 Howdy everybody thank you for coming to this distinguished panel and me We have Well, I don't have my notes with me perfect So I don't know these people are without my notes bill bill bill bill Actually in order on my left. We have Lawrence Krause a cosmologist at Arizona State University Writer of quantum man a book about Richard Feynman One of my favorite people on this entire planet, and you know as an astronomer I know exactly what that means Pamela gay an astronomer who does astronomy cast also known as star strider Another old friend of mine Neil de grass Tyson. I don't think I need to introduce him very much A you know who he is and and B He's given the talk after this so I'll let George introduce him more officially and you know him as the science guy I know him as speed walker from almost live for those of you the five of you laughing awesome He'll toe heel toe executive director of the planetary society Bill Nye We're gonna be talking about the future of space and I do want to mention that I'm actually quite pleased to be moderating a Very diverse panel and in fact the diversity should be very obvious to you all because two of these people have been on Stargate Atlantis and two of them have not So it's a pretty pretty fair split with that sadly Doctors McKay and Keller couldn't be here. They have a previous engagement in an alternate reality For the yeah, okay, so I'm trying to see the almost live fans in the Stargate Atlantis fans Okay, see who else like an alienate here literally The other day on Google I got an alert that evidently bill nine I are both employed by the NSA and the CIA and you know we can split that if you want NSA It's a living yeah Yeah, those those checks they keep they keep rolling in between big pharma and NSA. It's awesome Now for those of you here There aren't too many of you here I don't think who have been to all of the Tams or at least TAM 1 which was in Florida in 2003 And I was thinking about this the other day The Tams last three days roughly three and a half days, which is 1% of the length of a year And there are maybe four or five Extraordinary astronomical or space events that happen per year So the odds of any one TAM hitting a specific astronomical event seems rather low and yet at the first TAM Literally during the TAM we lost Columbia Columbia broke up in February 2003 and that happened during TAM 1 during another TAM the Huygens probe from Cassini landed on Titan the moon of Saturn and returned pictures and I remember scrambling to try to get those pictures displayed So that we could all see them and we saw them right here at TAM today we are Dealing with the last of the space shuttle flights that picture is in fact right side up if you're on the space station and That is an unusual event in that this this is an orbit. There is no right side up. That's right Um Near earth there might be you know, he's just to clarify you look better that way Neil. That's good. Okay Still is a down Yeah, and well That is that's an excellent point There is a down and and Atlantis is going to land on earth on July 21st The 42nd anniversary to the day depending on your time zone that Neil Armstrong set foot on another world And I will say in the in the midst of this We have another astronomical first in that the dawn mission is orbiting is going to be orbiting the asteroid Vesta sometime today This is a main belt asteroid the second largest. It's going to orbit for a year take close-up pictures this was taken about a week ago and It's in a week in a year after a mapping mission. It's going to move on to series the largest of the main belt asteroids I shouldn't be lecturing about this. I'm sure Bill knows more about it as the executive director planetary society And you can also follow Emily Loctawala who blogs for the planetary society and she's a fantastic science writer But with all of these events happening now and seem to be happening with him. It seems wholly appropriate, especially with this Really amazing panel to talk about the future of spaceflight the future of humanity in space if not Our direct presence at least our proxies in space by robots and I have been hearing over and over again I mentioned is to bill earlier that people are calling this the end of Human spaceflight or at least the end of the space program that NASA is looking to land the shuttle We don't have a rocket system in place Constellation which was going to replace the shuttle was scaled back and then eventually canceled and we don't have anything going up in The future and I actually want to keep this a little bit general and just feel you guys out and get your impressions about this. I Think it's far more sad that The James Webb Space Telescopes will be cancelled because that involves real science and not spending money to orbit 90 a hundred pound tanks of water around the earth and he means us and The James and so if it is really cancelled there'll be no that's the flagship of us Astronomy for the next 20 years and it'll be like the cancellation of the superconducting supercollider 20 years ago killed Particle physics in this country exactly. It'll be the it's a disaster And so people should write your congress people and tell them not to cancel the James Webb Space Telescope Is anyone here not familiar with this? So James Webb Space Telescope James Webb was the administrator of NASA under Kennedy So he had a lot to do with the Apollo program and what many people just like in NASA when you're called administrator You were the highest-ranking person. That's the biggest deal. Yeah, it's not Bill Nye's administrative assistant Which is a big deal But it's yeah, it's the head person so the in the case of the superconducting supercollider For those of you don't remember by the way, these are all United States things You're talking about if you want to go to the International Space Station You take a Russian rocket. They're fine. They work great. So I use rocket. It's a it's not cheap But it's considerably less than taking a US Space Shuttle right now a little over a billion a flight Billion dollars a flight. It's like that's not a good bargain. It's only 20 million if a US millionaire and you want to go Yeah, well then it's not it's nothing to it. No, but so the thing is the superconducting supercollider the physicist if I may God particle of them Astrophysicist Went to went to Congress and said they're gonna find my recollection. They're gonna find the Z particle or the Higgs particle Higgs boson right and Congress people looked at them That's fine for you guys But we have wars to conduct and people to feed and so on instead of saying we are gonna unlock the next secret of the universe That would have been a little more compelling similarly James Webb Space Telescope everybody Think of how much we love Hubble We love images from Hubble and how it has changed the world and when Hubble went way over budget people rung their hands wanted to De-orbit it. That's a verb But then when it turned out the mirror was made improperly, but then people made derangements to fix the mirror Okay, same thing is going to James Webb Space Telescope. It's not the telescope. That's a problem It's management. That's a problem. And so the universe isn't just expanding it's accelerating Right, and you know why? No, and nobody knows yeah And so if you want to find out you have to build missions like this I always like to say that no one knows knows why and if someone tells you that they know why they're lying Especially if they're a string theorist. Yes, okay so You know any What one of the important things that NASA Experimentally determined during the process of writing their most recent decadal survey is one should not allow planetary Scientists or astrophysicists to budget anything because we don't include Contingencies and we underestimate and we screw up and and this was actually they did something really awesome with a Recent survey of the community where they asked the planetary science community to say what should we do for the next 10 years? And by the way can find all of your dreaming to Projected president presidential budgets, so this is a realistic dream You're coming up with and the planetary scientists and the geophysicists and the astronomers went off and locked themselves in rooms And came up with really awesome plants and really they thought realistic budgets And then NASA did something for the first time that was very wise They sent all of the budgets out to commercial agencies to look over and check for realism and they came back about 30% higher Now with the James Webb Space Telescope This is a mission that I believe was originally budgeted under two billion dollars. It was nine hundred million Okay, originally then it got bumped up to about 1.5 And they're now estimating that it's gonna come out at 6.5 billion dollars because they let astronomers budget it and we shouldn't be allowed to and And Congress is looking at this and going well you guys clearly don't expletive know what you're doing and And and rather than looking at us and going wow you guys know how to do science We ask you to do something. You're not trained for They're trying to take away our toys And the other problem is Congress is trying to get rid of two to four trillion dollars of us budget and any of you Who've ever written a budget before know that when you realize you're over the first thing you do which is stupid But the first thing you do is just get rid of all the small line items And you realize they don't add up to enough, but that's still the first thing you do Every time I write a grant the first thing I do is get rid of postage and yeah, that's $200 and I'm 300,000 over So you're the one I Am that one But I write citizen science projects, so we'll get these people looking at the Don mission data. He's talking about So I want my postage back So human spaceflight is Is very expensive and there's long history of this, but let me just remind everybody whether you live in the u.s. Or not The reckoned in 2010 dollars like how many people have used the expression if they can put a man on the moon. Why can't they blank well in 2010 dollars Apollo cost 100 rather 151 billion 151 billion the interstate highway system, which is quite large and is used a lot more than by 12 people Cost 100 and by the federal portion 114 billion So it there will net I don't think they'll ever be another investment in space exploration at that level Because it was really a result of the Cold War. That's why people went to the moon and but on the other hand Everybody's pretty satisfied that if you can get a human into a situation to explore things the human does things Very well is sort of the best explorer you can get for now I just in a matter of years and that won't be true. I don't think Mars Phoenix curiosity. Hey, I'm a huge fan Hey, I got the sundials. I mean I'm crazy for Mars. Yeah, but but the geology I mean, I don't want to say the the other thing is bear in mind I mean, I'm from the US. I grew up in the US if it's US versus anybody and Whatever speedball, I'm or a hockey. I'd be generally US but Russian the Soviet Union put the first cameras on the moon The first soft landing on the moon the first sample return the first Mars rocks came back from the moon all Robotically Mars rocks from the Mars rocks on the moon bill It's on my mind You're not supposed to tell anybody See it's that's the kind of slip where you lose that CIA Exactly It was all by Hollywood anyway, so I apologize the first sample return from another world was done Robotically by the former Soviet Union, but people didn't really get excited about it and the Cold War didn't get resolved Until humans were there, but so there's something to that We're about to move into a new age where we have space asks which is led by Elon Musk Who did PayPal and Tesla who's the most amazing young South African? He's about my age and has like already had three major Corporations, it's he's the most inspirational person that I've ever encountered and I Have no clue it was said but all right As as we move into the future, we're going to be moving into a future where Instead of having NASA running the show, we're going to have the commercial agencies launching as well We're gonna have the Mojave spaceport spaceport America New Mexico We're going to have Virgin Galactic joining Virgin Atlantic as a way to spend your tourism dollars if you're stupidly rich But you know, but the problem is I think that's all a scam. I really do I think I just got asked about this. I the point is that it's exponentially look to go in earth or near-earth orbit You know to go the distance between New York and Washington above the earth. Yeah, maybe maybe private industry can do it But it's just exponent the laws of physics say it's just exponentially more expensive and exponentially more difficult to actually explore some more interesting and And therefore I don't think it's ever gonna be I don't think private industry has ever got the Back is not gonna be in the near term without the government. I've been politely silent, haven't I? I know I was really I was I was surprised. I was gonna use the word oddly, but okay, I Didn't think you were that polite though, but it's okay I just want to clarify some of this information that's being bandied back and forth There is Fundamentally no business case. Yeah for pride. Can I finish this head? I'm not sure I want to be here anymore There is fundamentally no business case for private enterprise to advance a space frontier And when you advance a frontier You are making mistakes that the capital markets choose not to value You are have to create patents to enable things that you don't know will work Anytime you were the first person to do something on that scale the history of human civilization has demonstrated That the only funding available to do that is via governments. Yeah, and so What then happens is the patents get issued the government figures out how to do it? They make it sort of routine, but they're inefficient because it's the government then you see it to private enterprise Can you give us an example? Sure the Dutch East India Trading Company. They were not the agency that Found America from Europe. That was Columbus funded by Queen Isabella. There was Magellan also funded by Spain They laid the groundwork to find out where to go. Does the earth have an edge or not? Is it something worth doing? Then behind them the Dutch East India Trading Company came to conduct business in a way safer They could have possibly have been economically justified had they been the first to do it You look at the railroads that crossed the United States Newt Gingrich mentioned that as Entrepreneurs leading the way But he neglected the fact that Lewis and Clark got there first on a major funded expedition under the Jefferson Administration so you lay out the land you map the rivers you map the terrain then you've got an understanding of What the risks are for the capital markets to then value then they come in behind so I see any Participation of the private enterprise in space exploration not the first ones to go to Mars not even to go back to the moon But to make our access to low-earth orbit the efficiently Costed exercise that it really should have been at the beginning of the shuttle, but was never realized And that is Why do we want people in low-earth orbit? I mean I just don't understand why why do we want people? Or that because they'll buy seats to take a vacation there. Well, they already have That people doing it that people buying tickets at twenty million dollars. Yeah, so you make it ten million dollars more people will buy the seat Even more absolutely, you're right. I think it's for entertainment. What are you arguing with me about well The point is as a goal as a national goal. What do you want? Why do you want people in low-earth orbit other than other? National goal if it's commercial, it's whatever makes money Yeah, I want them there because it will lower the cost of getting satellites for research into orbit. Thank you More NASA needs to go back to the space station They don't have to launch one of their own rockets They hitch arrived on Elon Musk, but hopefully we can get rid of the space station, so they won't have to go there Whatever they will need whatever is the need in low-earth orbit NASA should not be the truck driver Yeah, I agree with you completely. No, so as I always do So how do you the analogy is Antarctica for me like you maintain a scientific presence in Antarctica? You have people there they think deep thoughts they I remember very well cleaning bicycle chains with chlorinated fluorocarbon Carburetor cleaner can't buy that anymore because people discovered that it was hard on the ozone. Yeah, so you made you kill the ozone Yes, I was the guy so if you You maintain a presence in Antarctica and you maintain a presence in Earth orbit if there's scientific things to do there But the whole thing everybody is you want to explore space at a reasonable cost. This is something you do as an intellectual intellectually sophisticated society with treasure with money with means you Explore Lewis and Clark explored the continent you explore space you explore deep space Because you don't really know what you're gonna find and I remind everybody that relativity was discovered barely a century ago And yet everybody in this room got here on account of our understanding of relativity I mean you had your car navigation system with your many of you were on an airplane and Those are driven now by information from space if you told my grandfather There'd be signals from space that you have to take into account both the gravity of the earth and the speed of the space I think you were nuts But yet here we all are and so there is a whole nother physics. Yes, right there. Just it's so close And that when we discover it who knows and this is what I grew up in the US I mentioned that but what I've tried to do now I wrote this op-ed just remind people in the US Congress and Senate that If you don't want to discover what makes the universe accelerate, maybe somebody in another country Maybe and that's from China, but you agree with me that those discoveries won't be made by humans Orbiting 200 miles above the earth will be made by wonderful spacecraft that are designed by humans Yeah, but designed by humans that actually you know are cost effective. You said the key point I mean the difference between Antarctica and the International Space Station is I don't know what the but NSF Neil probably knows what the NSF budget is for Antarctica. It's probably less than 50 million a year I don't know, but but the space station is a hundred billion dollar tin can sitting up there doing absolutely nothing Well, so here's what be really good use of it Is to get tika knots on board that that's Chinese astronauts Chinese space flyers would be fantastic because Another cold war or even the beginning of a cold war is very very expensive Undertaking well anything we do to defuse it be good That's actually one of the big problems that we're dealing with right now in terms of trying to Make science in space something that's achievable because most nations in the world are dealing with economic crisis is right now and China is doing quite well and they're planning their own space agency They have their own space agency. They've launched their own men into space or in the process of planning their own independent space station that's theirs and If we could just partner with the cause we denied their access to our space station True citing human rights violations as a result. They said we still want to go to its space We'll do it without you and they built their own space program and became the third space-faring nation To put a human being into orbit and their ambitions remain high and and this year They tested number one in science and technology. We take you off If I may can we get questions from the audience because I was standing here I was gonna go there in just a minute actually and by the way Neil when you do that you're supposed to go Yeah, like that because that's that's the throwdown But I I want to point out That the governments are actually partnering with private spaces, of course Those guys are benefiting from right space X has actually gotten something like five hundred million Full disclosure Elon Musk is on the board of the planetary site and the I'm not affiliated. I just think he's awesome I'm just a big fan of space X and they're building their their heavy-lift rocket Which is going to be capable of 50 tons to orbit at what he's planning is a tenth of the cost of the space shuttle That's that's probably right. Yeah, so and the company approoses Electronic electric cars or that are better. Yeah all over California, which are Tesla. Yeah, which are built in Boulder by the way so they We went to the factory space X factory and looked at the engine. I got to say I'm mechanical engineer. I mean I'm human You yeah, really? I thought you're an engineer. Yeah, so These things are very clean and the reason is that you don't have to have tubes running everywhere to transmit pressures From one part of the engine to another it's very nice and we talked to Jeff for Kiki's the head engineer I guess of structures there and he said, you know, we didn't reinvent this thing We took the NASA documents and manuals and just read them. Yeah, so to your point the all the patents and intellectual achievements were done 40 years ago and these guys are re embracing it. So it's good and that's just one example I mean it's a good use, you know lower to get into space take so much energy to get into orbit takes about nine times as much Energy to get just what people like to call escape velocities about twice that again so it's It's an old thing called the beer can problem the amount of liquid in a typical beverage can Compared to the mass or the weight of the can is about what rocket fuel is to a rocket So you think about you know, how much you could put in that little pull tab on the top the little Opener This is this is Tam you said it's called the beer can Problem, but it's called the beer can problem and they said the weight of the mass This is a really important This is a vitally important issue But actually but but that's the reason one of the reasons why I proposed a one-way trip to Mars It's a part of the reason is that coming back costs so much because you got to send the fuel there to get them back So it's much cheaper much much cheaper to send people one way. So are there volunteers? Because I have meals. No, anyway, there's several people that I would like to send But it's my understanding it's qualifications are different. Yeah I need to bring Lawrence to a new place if I may oh wow is it Mars? I'm slightly scared Lawrence my distinguished colleague to my left is has a let me say party line position of the of the Scientific much many in the scientific community that the man program is largely just a waste of money that you take that same money and for every Chunk of money that you spent putting a human being wherever you were going to put them You can send a hundred unmanned probes thousand to go thousand. It's probably 100 in a thousand ten worst around okay, so That is surely true, and I have no argument with that But it assumes but yeah it assumes that NASA is your private science funding agency, but the History of NASA's funding profile has never Betrayed that fact if you look at the fraction of NASA's budget over its fifty three-year life That has given been given on to science it will average at about 22% of the total budget it peaked in 2004 at 40% the recent average has been about a third It has never been more than a half human space one The fraction of the total NASA budget given to science has never been more the average has been down in the 20s percent So what that says is? NASA was never budgetarily driven by science motives NASA from its conception Inception sorry yeah inception. Oh, we don't know I NASA from its inception as Sir William to my right duly noted was driven by Cold War politics Let's be honest with ourselves about this the very speech that we all remember and has resonates In our cranium President Kennedy saying we will put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth You can even hear his Brookline accent as he recites it in your memory in Kennedy Space Center, Florida, there's a bust of Kennedy and Chiseled in the granite in the main entrance are those words There's a lot of other granite there with nothing chiseled into it What they could have done was put another sentence from that same speech, but they didn't Here's a sentence from that speech The if the events of recent weeks Yuri Gagarin had just come back out of orbit and we didn't yet did not yet have a vehicle that could safely put a human being Anywhere off the launch pad he said if the events of recent weeks are any indication of the impact of this adventure of the minds of men Then we need to show the world The path of freedom over the path of tyranny That was the battle cry against communism that was the war driver That's what dislodged the hundred billion dollars from the American coffers to send us to the moon Let us be honest with ourselves about that the budget for NASA has always been historically driven by geopolitical forces Given that fact you if you want to have the argument that it shouldn't be a geopolitical force That's fine, but you cannot say You cannot cry foul because it's not science That's that's apples and oranges. Let me let me take let me come to your place The So first of all you're absolutely right is the same try the way is true from the field I originated from particle physics The huge funding for particle physics was also a remnant of the Cold War a remnant of the atomic bomb project Basically the fact that that big science was felt to be in the national interest in national security even if it wasn't And by the way, what year did the superconducting super? Collider collider get get its funding reviewed and then cut It was the years shortly after peace broke out in Europe. Okay, but there were other reasons when they cut No, you can say that there are other reasons, but I submit to you. I Submit to you that there is no greater driver than the war driver And that's why every one of your particle accelerators was fully funded for the entire duration of the cold Yes, but let me just so let me make the point clear though That that you're absolutely right that we shouldn't assume that everything is for science What I think we should be assume is that we should just be a little honest I about a little over a decade ago I actually testified for the House committee with Buzz Aldrin on the future of space exploration and my point is that I don't think human space travel is a waste. It's actually for adventure. I grew up Staying home from school watching the Apollo land that excited me I'm you and we've all been on stage with astronauts and we know how excited people are just to be near them And so the point is I just think we have to be honest we say we send humans into space for adventure and we do other things for science and if we're honest about it then the Science budget won't somehow keep getting cut when there's cost overruns for for the International Space Station or something like that The irony is we use the international arguments to rescue the funding in some cases the International Space Station is basically the stinkiest thing on Orbit from what I understand It's it's a men's locker room that occasionally has women in it and and the reason that this Are you saying men smell worse than women? Yes, I'm saying men's locker room smell worse So We're not going there But but one of the reasons that it's funding was saved all the different times It had almost got cancelled is because of the large number of international treaties that went into Having the US launch all of the pieces for other nations that forked over funding and started building things And at a certain point you really don't want to piss off all of your allies by canceling their favorite Just the simple geopolitical drivers International thing the James Webb State Telescope is a national thing and what I'm hoping is we can rescue James Webb at in part as we rescued Fermi the the Fermi mission which Phil was part of Almost got cancelled a number of times and it was through phone calls Which actually severely ticked off the then NASA director to the point that he told all of these astronomers that we need To sharpen up and behave or be sent to the I kid you not He said we'd be sent to the children's table next time. We call all of our senators. I Call all of your senators That's a quote Pamela and I were in the audience when he said that Was it Griffin or was it yeah, I think so yeah But but the hope is We we flew NASA instruments on the Chandra and mission that orbited the moon we had Beagle was something that We weren't totally part of but we were part of getting it there before it crashed and did nothing good They thought of it as an instrument more than a spacecraft. That's what yeah, cuz see me Cassini and the Huygens pro That was again an international Collaboration over and over and over the way we're accomplishing science is to have different nations build the things they're best at Canada makes the best robotic arms in the world So to do science we need to collaborate and I have no idea why Canada just got weirded that much But my husband's Canadian so I thank you the Canadians are moving further south in America apparently With global warming that's a you want to take questions the whole time Yeah, we want to explore space at an economical cost because we don't know what we're going to discover and the word explore Is a great word because when you explore no matter kind of no matter what it is you're gonna make discoveries And you're also going to have an adventure those two words are in the word explore So the word explore is great, but it has been at NASA They have the thing called the exploration mission directorate Yeah, and that means human spaceflight Instead of what you might think of it in the bigger picture like a telescope or a microscope or what have you so I I'd like to take questions you all we have a few minutes. I don't suppose anybody has real questions right for the for this group And while someone's coming up to the mic. I realized I have to say I have NASA funding I'm not speaking for NASA everything I say is strictly my own opinion A standard disclosure. I like my funding Go ahead Joe My boy Kurt Vonnegut once said that went in writing Always put a human character in a setting if you want people to pay attention and be interested in it And he said that people didn't pay any attention to the space program until we started sending human beings up there and human beings to the moon So it may be far less sexy to send robots up there But um my point here is If it were if we were on a game show, yes, you state that in the form of ex ex J ref staff Sean McCabe So my point is even if it's less rational and less practical What if we need that sexiness factor of sending human beings up there to get people interested in space and funding space in the first place Mars Phoenix It tweeted itself as a little person and was fallen in love with and when it died It was immortalized in wired magazine by people who cried at the death of a Twitter feed that died with the robot But you know, I think wait, that's delusional The reason why there's so much interest in that Twitter feed is because the manned Program was not itself advancing an exploration frontier had they been doing that at the same time No one would have given a rat's ass what the robot was doing, but and that's and that's what was Implicitly recounted here with the moon in the 1960s. There were robots on the moon. Did you hear about any of them? No, because the man program was advancing a space frontier if you do both simultaneously We're gonna be listening to the tweets of the astronauts and not of your robot That's how you know, I the man program the robots look really sexy. I hate to agree with Neil at all, but No, but there's some sense to what he said in this case, but the the Does anybody know exactly when anyway The point is I think you're right and the men though the fascination with humans and spaces in my mind It's one simple thing. They can die. We all want to wait and see if they're gonna die And and and that's the only interest in it We want to see if they're gonna die and and that Fascination is hard to match with a robot dying is no I agree completely, but at the same time one can create I think when I When you see you know the Huygens probe for example was a brilliant in my mind put a microphone on it and you can go to the webpage and listen to it land and then pretty soon with With what we're gonna be able to have with virtual reality and the ability to have images You will be able to be on another planet with a robot and feel like you're there And I think at that level it's gonna feel like we're there, but but I think it's very hard to be with humans There's no doubt on that line. Yeah, are we gonna have the next ham by Skype? Please know I'm gonna come meet like this. Are we gonna do it all robotically? He shoots his course My point is If we didn't look you know what 20 years if if if if the Randy Foundation was weren't so wealthy and no people couldn't afford to put it on We'd have it all by Skype if that was the only way we could do it And and at the end of the day the thing is manned spaceflight kind of awesome Kind of wish I could be part of it, but there isn't the budget in the world right now to do it, right? We want to learn we want to explore we want to do science and we have to use robots to do that hold on I'm sorry should I just calm down. No bring it on dr. T And I want to make sure we get the question, but I gotta rebut that Rebut that okay To say there's no budget in the world the federal budget is three point something Trillion dollars doesn't go as far as it used to if you Yeah, you speak real money if you want to count to a trillion it would take you 100,000 years, and that's one number per second every waking and sleeping moment of your life That's how big that number is point one point two. It's not that we can't afford it It's that we have chosen to not afford it. I tweeted recently. I tweeted recently that the US bailout of the banks exceeded the 50 year budget of NASA You want to put something in context if you want to do something with three and a half trillion dollars You can do whatever you want Whatever you judge to be important to the profile of the nation that you were trying to just build and to sustain So I submit to you that when you look at the NASA budget And I'm tired of saying this but I'll have to say it again The NASA budget is four tenths of one penny on a tax dollar if I held up the tax dollar and I cut Horizontally into it four tenths of one percent of its width. It doesn't even get you into the ink So I will not accept a statement that says we can't afford it I gotta say that's Dr. T Do the thing I really do look at it differently if you're gonna tell me I can cut That much of a bill off or right up to the ink. That's a lot of money That's I mean to me if you gave me the budgets being slashed From nineteen to eighteen point seven now to sixteen point something. Yeah, if you gave me sixteen point nine billion dollars I should be able to do something Exactly it's something done, but we have a legacy of these NASA centers all over the country That's left over from the Cold War and that's got to be shaken out. It's a long way to go But but in but there's another yeah Well, I mean the James Webb Space Telescope overrun is less than the cost of air conditioning in Afghanistan Okay, I'm right there. No, I'm a huge fan of James Webb. I mean bring it on let last week I was talking with David McConville is the president of the Buckminster Fuller Yes, and he said that one of the elephants in the room around space travel in terms of tourism space tourism is the impact on global warming Do any of you know anything about that? He said it was astronomical. I forget the figures Is he talking about the carbon footprint? Yes, mostly. I think yeah, no it is kind of gross. Well, we'll cross that bridge people and Climate change, you know is the biggest problem And so when you look at the earth from space I submit you are going to make discoveries about climate change as you wouldn't make But we're cutting the looking at her face. That's the problem We've also got the missions that are going to look at earth from space to probe climate change What's the carbon footprint on a hydrogen oxygen fuel tank? It's that the fuel tank isn't the thing it's calling the fuel there cooling It may be making petroleum products that maintain the refrigerator and all that stuff It's it's like your previous has made a plastic and that's a problem and they're solid rocket, but we got to get questions And the solid rockets have a very simple and slightly juvenile question for all five of you I just want to know what each of you think is like the next big thing that we should be doing like there's a lot of people Let's say Mars Earth like planets or Robotic missions. What is each of your next big thing that you think we should be doing you double NASA's budget and you do it all? It's a couple as you won't do it all if you double the NASA budget So for me there's two things I want to know why the universe is accelerating that's a big deal for me because I suspect It's the next relativity. It's the next classical physics. It's the next world changing and maybe even source of energy Then the other no no it'll never sorry. Sorry. Let me make that clear. You're not sorry about anything It won't it won't be except being here. No. Anyway, um, no, it won't be can't be a source of energy Please don't say that you're gonna encourage lots of crackpots. It is not a source of energy It's the energy of empty space if the energy of empty space getting lower by working then it wouldn't have energy It's it's not a source of energy. Please. No, no, we will never break the sound barrier. Yeah, exactly No, the energy of empty space is I agree with Lawrence Well, no, my claim is that by looking for this thing you will make discoveries. That's my claim Then the other thing that I'd like to specifically do I'd like to send the right instrument To some gully on Mars where there's a underground Understand glacier oozing super salty water off the wall on a summer day and Look for fossil Mars probes and stranger yet crazier yet something that's still alive If we discovered life on another world it would change this one in the same way Copernicus and Galileo and those guys change it now There's something you don't just throw a few trillion dollars at it. You work at it take a few decades But that discovery or that Proof that there was no such thing it would also be remarkable and it wouldn't be that expensive Most of it could be done without humans. Yeah, well humans would build this stuff. I got it But I think the discovery of light of at least conditions for life Elsewhere is something that is driving and probably one of the most interesting things it doesn't I agree I think we should we need to go to I would be amazed if we didn't find Evidence of life on Mars and find it was our cousins because we pollute each other and and and we Discovered that the Objects go between the two planets and and certainly microbes can live long enough for that for that short duration But we will also look at you can't find Mars rocks on the moon. Yeah, and you can find them on the earth. That's right but yeah, as we've just heard but We also want to look for life elsewhere and we'll be able to eventually be able to image planets and look for oxygen Atmospheres with for example, which is there's the oxygen on earth only exists because of life There was no free oxygen on earth before life, so that would be a wonderful wonderful probe As one of the people who helped discover dark energy the energy of empty space I'm fascinated by it, but I actually think unfortunately that's going to be it's unlikely that we're going to learn much about that in The lifetime of anyone in this room experimentally It's just a problem and I could go into it That's very very that's on there It's a it's the most fundamental problem in science in my opinion But I think it's going to require a good idea before an experimental help, so we shouldn't inspire people to look for it Yeah, yeah, we should because it's impossible. Yeah, I'll add that JWST is would go a long way towards figuring out energy Just cool. What what JWST will go a long way towards Oh, it will not that it'll go a long way towards discovering the primordial black holes and the origin of structure in the universe It's profoundly interesting, but I think it's unfair to say I really worry about hyping things when I know They're not going to do what you say they're going to do and I think JWST is plenty interesting without pretending It's going to tell us anything about dark energy Hubble telescope did a hundred times more than what anyone ever projected exactly But the stuff we didn't expect not the stuff we did Okay, so why don't we well now hang on? Okay, so you're saying Lower our expectations for the things we expect and heighten our expectations for the things We can't figure out what to predict JW every time we open a new window on the universe We are surprised and that's the reason yeah, that's the reason to open the new windows because you shouldn't listen to theorists like me because Because this is the big one actually that's your best line so far Neil Why are you looking at this new over this new horizon? What are you gonna find? We don't know We don't know exactly. It's a surprise new horizons is gonna find the surface details of Pluto No, listen, I took the wheelbarrow full of postcards to Mikulski's the senator Mikulski's office to keep the mission to Pluto going You know it's gonna arrive in 2015 So stay tuned it will it will be fabulous. Can I just give my favorite mission, which doesn't exist and isn't funded now But it'd be yeah, it would be to go to Jupiter's moon Europa. Yeah, yeah Surface The The gravitational stress on Europa from Jupiter and other surrounding moons is pumping energy into it much the same way when you Warm up a racquetball by hitting it you distort it it bounces back to shape You're pumping energy into it that has melted the interior ice It has had an ocean of liquid water that's been liquid for billions of years and every place on earth We find liquid water. We have found life. I want to go ice fishing on Europa Put lower submersible Look around and for me The biggest question will be what you call that life It'd have to be like your opinions, right? Your your opinions One more round here where only one of us can answer we have to answer it quickly so we can get through everybody You want to talk about dreaming an impossible dream? We're not yeah We're not gonna get to everybody, but we're gonna have one more one more good one here Do you think the concept of a space elevator is possible and if when no no But bear in mind that the space elevator is this thing that's so strong for its weight You could just take an elevator into space, but once again the political problems are gonna be the hard thing You know if the thing comes loose and starts whipping And then who's gonna build who's gonna be responsible the ultimate high ground and all that stuff, but You might use it to drill into the earth and drop a black hole One more here one more materials will do it manned interplanetary spacecraft solid shields or electromagnetic electromagnetic You mean like solar sales. No, he means shield I'll go electromagnetic. Yeah, I go not at all He goes to answer I really have an opinion about hardware For real last question here we go Why don't we spend more time talking about the economic benefit of big government science which is technology development The spin-off of which has paid for the space program dozens of times over I agree that we that that every time we spend a lot of money They're huge spin-offs But one of the problems that I think about doing that and the SSC had this problem Because we talked about all the spin-offs of doing particle physics But we didn't do what what bill said you need to do which is you can't justify a program by its spin-offs You got to say it's worth doing Because it's worth doing and if you just start to justify it by the spin-offs people are saying start to say well You know, why are you doing in the first place? So there's no doubt that when we spend any amount of money we we make technological breakthroughs But I think you have to justify for its own sake first I would claim that if all you did was say we're gonna innovate Technologically as one pathway towards economic growth and the other pathway would be we're going to Mars Who's coming and? Everybody who's the best students in their class chooses that as their profession rather than becoming investment bankers then you're gonna innovate As Phil could tell you there are plenty of ways in which space can kill us and wipe out the earth And so some people in the more romantic state of mind think of space human spaceflight as a way of ensuring long-time survival of Species is that at all a part of these discussions at this time is this more just um, you know an individual Driver for people. Well, you look at the cover of the Tam 9 brochure, what do we call it? Episode guide. Yeah program. It's this whimsical thing about the future But terraforming Mars is not as easy as it looks but it but it is I think we I bet we'd all agree though At some point in the long-term future the future of humanity is in space It's a part of we want to diversify we're all in a one-shot thing here on earth And so I have no problem with all the kind of a colonizing well other system This crops up in a different way there's a mission There's a telescope called large synoptic survey telescope 10 meter telescope designed to survey the sky once every three nights from the Southern Hemisphere one of the major One of the major justifications for its funding is it could find that killer asteroid and give us years And I know this because I narrated the NSF video. They're showing it'll give us a couple years chance to Figure out how to get that sucker somewhere else other than killing us And so we can justify prolonged justify science by saying we're going to prolong human beings by protecting our own planet With the LSS T in this case The only preventable natural disaster Near Earth object Make it short because our keynote speakers are real diva so I don't want to eat into his time because you know what he's like so real short. Here we go It's real short I'm guessing Lawrence Maybe I'm wrong, but I'm just guessing that Whatever it takes to Terraform Mars and move a billion people there so that we're a multi-planet species so that one planet does not go extinct from an asteroid Whatever effort that is that's probably more Than what it takes to deflect an asteroid I Absolutely, I agree with you there, but I agree but I actually so the notion let's live in 22 planets So we're protected. Oh, no, that's no, I don't mean to protect it I think we'll eventually we will eventually colonize other systems I think you said it to protect the species in that. Oh, okay. Well, fine Well, we only need to move two people to Mars then I Read that in the book really fertile people. Yeah. Yeah, you know by the way, I won't tell you Or actually we are out of time This has been an interesting panel. I Probably should have participated in some way, but there you go. Let's thank our speakers We have Bill 9 Neil Tyson Pamela gay and Lawrence Browns. Thank you And Phil plate our moderator