 We're very happy to have you with us. These webinars are monthly events for the Night Sky Network, though we look forward to continuing to livestream them on YouTube. For more information about the NASA Night Sky Network and the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, we'll get Dave at some point to put the links to find out more into the chat. And before we introduce Bruce, here's Dave Prosper with just a few announcements. OK, hi, folks. I'm so glad that you are all joining us this evening. Let's see here. First of all, I just got a couple of little bits of news, and we can get started here. So what do we got here? I got a little list. OK, so first off, NASA is actually holding a series of online workshops about the Mars Perseverance Rover and Mars Exploration. And they actually held the first one today, and the recording is already up. So you can join NASA experts and education specialists to ask questions and get teaching resources and share the excitement of space exploration in your community with NASA's Teaching Space website. And yeah, watched one earlier today and joined them on subsequent Tuesdays for more in-depth info about Mars Perseverance and find even more online educational events and workshops on their website. The link is in the chat. Or you can search for NASA Teaching Space on your preferred search engine. And that link is going in right now. The next announcement is more Perseverance News and Curiosity and all kinds of other Mars future and present robot-related news. If you'd like to help contribute to NASA science from your desk, you can by contributing to the online AI for Mars project, which asks you to help label terrain features from pictures downloaded from all of our craft around and on the red planet. So you can help train an artificial intelligence algorithm to help automatically read the landscape and help future and present Mars robots more quickly and safely traverse the dusty terrain of the red planet. You can find it at the link I'm going to pop in the chat. And you can also search for AI for Mars, which is one word with the number four in between AI and Mars. And just one little brief bit of Night Sky Network program news, this is the usual time of the season where we ask club coordinators to make sure you've reported on your events for the past quarters to receive, you know, to OK, it's surprises. But we understand that the current quarter, which was April to June, is a much quieter for clubs than usual due to the ongoing pandemic and related restrictions. So we have some updated instructions, which we also had in our recent newsletter, which is just if you can add reports to your events only if you've hosted any either online or virtual or in real life, if you have, or update your event statuses if they're already on the calendar to canceled if you did not end up holding them due to the restrictions. Both these types of events, the canceled and the actual reported events will be counted as participation in the Night Sky Network program for the duration of this pandemic and no clubs will be penalized for lack of participation during this time. And since the past quarter has been quiet, we're including both quarter one and quarter two events posted by clubs, both canceled and reported in the random grab bag from which we will choose five lucky winners for our quarterly prize. So five clubs will qualify to win any Eclipse globe from Sky and Telescope. And yes, that link is in the chat or you can look for the Eclipse globe, which, you know, is the globe of the earth showing the path of eclipses for this century, solar eclipses, I believe. And to be eligible, they must be updated by either canceled or reported on by July 15, 2020. So you have a month to do it. Winners will be chosen at random and notified the next day on July 16th. Yeah, a month out, you're good. And of course, if you need any help with getting these events reported or canceled or up in the first place or you just have other questions about using a site program, you can please contact Andy Sherwood, our awesome trainer and champion and she can help you get up to speed. And you can reach her at a-sherwood at astrosociety.org. And that is also going in the chat there. And of course, you can also reach us at night sky info at astrosociety.org and everyone gets that, specifically me and Vivian. And you can also find us on social network at night sky network. And that's it for me, Brian, back to you. All right, thanks, Dave. So for those of you who are on Zoom, you can find the chat window in the Q&A window at the bottom edge of your Zoom window on your desktop. Please feel free to greet each other in the chat window or to let us know if you're having any technical difficulties. You can also send us an email at night sky info at astrosociety.org. Also remember to down at the bottom to select all panelists and attendees. It defaults to just panelists and the only people who can see your messages are me, Dave and Bruce. So make sure that if you want your friends around the nation to see that you're greeting them, make sure that you select all panelists and attendees. If you have a question that you'd like to ask for Bruce and it occurs to you while you're listening to the presentation, then please add that to the Q&A window. Put it in there, helps us to not lose it in the chat. And so we'll be able to keep track of it and also whether or not we've answered it or not. So again, that's put your question in the Q&A window. Okay, we'll welcome again to the June webinar for the NASA Night Sky Network. This month we welcome Bruce Pittman to our webinar. Bruce Pittman is the director of commercial space development at Offworld, Inc. And is currently working as a contractor in the space portal office at the NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in the South Bay of San Francisco Bay. There he is the chief system engineer. Bruce is the co-founder and chief space science officer for the Not For Profit Future Frontiers Institute and is also the senior operating officer and senior vice president of another nonprofit, the National Space Society. So please welcome Bruce Pittman. Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. Let me see, back to Zoom. So let me start off with some of the usual remarks. Although I do work at NASA, I do not speak for NASA. So all of the things you're going to hear are my ideas and not necessarily NASA's ideas. So if you like them there, that's fine. But if you don't, it's all my ideas. Let me share my screen here and we'll get started. So I was kind of happy to be able to give this presentation because now is a very exciting time. I've been involved in space in one form or another for over 40 years. And I've been championing and advocating for commercial space activities for the majority of that time, probably for 35 years. I spent the early part of my career as a NASA civil servant and then I switched over and I left NASA and I became an entrepreneur. I was one of the part of the early startup phase of the space have that flew in the mid-deck of the space shuttle for many years. And so I've done a number of wild and wacky things over the years. I came back to NASA about 15 years ago as a contractor in the space portal office to kind of promote this idea of the commercial development of space and how this idea of public-private partnerships could help both the government and the private sector. So that's kind of a theme I'm gonna run through today. So I'm gonna give you a little bit of a historical background about how we got where we are today and then we're gonna go into the future, particularly the next 42 months and then a little, maybe a decade or so or more beyond that to look at some of the further range activities. But truly now is an exciting time. So I wanted to start the historical perspective with some of you may recognize this up in the upper right-hand corner is the last landing of the space shuttle. This is the space shuttle Atlantis. This is July of 2011. And this was the 135th flight of the space shuttle. And after this, the fleet was retired. And so now you can still see the space shuttle Atlantis down at the Kennedy Space Center in the visitor center where you can actually get up close and personal. One of the highlights of my career was in the mid-80s I was working on a project at the Kennedy Space Center where we were working on the thermal tile system for the space shuttle when I was working with Stanford University. And I got an opportunity to actually sit in the commander seat of Atlantis. So that was definitely a big thrill day for me. The what led to this final flight of the space shuttle was a rather tragic event that had happened on February 1st of 2003 with the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, which disintegrated disintegrated on our reentry into the Earth's atmosphere over Texas and the Southern United States. The vehicle was lost and all seven astronauts were killed. After that, in January of the following year in 2004, President G.W. Bush came out and announced that the space shuttle fleet would be retired after the completion of the International Space Station, which was still in the middle of its assembly process. So once the Columbia Accident Investigation Board had recommended that once the space shuttle, the space station was finished, that NASA should retire to the space shuttle fleet, which left NASA in kind of a tough situation that the space shuttle was not only used to build the space station, but it was also used to resupply the space station. So the question that they had to ask is, one, how are they gonna resupply the space station after the space station was completed and how are they gonna get the astronauts up and back? So our office that we actually started right about this time was involved in the very early phases. As a matter of fact, we actually came up with the concept for what turned into the COTS program, commercial orbital transportation services. And one of my colleagues, Dr. Allison Zuniga, actually came up with that name for the program. And this was a pretty revolutionary thing that NASA did back in that day, was they made a $500 million bet on teaming up with private industry to deliver a cargo and eventually crew to the International Space Station. And so in 2006, they released a solicitation, but it wasn't the normal solicitation that the government does. It was for what was called a public-private partnership using what were called funded space act agreements. And what this was different where in the normal kind of contracts, development contracts that the government does is they do what's called cost reimbursable or cost plus contracting, which basically means that all of the risk resides with the government and the government pays whatever it costs to get that develop. What we said that you should do a different approach and by partnering with the private industry, then you could shift some of the risk that the government triply takes over to the private sector as well as some of the funding requirements. But in return, you would back off and give the contractors, the private companies, more flexibility in how they carried out their development efforts. So that you were shifting some of the risk, but because now the government was taking risks in the sense they were only paying for performance, they were not paying for effort. And so since they were only paying for accomplished milestones that were agreed to by both the government and the contractor, then they were taking less risk. So they gave the contractors, the private companies, more flexibility in how they carried those out. So this resulted, SpaceX was one of the organizations that won one of those awards, Orbital Sciences Corporation won the other one. And what this resulted for that 500 million by the time all was said and done, there was some stimulus money from the 08 financial situation that was added in here. So at the end of the day, it was probably up about 800 million, but you've got two new launch vehicles, the Falcon 9 over on the left and the Antares over on the right from Orbital Sciences and then the Dragon and the Cygnus vehicles. So you've got two brand new launch vehicles and two capsules. The Dragon capsule is taking cargo up and back from space and the Cygnus only up and then it burns up on reentry. So this was a pretty successful model. And so the Space Act agreements were awarded in 2006, the Falcon 9 flew for the first time in 2010 and they docked with the Space Station for the first time in 2012. The Orbital Sciences was about a year behind that. So I'm gonna sound like a little bit of a SpaceX cheerleader here. And part of it is true, I am, I'm kind of a big fan, I've watched them, but they really have been driving innovation in the aerospace industry. And so I'm gonna kind of talk about some of those things as well as some of the other things that are happening. On the left-hand side here, you can see this was the Falcon 9, the original version that launched that first Dragon capsule to orbit back in 2010. And then you can see how it evolved. And this was what was called over here, this was called the full thrust version. So between this version over here, the initial one and this version over here, not only did SpaceX double the performance of the vehicle, they added another feature, which I will talk about in just a minute. And then on their own dime, on their own money, they developed this three core version of this, which they call the Falcon Heavy. This is the largest launch vehicle in the world and it is now flown successfully three times. And I'll show you a picture of that, of the landing of the side boosters in just a minute. One of the big things that they did that I think really makes SpaceX stand apart as a thought leader in this whole idea was the whole question of reusability. Like I said, I've been involved in this, in the aerospace business for many decades. And while the space shuttle was refurbishable and in a sense reusable, it took a tremendous amount of effort to refurbish a space shuttle and get it ready to fly again. While the original goal for the space shuttle was that you would fly one every week, the most flights that we ever did for the space shuttle was nine in one year and the average over the 30 plus years that the shuttle flew was about four and a half flights a year. So with the reusability just for instance, SpaceX has flown three times in the last two weeks. They have three orbital launches in the last three weeks and I'll go through some of those in just a minute. On the upper right hand corner here, you can see this was the boosters landing from both the side boosters landing from the launch of the Falcon Heavy. This shows the booster landing on the drone ship and over here it shows that actually on the drone ship and this is a picture of the drone ship that goes out into the ocean so they can land it here, they're landing on land, here they're landing on the drone. So with the launch that they just did over the weekend, they've now landed 55 boosters successfully by SpaceX. So about two and a half weeks ago, they had the commercial crew program. Again, this was one that I had been following for many years. I've been kind of waiting for this for 14 years since the original COTS award. There was an option D in COTS for crew. NASA chose not to exercise that and to go with a separate program for commercial crew that they started the Boeing and SpaceX was awarded in 2014 and SpaceX just delivered their first crew. This is Bob Bankin and Doug Hurley were delivered on May 31st. They docked with a space station and came in and they will be up there probably until the end of July or the beginning of August when the Dragon capsule will separate and return to Earth. Boeing also was one of the award winners here. They did their test flight of an uncrewed flight but they had some problems. They're gonna have to redo that later this year and they will fly crew probably in the first part of next year. So now we once again have the ability to fly American astronauts to the International Space Station from American soil, which we have not had from since the shuttle was retired in 2011. Since then, we've been hitching a ride with the Russians and the last time I looked, we were paying $81 million a seat for those rides. So it's good to have this back launching from American soil and American rockets again. So what this opens up is a whole new era of commercial space development and private access to space where there was many people that wanted to fly on the space shuttle but particularly after the loss of the challenger in 1986 that kind of killed any idea that that was gonna happen. But as part of the deal for the COTS program that the government has with the companies now it's Northrop Grumman bought Orbital Sciences. So it's now Northrop Grumman that flies those missions and SpaceX, one of the unique parts of this deal is that the companies own and operate those systems. They're not owned by the government and the government is just a customer to those. So while the COTS program was a demonstration the follow-on program for actual delivery of cargo was called the CRS, the Commercial Resupply Services. And so to date SpaceX has delivered 20 cargo flights to the space station. The Axiom with or the Cygnus and the Antares have delivered 14 payloads to the International Space Station. And now with the commercial crew we're starting to deliver astronauts. So what that gives is these companies now have the ability and the right to fly astronauts on their vehicles that are not NASA astronauts but are anybody that can basically afford the ride. And so I'm gonna talk more about that but the question is, is other than the space station where is there to go? So this is Bigelow Aerospace has been working for years to develop. These are called the B330 modules. This is 330 cubic meters of volume. You could see a Boeing module on the right side here and the Dragon capsule on the left-hand side here. And then a new player in the game that just started in 2016 is Axiom Space which is now just awarded one of the right to dock one of their modules to the International Space Station. This is scheduled to happen in 2024. And then what they will do is once the space station is retired probably at the end of the decade they will then transfer these modules out to become a free flyer here over on the left. And down here you can see the copula here's a close-up view of the astronauts wouldn't that be one heck of a view? So, I mean, I think that would be exciting. Bigelow also right now has a module up on the space station. This was a test module that they launched in 2016. This is called the beam module, the Bigelow expandable activities module. And so this is still up on the space station right now. It's used mostly for storage right now but this was basically done as a test. It's about, it's a relatively small thing compared to the B330. I think it's about 60 cubic feet in there. So one of the things that's gonna happen here I don't know when this is gonna happen but this was just announced earlier this year is Tom Cruise is going to hitch a ride with Axiom to the space station and he's going to make a movie or at least part of a movie in space. And you can see down here this is Senator Bullock in which was not one of the greatest space movies all the time. This was called Gravity but the special effects were pretty amazing although they got the orbital mechanics a little bit crazy and then this was Tom Hanks and his crew when they were filming Apollo 13. So Senator Bullock was flying around their wires. These people actually, Tom Hanks and Bill Paxton and Kevin Bacon, they were flying in the what's called the Vomit Comet a zero parabola airplane. And so they had to shoot all of those zero G things in 20 second segments where they could get microgravity in the airplane there. So that was pretty cool but Tom Cruise is actually going to go do this. And so anyway, it'll be interesting to see how this turns out. So you can all keep your eyes peeled for that. So he's gonna go up in the SpaceX in the Dragon capsule to the space station and film some movies. And the interesting thing here is NASA is very supportive of this which is a big change from 20 years ago when the first space tourist where the NASA administrator almost threw his body in front of the Russian capsule to keep them from flying private citizens to the American private citizens to the International Space Station where now that's a much more inviting environment. So what else can you do with this new launch capability? So one of the other things that SpaceX is doing there used to be multiple competitors here. One web was also in this marketplace but they just filed for bankruptcy. So I'm gonna talk about SpaceX and the Starlink system that they're putting up. So one of the things that they're doing is they're gonna put up a series of low earth orbiting communication satellites where most of the communication satellites are up in geostationary orbit. These are gonna be down below the level of the space station which is in pretty low earth orbit below 250 miles. And what they're designed is to provide worldwide broadband communications anywhere on earth. So they've got about 480 satellites up there right now. They launched the other ones, the previous ones a few days ago, the last batch of 60. Actually, they only launched 58 and I'll explain that in a minute but they've got another one planned for next Monday on the 22nd. And so by the fall, they plan to have 700 or 800 of these satellites up and they will start commercial operations. And then again, they launch on the Falcon 9. Starting next year they not only will have communications with the ground, they will have laser interconnects which will allow the different satellites rather than just talking back and forth to the ground, they will be able to talk with each other. And that's quite a sophisticated and capability enhancing feature that's going to be added. That's quite a bit of technical sophistication and that's supposed to come online in 2021. So by the end of the period we're talking about by 2023, they should have the majority of those 4,425 satellites in orbit. Right now they have approval from the FCC to launch as many as 12,000 and maybe as many as 30,000 satellites. So not clear how many they ultimately want to put up there but they are definitely keeping their options open. The thing that's significant about that is if you look at the broadband worldwide communication especially in the developing world and the part of the world where fiber optics cable is not currently available, it looks like the market for this kind of communication could be in the 20 to $30 billion a year range. So there's quite a lucrative market if you can tap into that. One of the other things that they launched on this last launch was they launched three satellites from planet. Now again, this was another spin out from NASA Ames Research Center. In the upper left there's, this is Will Marshall, Robbie Schingler and company and they were research scientists at the NASA Ames Research Center and they started looking at the idea of small sats and what you could do with a self, basically cell phone type technology. And so this is the full size view of their early satellites that they did. These are called DOVs. And right now there's about 250 of these up in orbit right now. And they take these kinds of pictures down here on the left, this is a picture from one of those DOV satellites. And so they basically take a picture of the entire solid surface of the earth every day. And this is about five meter resolution. These satellites over here are called SkySat. This was purchased from Google, which is a system that they had purchased called Curebella. And these are higher resolution satellites. And this is about half a meter resolution here on the right hand side. And you can see that's a pretty stunning view of San Francisco there. And they just launched three more of these satellites. So by the fall, they will have 21 of these satellites up in orbit. So the 21 of these satellites plus the 250 of these satellites will give planet this remarkable capability to look at the earth every day for all kinds of different reasons. So they've got commercial customers, they've got government customers and they're not the only ones out there. There's a number of other companies that are doing similar kinds of things, but this is another way that access to space is allowing us to do things that were never possible before. One of the things that they're really watching very closely is the, unfortunately not a lot of ability to do things about it. It is down in South America, the deforestation in the Amazon is one of the things that I know Planet is looking at very closely. So let's go back to the space station for a minute and talk about some of the things there. One of the things that NASA's been doing over the years is trying to make more and more, it easier and easier for non-NASA people to access the International Space Station. Congress in 2006 established what was called the ISS National Lab and they made the US portion of the space station a national laboratory which is operated by NASA but is not owned by NASA. So this ISS National Lab has half of the capability of the International Space Station, the US segment and half of the logistics both crew time and up and down mass for these non-NASA customers. And so NASA assigned a number of these space act agreements with companies. One of them is with a company called NanoRacks which has flown a large number of experiments on the space station. They now have not only internal spaces but this is an external platform for NanoRacks here in the upper right. And then this module right here which is going to be launched in the fall, this is called the Bishop airlock. This will be another airlock that they can use not for putting people in and out but putting experiments out into space from the space station. So this is something that a lot of people are starting to figure out how they can use. Another company that's doing a lot of work in the life sciences area is, this is a group out of Kentucky which is an outgrowth of a group called Kentucky Space and it's called Space Tango. And they're doing a lot of work in the life sciences area up on the international space station. So again, these are all done as public-private partnerships with NASA using these space act agreements. Some other companies that are doing some work in there, one of the things, and this was also something that grew out of work at NASA Ames. This was a spin-off from Singularity University called Maiden Space. And Maiden Space put up the first 3D printer in orbit. And again, this was done as a small business innovative research program with NASA. And then they did the first test unit back in 2014 and then they teamed up with Lowe's and they did a commercial version of this thing which is up there right now. So if you have something that you want 3D printed in space for whatever reason, you can contact Maiden Space and they will, for a certain amount of money, they will print you something in space. They're also doing a large number of experiments. This is for an advanced fiber optics technology called Z-Blan that they teamed up with Thor Labs to see if they could make Z-Blan in space. This spool holds about two clam motors of fiber optics that you can make from about one kilogram of preform. So if you can make high-performing Z-Blan better than you can make on Earth which they believe they can do in microgravity, this one spool right here could be worth several million dollars. So it could be a very valuable thing. This could be the start of space manufacturing. So there's a number of other companies that are also doing this. Physical Optics Corporation is also flying an experiment and there's a couple of other ones up there that are flying things. It's a not easy thing to do that microgravity is kind of counterintuitive. It takes experimentation, it takes learning cycles, so it takes numerous experiments. Almost nobody gets it right the first time, but I think one of these folks is gonna be successful and they're going to be successful with this. On the life sciences side, there's two bright biological 3D printers up there, one from Russia and one from a company called 10 TechShot which is teamed up with a terrestrial 3D printing, bio 3D printing company called InScript. And they've got this 3D bio fabrication facility that is flying up on the space station right now. And they've actually grown, printed beating heart tissue in microgravity from human stem cells. So it's a pretty amazing technology. So the end result of this, this not sure when this will happen, but the idea here is that eventually the idea that you could make a print a kidney, print a liver or even print a heart or a lung in microgravity because now you don't need scaffolding, you need down here on Earth to support 3D structures. In space, you could just print whatever shape that you want and it'll stay where you put it. So that makes it much easier to grow these things in a much simpler fashion in space than you can grow them on the ground. So this is another one of those areas that has, I think a lot of potential for the future. So I would expect definitely, in this decade, you will see some of these things come to fruition. Out in space, outside of the ISS, Made in Space is also working there. They have developed a robot called the Arconaut. NASA's given them a $72 million, what was called a step award to demonstrate this capability in space. This Arconaut, Tethers Unlimited has a similar kind of capability called SpiderFab that NASA has also been supporting here. And then Northrop Grumman has just launched what was called the Mission Extension Vehicle. So this is the servicing part of this, where they just basically take a satellite that's come to the end of their life and by grappling onto this Mission Extension Vehicle to the kick motor that got this out to geostationary orbit, they're able to extend the life of these satellites and without having to spend the money to put up a new satellite, the companies that own these satellites can get another five or 10 years of service out of them at a much lower price than replacing the satellite. So this was the first demonstration. It's just happened this year. They have a number of other customers that are signed up. So I think this is where you're going to see, rather than throwing things away, I think you're gonna see things like this where they're repairing and servicing things in orbit. And this is all done robotically. So there's no people involved in this. In any of this, these are all done robotically. So there are some new vehicles coming along. So these are three new vehicles that should fly within the next 12 to 18 months. On the left is the United Launch Alliance Vulcan. This is a replacement for the Atlas V, the new Glenn, which is from Blue Origin, which is a heavy lift launch vehicle. This is in the 45,000 pound class to Leo. And then the Starship Super Heavy from SpaceX is over there on the right. So what you'll see is probably 30,000 pounds for the Vulcan, 45,000 pounds for the new Glenn, and 100,000 pounds plus for the, no, 100 tons plus 220,000 pounds for the Super Heavy. So what you'll see is there's a lot of new capability. The things that's exciting is on the Blue Origin, the first stage is gonna be reusable. On the Starship and the Super Heavy, the whole thing is supposed to be reusable. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the Starship and the Super Heavy and what they're planning on doing with that. One of the things that they're looking at and trying to accomplish with this is what's called point-to-point, where I don't know how many of you've been crammed in a 12 hour trans-Pacific airplane flight. I used to do business in Hong Kong. So flying in San Francisco to Hong Kong was just a really, really long flight. Well, what they're doing now is they're talking about with this point-to-point suborbital capability is you almost go to orbit. You would launch this thing from an offshore platform and you would go around the world to these long distances. Probably the longest one here is London to Sydney in 51 minutes. So if you've ever tried to do anything like that, that's pretty amazing. London, New York in 29 minutes, New York to Shanghai in 39 minutes. So the idea here was if you could do this at a reasonable price, then would there be a market for this? So again, one of the recent estimates was that the market for this kind of a service, and again, this would probably be more than 42 months now, I would say, but by the end of the decade, you might see something like that. And what you would start off with this obviously, or not so obviously, is you start this off with cargo. If you really wanted to get something around the world for FedEx or UPS or one of the other services, doing this on a suborbital if it was really a high priority payload, you could test out this technology with cargo and then only add people when the flight safety had been demonstrated. So they're estimated that the market for this, if you could fly people, could be in the range of $20 billion a year. What about the moon? You know, a lot of talk about going back to the moon. So NASA has two programs I wanted to mention here. One is called for robotic return to the moon called the commercial lunar payload services. And these are the things that are supposed to fly in the next few years. Astrobotic has two landers. One is called the peregrine on the upper left and the griffin on the, which is a small lander, which is supposed to fly in 2021. And then in 2023, the griffin, Astrobotic griffin lander is supposed to do. And up there, it's carrying the Viper rover. So this will be a water exploration rover that NASA is going to send on a commercial lander to the moon to look for water. And then in 2021, the Intuitive Machines is going to land a robotic payload on the moon. And then Mastin down in the lower left-hand corner is planning on landing a payload on the moon in 2022. So that's a program. And again, these again are done under NASA's public private partnership program. And this is all done out of the science mission directory. So this, and then over on the human side of this, NASA just earlier this year announced their human landing systems. And there was three awards for that, the Dianetics on SpaceX and Blue Origin leads a team with Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Draper Labs to deliver. And so for over the next 10 months, NASA has put up almost a billion dollars, like $980 million to these three companies to mature their designs. And the idea is to get one of these, to at least one of these to the lunar surface by 2024. And then again, a little speculation, both Elon and Jeff Bezos have much bigger plans here. Elon wants to build a city on Mars. So this shows some of the examples of his Starship, which is designed to carry a hundred people to Mars. And Elon's ultimate goal is to have that ticket to Mars be less than half a million dollars. So you could imagine that's quite a revolutionary breakthrough. So there in the upper left-hand corner shows their moon-based Alpha, which they would like to do and he said that going to the moon would be a third or less of what it costs to go to the moon. So now you're talking about a few hundred K, which is not trivial money, but it's certainly not feel part of the pun, not astronomical. And then the final thing I wanted to show was this is something that Jeff Bezos has been talking about since he was a senior in high school, since this was from his valedictorian speech in 1984 when he graduated from high school. He's been talking about millions of people living and working in space and then turning earth into a rezoning it, residential and light industrial and moving all of the heavy industry off of the earth where it belongs. This actually came out of a summer study that was done in 1975 at NASA Ames and at Stanford called the Space Settlement Summer Study. And then there was another summer study that was done, a follow-on study that was done in 77 on space resources. So this is one of those pictures. So this is what actually got Bezos excited, not only about space, but about going out and making a lot of money, not just to make a lot of money, but so that he could go do this. And I actually got a chance to meet him at one of the National Space Society meetings. I'm gonna talk about that in a minute. And yeah, he acknowledged that this is what got him excited about space and spurred him to give up a good job on Wall Street to go found Amazon. So if you want more information, the National Space Society at nss.org, there's a bunch of information there, it's all free. So that there's a good historical reference there about a lot of the NASA studies that were done and everything. And then starting tomorrow, there will be a registration page for a, it's called a day in space, which will be a virtual event. We normally do a space or an International Space Development Conference, but this year, because of the coronavirus, we weren't able to do that. So this is going to be a virtual event that we're doing in July, and it'll be free. And so you're all more than welcome to sign up to that. And if you want more information on what we're doing at the space portal, you can go take a look at us there at the nasa.gov website. So on that note, I'd be happy to take questions. All right, well, thank you very much, Bruce. We've got some pretty good questions here. And so we'll leave this slide up for a little bit so that people can get that. But at some point we might want to have you stop sharing so that we can see you. So this is a group of astronomers that you're talking to. And there are a number of questions having to do with the Starlink satellites and some concern about those and their impact on the astronomy that's being done. And so do you have any insight about that? So yeah, the Starlink satellites, yeah. So Elon has been working with the astronomical community. What they've been doing is on the last batch of satellites they put up, they've been putting up the sunshade to kind of cut down on the reflections. I haven't heard how those are working, but I think that they're working out okay. And so they're planning on flying that on all of their future missions. So they are taking this seriously. They are trying to work with the astronomical community to try to mitigate the impact of that. I think the exciting thing, and this was from my previous life, I think one of the things that I think is exciting about these capabilities will being able to move astronomy out into space and put much bigger telescopes out in space so that you can do much more significant thing. We're spending $10 billion on web right now. And one of the programs that I managed back in the mid-80s was a thing called LDR, which was kind of what web kind of morphed into a smaller version of that, where web is about six and a half meters. What I was envisioning was we were trying to do conceptual designs on a 20 meter infrared sub millimeter telescope. And so I think with those kinds of things you could actually look at imaging exo stellar planets and things like that. So I think two things, one minimize the impact on terrestrial astronomy and then two try to use these new capabilities to enhance space space astronomy. Okay, a kind of a related question of that was, I guess these hopeful astronomers that somehow if they get mitigate the reflectivity, how long are the starlings satellites gonna remain in orbit before they decay or are they in a pretty stable orbit? No, they're like I said, they're in a pretty low earth orbit, but so they will decay. So that's one of the other things I had actually put some slides in but decided in them time to go into that was orbital debris is another one of the big things that you have to worry about up there. And so these are a low enough orbit, but if they wanna keep a commercial service then they're gonna have to replenish those satellites. So even if some of them come down, they're gonna have to replace those with new ones to keep their constellation and their customer base. So now hopefully those will be smaller, those will be less reflective. So as time goes by, you would expect those to get better and better at it. So whatever problems that we have in the near term, hopefully that will go down over time. So one person kind of related to both of those issues, the between the star link and the debris made note about space law and how space law draws on any of these and how are we managing some of these concerns and the commercialization in space? Is it kind of a free for all or are there anything that actually governs what they can or can't do? No, everybody that launches, every commercial provider that launches needs a launch license from the FAA. So the FAA gives out launch licenses and you have to kind of show what you're gonna do and how you're gonna do it. And so there are rules right now, they're pretty loose. There's government, the national space policy talks a little bit about orbital debris, but I think it definitely needs, I think right now they're saying you should bring it down within 25 years. I think a lot of people saying you have to do a lot better than that, that maybe five years would be a good goal after the end of life that you have to be able to get it out of the, to be able to retire the thing and either make it so that it's not a hazard anymore by reentry or whatever. Or what some people are looking at doing is that basically harvesting this dead hardware, it's high quality materials that are up and already in orbit. So why can't you just repurpose these or recycle these on orbit? So actually NASA has done some looking at that. Some of my colleagues from NASA aims from the space portal have looked into this and it looks doable. The problem right now is that due to the international law that where if you are out at sea and your vehicle is abandoned, then there's a right of salvage in space that doesn't exist. So if you want something into space, you own it forever. So, and so if somebody goes in and decides that they wanna harvest your satellite, that's considered a hostile act. So you would need somebody's permission even if their satellite is dead and you wanted to go salvage it, you would need their permission to go do that. And since about 80% of the stuff that you'd really like to salvage out of there these big empty upper stages and things like that, about 80% of the stuff you'd really like to get out of orbit is Russian, you'd need to go cut that deal. But there are some international law that governs what I guess a space law that kind of governs some of these activities then? Right now the treaty on the peaceful uses of outer space is pretty much the thing that controls it. The problem here is that this was written back in 1967 before all of this stuff happened and they didn't really foresee this stuff. There's some follow on kind of agreements. All I would say is we probably need to do more but that and people are talking about it. The United States is trying to address this in the orbital, in the space policy. I know that the National Space Council, this is the thing that they have on their agenda often is talking about what's called space situational awareness and space traffic management and orbital debris control are some of the topics that they deal with. But I would say more work needs to be done. Okay, so let's see, what else do we got here? So you talked a little bit about the dream about going to Mars and so given your experience and knowledge, what's the likelihood that Elon Musk is gonna be successful or anyone else is gonna be successful that NASA is gonna be successful that going to Mars, let alone going back to the moon? Well, I'd say it the other way around. It's much easier to go back to the moon than let's go to Mars. So I think that the chances of us going, putting people back on the moon is pretty high. You could argue about when. I think we'll also, the nice thing about what Elon is doing is if it works and I've learned not to bet against Elon, he's been pretty successful in doing, making things that seem to be incredibly or impossible happen. Not always when he wants them to or when he says he will, but eventually. The nice thing about his architecture is it's extensible that if you can really carry 100 to 150 metric tons to the moon or Mars, and I have to say, the part that I left out there is that requires you to refuel in lower orbit. So you have to have a tanker version of this where you can go and refuel the starship in lower orbit, and then you can go to the moon and back without refueling. You can go to Mars and land, but then you would need to refuel on Mars to come back to the earth. But that being said, it's one thing, if you're gonna go to Mars and you're gonna go to try to do it on the cheaper, with really a minimal amount of equipment, if you can take 100 tons or 150 tons or even send two vehicles and send 300 tons of vehicle, it's a lot easier to survive on a place like Mars if you can carry a whole bunch of stuff with you than if you're trying to live out of a backpack. Anybody that's gone on a European tour knows that if you're trying to live out of a backpack, it gets kind of sporty after a couple of months. So I think that's one of the advantages he has, but Mark, well, both of them are daunting. I think there's an awful lot of stuff that we have to learn that we haven't paid enough attention to about human factors and closely with life support systems and recyclability on the moon, you have to worry about the moon dust and on Mars, you have to worry about the perchlorates in the soil could have some severe health implications. So a couple of the things that you were talking about and I'm gonna see if we can kind of lump some of these together here. So it's apparently significantly more cost effective to have the SpaceX taking the astronauts to the ISS. And with, there's been some plans afoot to, I guess decommission the ISS, but it looks like according to some of your slides, there was some planning to have some new modules put up and some new efforts. And so are there plans to privatize the ISS with that lower the overall costs of running the ISS along with the lesser costs of using things like SpaceX to transport astronauts and cargo? That's a really good question. And there's a lot of debate going on right now. The Trump administration had wanted to basically terminate the ISS program in 2025. Congress did not agree. So the Congress is basically looking to extend out the life of the ISS to at least 2030. But at some point the ISS will come to an end. So what NASA's been focusing on recently is trying to look at how do you transition from the ISS whenever that comes to an end and however it comes to an end to what comes next and how do you do that seamlessly so that there's no gap? So there's no time between when the space station ends and these commercial things happen, we would like to have an overlap so that there's no gap there. And so that's, I know that I just had a telecom today with some of the space station folks and I know that this is something that's on their agenda is how do they do that? What kind of planning and transitioning do you need to do so that there can be a seamless transition as possible from the government owned and operated to commercial operations where the government is a customer but only one of hopefully many? Yeah, that seems to be one of the things that we're not very good at. We retire systems without having the next system in place. And so if they anticipate the ISS to be retired in say 10 years, then how do you make that seamless? We only have 10 years until then and that's not very long when it comes to engineering and planning these things. And so what about the private ventures, the more commercial ventures, the regulations that are governing them compared to the NASA regulations for them, it seems like to qualify the hardware that the NASA, it's much more restrictive than perhaps that some of the commercial companies would like. Yeah, because so there's two issues here. So one is if you want to fly NASA astronauts, you have to fly past NASA's rules. So like when Boeing and SpaceX wanted their contract was to fly NASA astronauts to the International Space Station. So you had to pass NASA's safety and all that kind of stuff. If you're just have a commercial vehicle, whether it's Axiom or whether it's Bigelow or whether it's one of the other providers that's contemplating doing this, if NASA's not involved in the process, NASA has no say in it. Again, you would need a launch license from the FAA but basically the FAA is basically worried about that you're not gonna hurt any of the non-involved public. One of the other blank spots in space right now if you'll pardon the pun is that there's people that the FAA controls the launching stuff into space. They control the return of things from space back to the earth. The FCC controls communications in space but the actual operation of stuff in space is kind of that is kind of the wild wild west. There's nobody that really has that responsibility either internationally or in the United States even. It's not clear. And there's people that are jockeying for that jurisdiction to go do that but right now that's kind of ambiguous. Seems like there's a lot of ambiguity and so we'll kind of maybe go with one last question here where we're over time just a little bit but this is a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for engaging here. So kind of a last one and it was the last question that popped up here that brings up a concern that this person has how well will the market forces govern that safety versus the regulations? If it's not cost effective to have an accident for a private company either but how well will market forces do with presumably there will be accidents and PG&E takes on lots of liability and they've been found at fault for those big fires in California. And so in some ways it's kind of a similar sort of scenario it says. I think that to answer the question directly that's a really good question. I don't know the answer to that. The I think encouraging sign though is government is or the private sector is asking the government for regulation. The private sector is saying we need some guidelines if nothing else than to limit their liability if they can say that we were following the government guidelines and there was an accident and that's one thing if they're just saying well we had to guess what was a good thing. This is similar to the aviation industry in the 1920s when the airline industry came to the federal government and they said we need some regulations because every time there's a crash we're getting sued. And so we need some government regulations to say what are best practices? What should we be doing? What if we do this? Can we say we're being responsible to the government guidelines? So they actually work with the federal government to establish those guidelines. I think something similar I've already heard. I've been part of some of those discussions where some of the people I thought I would never hear say that we're saying that we need to be, we need some government regulations and I was pretty much blown away. Wow. Well, let's hope that wise minds will prevail and come to a meeting of the minds that makes sense. Amen to that. Yeah. Well, that's all for tonight, everyone. Thank you so much, Bruce, for joining us this evening and thank you everyone for tuning in. So you're about to find this webinar, along with many others on the Night Sky Network website in the Outreach Resources section. Each webinar's page also features some additional resources and activities. We will post tonight's presentation on the Night Sky Network YouTube channel in the next few days. And actually, I think since we're live streaming it's kind of automatically populating that with that. And so we'll just kind of go in and do a little bit of cleanup. Join us for our next webinar on July 23rd when Theresa Nevis can kill off, I probably did not pronounce that correctly, from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center shares with us the latest from the NASA's Solar Orbiter mission. So again, keep looking up and we'll see you all next month. And good night, everyone. And thank you again, Bruce. This is really fascinating, you know, topic. And I thought we had some good questions too, so. Thank you, Brian, really appreciate the invitation. Yeah, well, thank you so much. And maybe you were looking ahead. I think it was.