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So that's a lot of catch up.

• 14:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 14:36Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 14:36Speaker 03

  I was actually there for that race.

• 14:38Chuck Nice?

  It's the same as driverless cars, right? I mean, that's the same real.

• 14:41Speaker 03

  They're on route.

• 14:42Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, you're on route, but the truth is, I mean, it's not to the point where a car can actually be a human being behind the wheel. You know, like.

• 14:51Speaker 03

  But not yet, not yet. Then that's with the Alpha Pilot program, which is, which is a partnership between the Drone Racing League and Lockheed Martin.

• 14:58Chuck Nice?

  Uh oh.

• 14:59Speaker 03

  Is, is creating, you know, the framework for being able to create autonomy.

• 15:02Chuck Nice?

  All right, now that's some scary crap right there, okay.

• 15:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Lockheed Martin has, has the F-35.

• 15:06Chuck Nice?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 15:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, yes.

• 15:08Gary O'Reilly?

  So it gets even better because you know, one of the sponsors for the Drone Racing League is the US Air Force.

• 15:14Chuck Nice?

  That makes sense.

• 15:14Gary O'Reilly?

  Isn't it just?

• 15:15Chuck Nice?

  They're just looking for pilots.

• 15:17Gary O'Reilly?

  Duh.

• 15:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a, they're for drone pilots.

• 15:19Chuck Nice?

  This is the future of, listen, this is the future of all warfare.

• 15:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, do you have like two huge thumbs or something?

• 15:24Gary O'Reilly?

  Let's see.

• 15:26Speaker 03

  It's the only fit part of my body right now.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  Well, and something I wanted to go back to that we talked about at the beginning was that we mentioned esports and we were talking about how esports are, you know, informing modern day performance in athletes and one of the ways to become part of the Drone Racing League is to go through an online tournament and so somebody can just sit down at their computer, play a simulator, that's a one-to-one representation of what it's like to fly our drones and become a member of the show on NBC.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, wait, so.

• 15:58Gary O'Reilly?

  It's a big incentive. It's a big incentive to win the esports category, to actually come in and be a racer with NOK.

• 16:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, well, all right.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  And that tournament is happening right now.

• 16:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let me ask a heretical question.

• 16:08Speaker 03

  Go ahead.

• 16:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If the simulation qualifies you to do it for real, why do you need the real thing at all?

• 16:16Chuck Nice?

  Right, why not just create everything inside a simulation because you can clearly create more interesting, more challenging.

• 16:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And more dynamic.

• 16:25Chuck Nice?

  And more dynamic, you know, situations.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  Of course, obstacles.

• 16:27Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  But you don't get the visceralness of being in person to watch the drones go by because when they're streaming by.

• 16:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not watching the drones, you have the headset on.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  I'm not, but the audience is, the people that come to watch and to experience.

• 16:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It doesn't become a spectator sport.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 16:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, because we can watch the drones.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  We want people to see the technology evolve.

• 16:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what you do is you simulate the people as well.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 16:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then in their own mind, they are people watching moving drones in the simulation itself.

• 16:52Gary O'Reilly?

  But they get the first-person view, don't they, the spectators with the headwear?

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Oh, they can.

• 16:56Chuck Nice?

  They can.

• 16:57Speaker 03

  But we also, we put everything up on Jumbotron and you can see everything.

• 17:00Gary O'Reilly?

  They can choose, yeah.

• 17:01Chuck Nice?

  So now, what is more difficult? Because when you're flying a drone, and I'm holding the controller in my hand right now, and so when you're flying a drone and you have the controller and you're looking at the drone, that is completely different for your brain when you are looking at a first-person representation of the drone itself. So what's more difficult?

• 17:23Speaker 03

  It depends on who you are. So like, some people that, for example, people that start with the video games, like that have a lot of video game experience, tend to prefer to be in the goggles. Some people prefer line of sight. But for me, I think the most difficult part of either is maintaining your nerves, right? Because all of your controls go through these tiny little sticks that move like two inches in each direction and if you have like a little bit of a nervous shake or something like that, the quad is going, you know, responding to you. So staying calm is the most important part.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So he has nerves of steel. The hands of a surgeon. Except he's flying a drone. Carrying somebody's hat.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  I could probably make more money as a surgeon.

• 17:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, has anyone considered some variant on Quidditch? Like drone Quidditch?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 18:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Like, because the bird, we could then be just some...

• 18:06Chuck Nice?

  Right, the, uh, the snitch.

• 18:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The snitch, excuse me, yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so drone racing is such a young thing that, you know, we're starting to figure out new and new ways to do it. So, you know, whether that's just heads-up racing, where it's first to the finish gate, we're starting to do like team races where it's marathons. Like, I've competed in a race that lasted 12 hours on purpose. Like, it was the most laps in 12 hours and stuff like that. And we're starting to see more and more adoptions.

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You can have ultimate frisbee, and the frisbee is a drone.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 18:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I can throw it in a certain way, then mid-course, it just takes off.

• 18:36Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 18:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So that it's, it's non...

• 18:38Chuck Nice?

  I like your Harry Potter idea better.

• 18:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I don't know, we're just helping out here, I don't know. So we gotta, uh, we gotta land this plane, land this drone.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:48Gary O'Reilly?

  Yay.

• 18:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So any final thoughts you want to offer? Tell parents who have kids who...

• 18:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, start playing video games now. It's the future. No. You know, drones are such an awesome hobby, sport, both whichever way you want to look at it. It's, you know, I've learned how to solder, how to troubleshoot, how to, I've refined my Google foo. Um, you know, my ability to figure things out. And, and I think that everybody should have, at one point, tried to fly, tried to build, and, and gotten into that technology.

• 19:16Chuck Nice?

  How many hours of practice will it take for somebody to be proficient enough to be a professional drone racer?

• 19:22Speaker 03

  During the season, I practice 10 hours a day.

• 19:25Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  I go to the field for, at 10 a.m., and I'm there until 10 p.m.

• 19:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So in three years, you've done your 10,000 hours?

• 19:33Speaker 03

  Hopefully.

• 19:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then...

• 19:34Chuck Nice?

  And now you're a master.

• 19:35Gary O'Reilly?

  But in AI, it'll take how long? Overnight?

• 19:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, overnight, yeah. Yeah, so you did, you did, did your 10,000 hours?

• 19:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, but I mean, I've, I is, I'll, I'll be doing the 10 hours a day for about a month at a time, rather than, because like, I gotta, you know, make some money once in a while and, you know, all those kinds of things, so.

• 19:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, and there's personal hygiene and this sort of thing. And your wife?

• 19:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 19:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and in-laws.

• 19:55Chuck Nice?

  Probably appreciates the personal hygiene.

• 19:56Speaker 03

  Sometimes.

• 19:59Gary O'Reilly?

  All right, so, rule number one, keep your fingers out of the blades. Lesson taught me, because otherwise, not good. Right, so, Paul Nacala, Drone Racing League Champion of 2018, and no doubt, championships to come.

• 20:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We gotta take a break, but when we come back, more on the Drone Racing Universe.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome back to StarTalk Sports Edition. Today, we're focusing on the Droneiverse.

• 20:50Chuck Nice?

  Ooh.

• 20:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We just invented with the-

• 20:51Chuck Nice?

  You did, just make that up. The Droneiverse.

• 20:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The Droneiverse.

• 20:54Chuck Nice?

  I like it.

• 20:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's ours, we own it. We've talked about racing them. That's understandable.

• 21:00Chuck Nice?

  Of course.

• 21:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, put that on the Speed Channel. But now, it's time to look into the technology that's being developed outside of esports.

• 21:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 21:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And to do that, we've got our next guest, Justin Pierce. I think I pronounced that name right.

• 21:16Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 21:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, Justin, we got you on video call.

• 21:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, we can hear you.

• 21:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Good. Did I pronounce that correctly?

• 21:23Speaker 04

  You did.

• 21:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Excellent. So, you are Chief Engineer at In Situ Inc. And it's a wholly owned subsidiary of Boeing Defense, Space and Security.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 21:35Chuck Nice?

  So, you guys are doing okay.

• 21:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Sounds important.

• 21:38Chuck Nice?

  Sounds important. That is, that's the word I thought, important.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what is this? There's an RQ-21 unmanned air vehicle Chief Engineer at In Situ for that vehicle. Is that correct?

• 21:50Speaker 04

  That's right. That's correct.

• 21:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's correct.

• 21:52Speaker 04

  That type model series.

• 21:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what are all the specs of the RQ-21, even the classified specs? What are they?

• 21:57Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm, yes.

• 21:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, we'll start with those first.

• 22:02Speaker 04

  The RQ-21A is considered a Group III unmanned aircraft system or drone. For scale, that's about 16-foot wingspan, 10 feet long, 135 pounds when it takes off.

• 22:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, so the group is, is the group a size reference?

• 22:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's correct. There's a group sizes that go from what you would expect on a low end, like a quadcopter, all the way up to a large Group V platform like-

• 22:29Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like an underfed basketball star. Yeah, Group V is normally my boarding position.

• 22:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Group V, on an airplane. That's under the wing, they strap you on.

• 22:41Chuck Nice?

  There you go, that's what he put me-

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Hold on tight.

• 22:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes. You're in cargo, what are you doing in this line?

• 22:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, what's it being developed for?

• 22:47Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:48Speaker 04

  Yes, our Q21 is a program of record. It's actually through development and fielded with the United States Marine Corps and United States Navy. Today, it does intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, and a number of important missions for our troops.

• 23:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay. And so, how does it differ, I mean, other than, of course, it has security elements, when the public thinks of drones, I think we think of the annoying ones that are buzzing around the park, and then we think of the military ones that get deployed in Iraq or Afghanistan, and yours is somewhere in between those?

• 23:24Speaker 04

  That's correct, yeah. It's size, scale, endurance. So, what we offer is a runway-independent aircraft that's launched from a catapult and recovers on a vertically attached rope by its wing. It's designed for mobility and transportability. Some of the differences are special payloads that you'll see from a military perspective, but also encryption and different types of cameras we put on there to be able to see at night, thermal, EO telescopes, just a little more high performance than you would have in that lower-end commercial drone you would expect, like a quadcopter, but not as large as, say, a Predator.

• 24:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I've got one last question I'm going to hand off to these guys here. And I assume it's not autonomous. There's someone at the joystick?

• 24:14Speaker 04

  That is correct. It flies autonomously, but there is somebody at a operator workstation that is directing the behaviors of that aircraft, taking care of it if there's emergencies, and driving the primary payload, which is an electro-optical sensor that is on the front of the aircraft.

• 24:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's basically a spy drone?

• 24:32Speaker 04

  That's right.

• 24:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 24:34Gary O'Reilly?

  So they prefer reconnaissance.

• 24:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Recon.

• 24:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Recon. So, okay, we've got this... Amazing piece of machinery, but what sort of hurdles have you overcome to go from the quadcopter scenario to where you are now? And what are you still in process of overcoming for drones and their development?

• 24:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, you know, one of the major areas that we focus on is reliability as these are used with our warfighters, we want them to be reliable, always airborne and providing eyes in the skies. Obviously, over the years, we've moved and situ has a family of unmanned aircraft systems or drones that it sells. So this is our largest version of aircraft with the smaller one being eight feet across. So how do you increase that size but still retain the way that it recovers? Because it's actually recovered on its wingtip, so that's a high energy recovery. Those have been some technical challenges that we've had to face.

• 25:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, so structurally, it has to stay in one piece as the wing gets captured by your, by your.

• 25:32Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 25:34Chuck Nice?

  So let me ask you with respect to that, it's kind of like an aircraft carrier, you know, the way it's made for mobility, it's made for being able to take off and land on the spot. But it's really big. It's huge. So if it's made for mobility, does it collapse? Is it buildable on site? I mean, I can see with the capture system, if you're in rocky terrain and you want to do some recon, it makes sense, you know, but this thing is huge.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, depending on the model of aircraft that we sell, we have a line of sight and a beyond line of sight capability. So you'll typically do launch and recovery in one area where you can have a little more room to set up, probably not near runway. And the aircraft itself actually collapses and the wings come off in a modular fashion, the nose comes off, it all breaks down into very small cases that are packed out.

• 26:27Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. But that takes a human element. It can't just, it's not, it's a fixed wing.

• 26:33Chuck Nice?

  That's the next model. It's the transformer version.

• 26:36Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go. Oh, please make that sound, just build that soundtrack into the next drone.

• 26:43Chuck Nice?

  Whatever you do, your next drone, no matter what it does, you go.

• 26:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay. Maybe.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  I'm sorry. Justin's looking at us like, what the hell did I get myself into?

• 26:55Gary O'Reilly?

  How soon can I go home?

• 26:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When will he release me?

• 27:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's the range on this?

• 27:02Speaker 04

  So typically advertised as 50 nautical miles is how far we can fly.

• 27:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Away and then it can still come back?

• 27:07Speaker 04

  And then it can come back, always in positive control by the operator. Equipped with a different nose module or front of the aircraft, we can actually extend that 200, 300 nautical miles with our extended range platform.

• 27:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that because it's lighter in that extended range or you get more fuel?

• 27:22Speaker 04

  We use a different data link. Instead of using a line of sight radio, we actually talk to space over satellite communication. It allows us to not have to have line of sight between the operator and the airplane.

• 27:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Also, your range is a line of sight problem.

• 27:37Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 27:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not how far it can fly.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, these aircraft can fly 16, 24 hours depending on them.

• 27:44Chuck Nice?

  So even when you're flying 50 nautical miles, you could fly 300. It's just that for those purposes, you can't talk to it, so you need to just keep it to that 50 mile

• 27:54Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 27:55Chuck Nice?

  That is amazing.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, okay. So the quadcopter ones that we see kids playing with, those obviously use rechargeable batteries. At what point is the transition between batteries and actual fuel that is driving the energy of the craft?

• 28:12Speaker 04

  That's an interesting question. I think it happens when we talk about groups or sizes, typically when you get to the 30 or 40 pound aircraft, you're looking at more energy density that you're getting from a fuel like gas or jet fuel.

• 28:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gas, you mean gasoline?

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Transition point you'll see. But there are larger aircraft that fly hydrogen fuel cells and other propulsion sources that are different.

• 28:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But regardless, if above a certain size, the battery's not going to work for you.

• 28:38Speaker 04

  That's exactly right.

• 28:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 28:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, we're all considering electric vehicles in terms of cars and trucks and buses. Is that a viable source of power for a drone or is the battery weight just another hurdle that you won't be able to overcome for the moment?

• 28:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it really is a trade-off. Typically with drones, the largest trade-off we're making is endurance and payload mass. So when I choose to equip myself with batteries so that I don't have to manage fuel, I'm typically going to get lower endurance. Some customers want that. They want to fly shorter sorties or shorter missions. And so, an all-electric aircraft can go a few hours and that may be sufficient for them. Our customers have preferred persistent surveillance and so, we typically don't use that because it's not as efficient.

• 29:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Our customers, the US military.

• 29:28Chuck Nice?

  Well, speaking of that, speaking of that persistent surveillance, so some police departments are now using drones, such as yours, they keep them in the air pretty much all the time. When a crime happens, the drone goes to the crime to the replace, and then what they're able to do is follow the action. So instead of a high-speed trace, whatever, they just basically, you know, mark a car and they're like, alright, we got it, now we're gonna follow and see where it goes. What other applications, and one, what kind of drone is that? Is it this kind of drone? Two, what other applications do you have for this type of drone outside of the military that you can't talk about?

• 30:09Speaker 04

  So yeah, typically, you're gonna have airspace, you're gonna have airspace considerations for where you fly those type of drones. So we're typically seeing with police forces in congested urban areas, it's gonna be a quadcopter or something of that size, typically not one of our aircraft today. But depending on FAA regulations, you can, you can see us transitioning in the long term away from that. Some of the more interesting applications that we have are around infrastructure inspection, so railroad or pipeline monitoring, that's typically staffed by somebody in a helicopter. And we like the idea of being able to extend the reach of our platforms and encourage, basically pulling people out of jobs that

• 30:52Speaker 04

  require them to fly around. There's no requirement for the aircraft to come back. So infrastructure inspection, high-resolution mapping, disaster relief and search and rescue. So we've participated in several disaster relief efforts. And then one of the more interesting ones we had locally was wildfire support. So helping firefighters understand where the fire line is, how it's changing overnight, because they can't go and, and fight wildfires in the dead of night. So we're there to be able to provide overwatch for them.

• 31:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So do you and your staff, when no one is looking, do you race your drones?

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a yes.

• 31:28Chuck Nice?

  Oh, my God.

• 31:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Guilty.

• 31:31Chuck Nice?

  That was amazing. Oh, my God, I wish to go. And for those of you just listening, Justin got a look on his face like, oh, man. Why'd you have to ask me that?

• 31:42Speaker 04

  No, we typically have to have vertical and horizontal separation. There's no, uh, there's no knife edge passes.

• 31:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, he lying right there. By the way, yeah. I'm sure he imitated the knife edge pass with his hands.

• 31:54Gary O'Reilly?

  So, okay, Justin, if you've got that range of capacity in terms of infrastructure, search and rescue, and your agriculture, you must have an array of optics because you're using different parts of the spectrum to, to analyze what you're seeing underneath.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  That's exactly right. So if I'm doing a search and rescue operation, I may want to equip, uh, or I'm looking for a boat that's, that's lost in the sea, I may want to use a payload like VIDAR, which is visual detection and ranging that constantly searches and gives an operator cues when it finds something that otherwise you wouldn't discern in water. And then I can put another camera onto that, uh, potential target and, or point of interest and see what's there. For agricultural monitoring, you're looking at hyperspectral, so operating in different, uh, in different bands to be able to create a picture of how those crops are performing. Yes.

• 32:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just to be clear.

• 32:45Speaker 04

  Very different sensors.

• 32:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With, as I understand it, hyperspectral imaging can give you early leads on the need for irrigation.

• 32:51Speaker 04

  Right.

• 32:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And, and, and the like.

• 32:53Speaker 04

  More water, less water.

• 32:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Are, are these built for speed at all or not?

• 32:56Speaker 04

  So, uh, as an example, our dash speed is on the order of 100 knots. So we're not talking Mach 1, but, uh, obviously there are larger aircraft that are built for that and they use different propulsion systems.

• 33:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so 100 knots, you're saying, how, how high does it fly? When you're?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  It could, it could fly up to 15,000 feet depending on avoiding acoustic detectability when we consider, uh, obviously what we do for our defense customers. We typically fly anywhere from 3,000 to 8,000 feet, but it can go as high as 15 or more.

• 33:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so what's to stop me from watching you come in and I'll pull out my shotgun and just take you out of the sky? If you are purely recon and you have no armament, no offensive or defensive measures, and I don't like you, I'm just gonna shoot you out of the sky. This is America, Jack.

• 33:48Speaker 04

  So, the way we avoid that, obviously, there's what we call the launch and recovery operation, or takeoff and landing in a conventional aircraft. Those situations definitely have to have perimeter and base monitoring.

• 34:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're susceptible there, yeah.

• 34:04Speaker 04

  And countermeasures. But when we're over a target, we mitigate that by the size of the airplane is relatively small, the color is typically gray, the engine is relatively quiet compared to what I can see at a given standoff distance. That's why we equip them with telescopes, so we can stay far enough away but still see who is there. For some of the other applications, mitigating that isn't something we worry about. We can fly as close as we need to, to see as well as we want to.

• 34:36Gary O'Reilly?

  So you're talking about piloted, we'll call them drones, you call them unmanned craft. Where do we go with AI? Because when we spoke to our drone racer, NERC, Paul Nakala, the whole thing was, a lot of prize money was put up by Lockheed Martin, a million dollars to be able to win an annual event. And the average speed of these racing drones is about five and a half miles per hour, because they can't process the optic, the visuals. Now, how far are we from cracking that? Because that's ridiculous. If all of a sudden you've got AI able to process like a human eye with that speed, and then, you know, those speeds you were talking about, then they really do max out.

• 35:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think, you know, one of the evolutions of the industry we're currently in directly is attributed to, what I would say, closely to Moore's Law and the ability to do advanced processing in smaller and smaller areas. So, to do those very complicated high-speed processing, you need a lot of horsepower in your electronics. And we're finding in some of the payloads, including VITAR I just mentioned, you can do quite a bit there. I wouldn't know enough to comment directly on drone racing, but if there are projects like Project Maven and the DOD that are targeted at artificial intelligence, in general, this is all about reducing how much the human has to work.

• 36:02Speaker 04

  Right, so today I have an operator and one aircraft. In the future, I think you're gonna have an operator and mini aircraft. And you're gonna have aircraft doing missions that that the operator doesn't have to have any concept of what's going on unless there's an exception. Unless there's a problem.

• 36:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, that means the AI is is doing what it's supposed to.

• 36:21Speaker 04

  Is doing what it's supposed to.

• 36:22Chuck Nice?

  Also, too, I just had a thought. Maybe it makes sense, or maybe it doesn't. Um, the idea behind the AI, you could treat it like driverless cars, where the car itself, or in your case, the unmanned drone, would be receiving the information, not actually doing the calculation. So the calculation is done on a base somewhere. And if you have 5G, that type of transmission technology, you're just really sending it split-second decisions as it's receiving it. So it doesn't really have to do the thinking. There's a brain someplace else. Does that make sense? Or am I just losing my frickin' mind?

• 37:02Speaker 04

  No, no, it makes sense. Uh, today even, when I, when you asked before, is there a person in the loop? Yes, to monitor what the aircraft's doing. But when we tie algorithms with sensors and have autonomous autopilots that are moving the aircraft around, you can begin to see that the aircraft can can do the entire mission with a person largely not in the loop. So we do that today. That's, that's where the market has gone.

• 37:31Chuck Nice?

  Actually, we do that on the planes that we fly on, and we don't know that we're doing it. Cause half the time that we're on a plane, those guys are in the front, smoking weed and chilling. What airline are you on? It's called autopilot. It's called autopilot.

• 37:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, no, it's a new airline called Get High With Us.

• 37:49Chuck Nice?

  High Flyers.

• 37:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  High Flyer.

• 37:51Chuck Nice?

  CBD.

• 37:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Justin, one last thing.

• 37:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're all, I think, comfortable with getting on these trams at airports. And we all know there's no, there's no one conducting those trains, right? They go between from one terminal to another.

• 38:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 38:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And that doesn't freak anybody out.

• 38:11Chuck Nice?

  Okay, you just freaked me out. I didn't know that.

• 38:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, look around the front next time, Chuck.

• 38:15Chuck Nice?

  I am never getting on a tram again. Thanks.

• 38:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so to me, that's the beginning of our comfort level of what we will entrust to pilot that is autonomously run. So how soon do you think we would have pilotless airplanes? Will that have to wait until long after we have pilotless cars, do you think?

• 38:38Speaker 04

  I, I think, I think obviously that driverless vehicles are going to pave the way for pilotless passenger aircraft. What's going to have to happen is airspace deconfliction. There's going to have to be an ability to sense and avoid other people that are flying around so that it can make decisions. So that's more sensors. But I don't think the leap is that great from driverless cars to passenger aircraft. It all comes down to, to safety. And there's a ton of people that are in this space and leaning forward. I initially expect that it'll be passenger aircraft that are optionally piloted. So similar to you would see today with so-called driverless vehicles, somebody has their hand on the steering wheel.

• 39:22Speaker 04

  And once the flying public...

• 39:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Even if they're asleep, their hand is on the steering wheel.

• 39:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, those, the, the videos of people driving that are asleep, I don't, I don't think that's going to work for, for optionally piloted aircraft. But I think as we gain confidence and trust, as you mentioned, Neil, the, the flying public will, will begin to entrust themselves with that technology.

• 39:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay.

• 39:43Chuck Nice?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. All right, Justin, well, thanks for, thanks for being with us on StarTalk. All right. I, so when we come back, we'll finish out our final segment with StarTalk Sports Edition.

• 40:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're back, StarTalk Sports Edition. We gotta land this plane somehow.

• 40:24Chuck Nice?

  You mean this drone?

• 40:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This drone!

• 40:26Gary O'Reilly?

  Okay, so we had, we've got Paul Nirkola, the Nirk, the drone racer.

• 40:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The drone racer.

• 40:31Gary O'Reilly?

  Alright, we've got Justin Purse, who's our drone engineer.

• 40:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Purse, spelled Pierce.

• 40:36Gary O'Reilly?

  It is, but I think it's an Irish Persh.

• 40:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Persh, oh.

• 40:39Gary O'Reilly?

  So I think this is...

• 40:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How he said that, he said that good.

• 40:42Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Chuck Nice?

  That was a good brogue right there.

• 40:44Gary O'Reilly?

  So, I look at the drone racing, and I look at who their involvement is. It's NBC as a media partner, you've got sponsorship from Lockheed Martin, and the good old US Air Force. So there's a recruitment drive, a sponsorship, and a platform. I think what we've got here is a sport that might be just beginning, and I won't even go with the takeoff pun, beginning to grow itself into some stature. Did you get a buzz out of it?

• 41:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because of that 360 support, from three very different branches of what we know has the power and the resources to keep something buoyant.

• 41:21Chuck Nice?

  Right. Well, the other thing too, and we didn't even touch upon this, though, and right now it's being kind of worked out, and that is airspace conflicts. So that delivery drones...

• 41:36Gary O'Reilly?

  You're thinking pizzas, aren't you?

• 41:37Chuck Nice?

  Well, in a way I am, because guess what? That's gonna be... I'm hungry! But that's going to be like, probably, the most drone traffic that we will see in our society, because, you know, think of the number of trucks that it will cut down on when you drop off. There'll still be trucks, but they'll just make a drop at a place, and then the drone will do the delivery, because it'll have a pre-programmed route, just like the truck I do.

• 42:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The truck goes to one hub.

• 42:05Chuck Nice?

  One hub.

• 42:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the drones come back and forth to the hub.

• 42:08Chuck Nice?

  And then the drones come back and forth to the hub.

• 42:09Gary O'Reilly?

  Basically, you're gonna create a beehive. With the drones like and they're just gonna

• 42:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A drone hive.

• 42:15Chuck Nice?

  A drone hive.

• 42:16Gary O'Reilly?

  Well, I hoped you'd get this.

• 42:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let's just hope they don't figure out how to make a queen.

• 42:19Chuck Nice?

  Oh, snap.

• 42:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then the drones take over. The drones achieve consciousness.

• 42:24Chuck Nice?

  Rise of the machines.

• 42:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The rise of the drones.

• 42:27Chuck Nice?

  Rise of the drones.

• 42:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And then they learn how to reproduce and there's the queen.

• 42:30Gary O'Reilly?

  So therefore, we're looking to continue with the size of the drone over built up urban spaces.

• 42:36Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 42:37Gary O'Reilly?

  Cause it.

• 42:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's gonna matter.

• 42:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, it is gonna matter, but that's the whole, but listen, right now in every single city, especially larger cities, there's a big fight as to what is the bandwidth of space or airspace that you get? And how big can your drone be? Cause that's gonna determine how many deliveries are gonna be made. And I'm just gonna put my money on Jeff Bezos. I'm putting my money on Bezos.

• 42:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No matter what. So here's something I think that people need to remember. You might say, well, I can go to the store and get my, fine, the drone can deliver your milk and your butter. Okay, and your, and your salad. But there's another use here that I think has gone under seen, under recognized. It's, um, I live in a, in an apartment building. I don't have a garage. I don't have a workshop. Okay, but I own a hand drill. Okay, so I've had that hand drill for 20 years and I can ask myself, how much time in total have I used that hand drill? Okay, I'm not a builder. I just need it for some emergency things here and there. I might've used it for 15 minutes? I mean, think about it.

• 43:42Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How long does it take to drill a hole? Right? That's seconds.

• 43:45Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 43:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  20 years I've used it for 15 minutes. So the future of drone deliveries might be all this crap that you own, that you hardly ever use, just let someone else own it.

• 44:00Chuck Nice?

  No, no.

• 44:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I say, no, wait.

• 44:01Chuck Nice?

  I don't like that idea.

• 44:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Why?

• 44:03Chuck Nice?

  Shh, be quiet, man. That's a good idea. We can do this.

• 44:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, sorry.

• 44:07Chuck Nice?

  What's the problem? You're just giving away all the good stuff, right?

• 44:10Gary O'Reilly?

  We gotta talk to him.

• 44:11Chuck Nice?

  I mean.

• 44:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I, so basically I rent a hand drill with the drill bit I need. And it's coming from a place that serviced it. Okay, like a rental car. They polished that.

• 44:25Chuck Nice?

  He keeps telling him, he's giving him away.

• 44:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm just saying, so that way.

• 44:28Chuck Nice?

  You know Jeff Bezos listens to this show. You're killing us.

• 44:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, so, so think about all the things that you, that we would share.

• 44:39Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 44:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There, there is basically shared.

• 44:41Chuck Nice?

  Shared economy.

• 44:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Economy.

• 44:42Chuck Nice?

  The share economy.

• 44:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The share economy.

• 44:43Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 44:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Old classic barter system.

• 44:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't need the storage space for it.

• 44:49Chuck Nice?

  Nope.

• 44:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause I only, and, and I need it, I'll be here in twenty, fifteen minutes.

• 44:52Chuck Nice?

  Fifteen minutes and it's boom.

• 44:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Boom. And, and you need a, a, a special sized drill bit. That's the one it gives you.

• 44:57Chuck Nice?

  Right. Did.

• 44:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You're not fumbling over the thing and the chuck key.

• 45:01Chuck Nice?

  Like I told you, I hate that idea. It will never ever work. Never.

• 45:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that's a whole other thing other than just bringing today's milk.

• 45:09Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 45:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, today's milk, let the, let the refrigerator monitor your, how much is in all your containers.

• 45:14Chuck Nice?

  And let it get your milk.

• 45:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Let it get the milk.

• 45:17Chuck Nice?

  Send for the girl, bring the milk.

• 45:19Gary O'Reilly?

  We're, we're exercising it in a positive way. But what if we exercised our mind and this will happen because we know it will happen? How do I criminalize this little drone of lovely drone, little gaggle drone?

• 45:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What you can do is you can, I don't want to give people ideas, but if you know the frequencies over which they're communicating, just hack into the frequencies, just hack it and, and it brings all the groceries to me.

• 45:40Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:40Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 45:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right?

• 45:41Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 45:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I don't have to pay for a damn thing.

• 45:42Chuck Nice?

  I just got grocery jacked again.

• 45:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Grocery jacked!

• 45:45Chuck Nice?

  Grocery jacked again!

• 45:47Gary O'Reilly?

  Jeff Bezos is gonna do that as well.

• 45:48Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 45:50Gary O'Reilly?

  With Whole Foods.

• 45:51Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You got grocery jacked.

• 45:52Chuck Nice?

  And believe it, that's happening right now. They call them porch pirates. It's people who just walk by places randomly and pick up whatever Amazon package is on a person's.

• 46:01Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, this is on, on suburban streets.

• 46:03Chuck Nice?

  In suburban streets.

• 46:03Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 46:03Chuck Nice?

  They just walk up.

• 46:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That won't happen in the city.

• 46:05Chuck Nice?

  No.

• 46:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You get your, you get your whooping.

• 46:07Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 46:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If people see you doing that. So this is a whole, it's a, it's like we're witnessing the birth of an.

• 46:12Chuck Nice?

  An entire industry.

• 46:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Industry, community and technology.

• 46:15Gary O'Reilly?

  See, the thing is we've, we've gone, because the drones originated back in the beginning of the 20th century and it's always.

• 46:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The way he said that, way back in.

• 46:23Chuck Nice?

  The beginning of the 20th century.

• 46:25Gary O'Reilly?

  Way back.

• 46:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, the twenty, you mean the?

• 46:27Gary O'Reilly?

  1917, something like that.

• 46:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drones?

• 46:30Gary O'Reilly?

  Drones? Yeah.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, Gary, you're telling me we had radio controlled planes in the 19 teens?

• 46:36Gary O'Reilly?

  I do believe so. And the good old military got there first.

• 46:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 46:41Chuck Nice?

  Nice.

• 46:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow, so they're thinking about.

• 46:44Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah. Pilotless aircraft using radio frequency.

• 46:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Cause back then we had, there's some big names back then. We had Tesla.

• 46:51Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, Tesla the man, not the car.

• 46:54Gary O'Reilly?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 46:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Edison was still at it. You know, there's some fun inventors back then. So maybe it's obvious that that would have been the next thing they did. Because we were trying to control and understand radio frequency energy.

• 47:08Chuck Nice?

  Now that I know that we had pilotless planes back then, we probably had Teslas back then and didn't know it.

• 47:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 47:13Gary O'Reilly?

  Wooden, wooden Teslas.

• 47:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wooden Teslas, right.

• 47:19Chuck Nice?

  That's pretty cool though.

• 47:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Right, so if you take a step back now, if you can have a radio controlled airplane, that means you can, at the time, radio control a plane carrying explosives and not put a pilot at risk.

• 47:32Gary O'Reilly?

  Yes.

• 47:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And attack an enemy. Yeah, man, people are just, what's wrong with people?

• 47:37Chuck Nice?

  The moment you start.

• 47:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What's wrong with people?

• 47:39Chuck Nice?

  The moment we start thinking about how we're gonna kill each other, we come up with the most brilliant stuff.

• 47:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Man.

• 47:46Chuck Nice?

  That's it.

• 47:47Gary O'Reilly?

  It's the blessing and the curse scenario. What should be a blessing, someone turns into a way to curse it.

• 47:55Chuck Nice?

  Mmm, no. Now you sound like, now you sound like my parents. That's okay.

• 47:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Talking about you.

• 48:02Chuck Nice?

  Exactly, that was the joke.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, I own an actual letter written by Orville Wright to a friend of his, who asked him, you know, your new aeroplane, what is the future of that? Could it be used for evil ways? I'm paraphrasing. He said, I hope not, but maybe it'll only be controlled by the good guys, the good guys, and then it'll be okay. So, early in this, people were thinking about the weaponization of these tools.

• 48:28Chuck Nice?

  And I'm glad to see it worked out just how he hoped. Just how he hoped. By the way, I own a letter from Orville Redenbok, who said, "Thank you for buying my popcorn. You're such a good customer."

• 48:43Gary O'Reilly?

  Did you weaponize it? So the thing, we've gone from military to sport and now it's back to sort of search and rescue. And we now seem to be entering, as well as the military phase, a more positive social phase where you can sense in infrastructure, pipelines, agriculture, development of crops, but then

• 49:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And disaster, very important. Post after tornado, after Plus, roads might be closed off because of destructive forces of nature, flooded, and yeah, and fire. So, yeah, so I appreciate the hopefulness with which you want to end

• 49:19Gary O'Reilly?

  Thank you.

• 49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  the show.

• 49:20Gary O'Reilly?

  Absolutely.

• 49:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That, yes, you have the militarization of things, but when you pause and take a breath, you can say, how do we improve humanity for having done so?

• 49:31Gary O'Reilly?

  And the answer is drone racing.

• 49:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Drone racing?

• 49:33Gary O'Reilly?

  There you go.

• 49:35Gary O'Reilly?

  And Full circle. And fridges.

• 49:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck Nice, Gary O'Reilly, Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist, bringing you another episode of StarTalk's Sports Edition. Until next time, keep working up.