 Good evening and a very warm welcome to everyone here. My name is Pavi Ravi, and I'm from Singapore. I'm a senior in the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and I'm delighted to introduce the Chief Marketing Officer of the Field Museum. Ray DeThorne joined the Field Museum as Chief Marketing Officer in February 2015. As CMO, DeThorne works with the Museum's Communications, Exhibitions and Guest Relations staff to transform the visitor experience to a more personal and interactive journey of scientific discovery. He works to drive revenue growth and tell the story of the Museum, its scientists and its collections, in a compelling manner. A self-professed museum fanatic, DeThorne grew up all over the world as the son of an Army officer. This allowed him to visit many of the world's greatest museums and natural wonders and created in him an appreciation for the natural world and the role of museums. DeThorne earned his Bachelor's and Master's Degrees from Michigan State University. He currently serves on the Board of Directors and as the Marketing Committee Lead for Ronald McDonald's House Charity of Chicagoland and Northwest Indiana. Without further ado, please put your hands together for Ray DeThorne. Thank you. I detected a slight groan at the mention of Michigan State University. Was that my imagination? It's my pleasure on behalf of the Field Museum to return this famous Martian meteorite Lafayette as a loan to Purdue University on the occasion of your 150th anniversary. I mean, really, it's an honor. For the purpose of returning it to where it came, this precious specimen was temporarily removed from a display on the second floor of the Field Museum. While our total museum is made up of nearly 40 million, that's million with an M, specimens and artifacts, we hold the meteorites that we have with special care. Our collection is one of the world's largest and is the largest of any private scientific institution. For perspective, we curate 12,908 meteorite specimens, and those are from 1,614 distinct meteorites. 139 of those are on display right now, minus the one that's back here in West Lafayette. I want to take a minute and recognize two Purdue students. They're right here. Would you stand up? Philip Ghazaryuk and Lauren Dilk, who took an interest in the Lafayette meteorite while taking Professor Fried's class. Professor Fried, would you stand up as well? Thank you. Were there any other people who signed the petition that are here? Would you stand up? There we go. Thank you for coming. You know, one of the things that's exciting about academia and science is the fact that young people aren't waiting until they graduate to make a difference. And they're inspired by professors like Dr. Fried. So that's really exciting. Clearly, they saw Purdue's 150th anniversary as the perfect opportunity to bring this meteorite back to their school and started that petition. And with Professor Fried's help, they were able to bring this rare scientific discovery back. As the legend goes, the Lafayette meteorite sat as a rock of unrecognized origin in the biology department in a drawer, a simple drawer. So you can find things hidden in plain sight clearly. And it sat there for an unknown period of time. We don't really know how long it was there. But it was officially recognized as a meteorite by a scientist here at Purdue University, as well as a curator at the Field Museum, somewhere around 1930-ish. And not long afterwards, Purdue donated it to the Field Museum. And we're excited. In fact, we're ecstatic to have it. But what's important, I gave you some big numbers about meteorites. But this is not just any meteorite. It's a Martian meteorite. There are 231 Martian meteorites known to science. 231, that's all. But what's more important is that the Lafayette Martian meteorite is not a mere Martian meteorite. It's a Nacolite. Only 10 of them exist in the whole world. That's all they're known. 10. We don't know if we'll ever find more, but 10. Because of their rarity, there's some of the most sought-after meteorites for research. We know that these rocks are volcanic and formed about 1.3 billion, that's billion with a B, years ago. And they were found, I mean, they existed in a shallow depth within the Martian crust or in thick lava flows on Mars. Analysis done on these meteorites shows that they rejected from Mars about 11 million years ago by an asteroid impact. And these meteorites fell to Earth over various years, but all within the last 11,000 years. So imagine there are only 10 of these. The fall date of the Lafayette is not known, nor is the location. But what is known is where it is today, and that's where it came from, which is here in West Lafayette, Indiana. So now I would like to turn it over to President Daniels officially so that the people of Purdue University can enjoy this amazing specimen. President? Oh, thank you. Because of the rarity of this specimen, I've asked security to bring it forward for the presentation. Around from that, between that and the first yellow chair. No? It's a very secure arena. It's in a caravan from Fort Knox. Security? Hmm. There we go. It's man in black. Thank you, sir. It kind of gives a new meaning to hard rock, doesn't it? Ladies and gentlemen, he's here year round. Maybe a few of you who don't recognize, behind the foster grants, this is our mayor of West Lafayette, rumored to have been a police officer at one time in his life. And John Dennis, thank you, John. Nice. Good to be here, Mitch. That is one knee rock, isn't it? Yeah. All right. So without further ado, thank you for this. Thank you very much. It's an honor to bring it back. It's an honor to receive it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure. Greetings, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us. This is the night we've been looking forward to with great anticipation. I know you have. You should all have received biographical information on our three guests tonight. Among them, they have decades of leadership in not just American, but world space exploration. And we could not be more honored than to have our own Bill Gerstenmeier, Dr. Jonathan Lanine from Cornell, and Mary Lynn Dittmar with us. Won't you please welcome them. As I say, if you haven't already, I invite you to read their bios. If I were to get into it, it would consume the hour, and that would cheat us all. So I'm going to ask each of them to make a short brief, a short opening presentation. Then I'll ask questions, and then we'll have mics here for your questions, the balance of the hour. We've decided that we'll start with Dr. Lanine. And because we have, of course, a leading public servant of the country, one of the great public citizens in Mary Lynn, and Jonathan, we have an academic. So of course he brought a slideshow. So we thought we'd get that out of the way first. But actually it sets up the rest of the conversation really well. So Jonathan, thank you for coming, and please lead off. Okay, thank you, Mitch, very much. So if we can go ahead and put up my slideshow. Humans have been stuck in low Earth orbit for the last 50 years, and during that time our robotic emissaries with scientific instruments and electronic eyes have wandered all over the solar system. And so I wanted to set the context for our discussion tonight by showing very briefly some of the places that we have been through our electronic proxies. So the first slide shows Pluto, which is the farthest planet in the solar system. Yes, I call it a planet. New Horizons showed that it has all of the processes that planets have, geology, glaciology, atmospheric weather, in spite of the fact that it's smaller than the Earth's moon. And in the lower corner of that picture, you see the next object that New Horizons went to, Ultimatuli, which is an example of some of the building blocks of the planets in our solar system. Two pieces stuck together for four and a half billion years early in the history of the solar system that would have been the start of the planet-building process. But now it's a kind of a cosmic graveyard, and if we move from that graveyard to a place where life might exist. Now we're at Saturn's moon Enceladus, and the Cassini spacecraft visiting Saturn for 13 years discovered that ice and organic molecules and gas are pouring out of the south pole of this small moon of Saturn. Cassini not only discovered this, but it actually flew through those jets of material that you see there. And it was able to make measurements that tell us that underneath the surface is an ocean that's supplying those salty ice particles, those organics, and that that ocean very likely is habitable. It could support life. And so the next step would be to go try to find life there. If we could find life, it might be independent of the origin of life on Earth, and that would be one of the greatest discoveries in the history of science. If we move further in still, we get to Jupiter, and the Juno mission is not only exploring inside Jupiter, but it's taking some of the most remarkable pictures of this very turbulent dynamic atmosphere, things that have not been seen with other spacecraft, and I think these pictures prove that you can have a psychedelic experience without pharmaceuticals. Just go to Jupiter. Then we move further in. Getting closer, we get to Mars, and here's a picture of part of the foothills of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater where there's a history when this crater was formed billions of years ago of liquid water sitting in this crater as a lake and gradually building up material layer by layer, which we've seen these remarkable images from the Curiosity rover, which is now actually driving up Mount Sharp and perhaps will find evidence of past life. Mars is a place where it's quite possible we had our beginnings that life might have started there and been transported to the Earth by the very process that this Lafayette meteorite was transported to the Earth. And that brings us finally to the Moon. And Apollo 17, which was the last human mission to the Moon, the Moon is the crossroad. It's the farthest point that humans have explored and it's kind of the starting point for planetary exploration in the late 1950s. And so I think it's the touchstone, the tie point for connecting these remarkable robotic explorations with the future of remarkable human exploration on our nearest celestial neighbor. And it's a history that I think we'll hear a lot more about this evening. So thank you. Thank you, Jonathan. Bill, Jonathan just walked us back from the edges of our solar system through Mars to the Moon and now it's your rather straightforward job to take us out in the other direction. A month ago there was an announcement, the latest, and let's hope a lasting strategy that would suggest that. Moon and then Mars. Could you reflect on that and what it's going to involve? Yeah, it was pretty exciting when the vice president goes to Huntsville, Alabama, kind of at the place where all the human lunar activity occurred and that great venue, he challenges us to go back to the Moon in 2024. And you may wonder whether we had pre-negotiated all that and doing all those things. I can tell you, no, we had not. So when I heard all that, I'm going, well, we're going to get really busy here really fast. And the good thing is we've been kind of planning for this all along. We've been talking about our gateway activity. We have the space launch system in work. We have Orion in work. We have all those pieces in work. And then we've been saying that they're adaptable and we can use those in new creative ways to meet these advantages or these challenges in front of us. And now what we're doing is we're putting all that together and we look like over maybe a three-flight sequence. So we'll do exploration mission one without any crew. We'll do exploration mission two in a fly-by of the Moon similar to what we did on Apollo 8 just to check out the Orion spacecraft. And then we believe on exploration mission three in 2024 using the gateway and pre-positioning some lunar landing hardware there. We should be able to land on the Moon in 24. So we've got that planned together technically. We've got lots of challenges in front of us. We're moving out on procurements. We're moving out on trying to get some budget amendment this next year. So all those pieces are there. So as Jonathan kind of laid out, this is this great intersection between where robotics and humans come together. And the way I look at it is my job isn't just to go to the Moon or help us go to the Moon. It's to how do we move human presence into the solar system? And the Moon is a great place to learn. And what we want to go back to the Moon, you know, we talk about going back to the Moon. That's the wrong nomenclature. We want to go forward to the Moon. And when we go forward to the Moon, we go in a different way than we went before. We're going to go in a sustainable manner with international partners, with the commercial sector. It's going to take every one of us. It's going to take every university. It's going to take all of us pulling together to go make this happen. And then we leave behind sustaining pieces that allow us to continue to do more and more dynamic things and eventually head out to Mars with humans. So again, we're going to move human presence in a sustainable way. And that first step is this 2024 challenge that we've just been put in front of us. So I'm going to need your help. We're going to have to get creative. We're going to have to be working on a lot of detailed research, a lot of fundamental activities if we're going to pull all this off. But I'm convinced as a team we can make this happen and it will be a great, great challenge in front of us. This seemed like the right evening and the right audience to make an announcement very important to this university. In a couple weeks we'll have commencement. And I'm just so happy to tell you that by vote of the Board of Trustees this year's one honorary doctorate to Purdue University will go to Bill Gerstenmeier for his many contributions. We're going to come back in a minute to the many, many daunting challenges that Bill and as a team captain of this big team he just talked about will have to face to bring this thrilling set of achievements off. But there are some other challenges right here on Earth. Mary Lynn Dittmar who has again been in every corner of our space program whether from Boeing or in many other capacities since but has been asked by now 60 or 70 companies who are involved in this space to add to our other involvements advising them and advocating for the kind of sustained program that would make all this possible. And then your job may be almost as tough as Bill's. I'm not sure if it's as tough as Bill's but it's tough. Part of what we spend a great deal of time talking about is the why of this which some of you may also be wondering about. I mean the technology is cool. This vision of going back to the moon is wonderful. Jonathan's big picture. I love the idea of the crossroads of the moon. But there are people who make decisions about policy in the United States and they also rate checks. And those folks are sitting on Capitol Hill and they also, they have to interact with the White House and ideally what the White House wants to do and what Congress wants to do are aligned. But Congress and the White House both have to figure out a whole lot of different priorities all the time. They've got the whole country they have to deal with and these priorities are competing. And so the question is why. And I'm going to go ahead and answer the question from my point of view and the point of view of the companies that I represent. The answer as to why is really simple. It's about American leadership. Leadership in space has been something that has been endemic to America for going on 60 years. Beginning in space science and very early launches in response to Sputnik. And then the development of the human spaceflight program. And we dare not let that lapse. That's my position and it's a position of, I think probably everybody on the stage, in terms of both science and exploration. It represents a place where nations have come together. We have many, many nations that came together to build the space station. We're up to 103 countries. 103 think about that. Who have participated in some way in the space station program. Either through science or exploration or both. And that ability to bring people together, to bring nations together and to demonstrate leadership is a gift that we have earned and dare not give away. And that's the why. There's plenty of other why. Scientific achievement and discovery, expanding our knowledge, understanding better about who it is we are in the universe, what our place is there. Going over the next hill, which is a big driver for me personally. It's like looking over that next hill, space exploration, Texas over that next hill. But the key for us is that driver for American leadership. And by the way, that language is, people resonate to that language across the entire policy environment. But communicating the why, having people understand why that's important to American leadership and the American place in the world is sometimes very challenging when you're in an environment where there are a lot of competing priorities. Marilyn, just to follow up for a second. When the Congress is reluctant or bulky or uncooperative, they're usually reflecting public opinion where they come from. And there's no place in America where the why is more readily understood probably than Purdue University. It may not be as obvious to folks here as it is to those who've been closer to it that how ambiguous at best the American public's view of space exploration is. You want to just say a word or two about it because it would really change or sustained support would start there. Sure. So there's about 50 years of polling actually about American points of view with regard to the space program. And I'll talk about human space exploration here. There's a myth that is that the American public was behind Apollo from day one. In fact, the American public was not behind Apollo until after the landing. And then the American public was behind Apollo. American public has been ambivalent about human space exploration for the last several decades. Not as ambivalent interestingly enough about space science, which has a more sort of focused approval. And so one of the things that we deal with all the time in the coalition is how is it that we help the public better understand. So one thing that's happened in the last few years is there's actually much more interest in human spaceflight now for two reasons. One is NASA's ramping up these development efforts and NASA has built itself quite a social media machine. For those of you that go to social media, it's amazing it leads the government in its social media capabilities. But the other thing that's happened is the rise of the commercial space sector. And if you're in a business and you want to make money and these people want to make money, then you have to do a lot of marketing. And some of these folks are absolutely terrific. SpaceX comes to mind as a marketing machine. Now that leads you down a lot of paths that I'm sure President Daniels will ask me about. But it is true that that marketing has actually really helped energize a lot of people in the American public who are now paying attention to space more than they were 10 years ago because of that marketing and frankly the technical achievements that have been associated with that marketing. The commission that you were my tutors about so much of this, you too, that we were all part of for the National Academies just three or four years ago. In the report, lifted three of the countless technological challenges up for special attention. And I'd like to ask any of the panel here to comment on them in order. The three were in space propulsion, radiation protection, and entry to sent and landing. And so we've got folks here who have studied and are working on all of these to one extent or another. Jonathan, Bill, take in space propulsion first. Where are we? What has to happen next? What's most important? We've gone out, we have this thing we're going to put around the moon called the gateway and it gets confused as being a space station. It's really a spacecraft that can move to different orbits. But really what it gives us this unique ability is electric propulsion. It can be in this near-recto-linear halo orbit around the moon. It can move to a halo orbit around the Lagrangian Point 2 on the far side of the moon. It can move to Lagrangian Point 1. It can be in a whole variety of different locations and that's all enabled by electric propulsion. So we've kind of determined what size electric propulsion we need. So roughly 12.5 kilowatts per thruster and four of those. That's the size of power from the spacecraft and it will weigh about 50 metric tons and with that kind of size it can maneuver in all these different locations. So we think this is really going to be transformative. If you're going to take large masses to the vicinity of Mars and other locations the way to do it is with electric propulsion. We need this next generation of thruster. So again this is where NASA can kind of push the envelope we're pushing that envelope but we did this procurement in a very different way for us. We could have specified everything NASA wanted and put it all out but we didn't do that. We went and looked at what was available in the commercial satellite industry and we said heck those aren't bad. They last for 15, 20 years. Maybe we'll just take those. So we removed all the NASA requirements that we would have typically put there and we said we're going to acquire a commercial satellite bus. We'll give you some high propulsion electric thrusters to put on there. We're going to give you some advanced solar arrays. So we put that procurement out. We received the proposals and a month or so we'll actually select those. And then we didn't say we were going to launch it for them. They have to launch it themselves and it needs to be on orbit around December 2022 is the goal to have it in orbit. So that is the first piece of gateway that enables us to do this and it lets us gain experience of operating with electric propulsion. It lets us gain the experience of operating in these unique orbits around the moon and it really is starting to move that human presence into the solar system by doing it in a very different and sustainable way than we've ever done before. But we're leveraging a lot of things. We'll see what industry did. Did they respond to the satellite bus industry? Was it there? It was interesting. I had a hard time convincing my team why should we accept someone else's requirements? So then we dug through the records from Apollo and we looked at the launch vehicles that were used for Mercury and the decree was we're not going to change those launch vehicles that were launching ballistic missiles because they had an experience base and a reliability that was understood and if NASA changed those we might change the reliability needed for our first crew mission on top of Mercury. So I used that discussion to shame my engineering team into accepting the satellite bus standards for this power propulsion element. So again, we're looking to figure out ways to do this in new, innovative and creative ways and really move this forward in a fast and expedient manner. Bravo. Jonathan? I'll just talk about radiation. We evolved in an environment on the Earth from the beginning of life that was not radiation free but very, very different from the radiation environment that we find in space and the Earth has been our cocoon for those billions of years. So one of the very serious limitations that we have to understand is the ability of human beings to survive and operate in an environment where the radiation from the solar wind, from galactic cosmic rays potentially can provide lethal dosages and so we have to shield against that particularly in transit to the Moon but also on the lunar surface. We have to shield that for the long voyages to Mars. In fact, one of the reasons that in our report that President Daniels, myself co-chair and Mary Lynn Dipmar kept us honest and Bill was on the hot seat for a lot of our discussions, Mars was the horizon goal because it's hard to imagine being able to keep humans alive for destinations much beyond that simply on the basis of the radiation and so that's going to be a huge challenge. The descent in landing for Mars is very different than it is for the Moon, obviously. The Moon has no atmosphere. The spectacular landing of curiosity on Mars with the sky crane is a system that doesn't necessarily scale up to the kinds of payloads that will be required to put humans on Mars. Factors of 10 larger in mass or even more. So being able to go to the Moon and to develop the technologies that can feed forward to getting humans to Mars in the future in addition to the intrinsic attractiveness of the Moon as a target, as a place for humans to explore along with robots, it is really the essential stepping stone for getting our capabilities to the point where we can send humans to Mars and bring them back again. My only ad would be back to in-space propulsion for a minute. The solar electric stuff that's going to be going on with the Gateway is great because it's the first time that's really going to be demonstrated sufficiently and over time in a sustainable way for human space exploration. But the other thing is that to go very long distances, like to go out to Mars, we've been using chemical rockets for an awful long time. We're going to be using chemical rockets for the foreseeable future and there are a lot of issues with chemical rockets. They have to carry so much propellant to get off the planet in the first place. But they're relatively slow. Even something like SLS, which is going to be very, very fast, it cuts time, for example, to the outer planets from five years to two and a half in terms of transit. When you're talking about taking human beings and sticking them in a hard radiation environment, the reasons that Jonathan was just talking about, you have to manage radiation shielding. But if we can speed that up, right, so that they're simply not in transit for as long, then that's obviously going to be better for a number of reasons. One of them has to do with radiation, but then you've also got consumables and you also have people in deep space and you've got needing to keep them healthy. If you can do that faster, then there's a lot of benefits associated with that. And so the one technology that NASA had under development for a while and then stepped back from a bit and is now certainly back under discussion again with some money starting to go back into it is nuclear thermal propulsion. Because that will enable us to move much more quickly to those destinations. I remember some of the more fascinating speculative discussions we had went beyond the physical difficulties to the psychological, which also no one really knows, but no matter how well Bill trains them, people in a very confined space for that length of time can't take anything for granted there. Yeah, I think the thing that we talk about is as you move further out, you become Earth independent. So you're breaking that tie back to the home planet and I think that's going to be really hard. I was talking to John and I have some pictures from the Curiosity rover of looking back at the Earth and when the Earth is a little tiny dot in the sky, it really is going to be that sense of distance and that detachment and you're really going to get this sense of loneliness and the time delay of the communications of 20 to 40 minutes is going to be really hard and so I think that's something we're going to have to deal with as a species and make sure we're there. But again, moon is a great place because it's five days away if something happens to you on station, we can get back in about an hour and a half or so, but the moon is five days and then now we're months when we go to Mars. So we need that intermediate destination where we can start practicing the things that allow us to become independent and artificial intelligence and smarter spacecraft and all those things where the crews are going to be able to have to take care of themselves. We can demonstrate all that around the moon and get comfortable with that technology that allows us to then take that next step because I think going to Mars immediately is too big a step to take in one piece. Before we move to the next topic, Bill, anything to say about the EDL challenges for the engineers in the audience, there will be a lot for them to work on. I remember Jonathan or somebody to say, it's not really hard. It's like landing a house at 80 miles an hour. Yeah, right. It's a huge challenge. Jonathan described the sky crane. We land these one metric ton payloads on Mars. We think the minimum size asset vehicle to get off of Mars without any fuel is 25 metric tons. So that's that ratio of 25 that Jonathan was alluding to of how difficult it's going to be. The other good thing is that science is there with us now. We have a radiation monitor on Mars today on Curiosity rover, and I can get hourly and actually hourly radiation measurements on Mars. So it's pretty neat to see that puny little Mars atmosphere, that CO2 atmosphere, it actually does a fairly decent job of shielding. And you can see differences between the daylight period and the night period. So you can actually see the diurnal cycles of the radiation go up and down. And one fact that's not readily known is if you can get to Mars, the radiation level you get in a year on Mars is about equivalent to what our crews get on board space station. So Mars with its small atmosphere and the shielding of the planet itself provides pretty good radiation detection. The thing we got to do is we got to get that transit from Earth to Mars to be much faster the way Mary Lynn was talking about. Can we spend a few minutes on the growing involvement of the private space industry? First, it's integration into all your other plans. I do want to ask you just for fun in a minute about tourism. But to take the more important question first, how's that going and what can we expect in the next few years? Again, I think it's a really great time in our industry. We've got three space capsules in actual development ready to go fly all at once. And I don't think we've ever been in this level of development and manufacturing in the U.S. for our human spaceflight program ever since maybe even Apollo. So we've got the Boeing CST 100 in manufacture. It should fly on an ascent or a pad abort test sometime probably in June, July of this year. And then it should do its uncrew docking to the space station sometime in August of the year. That's the Boeing spacecraft. SpaceX just did that. They took their spacecraft in an uncrewed version, docked the space station. They were doing a test last Saturday on the landing site down in Florida and they had an anomaly and they essentially lost the entire spacecraft. And so that spacecraft was going to do an in-flight abort test for us probably in the June timeframe and then they were scheduled to probably take crew to station on a test flight sometime in the early fall. I think that's all kind of now going to be put back on hold until we understand what happened. But I think it shows how difficult and unforgiving our business is. It doesn't matter who's doing the work. The laws of physics still sit behind everything we do and that attention to detail and making sure everything is right. The little small things that you don't think about can really cause you huge problems. I have a plastic bag in my office and there's this little wire that's thinner than the hair on my head and it's in this bag and I'll hand this bag to folks that come in my office and I'll ask them to say what's in the bag and they look and they can't find hardly anything. And then they find this little tiny piece of wire and that little piece of wire shorted between two pins on the wrist joint of the International Space Station arm and took down the entire arm. So I use that as an example of how much precision is required in our industry that something as small as that little tiny wire floated and it was present from launch. It took a year before it floated between just the right two pins on the connector and shorted those two pins out and took down the entire arm. So that shows how much precision and expertise is needed in our business and I think we'll learn this and we'll get better from the SpaceX event. You know, my teams hate me when I say this but I consider close calls gifts, right? Sometimes I call them gifts from God and then my whole team throws stuff at me and says, what's wrong with you? And my point is I would rather learn in a test flight than have an event like Challenger or Columbia. And so this hardware speaking to us it has told us something, we're going to get better. SpaceX will get better and move forward. And then we've got the Orion capsule, our deep space vehicle. It's in integration down in Florida. It's being attached to the European service module. It gets shipped to Plumbrook for testing probably in the August timeframe this summer and then it will go down for the expiration mission one uncrewed launch to space. So again, what a tremendous time to be in this business with all this hardware and flow, all this testing going on, all this future work moving. You know, once in a lifetime in your career you get a chance to see this much hardware to be involved in tests, to be working at this level. It's a great time. So I can't, for the students, it's an unbelievable time to come into this industry, get involved, get in test, get in hardware, gain that experience. You will gain experience that you would take you in my life a lifetime to learn. You're going to be able to get in a month. So this is an awesome time to be in this business. Just reminding us if we needed it about the incredible uncertainties and all the things that can go wrong. Marilyn, before we move on, I've got to ask you you're in regular touch with a lot of these folks. I made a little list of what we were told to expect by the private companies. I don't know if anybody here has bought a ticket or not, but Virgin Galactic said they'd be in, they'd have tourists up there by 09. Blue Origin said by 18, SpaceX said they would go around the moon in 18. We're still waiting. You said they have to make money. I'm not sure Bezos has to make money. I think he's got more money than God. That said. Yeah, so just to sort of double down on what Bill just said, it's really hard to do this work. And most of my space hands-on experience came from Space Station, and Bill's got more experience on the overall program management piece, but I was down in the guts of trying to do systems and subsystems integration and look at all that, and it's get all the pieces to fit together across the interfaces that were international, and it's very hard to do this work, and it doesn't make any difference who's doing it. So, for example, the Falcon Heavy was originally going to fly in 12, and 14, and 15, and 16, et cetera. And the SLS was going to fly in 16, 17. So, anyway, if you look at this, it doesn't make any difference who's building it. Virgin Galactic had a couple of accidents. One couple of them that were involved casualties. They have learned from those experiences. I talk to their folks pretty frequently. I think they'll make it. I think that... I also think that Jeff Bezos is low-origin. I'll send New Shepard into Suborbit with people on it. So, I think that we'll get there, but what is worrisome sometimes, the marketing is really important for those companies. They have to keep investors in. Again, Bezos is a little bit of an anomaly here, but they have to keep investors in. They have to keep the public involved. They need to continue to sort of prove that they're capable of doing things, and when they're waiting to do things, they market. Now, as a businesswoman, I've started three companies, and I don't have any problem with that. And there have been times that I've said, oh, yeah, I can do that. And then I think, God, I've got six months. How am I going to get... But you do keep putting those goals out there and really pursuing them. But what people do need to be sensitive to is it doesn't make any difference. Who's doing it? It's extremely difficult. It's very, very risky. And you need to start pulling the marketing apart from the reality. So, it always takes more time than it sounds like it's going to take. It always costs more money than it sounds like it's going to cost. It always has schedule and risk associated with it that is greater than you think it's going to be. Even the smartest minds, even the most experienced folks, even the most creative entrepreneurs, that's always going to be the case. And so adopting sort of a little bit of a skeptical position with regard to this is probably useful when you're trying to analyze and think about how to go forward. That said, those companies are achieving some amazing things. There is definitely some great technical development going on and some real innovation in the way that they're thinking about it. I was on the SpaceX floor a couple of years ago and I was watching them move rockets out of the factory. Whereas the traditional way of doing it would be to sort of build some big vehicle to essentially place the rocket on and then sort of trot the rocket out of the factory at a very slow rate. SpaceX was basically sticking wheels on the rocket, treating the structure as its own carriage, okay, and then using that to say, that but not. I mean, you look at it and you kind of go, well, duh. But it was just a really simple difference, okay, in the way that things were happening. And I think that energy coming into the business is really very helpful and really very good. Yeah, so from our standpoint, it's really exciting because now we don't have to do everything on the government side anymore. I can go acquire services. I have to be wary that they're going to run into the same problem, so we've got to make sure that we've got a backup plan. So, you know, we bought some extra Soyuz seats this year and I got kind of chewed out for that. You know, why am I doing that? These guys are ready to go fly. And I wrote this nice little memo and said, based on my past experience, we've had a lot of trouble in these last years. This is something we need to have a backup plan for just in case something happens. And then this happens. And then you get no credit later. But it was good that we did what we did because we're still moving forward. But again, I see this as kind of the ultimate team sport where we just got to keep communicating back and forth. And what's good is the new companies are starting to be a little more honest with us and they're starting to come and tell us, yeah, this is hard. And it's good because we actually share data back and forth. We can learn from them. We forgot how it is to lean forward to see that sense of urgency, that ready to move forward. You know, on the government side, we're not quite as cost-conscious as we should be. We're learning a little bit of cost-consciousness from them where it's their own money. So these are great things. So this is an awesome time because we are really, it's truly a partnership where we're counting on each other. We're working together. And it's just a neat thing to see in the aerospace industry. It's not the classic big, slow things we were before. This is really the best of us pulling together to do these awesome missions. Well, rest assured you'll always get credit here, Bill, even if not back at the ranch. So let me alert the audience. I've got really one more topic or one and a half to ask them about in just a couple of minutes. I hope some of you will step forward with your questions. Notice I said questions. That's in the antonym of speeches. Jonathan, if you'd start, maybe, the Web Telescope, a fascinating project, very exciting in its way. Last I looked, it's cost had grown between five and six times. It was pushed off by a decade, somewhat like some of the other hitches we just heard about. But it'll soon be there, I hope. And what are you expecting? What are you hoping for? Where will it take us? Well, so the James Webb Space Telescope is another example of something that's very hard to do, but it's very hard to do because there's groundbreaking science that is there in the telescope design that we can't do any other way. And so Webb is designed to be an infrared telescope that has tremendous sensitivity, much more sensitive than Hubble. It will observe the universe at wavelengths of light that go well beyond what Hubble could into the infrared. And at the same time, with a very large mirror, it will be able to detect very, very faint objects. There are two examples of why one needs something like Webb. Six and a half meter mirror made up of multiple mirrors, a sun shield that is the size of a tennis court, and the whole thing will be put well beyond the orbit of the moon pointed out into space that the sun shield can block the sun and the earth's not a source of radiation either. So two things. One is, we know the universe is expanding, space is expanding, carrying the clusters of galaxies with it. The farther out we look, the faster those galaxies are moving relative to us and the fabric of space. And because of that, their light is being stretched out into longer and longer wavelengths. So something that we would see in a nearby galaxy that might emit light in the ultraviolet or the blue part of the visible spectrum is going to seem to us for a distant galaxy to be emitting that light in the infrared. And Hubble can't see that. Hubble can only go out a short distance in the infrared. It's got, the earth is this huge heat source behind it and that basically blinds it even if it had the right infrared detectors. Webb can see that. So Webb can see further into the past than we could see with Hubble to the time when galaxies actually were starting to form. And that's a key part of the formation of structure in the universe that eventually became stars and planets and us. And with Webb we can see that. Second example is planets around other stars. Planets are really faint. A planet like the Earth, for example, will have a signature relative to its star that might be a billion times fainter in the visible, but a million times fainter in the infrared. So it's easier to do in the infrared. And Webb will be able to detect and measure the composition of planetary atmospheres down to objects a few times the size of the Earth, which Hubble could not. So when you dare mighty things, it becomes a technological challenge that often has unanticipated roadblocks. And as President Kennedy said, we do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. And once they're actually done, the payoff is that we discover things that we just did not know before about our place in the cosmos. So in spite of Webb's troubles, I'm really gung-ho about it, and I'm looking forward to its launch. And I know we're going to discover things about the cosmos and about planets and star and planet formation that we just didn't anticipate. So worth waiting for and worth the money. Yep, absolutely. And so remember, questions were almost ready. But let me just then follow that with one more. So here, for all our hopes and dreams and enthusiasm, we have enormous technological challenges. We have challenges bringing public opinion along that might support the necessary investments. And oh, yeah, P.S. countries broke and borrowing every dollar almost in the discretionary budget now. So let me just ask a specific question that I remember some fascinating debates about, the International Space Station. I learned from you today, Mary Lynn, that despite the fact that it's a consumer of dollars that might otherwise support some of these other things we're talking about, it appears that its adherence may prevail and extend its life and our investment in it in another several years. Good idea, bad idea, dubious idea. How do you feel these days? So I'm going to give an answer, this is an easy answer to give, except that as you pointed out, the country's in debt and borrowing more and more and more. I was in a discussion recently with the White House about the positioning of the U.S. space program relative to other contributions and other priorities that are in competition with it because everything in the budget is in competition with everything else. And I asked, given the growth and capabilities and the propagation of technologies across the globe and the greater and greater number of countries, some of whom are friendly to us, some of who may not be so friendly to us, that we're developing these capabilities and bringing them online, was this space program really positioned where it needs to be in terms of a whole-of-government approach to U.S. leadership? And I argued to him, I said, let me answer that question too. No, it's not. And I meant that both in terms of policy, but also funding, right? Also resources available to it. So my first response, I'm going to give you two, one of which is, NASA gets one half of 1% of the U.S. budget. One half of 1%. I would argue that its return on investment is much higher than virtually any other agency. That for all of the protest it gets for taking too long and overbuilding things, the return on investment in human exploration, what we learned from that, the technologies that's developed that affects every one of us, the science that's delivered, it is such a bargain that there is absolutely no doubt in my mind, but just double that. Just get to 1%. And if you got to 1%, niche that would fix your problem right there with station. So that's my first answer. The second answer is, in the current budget environment, it's true that if you continue to put money into station, that money's not going into other things. I mean, that's absolutely true. And on the committee, we talked a lot about sort of ending the station. And when did it make sense to end the station? I'm going to say this in the handoff to Bill, because he's far more eloquent about it than I am, but until we have things flying on a regular basis, until we've got human beings flying into deep space on a regular basis, until we're actually in the process of doing the science and the human exploration on the surface of the moon, beginning the prospecting that's going to be necessary both with robots and then humans to sort of figure out what we can actually do on that surface with those resources that are there, until all of that is happening, it makes no sense to me to end the station. And so that would be my response. Before Bill responds, it's worth pointing out that during the peak of the Apollo development, NASA's budget was almost 4% of the federal budget, more than 4%. And we're talking now about going from a half a percent to 1%. Today it's eight times less relative to the federal budget than what we spend. Then I look at station and I call station an innovation accelerator and people look at me weird, but if you think about what we've done, we were able to take huge risk with the cargo being delivered to station. We essentially placed no requirements on the payloads writing on top of these cargo vehicles. So NASA essentially started an entire new launch industry when we made the selections for the cargo vehicles to go to station for SpaceX and for Orbital at the time, neither one of those rockets had flown. So here's this agency investing in two systems that had never flown and we placed no requirements on them at all other than delivered cargo to the ISS. What that did is that revolutionized the launch industry. So that lowered launch cost for every user in the U.S. and that allows science to do more missions, it allows a DOD to do more stuff. That came from this human spacecraft called the Space Station. We're now doing the same thing with commercial crew. We're investing again in two providers. NASA's going hand in hand with them because our cargo is now very precious. It's not cargo that we can lose but we're enabling them and we're going to let them we're going to buy a service now from them of which they will own the spacecraft and they can sell those spacecraft to others. Then in several months here we're going to do the next step. We're going to make space available on station for a company to take tourists to and NASA will just recoup what our costs are for room and board on board the Space Station but it's up to them to make a negotiation with the launch crew provider. They do that independent of the government and they get a chance to go see if this tourist market is real or not at very low risk. This is exactly what the government should do. Government lowers the risk to where industry can now innovate, generate revenue and move forward. This station is doing exactly what it needs to do I believe as we move forward and it could be transformative when we acquire services moving forward. It's a very transformative time with station. Let's see how that works. Thank you for stepping forward. Questions please. I actually have two questions for Jonathan. The first question is the pictures you showed us of the other planets. Are those real colors in the visible spectrum or process colors? So the picture of Enceladus was very close to real color. It's rather gray. The picture of Pluto is color enhanced and the picture of the two pictures of Jupiter are greatly enhanced relative to what the human eye would see. Now of course the human eye is an imperfect instrument anyway so the enhancement of the color is really a way of seeing things that are there in the data where your human eye can't really pick them out unless you enhance them. So I don't like the term false color because it's only false in the context of what your eyes might see if you were there but it's really there in the data. Comment about the blue sky on Mars the sky on Mars to us would appear rather peachy I guess you would call it but it's actually useful to adjust the colors in that way because it allows you the colors of some of the rocks and to correlate that with the way those rocks would appear under blue sky on the Earth so geologists are used to looking at rocks with a blue sky not a peach sky and so those images the way their color adjusted actually have some utility to them. Thank you so the second question so the second question is that you said life might have started on Mars so is there any evidence to show that it is more likely that life might have started on Mars instead of Earth? This is really a supposition and it's one that maybe we'll be able to test some day but the possibility is that Mars actually cooled down earlier and perhaps had liquid water a little bit earlier than the Earth did the Earth being larger may have had a magma ocean which is of course molten rock and it's hard for organic reactions to proceed and so it's possible that the first steps toward life and maybe even the origin of life itself occurred on an early Mars which was more Earth-like and was Earth-like earlier than our own planet was but again this is just based on the notion that Mars being a smaller object would have cooled off earlier. Thank you Next Good evening Apart from yourselves we've had a number of wonderful speakers lately as part of the 150th talking about topics ranging from the coming revolution and artificial intelligence to robotics systems what is it about humans that makes it worth taking all those dangers and challenges and putting people on Mars as compared to saying doing more rovers and even if they're better now what happens when robots become good enough? And you had an interesting actually President Daniels wrote one of the most imaginative paragraphs in our entire report about a time when robots and humans might in fact meld in some way so I'm going to let him talk about that but let me just say that one of the presenters that we had in our committee pointed out that in tests at real geologic field sites with human geologists and rovers that were being operated by tele-operated by humans back in a remote site the humans were able to identify interesting geologic features much much more quickly than the rovers were and an outstanding example of that on the moon was when Harrison Schmidt kicked some dust and said hey it's orange and a rover of course might not have seen that now that's the rovers of today 20, 30, 40 years from now with AI with more decision making capability that might change but right now we outclass our machines by a lot Very good, how about here? Thank you all for coming I really appreciate it so the question I had was I know that a couple months ago the Chinese space administration recently launched one of their rovers on the dark side of the moon and that kind of got me thinking so what's the difference between a space agency that's kind of run by a communist government compared to something like NASA which is more of a democratic type of government? Well, so I'll give you my answer this is actually a part of the conversation I was having with the White House because essentially what I was saying was look, you have a lot of stuff going on here China has an entire list of achievements that they've got set up they're going to put a space station up they're going to populate that space station they've got another series of rovers they just decided they're going to do yet another rover in the same Changi basically they're going to they're planning to build now a heavy lift rocket super heavy lift rocket they have verified and locked down what the design of that rocket is going to be they sort of laid that out they're now talking about putting a lunar outpost that just came out last week so essentially there's an entire series, programmatically and being a communist totalitarian that has a space agency that is military and on which they are spending a ton of money relative to what the United States is spending right, they basically have this uncanny knack of doing what they say they're going to do about when they say they're going to do it and if we're not paying attention to that shame on us, right the whole, for me the argument about going into deep space and American leadership is whose values do you want to be out there do you want values that are open in a democratic society that respect property rights that protect intellectual property that's for the commerce folks that are interested in sort of doing science on an international basis which is Chinese to do or do you want a set of values that's being driven by a totalitarian communist perspective anybody want to vote I mean you know like option A or option B for me it's option A so that would be my answer and I would say that one thing that's also not known about station is we worked as an international partnership so we have 22 countries from Europe involved in station we have Japan we have Canada and we have Russia and we built these things we call interoperability standards so when you saw the dragon uncrewed dragon vehicle come up it docked the station it docked to an international docking standard so that design of the docking mechanism of space tech they just built to the standard they didn't have to build a specific design it's like a USB port on the side of your computer anybody builds to it so we've built one Boeing's built one the Europeans are building one this interoperability thing is going to be huge because now there's an open architecture in space so we the US international space station partnership are publishing standards for atmospheric pressure for voltage for data buses and it doesn't tell you how to design but if you can build to that you can come dock to the gateway you can be part of the lunar program so in this way we're not excluding anyone from what we're doing but again we're setting the rules of the road we're setting that standard out there in front and then the rest of the world will follow us and then that keeps us a leader in space and we're going to have to cooperate and participate with others that want to move forward so this is another hidden benefit of the space station I want to go back I'm not a stable rattler but I think that we do have to find ways to work with China we're already doing that in some ways and it would be great to sort of figure out exactly what that relationship is going to continue to be but we also need to be cognizant of what's happening in the rest of the world both on the cooperation side and the competition side I just think this was such an insightful question I'll just make this point that came home to me during our commission days that Bill in his career has probably been asked to carry out I don't know what you count seven or eight different strategies and the problem in our democracy as you elect a new president somebody persuades him to try something new just a few years ago he was supposed to go through a baggie around a space rock now we think he's in a much better situation but we like the strategy now the question is can the United States discipline itself to stick with it we know a place like China can as Mary Lynn showed you I think that's one of the biggest questions and the heroes of NASA have been forced to be tugged back and forth over time and you can't expect them to achieve these great long term projects on that basis and you're joining us in sharing your perspectives and now allowing us to interrogate you you all highlighted a couple differences and parallels between this kind of new boom in space exploration and the kind of story days of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo programs but it seems like another difference is in our tolerance for risk both programmatically as agencies and individually as astronauts so obviously spaceflight will always be dangerous but as we move forward from low earth orbit to the moon and to Mars and seemingly increase to the people involved in those missions how do you think our society's tolerance for risk will play a role in our ability to progress further into the solar system? I'm going to throw one statement out there before everybody else talks and I'm going to be really brief there is a line that's written in the pathways report and I know because I wrote it and I don't remember exactly what it said because I haven't read it for a while but basically what it said was that it was an inevitability that continuing to explore space would lead to the loss of human life period and that if as a nation we are not prepared to accept that reality then we ought not do it at all and I feel, I think everyone here feels very strongly about that the societal issues having to do with risk I think part of what's failed here is to have people understand just how difficult this is what the value of doing it is and this trade between human life and actually going forward and why that's important is why I started with why we need to keep on talking about that and I would say I think we need to be more transparent and more open about what the risk is I think sometimes we are afraid to describe how tough some of this stuff is and how risky it really is we treat our astronauts the folks that go to space as heroes and they truly are heroes they are putting their lives on the line for us we need to have missions for them like Jonathan talked about that are really worthwhile where we go with robotic spacecraft on the moon and we will look around in various locations we will find interesting things there are some discussions I had today about lava tubes that are fascinating on the moon some of those things will be interesting with let the science small rovers look at that and see what's there and then find a location that is so complicated geologically or it's so confusing from intellectual standpoint it benefits from having a human and the risk of the human going there with their intellect and their eyes and their creativity and ingenuity to then interact with that environment and bring back that knowledge but that we need to be selective where those are where that benefit of putting the human life at risk is there so we don't treat the life as trivial but we also don't need to be parallelized by it either we need to openly discuss this risk and that's part of this team thing I described I talk about my team and I want my team to tell me what they know and what they don't know you know if a technician is working on a piece of hardware and all of a sudden he's torqued this bowl a hundred times and now he goes and torques this one and it doesn't torque exactly right he needs to come back and say hey there's something that isn't quite right and not be afraid that oh we're going to miss a schedule or that's there we're going to miss something and that's what we got to do so we have to this is the ultimate team sport we have to play flat out we have to be open and we've got to be willing to take the risk and we need to describe that risk to the public and you need to help you as individuals also need to describe that risk moving forward you know I used to go to Thanksgiving dinner and my cousin hated human spaceflight so she would just berate me every Thanksgiving about how all this money was like the most miserable Thanksgiving ever and so then I used to load Thanksgiving I don't want to go so then I decided once I would take her to a shuttle launch so I took her to a shuttle launch and she spent the day with the technicians who were putting tile on the bottom of the orbiter so these folks are the most meticulous folks in the world of putting this tile on to make sure that this tile is adhered and is there and there's dedication and passion is there so she feels that then she sees the launch and she feels that energy from the shuttle reverberate back in her body and she sees that happen from then on Thanksgiving's were totally different why aren't we doing more human spaceflight why aren't you flying more shuttles so what I think we need to do is you need to explain from your perspective why you're excited about this why you're making hard studies why you're doing the finals and having fun over on the other side you need to explain in your words why you're doing what you're doing and get other folks excited about what we're doing in human spaceflight I regret to tell you we've come to the end of our hour I think we'll take one more question I don't suppose there's a business major in the group anyway so if there's not let's flip a coin how about over here hello thank you for accepting this last question and this question is actually to be Dr. Gersten Meyer is with the advancement of commercial space industry moving into the space in which has traditionally been held by national space agencies is there a concern with the privatization of space in which that the technologies are developed by these private industries being withheld for their own self-interest as opposed to the advancements which are proliferated where public funds are invested within NASA or other space agencies I think that's a really important thing we need to think about where the right place for government is I sometimes use a chart and on the chart I have on the left hand side it says explore and explore is the stuff the government ought to be doing so if there's a brand new technology that needs to be distributed to everyone that's this explore side then the other side of my chart I put develop and that's where the private sector can then take that technology and then go use it so we need to be selective of where we do that so that information can get distributed if the government does it it's available to everyone to use and then it brings a whole bunch of industry forward to do this develop side where we can buy our services and there's competition on that side it helps keeps costs down so we've got to be very selective about where the government invests and doing fundamental research the fundamental stuff that's done at the university is really really important because that needs to be general public knowledge that can be shared that makes our country good and keeps us a leader in the world whereas those specific things then the companies turn that into services you see that all the time even in commercial crew and commercial cargo the engine technology a lot of the stuff that is there is really came from Apollo came from earlier missions and that's the right thing for the role for the government is to do that generic stuff that can be shared with all but then by services then to get out of the business where the government is not operating the system we're one of many buying services in these areas then that freezes up to do more that fundamental research so I think the government's role is more on the fundamental research side great question to end on thank you very much thank you Phillip, Lauren and Andy Professor Fried I believe we're going to be available for those of you who want to inspect our our returning meteorite right after we're done here but I hope you all enjoy that as much as I did win in 2024 we are back on the moon and on our way to the horizon destination of Mars you'll all be able to say that you spent tonight with three of the people without whom that would not have happened so let's thank them for all they've done