 Coming up, five teams are left in the Google Lunar X Prize. Four planets are seen for the first time. I interview Jim Adams, the former Deputy Chief Technologist at NASA. And I'm in at least two segments of this particular episode. All of that and more coming up on this episode of Tomorrow's. Good morning. How's everything up with you guys? Not just to me, but to you and everybody else. Jared's here, Mike's here, Dudda's here. I don't care about Ben. He's in the next room. It's fine. Anyway, welcome to Orbit 10. This is episode four for January 28th, 2017. And of course, the first thing we want to do is give a huge shout out, and I promise I won't scream this time, to our escape velocity patrons. These are the people who have contributed $10 or more to this particular segment of this particular episode. It's just so much fun to say it that way. It's like you have to over articulate and make sure you get all of the words out. I'm giving you a little extra time to make sure you can find your name on the screen. If you are interested in getting your name on this particular screen and subsequent screens, you can always head over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O. Eh? What's that? It's almost like I prepared for this or something. I did it. In any case, we always like to start off the show with a couple of launches. Thankfully, we can always start the show off with a couple of launches. Mike, what have you got for us? Oh man, so the first one is actually a launch out of Japan. And unlike last week with that failed experimental launch, this one was totally successful and definitely a much bigger rocket. This is their H2 rocket, so let's check out the launch footage. Now, this launch actually took place on Tuesday, January 24th at 744 Coordinated Universal Time from the Tanagashima Space Center in southern Japan. And it technically was a commercial launch for the DSN Corporation, but the payload was an X-Ban communication satellite which will provide service to the Japanese military until 2030. Now, the payload is called DSN-2 and actually the DSN-1 hasn't even launched yet. It had a failure last year when it was being shipped around. But in any case, when it's an entered service, it'll be renamed Kirameki-2 and that's kind of a tradition that Japan has to rename their satellites once they enter orbit and enter into service. Since the whole being for a military customer, JAXA and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries didn't provide any footage of the launch or any live broadcasts, so the footage you saw was from a Japanese news station. So in any case, congratulations to Japan for their first successful launch of the year and it's always awesome to see their H2 launches. One of the interesting things I've realized that after watching all these different launches is not only do each of the rockets of course look a little bit different and what have you, and depending on where they're going, those launches look different and look different than daytime and all that other fun stuff. But I realize that camera work has a huge impact on the way that we perceive the launch. You know what I mean? So somebody was like, oh, that's a really aggressive turn and all I could think was, well, maybe it is, but maybe it's just the camera guy was like falling asleep a little bit. Like it could have been anything, right? But anyway, and we have another one. Yes, Soyuz, is that correct? Yes, and this one was live broadcasted. So we have quite a bit better footage. And yeah, this was actually for Ariane space. So let's check out the launch for this. You can tell it was live because of the static. Yeah, I'm not sure what's going on with this outfit out there. Now, this was actually Friday night, technically Saturday morning on January today, January 28th at 103 Coordinated Universal Time from French Guiana. And this was the Soyuz ST-B, which is an upgraded Soyuz 2-1B, which is only used commercially for launches in French Guiana. And the payload for this was Hispasat 36W-1. Not a very inspiring name, but in any case, it's a telecommunications satellite for Hispasat, which provides Spanish and Portuguese services to Spain, Portugal, the Canary Islands, and South America in a geosynchronous stationary orbit. And I just love the footage that they provide from this and the views are getting better and better. And thankfully, at this very critical moment right here, where the third stage separates from the second stage, they didn't have any problems like the Soyuz has been having. And I'm assuming because this one has a little bit more quality control with it being a commercial launch for Ariane space. And as you may remember last year, we kind of couldn't decide whether or not to count launches like this for Russia or for Europe. And Lisa Stojanasi was able to find that you were able to, it counts for Europe because it was from the French soil, from French Guiana and Ariane space as the primary operator. But in my mind to kind of also like a count towards Europe is Russia is a part of Europe. So this is just a very awesome example of European cooperation. It was a Russian rocket being launched by the European Space Agency, specifically Ariane space for a Spanish telecommunications company. So that's I think is a really cool example. I'm definitely count that for the first launch towards Europe this year. So very cool to see the first launches from Japan and Europe this year. See now we need like a tally board in the back and just so we can be like and then we can debate. Right, exactly. And we'll like flip it over. Exactly. That's awesome. That'd be awesome. It reminds me of volleyball in middle school for me. I know I'm 5'4", I played volleyball. It was only for a semester, it's fine. Mike, you have some other interesting news talking about the moon. Tell me more. Yeah, so this is some news from the Google Lunar X Prize and with this they had a deadline at the end of last year, December 31st as to how many teams would be able to continue to proceed in the competition because they had to have a verified launch contract by the end of the year. And five teams have been selected for this. And the first one is Moon Express. They actually had a verified launch contract in 2015. They're going to be launching with New Zealand's Rocket Lab. So that's a pretty cool. The second one was SpaceIL, which is the Israeli team and they're going to be launching with SpaceX. They have quite a bit of funding from the Israeli government and from quite a bit of private investors as well. So that's really cool. And then Synergy Moon is the third team. And this was just back in August of last year, 2016. And they're going to be launching with interorbital systems. And the rocket that you see on screen is going to be clustered together kind of O-Trag style to have something big enough to be able to launch a small rover to the moon. So I'm really excited to see how their progress is since it's all kind of a grassroots project and have team members from all across the globe for that. But in any case, the fourth team was Team Indis from India and they got their launch contract verified on December 1st of last year. So just kind of right there close to the deadline. And they're going to be launching with the Indian Space Research Organization. They're going to be using a PSL-V rocket to launch their lander to the moon. And they're going to have their own rover that they're going to take on that lambda. And they're also going to be taking another team's rover. This is Team Hakuto, which was barely got their launch contract verified on December 20th with partnering up with Team Indis to be able to launch their rover along with theirs. So that's very cool. And unfortunately there was another team, part-time scientists from Germany, that announced a launch contract in November of last year but was unable to get it verified in time. So one really cool thing that the Google Lunar X Prize has done is they are splitting a $1 million purse prize to all the teams that have participated so far to kind of give them a little bit of a kickstart so that they can continue on with their operations. And some of them that have commercial plans like Astrobotic, for example, plans to land several people's rovers and kind of landing experiments and things like that commercially. And Moon Express is doing that as well. But I think that that's really cool with the Google Lunar X Prize to dish out that money to all the teams that haven't been selected so that they can continue going. And I'm kind of excited to see where that will take the other teams that haven't been selected, especially part-time scientists. Maybe they'll still go to the Moon anyway, especially if they do have a launch contract, even if it wasn't verified by the GLXP. People who are just tuning in or are unfamiliar with the Google Lunar X Prize, it's a challenge that calls for privately funded spaceflight teams to land privately funded robotic spacecraft and rovers, essentially. On the Moon, you have to travel 500 meters, you have to transmit back high-definition video and images, and there's a bunch of different extra little milestones of if you get images from one of the Apollo sites or all of those sorts of things. So that's a general summary. You can survive a lunar night which lasts, what is it, like two weeks? 14 days. 14 days? So there you go. So bonus prizes, and if they win the first prize of just being able to land and travel 500 meters and transmit video, they get $20 million and then there's about $5 million associated to all those different bonus prizes. One new rule, too, as well, I forgot to mention, I'm sorry we're taking so much time on this, but one new rule is that any of the teams, as long as they launch their mission by the end of this year, 2017, as long as they accomplish it the following year, they have their mission launched before the end of this year and they're still eligible to participate and possibly win the prize. And in the case of Team Indus and Team Hakuto, their mission on the PSLV wouldn't even be launching until December of this year. So it'd be definitely cutting it close and almost impossible for them to win it otherwise unless they could complete the milestones in January and February of next year. But maybe someone else will get there first. We'll see. Perfect. So, Jared. Yes. Mike has done a lot of talking. Now here's your chance to say something. I want to show everybody something absolutely mind-blowing, which is something that came out this week, which is that we have directly imaged planets before. So we've imaged planets going around other stars before, but we've never imaged a system of planets before until now. And this is what it looks like when you image a system of planets and you can notice them just barely moving. And this is the first time a multi-planetary exoplanet system has been imaged directly. And this data was gathered from a seven-year period from 2009 to last year, 2016 by Canada's Hertzberg Institute of Physics in UC Berkeley's Nexus for Exoplanet System Science. This star is called HR 8799 and it's 129 light years away. It's about 60 million years old and about five times brighter than our sun is. Now, the reason we could see those four planets so easily is because they are larger than Jupiter. All four of them are larger than Jupiter, so they're very, very big. The innermost planet orbits once every 400 years, so it's very, very far out. It's farther out than Saturn would be in our solar system. And then the outermost planet orbits once every 400 years, so that's why the outermost planet over on the left there just barely appears to be moving. But you could see that they are there and we've actually imaged an exoplanet system. And this is truly one of those things where it's the first time we've ever done this. So there's a lot of things where like gas is the first time we've ever done this, and really the first time we've ever imaged a multi-planetary exoplanet system directly using telescopes here on Earth. So this is very exciting because you can then figure out where you want to point the James Webb Space Telescope when it's up and operational in 2018 or 2019 in that region and get even better imagery than what we can get here on Earth, so very exciting stuff. And I was really thrilled to see this announce this. The chat room just like blew up comments on this one. Anomaly is saying, I want this as a screensaver, totally. Mr. Maccabar says, has the Eater one has a moon? No, we actually can't detect moons going around exoplanets right now because moons around exoplanets would be smaller than the exoplanets themselves and it's just very difficult to go through. But there is a team using Kepler data, going through the Kepler data trying to find exo-moons around planets, but so far nobody has found one. Awesome. Let's see, we have six million a baby. Yeah, 60 million years old is a baby for a star. But it is pretty large. You said the innermost planet was a 40 year orbit. I mean, obviously it had like a little sun blocker so that we could image the exoplanets. But was that star like way more massive than our star? That star would be about 50% more massive than our sun roughly. It's a little bit bigger. It's a big system. Big baby too. Big baby. That's it. That's very, very cool. I totally want that as a screen saver too because that looked really super trippy. That was awesome. It's awesome. I'm still kind of like, I can't believe they did that. It's great. Very cool. Mike. I kind of bring things closer back to home. A little bit. Also kind of exciting. Tell me more. I thought that this was really cool. Boeing on Wednesday of this past week revealed their new spacesuits or rather their new pressure suits for crew members that are going to be riding on the CST 100 Starliners. This is Chris Ferguson who is modeling that. The suits are designed with a lightweight fabric and they also have lighter gloves that have a special material on the fingertips so that they can manipulate touch screens. Anyone who lives in cold weather knows that when you're wearing gloves you can't really operate your touch screen phone or your iPad or anything like that with your gloves on unless they have a special material on it. This way they can manipulate a lot of the new touch screens that are going into their new glass cockpit for the CST 100. Something else with it is it has a zip up hoodie that ring with a big helmet so it should be more maneuverable than the shuttle pressure suits during launch in a sense. I think that's really cool and they definitely look really interesting and they also all the valves for the oxygen and gases are right in the front there so it should be easily accessible and there's a video as well that I didn't see until late last night on their YouTube page for Boeing and it shows a little bit more and shows how easy it is to maneuver around in it so that's really cool and I'm excited to see a little bit more of how it holds up and whether or not their data is good and if they're going to have to make any modifications because I don't know, that would just be really cool they should sell jackets like that to the general public that have a zip up helmet hoodie like that I would buy that. So the chat room is making a lot of different references to Lego Benny because they're getting a lot of like it looks like a Benny hip-hop looks a little Benny, looks a little Lego got it, okay but one of the questions that came up in the chat room it says, Jesserot wants to know why it's the color blue and Spaceman Sif said, isn't the orange color the necessary for rescue purposes so you can see the better in the ocean do you have any idea why blue was chosen other than Boeing blue and that's cool as far as I know just because they wanted to have it so blue can be used for emergency services as well they had the blue suits of the Gemini program so I don't think that there's any particular reason other than it's the same color as all of Boeing's fonts and paints and everything like that and even in the video they're just like, I'm proud to be wearing Boeing blue I guess that means it sucks for any other aerospace company with a blue logo that wants to do their suits in blue unless they want to be also Boeing blue so that would be interesting it just has to be off a little bit it has to be whatever color their blue is Grumman blue not Boeing blue, Grumman blue you're right, so sorry Jared, already having questions people in the chat room are wondering about JWST tell me a little bit more about what James Webb Space Telescope is doing so there was a story that we covered during our ninth season which talked about vibration testing and an anomaly occurring during vibration testing on some of the parts of the James Webb Space Telescope and that December 3rd test generated excessive vibration in a mechanism that holds the stowed portion of the folded mirror so the two sides that you see right there they actually will fold out to make the full primary mirror of the James Webb Space Telescope and there was an excessive vibration with them, well that vibration was successfully traced to a locking mechanism and it has been corrected so tests have resumed on the multi-billion dollar space telescope in preparation for an October 2018 launch on an Ariane 5 and of course this as we like to note is flying to a Lagrange point a million miles away from the earth so unlike Hubble it will not be easily serviced in earth orbit you're going to have to go a million miles away from the earth to do that so basically everything needs to work no big deal, that's kind of space in general though, right? it's fine, it just needs to work the first time 8 billion dollars so yeah, it's no big deal having to make that work right, exactly that should be fine that's not a big deal, right? there you go I would go wrong with it if they would mount an Orion SLS mission to go try to service it or fix it potentially, I mean everything has to go right with that too I don't know if it's I don't know if it's being designed to actually be serviced or not unlike Hubble was designed to be serviced, I don't know if James Webb is actually going to be is designed to be serviced or not I don't know right offhand if it is or not interesting, alright, good to know like you've got some Dream Chaser news what's going on there? well, just real quick, the Dream Chaser has arrived at NASA Armstrong Flight Research Center to go through a lot of testing including a drop test from a helicopter and I just wanted to show this image real quick it's really cool, I thought it was really awesome especially the next image here in the background there now the foreground, that's the HL-10 and that was a lifting body that flew from the same base there from July 1966 or 1975 and it's kind of the grandfather the next step from that was the HL-20 which the Dream Chaser is based off so I think that was just a really cool shot to show that kind of history here's the Dream Chaser coming back to do tests there and getting that really cool shot from essentially it's grandfather in an airplane genealogy let's say but they're going to be doing a lot of tests there and hopefully everything goes well aerodynamic properties, flight software and the control system and hopefully they don't have any problems with the landing gear this time when they do the drop test and can move on with the milestones that they need to make on the vehicle for their CRS-2 the commercial resupply services contract which is going to begin in 2019 for them for Sierra Nevada on their Dream Chaser and go through until at least 2024 hopefully longer than that so I just thought that was really cool NASA gym apparently in our regular chat room because I'm kind of bouncing between hosts in our regular chat room is saying that James Voteloscope is not designed to be serviceable but the anomaly says in the chat room that Hubble wasn't actually designed to be serviceable either which I don't know I wasn't a space geek back in the day so I apologize I would say that it was designed to have new instruments put in it interesting or else they wouldn't have those service doors on there oh yeah see that's a really good that's a good thing James Voteloscope is substantially further away from where Hubble is and there's no vehicle that can send humans to JWST for servicing whereas with Hubble we could send the space shuttle at the time up to Hubble to actually service the telescope so there's that aspect of it as well there's not to say that we can't design a vehicle in the future to go service James Voteloscope but basically if we have an anomaly where like with Hubble it was out of focus that happens with JWST uh oh we have no plans back that's it thank you Ben that explains that already Jared you've got some more stuff to tell us yes I want to show you guys some really cool images since that seems to be what I do on the show is show off cool images which goes R which is now being called goes 16 has finally reached its perch in geostationary orbit and it's sending back images from its advanced baseline which look a little something like this so there's that beautiful blue marble of the earth now these imaging systems actually generate the ABI actually doesn't just generate this kind of an image it generates 16 images 2 invisible light 4 in near infrared and 10 infrared channels 16 channels full disc scans of the earth faster than any other goes satellite does now it was launched on November 19th on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V in the 541 configuration with a 5 meter payload fairing for solid rocket boosters in a single engine centaur upper stage now this view has the resolution 60 times better than the previous goes satellites looking at the entire earth which will allow for more accurate forecasting and better data for meteorologists look at this of North America right here just a fantastic shot just a little bit cloudy on that day but still pretty good looking now what's cool I didn't know this is that goes 16 is actually using the moon to help calibrate itself so it takes images like this as well with the moon in the background of the earth so it's using that to train its sensors as to light collection and other things like that very cool work that the national oceanic and atmospheric administration and NASA are doing together with that spacecraft very cool really really awesome alright now that you've effectively blown our minds twice in this segment we're welcome we need a break okay okay so we're going to take a short break I know right and when we come back Ben is going to be back with an interview with the guy we like to call NASA Jim Jim Adams formally of NASA so we'll be right back and welcome back to tomorrow my name is Benjamin Higginbotham coming to you live from station 204's observation lounge now before we get started with our interview with NASA Jim I did want to give a huge shout out to all of the patrons of tomorrow who helped make this specific segment of this episode happen these are our escape velocity members they've contributed ten dollars or more to this specific episode we've also got our orbital subscribers those are people who've contributed five dollars or more to find out how you can help crowd funds this show as of tomorrow at www.treeon.com slash t-m-r-o alright we are joined now by Jim Adams known online as NASA Jim Jim you've had this I'm just going to really cover just a few points of your resume which your total time in aerospace 36 years total time at NASA 26 years starting off at GE Astro Space Division I want to touch on that in a moment then you move to the NASA Goddard space flight center you were there for 17 years finally ending up at NASA headquarters for nine years that is a very long time in space and thank you very much for taking time out of your Saturday to come on the show I'm sure you've got a lot of really fun stories over your decades of experience in aerospace I got more stories than you got time that is a good problem to have alright let's start off with GE Astro Space Division GE I think of as General Electric I don't remember them having a space like the guys who make my toaster in my refrigerator they had a space division or is that a different company completely they did they were some of the very first company they were one of the very first companies to be in space and over the course of the 1980s and early 90s when all of the companies started to merge GE merged what GE really wanted from RCA was NBC but they bought all of RCA and merged the two companies and then spun off the combined RCA space division and the GE space division to Martin Marietta Corporation and then downstream Martin Marietta and Lockheed combined to form Lockheed Martin which is just a fantastic space company today you know with many divisions across the nation and you cut your teeth over at GE what did you do down there was it like engineering side what did you do over there so I graduated from college with a BS in physics and at the time the microchip was just coming online and becoming useful and so I was down the road from a company in Ohio that made cash registers and so I thought what I wanted to do when I graduated from college was to design electronic cash registers back in the mid 70s they were still mechanical devices the first career mistake I made was not recognizing that they'd be hiring electrical and electronic engineers and not physicists so I ended up having to go with my second choice which was aerospace and I was hired into General Electric to do radiation hardening and understanding the radiation effects on the spacecraft that we build both on civilian spacecraft as well as military one of the really cool things I did almost right out of college was I was part of a team a military satellite out to Nevada hung it in a vacuum chamber and blew up a nuclear bomb underneath it not many people get to claim that fortunately we don't do that today but yeah early in the late 70s early 80s the cold war was still going on and the government was paying companies like General Electric to assure that their satellites would withstand impacts of or the effects of nuclear blast going back to rad hardening for a moment we hear a lot about radiation and space and we might be going back in your timeline a little bit but sending humans to Mars and radiation is that going to be as big of a deal as everyone makes it out to be or is it going to be a thing we need to worry about but not a stopping point yes it's going to be a big concern and a lot of it has to do with what we now understand about the radiation environment and space that we didn't understand back when I started and while the solar wind does produce some radiation it also shields us from cosmic radiation which has a much harder much more severe effect on the human body and so depending upon the time of the solar cycle that you launch the humans in and how much time they spend in space and how sensitive they are they could be severely affected by the effects of radiation in space and so those are big that's a big challenge keeping the astronauts alive as they go on to Mars spend time there because they're not shielded as well at Mars as they would be on Earth when they come back so a three year exposure is a big deal to an astronaut and I know we're diverging a little bit but International Space Station does have some radiation protection simply because it's still kind of protected by our magnetosphere a little bit it's not so high up that it's just like out in the middle of space it actually has a little bit of atmosphere up there still that's correct it's not atmosphere it's magnetosphere that actually shields you from a large magnetic field which diverts the solar wind as well as other bits of radiation sometimes solar storms get through and the radiation the background not the background the cosmic radiation is still higher than it is on the Earth because there's no atmosphere to shield us but the fact is that the ISS is not the same as flying an eight and a half month journey to Mars so you moved from GE to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center you're there for just under 20 years and I know you worked on a series of programs including STEREO which is a program that looks at the sun actually there you go there's a graphical representation of STEREO tell me a little bit about your experience at the Goddard Space Flight Center well that was a place where I had come because of my background in systems engineering that I gained at General Electric I had come to work on the International Space Station we called it Freedom Space Station Freedom back then but due to some re-organizing the package the work package that Goddard had had got terminated they changed the size of the space station and how they would attach payloads and who was going to manage science and that sort of thing and so they had me reassigned to do what I knew how to do which is build satellites and I got an opportunity to work on several heliophysics types of missions wind was the first one we launched that in 1994 and polar we launched in 1996 and then on to then I got moved into some resources missions like it's now called Aura at that time we called it EOS Chemistry and let's see quickscad and a number of other missions that I helped out with and then I was assigned to work on the stereo mission which is a pair of spacecraft takes two images like the one that was just shown and would combine them so that you could get a three-dimensional view of coronal mass ejections and the solar wind of course you couldn't we didn't put them in a stable orbit around the sun they're continuing to drift and so there was only a period of time of about two to four years where they were the right separation to do that 3D imaging and then they continued to go on around the sun and when they came out of conjunction stereo B was they were unable to get a lock on stereo B I think they've re-established communications now there's an interesting story there between stereo and New Horizons mission to Pluto if you're if you're interested I can tell you that yeah go ahead absolutely so both of the missions were the primary builder was the Johns Hopkins University applied physics lab in Laurel and they were actually stereo and New Horizons they were built side by side in clean rooms right next door to each other using similar parts and project manager he's got his blinders on and he is looking at a mission he wants the best quality parts he can possibly get so that you don't have problems in space because you don't send missions to be send to these kinds of missions you don't send either robots or humans to service them so I had bought all of the inertial measurement units that we needed and there was a parameter that showed that this was going to be like the most perfect inertial measurement unit that we could have gotten Honeywell I believe was a supplier and in fact that it was going to exceed the mission lifetime by a great deal which is the kind of margin that as a project manager you want because then you don't have to really worry about it over the life of the mission and got a phone call one day and they said hey look the inertial measurement units same model for New Horizons is not measuring the same as yours yours are better and so we want to take the ones for stereo and give them a new horizons and then you can have the ones from New Horizons which will still the predictions say will still meet your lifetime and I had my blinders on had no idea my future was going to include being the program manager program director for New Horizons and stamped my foot a little bit but finally somebody said put your big hat on Jim this is the whole agency you have to think about and so we did the swap stereo went on to have two extended missions and it was just perfect but then when stereo B came out of conjunction one of the inertial measurement units had failed and that's one of the reasons why it was tumbling and do you know that was just one year before New Horizons arrived at Pluto had we put that IMU on New Horizons they would have had a number of anomalies to deal with that they probably didn't need at that time I'm not going to say that they would have lost the mission but you know sometimes a manager gets it right despite of the project manager is whining but there would have to be fair on New Horizons I have to believe there would be redundant IMUs that's a pretty important part of the spacecraft right so if you lose one the computer is going to go oh well that data is bad and continue using the good good units that's exactly right Ben so what would have happened though is because they would have only had one operating they may have had to make some operational choices about how close to fly what kinds of maneuvers to do and when and they would have had to go through the whole planning cycle of all of that which would have just sort of stressed out the fly by team so it's like I said I won't say that they would have lost the mission but the fact that the IMU failed on stereo just sort of confirmed that the right decision was made it's also a little bit awesome that you ended up working on New Horizons so your own decisions earlier helped you you helped yourself your past self helped your future self so yeah in fact can I just take that one step further when we were launching stereo we did this slingshot maneuver around the moon so we basically put stereo into highly elliptical orbit we get closer and closer to the moon and then the last time we came up to Apogee the moon was there and one would sling off this direction and the other would do a maneuver like that and so we'd have one kind of out in front of the earth and the other kind of behind the earth well the deep space network when we were at that point it's a very critical point in the mission the deep space network was trying to supply us with I think it was four antennas to cover that a primary and a backup for each of the spacecraft and that was really stressing out the deep space network we ended up in a debate for antenna assets with the Cassini mission and we were told that we had to live I think it was with two antenna and not four because there was once in a lifetime science happening at Saturn and that we must relinquish these antennas to the Cassini mission and they were going to be taking science at exactly the same time as we were going to be doing this maneuver around the moon and so we finally figured out how to make it all work and everything went great we didn't hear back from Cassini so I assumed that they were fine, Stereo was fine and then my first day on the job let me see if I got it here in the downtown to work in planetary science they had this enormous picture ignore the text below but they had this you've seen this picture before this so the guy was showing me around NASA headquarters on my first day directing planetary science which included Cassini showed me this picture on the wall and he said while you guys were arguing with us about DSN assets this was the image they were trying to take and if you recall then that at about 10 30 o'clock and three quarters of the way out from Saturn there's a little tiny pale blue dot in this picture and that's Earth from Saturn it was one of the first images of Earth we had taken from Saturn with Cassini and so sometimes your decisions do come back to bite you so does that happen a lot debating over resources does that happen a lot trying to get deep space network resources moving assets from one spacecraft to another to figure out what's best for each mission is that a common occurrence it does and one of the things you should do sometime is interview one of the executives at JPL manages the deep space network which by the way is a phenomenal national asset it doesn't get a lot of praise but frankly you don't do missions like Pluto and Cassini and stereo and Mars you don't do them without the deep space network every bit of data that we get every command that controls them goes through the deep space network and so there is a limited amount of resources limited amount of time that you can use these antennas and obviously Mars is not the same direction as the moon at all times and Saturn and Jupiter they're not always in the same direction so you can't you can't always use a single antenna for multiple spacecraft and so there used to be I don't think they do it this way anymore but there used to be these weekly meetings where the planners for each of the missions would actually get into a room and debate who was going to get which assets and when and so it was fairly lively meeting apparently one of those things where people missions that actually had the most aggressive planner could get more airtime essentially Green Jim to ask and this is a pretty decent question sounds like we need more deep space network assets are there plans to extend it are you aware of anything to expand DSN? Yeah actually space network is trying to modernize they're trying to come into this century they had this kind of a virtual strategy that they didn't need necessarily the same asset all around the world but they were looking for ways to create a like a dynamic switch so that the planners could say I need a contact with stereo at this time and at this point in space and then there would be this an automated system that would sort of figure that all out and come up with a prioritized list of where to point the assets and when these are not cheap things a 32 meter deep space antenna is going to run between 30 and 40 million dollars and so you don't just sort of pop pop them up lightly anywhere on the other hand they are enablers for the missions and sometimes the missions are billion dollar missions and so these are things that kind of get maybe upgraded by missions along the way and in fact the 70 meter antennas that were famous for we've got three of them around the world were actually upgraded from smaller diameters as part of I think it was Voyager as part of the Voyager mission so as we look at talking data acquisition that actually segues beautifully over to TDRS which is tracking and data relay satellite system which is used extensively for shuttle missions because you can't send your radio signal down through the plasma so instead like in Apollo you'd have the blackout period and so instead you go up to TDRS and then back down and that's still used by spacecraft today and you worked on TDRS as well do you have any awesome TDRS stories that go with the stereo stuff well with TDRS I was the project manager for the current block of TDRS for such a short period of time it's more of a career story it's like I moved from a mission called GPM Global Precipitation Measurement which by the way launched on an H2A it was an amazing ride that they got but I was moved from GPM to stereo because the agency said listen we need you to go be a deputy project manager before you can be a project manager and at the time I was I was formulating GPM so I went from a formulation project formulation manager to a deputy project manager and then once we finished stereo and we got it launched they said okay here's a project you can work on it's TDRS so I was there for about six months and I got a phone call from Mary Cleave at NASA headquarters who said listen we'd really like you to come downtown and help with planetary science and so I had finally achieved what I thought was going to be my career goal which was be a project manager on a flight project and somebody said no no we really want you to come manage programs of projects and so that's kind of the career story associated with TDRS it was a fun time working with TDRS because there's some amazing technology there that a lot of people don't know about it was one of the first times that we used the technology that allows satellites to have direct access instead of us calling the satellite from Earth the satellite could phone home basically through TDRS some amazing technologies there doesn't TDRS and DSN go together in a way not necessarily today but as we start extending and doing more Mars missions as we start putting humans on Mars aren't we going to need to extend both the TDRS and DSN networks to kind of play together so we have this constant line of communication from Earth to Mars so so yes and the organization at NASA headquarters that runs TDRS also runs the deep space network and also runs the data network called the Near Earth Network which is like DSN but for all of the Earth orbiting satellites and and that's the virtual network that they want to pull together and I'm blanking on the name they had for it but they had this strategy where we would conduct a virtual switch and it wouldn't matter whether we were going to use a TDRS or Near Earth Network Aperture or a Deep Space Network Aperture the switch would help figure out exactly what was needed for particular missions but in general you can think about it TDRS is a relay satellite that looks down on the Earth so we can communicate up to geostationary just like that communication satellite that you mentioned on the H2A earlier in the broadcast and then it would reflect that data back down to Earth in some particular location TDRS or a DSN has these very big apertures which means very narrow beams and they're designed to be pointed way out into space into Mars and the moon and Venus and Saturn of course Pluto and so they're specifically designed for different sorts of mission profiles. Near Earth Network is the same deal they've got it turns out that most of our Earth resources satellites are in polar orbits which means that you can communicate with them in the polar regions of the Earth like Antarctica and the Arctic then you're going to get the most amount of communications time with them on a daily basis and so we've got some most of our assets are up above the Arctic circle on an island in the Arctic which somebody probably in the chat room can remind me what the name of the island is but it's up there I believe part of Sweden yeah so you worked on TDRS then that was at Goddard and then from there as you mentioned you moved over to DC where you became the Deputy Director for Planetary Science you touched on a little bit of what that entailed but now you're overlooking spacecraft what does that job title actually entail so the way that the Jim Green I doubt that's the same Jim Green that's in the chat room but Jim Green and I Jim was the director I was the Deputy Director he was the scientist I was the project manager engineer type so he, Svalbard there we go thank you Jazz Throwout just gave us the name for the island he took care of the science and I was the face of the program and I took care of the programatics and the engineering side of things and so together we managed a budget that was at one point in time about an eighth of the agency's budget one and a half billion dollars a year and I can't remember how many assets we had in space at any given point in time but we had assets in operations we had missions that were being built and we had missions that were being proposed and that ran the gamut from Cassini and New Horizons to all of the Mars rovers and assuring that that the Mars rovers not only operated well but the curiosity was going to get built correctly and as well as things that in the middle like if you recall from a while back there was this concept to send a boat to Titan so those sorts of things were all part of the portfolio that I helped to to Shepard so you mentioned curiosity we've actually talked about curiosity quite a bit before it landed were you surprised when the sky crane worked flawlessly or were you like nope all the models showed it would work I had no doubt in my mind so all along I had extreme confidence in the JPL team I was very confident that it was all going to work until like the last 24 hours and then and then I started to get nervous I guess maybe cold feet I'm not exactly sure but I was pretty confident that the team at JPL had thought of all of the contingencies and we thought through there were several independent review teams that had thought things through and knew that we had it right obviously there was a painful delay we had to delay 26 months because some of the motor actuators were not performing properly and we were just not going to make the launch window we made good use of those 26 months to assure that the mission was going to perform just flawlessly and then it did and boy what a relief that was I can tell you a story about the wheels on the rovers if you're interested yeah absolutely so in the early days of the curiosity rover there was an engineering model called Scarecrow and JPL was running that around the Mars yard at JPL and I went out to take a look at it and they were showing me how it was working and I noticed the tread on the Scarecrow had sort of a herringbone pattern and then in every rotation there was in reverse print the letters JPL and I said well what's that a visual indicator so that we can look back and count the number of visual indicators multiplied by the circumference of the wheel and we would have a backup way of knowing how far the rover had traveled because there's no GPS on Mars and so I came back and the guy Doug McQuistion who worked for Jim Green and I managing the Mars exploration program and I don't want us to leave JPL imprinted all over the surface of Mars tell them to change it you know make it NASA or USA or Earth or something and and so yeah there's the is that an artist concept or is that the Scarecrow that might be the Scarecrow and so so they did and what they did was they put in a series of holes and and that was fine and I didn't hear anything more about it until just before the launch Pete Warden who was the center director at Ames Research Center came to my office and he's waving this picture and he says do you know what this is and he shows me this picture of one of the wheels and I said yeah that's the rover wheel and he said do you know what those holes are and I said yes those are the visual indicators so that we can multiply by the number of times the wheels gone around the circumference and we'll know how far it's traveled he says well that may be but those holes are also Morse code for J, P, L so I had been still makes a great story engineers are tricky that way but one of the really it was a Mars mission as well that kind of made us aware of the power of social media we were landing the Phoenix lander in the northern regions of Mars and there was a science team and there was a limited number of resources one of the primary purpose of Phoenix was to determine whether or not what we were seeing from Earth was actually ice and so it would dig down and it would scoop up a bunch of soil and this white stuff and we were pretty sure it was water but we weren't 100% sure and as one of the scientists said you know you have to know it's water you actually have to taste it and so we had this device that you would put the soil in and it would heat up put a sample and hit heat up and then we would analyze the gases on board that were released as a result of heating it up and you only had a number of pristine cells in this device and so obviously these were precious measurements and the science team would debate whether or not this was the sample that you wanted to use to contaminate that cell with to determine whether or not you were actually seeing water and of course there were a lot of scientists there that thought that of course it's water we need to be looking for other things more organic kinds of compounds and so the device was capable of that so there was a lot of debate and a lot of tension about whether or not we should be looking for water or if this was the right sample or not and scientists can be a pretty lively bunch well at the time we had Twitter was just emerging as a useful communications tool and Jim Green and I didn't know anything about Twitter but Mike Griffin who was the administrator did and and so there was this science back room and the scientists were arguing and some of the younger scientists were twittering out verbatim the debate that was ongoing and it was like oh my god he just called her an SOB and and that sort of thing and so one morning Jim Green and I are sitting in his office and we got this phone call and it's like Jim this is Mike Griffin your scientists are making us look bad figure out what to do and so there was a big debate at NASA headquarters to first off figure out what this new social media asset was and some of the bureaucrats at headquarters said you got to find a way to shut this down and my gut told me that's kind of like the wrong thing to do we had to find a way to have people tweet responsibly I suppose was the phrase we were using and understand where these messages were going and the kind of visibility that you could get from it very very powerful communications tool especially for science these days and apparently politicians as well so so that was our introduction to social media and one of the assignments I had from Green was go figure out what this is and that's how I ended up with the NASA Jim account on Twitter and ultimately Facebook followed Did this lead into any of NASA's social media assets at all then like the public facing stuff because you look at NASA as a government agency they're one of the best when it comes to social media they're just fantastic at it with tweet ups and social gatherings and just incredible Twitter posts and beautiful imagery is this where that all stemmed out of I won't say the planetary science took 100% credit for that I mean the man's spaceflight program also knew of what the power of social media was and used it wisely and so but yes I think over time that's where people like Stephanie shareholds and others began to conceive of the idea of tweet ups and in science anyway Juno was the first tweet up for NASA science and of course Juno was one of my missions and I was a big proponent of the Juno and then ultimately the grail tweet ups and they're now called socials of course so what I've got Ben is from the Juno mission because that's really where that all started is I've got a couple of stickers decals this is the Juno sometimes I'm looking at the wrong screen here this is the Juno decal for launch and then they reissued it just last year for the arrival at Jupiter and so what we'll do a little later on is I'm told I can enter a code into the chat room and select somebody at random and we will send them these stickers from Juno there was a oh the social media story about Juno was I was in an elevator they always tell you you should have your elevator speech and this was before I had easy access to Charlie Bolden I was in an elevator with Charlie at a stamp unveiling from Mercury at Kennedy Space Center and I turned and I said look the next shuttle landing is the last human space flight event and forgive me for not remembering the STS number of that and I said the very next thing is the Juno launch and I said you know often times you'll get 100,000 or 500,000 people out for a shuttle event and for STS-135 and for an unmanned launch you know we may only invite less than a thousand people and most of those don't even show up and so I said what do you think about said to Charlie what do you think about setting a goal to have 10,000 people attend the next thing after the end of the premier human space flight program and he was excited about it to use a phrase it's over the moon and that's where Juno 10K came from so we began pushing that on social media and in press advisories that we were shooting for 10,000 people to attend Juno and as part of that we held a tweet up out at Kennedy Space Center we erected a tent and had air conditioners and that sort of thing and got a lot of press for Juno that way we had I believe it was 12,000 people show up to Juno that day it was very hot as I recall in August it was over 100 degrees and the metrics were an amazing thing we had never really fully understood what the reach of Twitter could really be until we started playing with Juno and the tweet ups and that sort of thing so social media is extremely powerful Juno was a pivotal point for us as well I believe you personally invited us when we were back at Spacevidcast to go down and interview some of the scientists and we actually got to see Juno on the ground and this was one of the first times we got to go in as official people and do some incredible things and it was just an awe-inspiring moment for us it was very, very cool to be able to see the spacecraft on the ground which we had never seen before and talk to the people that were working on it and see their enthusiasm and their I don't want to say apprehension at launch they weren't scared but it was definitely a let's get it going it was very, very cool and I feel like that was kind of as NASA was re-shifting itself into social and kind of testing the waters with what it could do it was very cool and I think Juno was hallmark in that whole strategy that started treating social media organized social media as media rather than as the scum of the earth and space gates and that sort of thing so here's what I'm going to do because I got another thing I want to give away as well that's assisted with Juno I'm going to randomly press the code here and we will see who the winner is of the Juno decals of the 126 users that are in the room at the moment and then that should go to Lars von Braun Lars von Braun so somebody will contact Lars and ask for his contact his postal address and stuff we will send those off one of the advantages of watching the show live you could win stuff randomly very cool absolutely so you were talking about the nervousness associated with launch I went through my swag and I found this let's see if we can get a good picture of it this is a launch coin produced by ULA that gave us a perfect launch on Juno and this is the Juno launch coin that ULA had minted as a result of that and so as we talk a little bit in about 5 minutes or so we will pick somebody else and mail that off to them as well so that will be awesome and actually you mentioned treating social media differently that is actually very valid we first hand experience that with NASA specifically Kennedy Space Center we tried and tried and tried for I don't remember it was a year, year and a half to just get down and be allowed to shoot a launch just to be allowed on site and it was groups like you and actually Miles O'Brien and a few others with the help of DC because Kennedy Space Center was like no they are not real media absolutely not and so we literally had to bring it to NASA DC and say no we do have a real audience here we have people excited about this and that was the turning point I think for NASA and it was right around that Juno time it was it was kind of a it wasn't like it just flipped it was it was like a I would say one to two year process at least from our side and it was quite amazing I agree it was a great time and and it was also a time frame when you know commercial space flight no pun intended was taking off and and so to have social media and commercial space flight become part of the the aerospace family rather than than you know stepchildren I think that was really important in terms of creating a relevance for what's going to happen in the future in aerospace the journey to Mars you know Elon's vision NASA's vision it almost doesn't matter it's a vision that says humanity is going to move out beyond and I think that's I think we need social media we need commercial space flight in order to make that sort of thing happen so you mentioned you didn't have very good access to Charlie Bolden at that time but then we actually just a little bit earlier we saw a picture of you right next to Charlie there we go directly next to Charlie pretty good access right there I assume that's when you moved up to the deputy chief technology technologist easy for me to say at NASA what did that job entail so I love this picture before we go on to that I love this picture it's taken by Bill Engels and it was the Grail launch and a lot of people on social media accused me of showing that's actually you know in the middle of the countdown but they were accusing me of showing Charlie how to play Angry Birds so what were you no the reality was the reality was that I'm trying to remember which rocket I think they were those are video cameras from around KSC that we were looking at we were in a long hold on Grail waiting for the weather and what we were actually looking at was the erection of the MSL launch vehicle on on the Atlas for vertical integration facilities those were fun times MSL and the Mars Science Laboratory yeah curiosity rover now yeah so yeah so I had been asked prior to that time frame the 2010 2011 time frame to consider going and working as the deputy chief technologist for the agency and twice I said no because I said you know I said to Bobby Braun then the chief technologist the agency would you know I got all of these launches coming up these scientific discoveries are happening we're changing how we look at the universe every single week something news coming out I said would you leave all of this and Bobby said to me no he wouldn't and then after we launched Juno and Grail successfully we I got a phone call from the deputy administrator at that time it was Lori Garver and she said listen we really need you to come do this technology job and I said okay it's third time and it's kind of a big deal person that's asking and so I I agreed to go do that you know in everybody's career there's a sweet spot and now looking back I would say planetary science was the sweet spot I enjoyed my time as deputy chief technologist but I don't think anything holds a candle to the things that we were able to do in planetary science what's your favorite moment in planetary science your favorite like you got to find this one time what would it be you know I'm goodness there were there were so many but but I would I would have to say landing on Mars so much energy went into that and it wasn't just the curiosity it was the phoenix lander as well getting our footprint robotically on another planet just spoke volumes to me and then to be a part of thinking about what the vision and the future would be was one of those things that you just really can't replace but I have to say there were emerging technologies that are just going to change the future not only for spaceflight but also for life on Earth and to have been a part of helping to develop those and promote those and encourage the agency to move from tried and true don't bring me new technology because it's a risk to being willing to take an acceptable risk that was a privilege as well. Are you seeing that shift in NASA right now continuing are you seeing NASA that you started at 25, 26 years ago a very different NASA than what we have today? Yes and it's largely I think because the technology enables the engineers to be as creative as they possibly can and I'm sure there's more creativity to tap into but when I started at NASA we had ways that we did things that we haven't helped you if you should introduce a new kind of code to something a new modeling then there were all kinds of processes that you'd have to go through in fact even as late as Juno something today that we take for granted this was 3D printed this was a concept mission that was going to go to the moon before they cancelled the constellation something as simple as 3D printing still even during the Juno days was embryonic in terms of real hard applications and so there's a story about I'm sitting in the chief technologist's office and I'm looking at these waveguide brackets that have been 3D printed out of titanium and I thought hey those are pretty cool and they and at the time it was Bobby or Mike Guzeric I think and he said to me yeah those are flying on Juno and I said oh really and so the next time I ran into my Lockheed Martin folks who just did an excellent job building Juno I said you know I saw these waveguide brackets that were supposedly 3D printed and I didn't know anything about that and and they all kind of got like sheepish looks on their faces and they had actually 3D printed out of titanium the waveguide brackets on Juno because it was going to save time and money and they chose to do it under the radar because they knew full well that NASA would want them to start doing engineering analyses and make a you know 100 of these things and cut them all up and all that kind of stuff but they were confident that they were going to work because they had done the right kinds of analyses and so they just flew it under the radar and didn't tell us I got to figure out how to shut my Skype down here because it's pinging so yeah but that was just back in 2010-2011 time frame today the guys out at JPL can 3D print this is a single print I'm looking at the wrong screen this is a fabric made out of this happens to be made out of steel but I've seen it in plastic and titanium as well it's got a smooth surface on this side and then I don't know if you can see the interlocking here it's not almost like chain mail yeah that's what I was thinking it's almost like 8 bit chain mail you cannot make this without 3D printing in metal it just doesn't happen and so we're we're enabling innovation and creativity somebody may say well what are you going to use it for we don't know exactly yet but there is something useful for having done this 3D printing structures in space maybe or I don't know if you know this or not but New Horizons had a layer of Kevlar to protect it from debris as it went through the Pluto system maybe we'll be making armor for deep space probes this way in the future but this was actually a gift from the retirement party because I was such a proponent of that JPL gave me that as a gift and you mentioned your retirement party do you no longer work at NASA do you miss it I do yeah I think the I think the opportunity and the vision of the agency is just prime for continuing to move forward I think we're now to the point where we can start talking about Orion and SLS and actually sending human beings to places that we just have only talked about for years and so it's going to be the last half of this decade it's just going to be awesome especially from a human spaceflight standpoint presuming that the new administration makes space a priority and I noted that we got at least a couple of words in the inaugural speeches so hopefully that will continue and that leads nicely to a question from Chris Radcliffe which is is a career at NASA something you'd recommend to young scientists and engineers these days yes I would say that the best thing to do at least for me I went and I got ten years cutting my teeth in the space industry and then I made a conscious choice to leave industry and go work for NASA that conscious choice has a cost associated with it because typically that's the point in your career where your salary and in the commercial environment starts to grow a great deal faster than it was as a civil servant but if you feel compelled to be a part of the space agenda for our government and really for the world then NASA is the place to make that happen and there's something to be said even if you're not earning the kinds of salaries that you can get from the larger aerospace corporations there's something to be said for driving the truck now that you're retired what are you up to what am I up to so I have a period of time where I'm really not allowed to work for NASA but I have set up a small consulting business and I'm working on developing a client base to do things like independent reviews and consult on proposals and that sort of thing because of my perspective in the meantime I have developed a skill in public speaking and science communication and so I have been asked by a number of organizations to come and speak and so the first month after I retired I took off for South Africa and I did 20 lecture 8 city tour speaking to high school kids, speaking to the public speaking to industry and government officials about the benefits of investing in space and art space is art I did an introduction to the electromagnetic spectrum a variety of things so and it turns out that in March I'm going to go back again so that's going to be a fun thing to do at the same time while I'm trying to build a commercial client hill. That sounds pretty incredible is it working? Are our kids getting excited? You go, you talk to them about steam it sounds like science, technology, engineering, art, math are they getting exciting going yes this is something I want to get into always always and it almost doesn't matter if they end up working for NASA or even in aerospace what matters is that you encourage them to stay in school you encourage them to focus on math to focus on the intersection between math and art is really I think that's going to be one of the emerging skills of our children in the future and to apply those things to apply their brain to the problems that the world faces and we've got plenty of problems for people to solve before we go into break you have one more thing to give out although the chat room request that you give away the 8 bit chain mail I don't think that's going to happen you said it was made out of titanium that's got it that's a actually this happens to be steel but I have seen versions of it in titanium and in typical 3D printed plastic as well it looks incredible on screen but one more if you want to send that through the chat room again another reason to watch live not just on demand you get to ask questions and free swag so Chris Radcliffe congratulations Chris there you go there you go so somebody will contact both of you and get your particulars forward to them to me and I'll drop those in the mail next week sometime so Jim if people want to find you online or if they want to hire you to speak wherever they may have for some sort of steam type event where can they find you Facebook it turns out to be the new business tool so if you just go in and type NASA Jim Adams you'll find me almost immediately you have some incredible stories I hope we can bring you back on in the not too distant future I'm sure we only hit the tip of the iceberg on all of this but absolutely fascinating thank you so much for taking time out of your Saturday to come on the show really appreciate everything you've done for us oh thank you and I've been a fan of space vidcast and now tomorrow ever since you guys got started and since the Juno days and so hopefully that will continue and it will go well for you this orbit round awesome thank you so much alright we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back comments from last week's show stay tuned we'll be right back we've always looked to the stars they guide us give us comfort help us find our way we see ourselves out there when we look up it inspires us and we long for something we don't yet know we yearn to go there so we venture forth we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other thing not because they are easy but because they are hard because that goes to serve to organize the vision of this I'm already choosing I'm already made here the eagle has landed it's one small step for man one I have made for this the exploration of space will go ahead whether we join in it or not many think we stopped exploring but we know our journey didn't end we've only just begun Brian is functioning perfectly at this point come with us and explore tomorrow and welcome back to tomorrow now before we get into comments from last week's show to everyone who makes this episode these are escape velocity members they contribute $10 or more to the specific episode we've also got our orbital subscribers there are people who have contributed $5 or more to this specific episode at orbital you also get access to free worldwide shipping from our swag store we've also got our suborbital subscribers at this level what is this I've lost my place this is $2.50 or more at this level you get access to After Dark as soon as it's available online and of course your name in the show and we've got our ground support crew these are people who have contributed $1 or more to this specific episode every single penny, every single dollar helps thank you so much to everyone on all of these lists hopefully you're able to find your names we keep getting so many more subscribers and fonts unfortunately get smaller but it means a lot to us and it really helps the show to find out how you can help crowdfund the shows of tomorrow head on over to patreon.com slash T-M-R-O I've just learned that one of the things that those patreon funds are going to be purchasing are some sound absorbing panels on these walls because when I shout I can hear it bounce back into my own ear all right Capcom comments from last week oh what did we have last week it was Dennis, oh that's right I wasn't here yeah we were here that's why we have no idea what's going on Dennis we go also really quickly Jim had another Juno patch to give away and gave that away during the break watch live I love guests who know how to run our technology this is really cool I will say Jim's interviews probably my favorite of all time for this show as was the chat room yeah that was fantastic we normally do the five questions at the end but we ran so long now I know we're a web show so we can do whatever we want but there's a point where you can't go forever so yeah we skip those I'm hoping we can bring him on again in the future and continue telling great stories because that was incredible and we get to his five questions at that time all right Capcom last week it was Dennis Wingo going back to the moon right this time you and I were here but you guys you guys took that show yes so so much fun to be like hi it's me hi me again hi still me right yeah oh that's right two weeks ago I wasn't here for two weeks was I yeah this is a whole lot of like sorry still my talking head I apologize hi for the third time yeah all right Capcom this one comes from Falcon 73 50 off of YouTube I think a test round to the moon would be a great test for SpaceX before their run to Mars I can't really comment on any of that you guys well I remember at one point and I think this was before even Falcon 9 even started flying Elon did have ideas for I guess what they would have called a gray dragon to land the dragon capsule with the Draco thrusters on the moon first before trying to attempt on to Mars but I think that that idea never really got pushed forward into any sort of development phase but that would be very cool to see them do test missions on the moon first and if any sort of anything popped up like the European Space Agency's lunar village it would be awesome for SpaceX to like do cargo missions or something like that and make extra money for their ambitions to go to Mars with their interplanetary transport system yeah and I feel like depending upon how much fuel you use with the super Draco's as well you could turn the dragon into a hopper vehicle where it can you know take off and fly somewhere else again and that would be really important to do comparative analysis of the surface of the moon a lunar emergency rescue vehicle ooh L.E. L.E. L.E. no no we got to work on the marketing on that one that's no good it's not a L.E. pretending L.E. marketing's come back they said you need to change the name alright not into that one sorry alright cap come next stuff someone needs to add L.E. into the Tars chat room system just call it L.E. and have it end with dragon L.E. lunar autonomous rescue dragon L.E. remember I wanted to make shirts per episode I think L.E. on the front and L.E. on the back oh man not wearing anything that insinuates that I'm better than I already am okay so next question sorry next comment I have derailed the show this is why we don't have you on 2001 let's go go go go you got this I can't even know 2001 Lex to lioness Lex to lioness yeah that seems alright Lex tilliness in the interest of passing on information the Japanese do not use a countdown instead they use a count and launch on 10 nice interesting that's really exciting if you think about it one two three my parents did a lot of countups with me when I was a child yeah that was for you standing in the corner and like yeah this brings up this is an interesting thing of how different space agencies count down or up to there like in the United States generally speaking zero is the moment you lift off the pad but that's not when your engines ignite you ignite your engines however much time you get down to like one and lift off but then there are other there's a different agency that's like zero plus one plus two plus three and I'm like oh what is happening right now yeah are you on space they light their engine at zero but they're still on the pad for what eight more seconds is that about right six to eight seconds Mike you might know it really depends depends on the mission but uh but yeah it's interesting how both area on space and uh India it in the in space research organization also do the the count up and sometimes it takes off at like plus four plus eight you know it just really depends on on which rocket they're using so much so use even with so use it doesn't actually lift off the pad until a couple seconds after they've counted down after zero so Dan Dan TC 24 in the chat room says we use the Von Braunian method which which is I believe correct right the zero being lift off is the the Von Braunian way of doing it I actually prefer that because then you know you know right that's the start of that that's the lift off is the thing right that that's what you're going for so if it plus one you haven't done anything yet something be wrong so anyhow right I prefer you may launch when ready after you sir um next one comes off of YouTube this one comes from Jack Quasar which I'm totally sure is a legal name you always have great guests but I find myself agreeing 100% with everything Dennis Wingo has said I certainly hope he's right about the direction of NASA over the next few years and James Tiberius Kirk is the best name for a cat that was amazing that was amazing but I was talking uh Ben and I were uh you know we weren't not here we were in Florida and we were trying to tune into the show because we realized you guys were on and uh it was it was right around that time when like the cat had jumped up onto his shoulder kind of thing and I was like what's going on Ben's like I don't know I think it's a cat and we're here and I'm like what what is oh that's James Tiberius Kirk and I'm like wait no seriously what is happening right now anarchy oh that is so amazing it was when mom and dad are away the cat exactly clearly no that was that was good stuff that was it was fun it was really great to be able to tune in from that far away and even though it may have sounded like that was a little chaotic to you or what have you but you guys did a really great job and it was super it was a fun moment to kind of to have um and Dennis is great Dennis is a great interview he's always has something interesting to say no matter what yeah totally totally good job I love how you make it seem like you were just casually just like oh yeah isn't our show on right now you want to watch that no well because with the time I am really bad I am not as good with time zones as uh Benjamin James over here and uh I just live in universal time everything I do is in you are they on are they they're on there now right like we should probably try and tune in with that and like Ben with where we were was not super amazing uh so that was kind of another issue with that was like I don't know can you get on can you do you have I have three dots you have four dots I don't know hold hold it was one of those like can you hear me now this is sort of how it felt so at least we found we heard some things going on uh you know had to watch it after the fact like most people all right next up the next comment comes off of Reddit this one comes from Brandon Mark that I always call Brandon Mack for some reason I apologize uh here's an awe inspiring thought whatever we'll see of KIC and I almost said and nine eight three two two two seven okay you sound like an automated phone sister yeah thank you that's what's going for eight thanks moopy three two two two right right five years from now is this your number actually I've been during the reign of the ancient Roman Empire since star pair is about 1800 light years away yep I almost said 18,000 I'm really bad with numbers you guys I'm sorry it's okay so that is really cool that is a really interesting thought it's uh like whatever you see five years from now we're only we're seeing into the past which is such a crazy astronomy is like the one way you can actually do time travel so yeah every telescope is a time machine that's right that's a good that's a good point it's a way better shirt than lard every telescope I don't know lard is a pretty good lard lard lard no lard how many of you would buy an f orbit 10 04 lard shirt I'm just curious I would only mind if it says I'm lured next stop next stop oh boy alright last comment for this particular show comes off of YouTube from Steven Thompson probably the fastest way to get to congress behind NASA returning to the moon will be China landing on the moon saving face politically probably trumps little things like saving the environment or moving heavy industry off the planet yeah you know probably right that's how we Carl Sagan just is like random shouts about Carl Sagan in our chat room going on right now I just realized I never fixed the close I saw him loaded up in preview and I'm like he's gonna yeah she she so before we go into after dark I will show you she mentioned prior to us going being gone for the last couple weeks or whatever it was that she she felt too short around everyone so let's just it was a little bit better when it was just Mike and I but I realized I was even looking up at the screen like this and I'm like man I'm tiny in that same day just built this which is all sorts of amazing so she just stands on that all sorts of TV magic there you go makes a difference even though all right everyone makes a huge amount of difference it does I'd like to thank everyone so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this week's show leave your comments on our YouTube channel Facebook or Twitter wherever you'd like so we can bring him into next week's shows next week's show is gonna be Dave this we're gonna get an update on the impossible drive the em drive another fan favorite another fan favorite no it's gonna be cool because there's more data that came out kind of a actual like I believe it's a peer reviewed paper now at this point I like data yeah it's data so we're gonna get an update on that em drive for those of you watching live stay tuned after dark is up next for everyone else will be available in about four weeks thank you so much see you next week