 Hi, everyone. Hi, I'm Linda Elkins-Tenton. I'm the principal investigator of the NASA Psyche mission, and I'm managing director and co-chair of ASU's Interplanetary Initiative. So welcome to another social distancing social from future tents in partnership with Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. Today we're talking about an amazing idea, space exploration in the age of social distancing. And I'm joined by Ellen Stophan, my very good friend and the director of the National Air and Space Museum. Hi, Ellen, how are you today? I am great. It's great to see you, even if we're on the opposite sides of the country. I'm really glad to be able to chat, even if it's from a distance. We had talked ahead of a time about some big ideas that we might want to go over here, and I thought the one we should maybe start with is the importance of really bold, inspirational activities, even, and maybe especially now. And I think you have some amazing things to say about that theme of why space exploration during the age of COVID. You know, two of the things I've really been reflecting on over the last 10 weeks that I've been pretty much just sitting right here in this chair is that whole idea of what the space program has done for this country, not in terms of the stuff you and I care about understanding how planets form and how they change over time, but really that inspiration piece. And when you consider last summer, we spent an awful lot of time celebrating the 50th anniversary of the landing on the moon. And to me, as we went through that last summer, really reflecting on the fact that when John F. Kennedy called to land humans on the moon at that Rice University speech, eight and a half years later, we landed on the moon and safely returned those three astronauts back to the earth. At that time, he made that call. Lindy, it's astonishing to reflect on what, how little we had. We had never really kept anybody alive in space before. We didn't, you know, so our knowledge of life support systems, our knowledge of how to do trajectories, let alone planetary returns. What we didn't know was staggering. And yet in eight and a half years, we did it. We need that kind of moonshot thinking, you know, to overcome things like a pandemic. But we also need, I think, especially the people in this country to reflect on the fact, look what we're capable of when we put our mind to it. It's so easy to be discouraged right now. And yet think of Apollo, think of those eight and a half years. Look what we overcame to make it possible, possible. That is so well said. And I agree with you entirely. And I, what you started, you know, you said at one point, not the things you would not care about the planet's form. And I love the science. I really do love the science. And I know you love the science too. But I think it's true for both of us, that it's not fundamentally the reason that we do what we do. I talk about this with the Psyche team. I think the real purpose of space exploration is to remind all of us here on earth of the miracles that we can create when we work together. And you think about something as complicated as what people figured out to do during Apollo, or I just think about Psyche trying to send this robotic orbiter out to this asteroid way past Mars, to know that we can get it to the asteroid and put it into orbit around the asteroid with this team of right now 800 people. And it's a project that's way too complicated for any single person to understand. And that is a leap in human evolutionary ability when we can do projects that are too complicated for any single person to understand. And yet they work the way space exploration projects work. If we can do that, we can solve our problems here on earth. And so I think we can't help exploring. And the fact that we can't help exploring gives us this way to inspire ourselves to do better here, especially now. Yeah. I mean, two weeks ago we had, I think it was two weeks ago, we had Jim Lovell came and did an air and space live with the Smithsonian. And obviously the guy is the most charming, great storyteller on earth. And to hear him talking about Apollo 13, again just the 50th anniversary of that this past month. And apparently no one actually did say at the time failure is not an option. But obviously it's a term that Geocrance has certainly made popular, but failure wasn't an option, right? They didn't look at it that way. They said, we're not going to lose these astronauts. This catastrophe has happened. But we're going to bring those astronauts back safely. And they did it. And again, we need that kind of Apollo 13 moonshot thinking. And I think if people remember that, and like you say, it is what drives most of us to participate in the space program. We love the science, but it's the inspiration that really keeps us there. I think that's right. And that inspiration can work for everyone, not just for the thousands and thousands of people actually work on space exploration, but for everyone else. In fact, in a way, it's sort of the ultimate inspiration. It's a sort of a vehicle that brings students into education that convinces people to try something new in their lives that pushes us past. And if there's ever a time in the world that we need that, I think that it's now this idea that each person could internalize that they themselves can make a difference. They themselves can figure it out. And the power of having that kind of purpose and project in your life, on Psyche Mission, we just did our project critical design review last week, Monday through Friday, every day. And it was the 18th critical design review and what I was calling festive critical design review season. And it is, I would say, probably the biggest and most important review in the entire lifetime of a mission. And Thomas Sirbook and associate administrator at NASA messaged me right after I gave my opening remarks. He said, I think CDR is the number one indicator for how a mission is going to go overall. He said, have fun. Good luck. Oh, thanks. So there we all were doing for the very first time doing this virtually. NASA has never done this virtually before. Everybody presenting all day for four straight days. And then the closed board review at the end. And what I saw in the people there was that the project and the purpose was carrying them through the fear and the trauma of what we're going through as a nation and as a world. And so I feel that there are places for everyone who wants you to feel connected to the projects that we're doing and feel that inspiration for the future, which maybe many of us need right now. I hope so and I hope people watch the launch next week with that in mind. You know, a lot of us are very focused on the fact that we're going to launch US astronauts from US soil for the first time since the last shuttle mission up to the International Space Station on the SpaceX rocket. And to me, it's this incredibly exciting milestone that again really shows this is our space program. We're going to move it forward. We really are going to give people back to the moon and on to Mars. And I think next week's an incredibly exciting event. And I hope people can find inspiration in it. I really hope so too. And I can hardly believe that it's happening at this moment when we need the inspiration most. Is there more that you can tell us about those astronauts? And I'm thinking also of the questions that we got before this event via Twitter. People asking about are the astronauts social distancing? How are new astronauts going up to the space station kept so that there's no chance of infection? Can you talk about all those things that they must be working on right now? Well, it's funny because quarantine has been part of the space program for astronauts since they're, you know, quarantine is something they know a lot about. I mean, we actually have at the Air and Space Museum the Airstream trailer that was specially adapted for the Apollo 11 crew when they came back from the moon. Because at that point we didn't know as much about planetary protection as we do now. And at that point the moon, people hadn't ruled out the moon as a potential biological, that it could host biological organisms. And so the astronauts were quarantined when they came back from the moon and we could they quarantined the first few crews and then stopped doing it. We obviously don't do it anymore. But astronauts are always quarantined before they go up to the International Space Station. That's long policy because you don't want one astronaut with the flu or cold or anything going up there and in the confined space of the space station, then getting all the rest of the astronauts sick and what if they were complications? So in this case, COVID isn't really a new circumstance for them. They want to make sure that nothing, no germs, get up to the ISS and dump along there. And they have a pretty rigorous cleaning of the ISS itself because it obviously is an environment that's like sitting there. It's kind of warm. It's, you know, got a little bit of humidity and a lot of people in there exercising and stuff. So it's not pretty rigorous cleaning and sampling of it. But because the astronauts are quarantined together and because we're pretty confident they're healthy when they go up to the International Space Station, they don't have to do social distancing once they're up there with the other astronauts. But there are certainly, certainly those astronauts that are launching next week are already in quarantine. That's amazing. And it sounds like we might have actually learned things about how to quarantine people from the space program. Just, is that true that you know? Well, I think it's again, yeah, because it's a, it's a long term thing. I mean, it's been going on since the 1960s. We've been quarantining astronauts and a lot of it really is this incredible monitoring of astronaut health and certainly what we've learned about telemedicine. That has been routine on the ISS for the last 16 years. So almost 20 years. In fact, this year we're celebrating the 20th year of astronauts up on the International Space Station. So while they've been up there, you know, we've had astronauts, normally they go up for six months. Sometimes they're up, they're in the case of Scott Kelly for a year or nearly a year with Peggy Whitson. And so they've, we've been practicing telemedicine. They've learned things about telemedicine that are now being implemented. They were around the world before COVID, but certainly now with this current pandemic, many of us have gotten more used to telemedicine. And that to me is one of the amazing things about the technologies that come out of this, of the Space Station are things that people don't even realize are already part of their everyday lives. And we've been learning an awful lot about human health on the ISS. Because we've really learned about how the human body changes when it gets into microgravity, your immune system actually does lose some function. That being said, we've not had astronauts become ill. Your bone density, your bones lose density, your muscles start to atrophy, so the astronauts have to exercise for about an hour and a half every day on the Space Station. My favorite thing is what we've really learned is that to keep the astronauts healthy, they need to eat right, not eat too much salt and exercise every day. Now does that sound something familiar that all of us should be doing? So let's astronaut lifestyle. And I think another part of that, which is really important is all the work that people have done on how large a group do you need socially to remain our human healthy social selves. And that is particularly important right now, where we're going through this process that is called social distancing. But I think that that's really a misnomer, because it's physical distancing. Socially, we can still be deeply connected. Seeing you here makes me happy. I've missed you. It's nice to see you. And now I feel this warmth of friendship. And so having that group of people you are socially connected to is also critical. And a lot of experiments have been done on that, haven't they been? There's been a lot done with the astronauts because they are in isolation, but actually the doctors have really been able to pull on a huge body of research about humans in isolation, whether it's humans who've had to spend time in submarines, people who over wintered in Antarctica in small groups on bases down in Antarctica. So human behavior in isolation is has been pretty well studied over the years. And certainly the astronauts are part of that. So astronaut mental health, there's actually been books written on it, because that's an important aspect. As we all know, when you're not feeling particularly happy or particularly energetic, it really does affect how you work, how you think how productive you are. And it turns out the more people do not interact, you almost become dopey. You know, your reaction time slows, your mental processing slows. And why we really think about this a lot is we're up there with astronauts on the International Space Station, not as the end game. The end game is we want humans on Mars doing field work, we want humans on the moon, we want, I've been addicted to the expanse for the last 10 weeks. We want humans across this solar system and beyond. And so we have to really understand what are those effects of space on the human body? And what are the effects of long duration space travel? And right now it's about seven to eight months to get humans to Mars. They're going to be there for probably some amount of time. You're talking about a three-year mission. How do we keep the astronauts not just healthy with their body, but healthy mentally? And part of that is stimulation, exercising, talking to family, having time on their own to do what they want to do. Watching movies, interacting socially with each other. Those are all things they've found to be really important. Just like they are for us here on home at home. And this is a lot of the inspiration for the interplanetary initiative at ASU. As you know, this idea that to become an interplanetary species with all of the discoveries and the wonder and the inspiration to do better that that will bring to us, we need all different disciplines to take part in this. It's not just the scientists and engineers, but obviously we need sociologists and psychologists. And we need people who are experts in, frankly, entertainment and the cognitive science of that. And food and all the different things that make us human have to be part of this process. And so all the more reason to be doing this now. Yeah. And one of the things that I know you're going to be, you will care about as much as I do is one of the things they've certainly found with a lot of the kind of group experimentation that we've done for preparing humans for long duration spaceflight, diverse teams do better. You know, having both men and women, having people from different backgrounds, having a mixed group means you're better performing happier group. And that's not a surprise to those of us who are really committed to importance of diversity and how we need to make sure we're including everybody in science, technology, engineering and math fields. But it's something we know about from doing research on getting teams ready to go to Mars. I love that. I absolutely love that. And that is something that I'm passionate about and that we've talked about a lot of times, how do you create diverse teams here on earth that make such a difference to everyone who's involved? No, I love that. That's great. One thing I think we should talk about a little bit. I think that we've covered in my mind all of the compelling reasons why humans need to do this and also foremost among those the fact that we can't resist. But there are always people among us who have to do it. We're going to try. It doesn't matter. We're going to do it. We do challenges right in this moment in continuing doing what we're doing. And I feel like that's something worth talking about. And I'd love to hear from you just to begin with about the ways that people can interact with the museum right now when we can't go there in person. Well, it's been an interesting time for us because the Aaron Space Museum is usually vying with the Lou for the most one of the most visited museums in the world. We welcome somewhere between five and eight million people through our door every year. So those in-person visitors are really important to us. But frankly, even a couple years ago, we started really thinking how do we become not just a national museum, how do we become a global museum? And this is something that Smithsonian, which has 19 museums and research units, has really been thinking about writ large. So we've started working on it, thinking what's our digital strategy? What's our online education strategy? And then, of course, COVID hits. And all of a sudden, that's not just a we need to get to that. We need to do that in the fuzzy future. Oh my God, we need to have done it yesterday. Teachers around the country need us. Families around the country need us. So the Smithsonian with the Aaron Space Museum being part of this has done a huge pivot. So if you go to our website right now, the first thing you see when you land on our website is K to 12 teacher resources and what we call Aaron Space everywhere. What can you do? You can take a virtual tour of the museum. You can listen to Jim Lovell talking about Apollo 13. So you can really experience our content. And right now, frankly, I've got a lot of my team working on how do we make this even better? How do we expand it even more? And frankly, museums around the world are doing this. And it's really important because museums are living places that help the public understand the present in the context of the past, but then really help to envision a better future. And so what better time than now again to look to a place like the Aaron Space Museum and say, look what we've overcome in the past, we defy gravity defy a virus also. Yes. Oh my goodness. I also feel like in a weird way, this is a great opportunity for education. And we've been stuck for a long time in this passive kind of education where where in its end manifestation, there's someone at the front giving a lecture and you are listening passively memorizing things and then putting them back on an exam. And I would argue that very few of those skills are actually useful for work and life. The things that in fact you're being trained, there's there is a phenomenon studied by psychologists called called learned helplessness. And I think that phrase kind of says it all. You learn to be helpless in learning. You learn that only the other person has the answer. You learn that everything's already been discovered. You learn that the only way to make progress is to memorize. And it turns out that when you take people out of the classroom and have been learning online, then they have all the online resources because now we're in a world where all the content is available to us all the time. And so in the classroom, you can pretend that the student has to solve the addition problem without their calculator or pretend that they need to know who did a certain thing without being able to look it up online. But when everyone is online all the time, it teaches us that we have to learn those other more important transferable skills like how do you work together in a team to come up with a more complex answer to something or how do you ask the right question. And so we have this amazing opportunity and it is happening. I see it happening with some of the public high schools in Arizona that we work with where they're learning to teach differently, teach for the future. And so I'm hoping that like the revolution that you're going through bringing your museum into a much more accessible and different space, that I think it's happening in education too. I don't think that this is terrible. I think that this is a way for us to be better to give us a way to pivot. You know, I think a lot of people might agree with me with this idea that STEM education actually has not been ideal. It's been exclusionary. It's been non-diverse. It doesn't always hold creativity. And so it's not that we want to return to doing what we used to do. It's time for us to figure out how to do it better and that we have this chance to try. Yeah, we've been thinking about that exactly a lot when you think about, for example, right now our virtual museum tours are literally you're walking through the museum. And yet we have this amazing collection, a lot of which is in storage. Some of it is archival materials, archival video, diaries. And if you didn't approach it as we're starting with the physical and going to the virtual, if you start with the virtual and reimagine, just think what you can do. And so to me, it's this incredibly exciting time. And I know, you know, obviously, neither one of us want to make light of how horrible this pandemic has been and how harmful it's been, especially in certain communities around this country. But you have to say we're in this incredible lemon of a situation. And how do we make lemonade out of it? How do we become better through this and really learn from it? Exactly, exactly. No, not to minimize in any way the unbelievable trauma that people are going through. And also, as you point out, the disproportionate way that that trauma is falling upon certain groups, surely we could do better. And so let us not give up, let us strive more compellingly toward that. I want to encourage everybody to put in questions if you have them, because we'll be very happy to take questions from people online. And the questions that we that we collected ahead of time on Twitter, just a few of them, mainly about social distancing with astronauts and how they take care of new astronauts arriving that were that were answered. And I wondered, one question that you had that we had ahead of time that you touched on but didn't quite completely go through was this question of someone asked, I'm just going to read it out because it's so clear the way it was written in Twitter. If someone coughs or sneezes on the International Space Station, wouldn't droplets just hang around until they collided with some surface stopping momentum? How do you keep the entire station sanitized? Can you say more about that? That's exactly what would happen, because obviously the first of all also realize that in space you can really play with Newton's laws and I would love to see a great video of this because when you sneeze on earth we're pretty grounded when we sneeze and you're propelling something forward, but you don't move backward in space. If you sneeze, you would actually move backward because for us there's an equal and opposite reaction, right? We all learned that from Newton. So first of all that's kind of funny to think about unless they were hanging on. I would think you'd have to hang on before you sneeze, but yes, but obviously yes, any droplets would remain in the air. And so for example I've never heard of anyone doing this for a cough and a sneeze, but when the astronauts wash their hair, they put little bits of water on their head and wash their hair and they're having to hose up any little droplet of water because of course over 80% of the water on the International Space Station is recycled so that it can be used again. Think of the ISS as how we should live sustainably everywhere. So they preserve every drop of water and so I would imagine if you had all these droplets hanging around, one could vacuum them up with their little suction device they use for water, but don't worry about keeping the ISS clean. As I said, they do have to clean it frequently and they want to make sure that the interesting thing they have found is through experiments, bacteria actually or and viruses don't behave the same way they do on earth because again everything here on the earth has evolved in one G of gravity and it turns out that has affected like with our immune systems becoming less effective in space, you don't really, it's hard to predict sometimes what the lack of gravity does to an organism and it turns out that it sort of turns different genes on and off. So some bacteria actually become more virulent in space, some become less virulent and so they're trying to use this information. For example, there's a lot of research done up on the ISS on the potential for new vaccine development because as you figure more out, Lindy we know as scientists when you figure more out it tends to open up even more questions that you hadn't even asked before and so they've learned so much on the ISS but there's still a lot of microgravity research to be done. It's an incredibly rich facility. I love what you just said and to me that is the central thing that I want people to learn when we're learning together and that is that it's all questions, there are almost no answers out there. You grow up surrounded with textbooks, you think everything's been discovered, where's the place for me in that world of discovery it's all done? Well it turns out all of our information is changing all the time and every time we make a new discovery it's just a sea of new questions and there's so much to still learn. We've got a couple of great questions and this first one brings us around to new space. It seems we're finally entering a phase of space exploration and travel in which private companies are finding success. Do either of us think that considering problems with government funding and shutdowns and juggling priorities will there be a moment in which private companies overtake the government in space and I think that's such an apt thing to talk about with the crude launch that's about to happen. Yeah and I always find this because I get this question a lot from the public and I always find it to be a really interesting perspective that frankly is very different from the way that I come at it because people really look at it as a competition like oh SpaceX and and your Boeing's and and Blue Origin they're like against the government and it's an and it's it's it's not an or and and so to me when I see SpaceX you know getting ready to launch astronauts up to the ISS and and Boeing hopefully following next year when you see Blue Origins and Virgin Galactic you know moving towards taking Torah Summit into space that's an and and the more they work on that transport piece to me it allows NASA to focus on the exploration yes um because if you think about when the railroad started in the United States you know it was the railroads were first the government you know that was who was doing it and as soon as it became profitable and there was a profit mode of the government stepped away and so to me something like taking astronauts back and forth to the international space station that's I don't want to call it routine anytime you're messing with space it is not routine but that's something that NASA can now turn over to the private sector and just buy as a service just like they buy you know widgets from a company but when it comes to sending humans to Mars or figuring out the next great observatory that's going to help us understand the origins of the universe or really figuring out how do we develop even more advanced sensors to help us understand Earth's climate those are things that only the government can do only NASA can do and so I like to say the more the private sector steps up the more NASA can step forward that is so well put in the history of science in exploration has always been one of tagging along you think about Darwin on the beagle and he was just put on board to keep the captain company he wasn't put on board because it was a scientific exploration it was absolutely a commercial exploration and then he used his brain and discovered things along the way but it wasn't about science to really make those expensive fundamental discoveries about science it takes a government doing it on behalf of the people and then when you have those things that can be monetized the market parts this is something that Chris Lewicki and I have been talking about a lot what is the deep space space economy you know what is the sustainable market for something that's not in in Earth orbit and those are really great questions it has to be and also because what you think about I think Star Trek showed it to us first in our generation how we can be our better selves we can do this as an and it doesn't have to be bimodal it doesn't have to be the US versus the Soviet Union or the US versus China can be us as humanity doing things together in an idealized state and so let's see if we can creep toward that and instead of or you know I did another fun event with the future tense folks on science fiction and we our museum people might say what do you have science fiction in your museum for but right when you would come in before we started the renovation when you came into air and space there was the model that was used in the filming of Star Trek the Starship Enterprise right in our front doorway and science fiction to me is a really interesting way in which we create the future because I was listening to an NPR show and I don't know who said it but they said no one ever invented something that someone didn't imagine first right and and so science fiction to me it's how we imagine right so we're imagining that deep space economy in countless tv shows science fiction books you know that's been explored and so to me we're now working on how do we actually make that a reality suddenly it seems touchable just the way you know to me at some point a cell phone was not something you know that was a communicator on Star Trek it wasn't something I would all of a sudden find indispensable in my life and science fiction helps us imagine the future and then we create it right right and to talk about something I learned just a few years ago how fundamental the idea of space exploration is to the human psyche that the Greeks so we're talking you know two millennia ago people had begun to imagine being off of the earth out into space looking back at the earth and seeing it as a sphere against space and seeing all of the earth in its in its entirety from a vantage point that was well off of the earth and this was before there was even the imagining that there could ever be the technology to allow us to do that we were already driving toward being in space and I feel like this other another question that we got is kind of perfect for you as a follow-up to this the question is how should we better promote the goals and ideals of our space program and NASA's work among the public are we both the public in the media and the press doing enough to talk about space exploration and what it can do to change our understanding of our world and the benefits the research can bring you know that's something that is really um you know it's frankly it's why I'm at the air and space museum because because to me the next step in my career was how do we take these amazing things that we do in exploration and aviation and get the public as excited about it and is inspired by it because um you know we started out with this talking about the inspiration of Apollo and and Apollo inspired an entire generation of STEM people some of them became astronauts friends of mine who were inspired by Apollo some of them um became some of us planetary scientists but a lot of them became the doctors the mechanical engineers the civil engineers the architects that helped move this country forward a guy like Jeff Bezos why is did is he the tech guy that he is today he was inspired by Apollo so that inspiration piece um I think is something that we can just never never stop overlooking and so then the question becomes how do we do a better job of communicating this and I always feel like there's the nerd public of which I'm firmly a member and I'm totally paying attention to what psyche is doing and I'm totally excited about it and I'm I'm waiting for that launch next Thursday you know Wednesday Thursday um next week but there's a lot of the public who's not paying attention and those are the people I want to grab hold of those are the people that I do want to engage and frankly I thought we saw it happen for example when Scott Kelly was up on the International Space Station for a year you know he was on the cover of time he was on the nightly news and so we broke out of we broke out of just talking to ourselves and enlarged who we talked to and so me why did that breakthrough people were excited about the idea of why we were going to Mars we were doing something new we were doing something innovative we were getting ready we were doing something we'd never done before and so part of it is to I think really frame better how we talk about what we do and I will say you've done a fantastic job of this with psyche you have to make it relevant you have to have the so what the why and I feel like we can always be improving how we do that yeah I agree with you completely as you know that I do because I do talk about this all the time and it kind of connects with some questions we're getting about why would we prioritize space exploration at a time like this and also what can we bring out of this COVID pandemic that will help us do more space science and engineering in the future and and to me the the very most fundamental answer is by aspiring to be more than what we are that is what makes us human and if we were to stop if we were to lose our exploration spirit the idea that we could do something bigger that sense of inspiration it would be like losing civilization and I don't think things things are are optional it would be it would be another version of life without Mozart how can we go forward without our souls I think I think we need this in a sense more than ever yeah yeah I think it's that inspiration piece it's the knowledge piece but but frankly there there is an economic piece I mean when you invest in doing something really hard you return that money in spades to the US economy so I I always left at one point there was a a cartoon that showed like NASA launching a rocket with dollars going behind it you know we don't actually spend the money in space I would say that every dollar spent here on earth with humans and so to me it's an investment in the future it's an investment in STEM jobs it's an investment inspiring kids um and I think it's the now more than ever that we talked about mm-hmm yeah I think actually now more than ever I agree with that and if there's ever a time that we need to be inspired beyond ourselves it's certainly now we have a question here about the resources that are available to our educators to incorporate especially our ideas about new pedagogies and the way we might be thinking and you talked about your museum website and anyone who's interested in learning more about what we've been doing feel free to email me my email name is is out on the internet and others on a state university and we see to reach but but Ellen what other resources and what other ways to share not just the pedagogy but the ideas and the topics that we're talking about I think there's a lot of resources out there and I would really urge people to go to a site we have with the Smithsonian called the learning lab so if you just google learning lab you'll go to it and it doesn't pull just resources from air and space but from all across beautiful the Smithsonian the Smithsonian is really unique in this country we don't have a ministry of culture but but we have the Smithsonian which covers the arts the sciences exploration and to me more than anything inspiration and obviously it also talks about the story of all of the people of this country and their incredible experiences and and so I would really urge people to go to learning lab because you'll find things that you didn't even know you didn't know and I think that that's beautifully connected also to and you should correct me on this but my understanding of the origins of the Smithsonian where where Mr. Smithson had money at the ready and it was really the return of the exploration expedition it was sort of America's answer to the Beagle our giant expedition that went to the Antarctica and way up to the Pacific Northwest and came home with ships full of discoveries and didn't that become the Smithsonian? It was part of the original collection of the Smithsonian but you know when he died he actually he left his money to his nephew he had no children he left his money to his nephew and said well if my nephew pre-diseases me or dies before before me he the money should then go to starting an institution for the purpose of the diffusion creation and diffusion of knowledge in the United States and there was a lot of confusion about why he did this and I'm sorry but luckily for us poor Mr. Nephew did die and so the money didn't go to the nephew and instead came to the United States and frankly and Congress didn't know what to do with this they're kind of like okay what do we do with all this money and while they were arguing about it apparently they invested in the money in bonds um which went uh which went valley up oh I didn't know that the money disappeared actually and Congress decided um you know what this was actually a good idea and founded the Smithsonian that's a great story it's a great story we have just a few more minutes we're going to sort of wrap up in about four minutes um I wanted to answer a question someone has asked about how uh working on psyche mission has changed with the pandemic and then we have another question about um how people can learn more about what our astronauts are doing on the ISS and what programs NASA is working on and Ellen what your favorite or our ongoing purchase that you're most excited about so let me answer about psyche and then hand it to you to say where good people should go and what you're most excited about I think it'd be a great place to end so it's been uh an amazing challenge for psyche because we are in this really critical period where we're um hopefully about to pass our CDR and get our decision from NASA to go to the final assembly test and launch and we're supposed to launch in two years and so much can be done remotely but of course you can't actually build hardware without building the hardware with your hands and so we've done incredibly well all of our hardware builds are ongoing all of them at a lower level a safe level of people distanced and huge amounts of careful work to keep everyone safe we have no one on the team who's sick we're very very lucky and everyone has the option who would be working on hardware whether they feel comfortable with what we're doing or not and they can opt out with no detriment so we think we're handling it really well and at the moment we are okay we're still you know fingers crossed that that we're able to move forward at least at the pace we're going right now um it's it's happening we started doing things like um every couple of weeks having a a a WebEx video meeting for the entire team and so we'll have 200 people or 300 people online in you know in the morning just for an hour to catch up with each other because I think in the end the thing that makes all of this possible is the fact that it's a human endeavor everything we do is a human endeavor it's about the people working together and it's about inviting everyone to the table to make their contribution and about caring about every person and to me that's the most important thing about the team and about the thing that we're doing and and so far we're we're muddling forward and so um you know keep your fingers crossed for us so tell us more I'm I'm totally excited well people want to learn more about what's going on up on the International Space Station please go to NASA's website where they have tons of pages that talk about the research that goes on on the ISS all the technology development um and I'd also go to another NASA page that I think is called NASA in Your Life that talks about all the spin-off technologies in your house in your clothes in your workplace in the world around us that have come a lot of it from our push to get humans um up up above the earth um and then hopefully onto the moon and Mars so please check that out in our last my last 30 seconds the thing I'm the most excited about right now is another upcoming NASA mission it's called Dragonfly who investigator on the mission it is a mission led by Elizabeth Turtle of the applied physics lab of Johns Hopkins University and it's going to send a quadcopter so a little drone well it's not so little um to Saturn's moon Titan which is my favorite place in the solar system I am so excited about Dragonfly also and uh just a shout out for diversity and inclusion there are um so far three women who have competed for and one major space missions the first was Maria Zuber and I was the second and Elizabeth Turtle is the third and all of us are friends and colleagues and I'm so rooting for Dragonfly because that is going to be so cool so um I think that our time is up and so first of all thank you so much Ellen it was such a pleasure to share this with you and thank to thanks to everyone who joined us today and there will be more future tense social distancing socials coming up I think they happen on Tuesdays and Thursdays and so I think that's the end for today so thank you all for coming and uh and goodbye and stay well thank you