Robert Zimmerman, a space exploration advocate, marks the Columbia accident’s first anniversary, exposing NASA’s management failures—ignoring foam debris risks like Challenger—while defending the shuttle program’s 2% mission success rate. He champions Mars colonization, citing hematite evidence of recent water and dismissing lunar landing conspiracies as "despicable," instead praising Soviet-era engineering like Mir’s shape-memory alloy girder and closed-loop life support systems. Criticizing NASA’s bureaucracy for stifling progress—such as blocking astronauts from eating ISS-grown plants—he argues $12B Bush funding is inadequate, proposing private XPRIZE-style competition to spur reusable crew vessel development. Space’s future hinges on overcoming weightlessness risks and leveraging incremental lunar research before boldly expanding to Mars and beyond. [Automatically generated summary]
Am I going to begin with what we're really going to talk about, John Jackson?
Or the more serious news?
I think I'm going to take a stab at the quorum and try this.
President Bush, under mounting political pressure, will sign an executive order to establish a full-blown investigation of U.S. intelligence failures in Iraq, according to a senior White House official.
That's a big deal.
The investigation will look at what the United States believed it knew before the war against Saddam Hussein's regime and what has been determined since the invasion.
Former Chief Weapons Inspector David Kaye has concluded that Iraq did not possess weapons of mass destruction, a chief rationale for the U.S.-led war.
That leads the news.
As well as does the second story of Iraq II, two suicide bombers have killed at least 56.
So it goes on daily.
Killed at least 56, wounded more than 235 in the deadliest assault in Iraq in six months.
The attack struck in the Kurdish heartland, took a heavy toll among senior leaders at Iraq's most pro-American ethnic group.
Now, like most red-blooded Americans, Ramona and I watched the Super Bowl followed by the beginning of the all-star survivor thing.
And the Super Bowl, well, the Super Bowl, first of all, it was a very good game.
It didn't start out that well, defensive, typical of a lot of Super Bowls, you know, boring kind of for a lot of people.
But then it took off.
Did not meet Mr. Morton's expectations at all.
3229 New England, as you now know.
But what everybody's talking about is what's on Drudge right now.
And I will escort you through Matt Drudge's headline.
Outrage at CBS after Janet Bear's Breast during dinner hour.
Super Bowl show pushes limits.
and then of course there's the photographs of that moments well now And the dance ends.
This gentleman, this singer, Timberlake, reaches over and appears to rip from the body of Janet Jackson the very portion of her dress that covers one memory gland.
Now, they did this just like that.
And you could hear the gasps in the back.
And you could only imagine that the CBS deal probably in their 70s, right?
By now, I don't really know that to be true, but I just kind of imagine them sitting there watching the Super Bowl.
We, the proud carriers of the Super Bowl, and then that instant when it was ripped off, they probably looked.
So they weren't too, CBS was not really happy at all.
Also, the NFL chimed in, and the NFL was, I don't know, I guess shocked, doubtful, they'll use the same routine for the next Super Bowl, they said during the show.
And then the Drudge story tonight, this is the capper.
The male involved here, Mr. Timberlake, is now quoted on the Drudge page as saying, quote, I'm sorry that anyone was offended by the wardrobe malfunction during the halftime performance of the Super Bowl, end quote.
The wardrobe malfunction.
Now, the photograph is on the Drudge site.
I'm sure everybody's racing to it right now.
Remind you that this would perhaps not be appropriate for children.
It doesn't bother me.
It is, well, it's a mammary gland with a metal starfish, I would think it is, missing the center portion of the fish.
And that's all there is on this mammary gland.
And now it may have been a, just, you know, it just may be that piece just fell right off and just collapsed in his hand.
But, you know, it just, you know, while I do believe in coincidences, this one, I don't know.
I guess you will have to decide.
Do you see this as a serious, very serious wardrobe malfunction?
Or do you see this in some other way?
So, you know, the ocean currents are headed west.
Europe will freeze, but we will talk about this because this is America.
Oh, boy.
So, anyway, it was a good Super Bowl.
That's what everybody is going to talk about.
I absolutely guarantee it.
Being 58 years old, I've seen a few, and I'm not shocked nor outraged, nor even particularly surprised, honestly.
I guess I can imagine the CBS guys.
So it'll be interesting to see how everybody handles this.
You know what?
let's take a break and all the right Thank you.
How else would the Super Bowl end in a very kicking field goal in the last, you know, like four seconds or something?
That's the way it's written, right?
And that's the way it ends.
Vietnamese officials on, oh, wait a minute.
CBS, here's something from CBS.
CBS apologized on Sunday for an unexpectedly R-rated end to its Super Bowl halftime show when singer Justin Timberlich tore off part of Janet Jackson's top, exposing her breast.
Well, that would seem to be in conflict with the wardrobe malfunction statement.
Oh.
Oh.
We have a difference here.
By the way, in the program following the Super Bowl, Richard Hatch also had a wardrobe malfunction.
Anyway, let's try and gather it together here.
Vietnamese officials on Monday said tests had confirmed that an 18-year-old boy did, in fact, die of the bird flu, becoming now the country's ninth victim to die from the disease now raging through the region.
The teenager from the ethnic minority group in the Central Highlands died early Monday, said Tran Tinhyun, who would happen to be deputy director of the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh City, where the boy was admitted January 29.
That's an important story for all of you to keep following very closely.
This is a species jump thing, and it's not good.
There is this incredible girl who has been brought to Britain.
I guess you probably heard about her.
Maybe, maybe not.
Claims, in fact, demonstrates amazing powers.
Absolutely amazing powers.
Russian Natashka Dominka, 17 years of age, stunned doctors in her home country with her ability to see medical conditions inside of people.
It's a real story.
We flew her 1,500 miles to London to demonstrate her extraordinary powers to a son reporter, that would be Brian Warden, who suffered multiple injuries when she was knocked down by a car in October last year.
So in other words, this incredible talent she claims to have began after the car accident.
She is still recovering from the hit and run and uses crutches or a wheelchair to get around.
Before she arrived, one reporter removed a leg brace and hid all clues to her injuries.
Then the petite blonde teenager who looks years younger than her age began an examination.
She just stood up, let her eyes scan over the fully clothed body and made her diagnosis.
And she's able to do this again and again and again and tell what's wrong with people.
So she's being investigated right now.
I wonder don't you, how many humans, you know, through some either inherent natural born ability or one that is acquired in some accident that changes the chemistry in the brain can do things that might amaze us all.
The technology was basically based off of Nikolai Tesla.
And basically, in short, it's the same theory of vibration and frequency like the fluorescent light bulb, but he did it in a three-dimensional hologram tip that you put on.
For example, he was talking about this chip that you put onto the vehicle or onto the fuel tank that modified the molecules of the fuel to burn cleaner and get more fuel mileage.
In fact, the website is on your webpage on the lower left at the bottom, which is a green tab, which rotates with miles per tank.
And he has his...
Yeah, he's got a hop button up there on the lower left of your website.
However, I guess I would put this in the same box with, you know, machines that get more output than input, machines that eternally move, whatever the claim is.
Always ready to listen to stuff like that, but I have yet to see anything deliver.
And I'm always available, by the way, for a convincing demonstration that will allow inspection of what's actually supposedly being done.
We live out in the country, and a lot of people dump animals.
And one night about midnight, she wanted to go out a little bit, so I let her out, and I don't let her out real late because we have coyotes around our house.
And so I stood and watched, and here she came up the driveway with this little shaggy white dog.
A cat that saves other animals and brings them home to this lady.
West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
Hello.
unidentified
Hey, Art.
Hi.
Hey.
After listening to your show last night, I was floored when I got up and tuned into the Weather Channel, and I saw a new promo for their feature called Storm Stories.
Well, I guess I expected to see some rocks mostly, and I'm not disappointed.
Oh, they're nice rocks.
There are even cliffs and, you know, areas that show possible weather wear and all the rest of that, and that means water, so I'm not disappointed in the rocks.
Yes, when I say I take unscreen callers, baby, you're on the air.
That's how it works.
unidentified
That's right.
Yes, so I was just calling, first of all, to mention a little bit about, let's see, it was Sean David Morton you had on the first hour last night, right?
Well, I mean, it was Fortune, of course, and The Independent in London.
But, God, this is incredible.
I'm trying to keep a good humor about it all.
It'll probably dawn on.
Maybe it'll dawn on people.
I don't know.
unidentified
Yeah, when there's like glaciers coming down the Thames River or something, maybe then they might snap out of it and realize, hey, we got a problem here.
Otherwise, I would get angry at the lack of coverage.
But, I mean, a story this big by people, you know, with so much authority and science behind them, to be ignored is just absolutely totally amazing to me.
And I'll tell you what, our government and our highest officials are eventually going to have to turn to people like that and ideas like that.
They're going to be forced to.
If you simply read the right stories, like the ones that I've been presenting you with, that tell you what's coming, then you realize that efforts of that magnitude are going to have to be looked at along with a lot of other things when people wake up and realize what's going on.
FYI, KFI640 Los Angeles, has in fact moved Mr. Nori Slutt, the gracious, gentle, and most significantly informative from 10 p.m. to,
of all things, 1 a.m., where most of our heads, well, we're on the pillow, you know, and when we have to hit the desk at 7, 8, or 9, well, golly gee, we're deprived.
For all of those who care about us in Los Angeles, regardless of region, those of you who have friends or family in Los Angeles, we need your support too.
And with your permission, Art, I would like to provide, in fact, in this case, an address as per instruction, TFI is not receiving phone calls or emails regarding this matter.
No, I can't let you do that because without having arranged it first, and I do open lines, and so I can't arrange that kind of thing.
We can't check it out, and it could be something other than, even though I'm sure you would never give us something that would lead people in the wrong way.
Once again, look, Coast was number one in every single demographic.
That means every age group listening.
It was number one, number one, number one, right across the board.
And I have nothing against John Ziegler, who is now in that time slot.
I'm sure he's a great guy.
But, you know, he's doing what, well, what's on the radio all day long, everywhere else.
And it's just more of the same.
And by 10 o'clock at night, people don't want that.
People would like something a little different, which is the reason that this program has done as well as it is done.
It is the material that we deal with, it's unlike anything else you can hear about on any other radio program anywhere, anytime.
And it's done in a very different way.
And that's why it's number one.
And a lot of people are really upset.
I've had thousands of emails.
John says he hasn't had one.
Now, that's perhaps a bit disingenuous since I have copies of many that have been sent to him.
So that's certainly not true.
And in the end, not to worry because the people will tell the story.
In the end, what happens when the audience measurement is done will tell the story better than any other thing that could be done.
In fact, I offered to engage the program director of KFI in a bit of a wager, one of her paychecks against one of mine, regarding the results of the next measurement that I just spoke about, and she declined to participate in that.
Well, first off, I remember hearing a blip about this maybe five years ago about possibly the near future an ice age.
And I was in a geology class at the time, and I'd asked the professor about this, and he told me that there was no way possible that an ice age could come on this quick.
I was just wondering if in any way possible this could be connected with Planet X. Well, that wouldn't be my first leap of conclusion.
Planet X, which, of course, has not yet arrived.
You continually, if you watch your email, will see sightings of it claimed at various observatories at certain times, sometimes in Australia, but no Planet X yet.
So I wouldn't jump to that as my first conclusion.
yeah but but they left them half an hour so i can so i can see whether all them apparent mindless brain boring There's one person that dies after that, I believe.
unidentified
Maybe two.
After that part, it's all about the story, and basically it tells them why and how and what.
I'll try and return to it and see if there is redeeming value at the very end.
But yes, that did get me, the little machine that hit the guy's head and then wore its way in.
Oh, that was awful.
Absolutely awful.
we're going to take a break here and uh...
unidentified
when we get back we're going to talk about the u_s_ space program and where we're going or perhaps not going with it yeah no You don't have to shout or leave the loud, you can even play them easy.
Forget about the past, and all your sorrow...
Music Ain't got no trouble in my life.
No foolish dream to make me cry.
I'm never frightened or worried.
I know I always get by.
I hit up, I'm cool down.
Something gets in my way, I know about it.
Don't let light get me down.
Gonna take it the way that I found it.
I got music in me.
Yeah.
I got music in me.
They say that life is a circle.
I'm mad in the way that I found it.
Gonna move in a straight line.
Keeping the beach.
Hurry on the ground.
To talk with Art Bell.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
Robert Zimmerman coming up at America's Space Program.
Robert Zimmerman has been a producer and a screenwriter of feature films, documentaries, industrials, and commercials taught at New York University, the New School for Social Research, and the Stevens Institute of Technology.
He is an award-winning author, writing articles and books on issues of science, history, technology, and culture.
In the year 2000, he was co-winner of the David N. Schramm Award, given by the high-energy astrophysic division of the American Astronomical Society for Science Journalism.
Mr. Zimmerman received his Bachelor of Arts degree, Cum Laude from Brooklyn College.
He received a master's degree from New York University in 1995, majoring in history and film.
And he's got a lot to say about the U.S. space program coming up.
Good evening, Robert Zimmerman, in a moment.
And I guarantee you that by the end of the night tonight, you're going to be going, oh my God, I didn't know that happened during that mission.
Robert Zimmerman's going to talk to us about U.S. spaceflight, past, present, future.
And I guarantee you, he has got some information on some of what occurred in space that's going to just blow you away.
Yeah, they're going to reduce the problem, but I don't think they'll be able to eliminate it.
And they recognize that.
What they're trying to do now is approach the technical solution from several routes.
One is, can they do repairs in orbit?
And they're looking at a variety of different technical engineering designs for allowing an astronaut to do a Spacewalk with equipment to either put a plug in, a small hole, or to maybe put an inflatable patch that would go inside and inflate, or even put an overlay, and they would actually use the kind of ablative material that was used in the Apollo program, which burns off, takes the heat away as it burns away.
But what that does is, of course, it protects the spacecraft.
They had seen similar issues earlier, and they were concerned.
They had been raising this issue several times.
This is a repeat of what happened with Challenger.
What is it now?
That was 1986.
That's 18 years ago, it's hard to believe.
This is really a repeat of the same story.
You had managers who, that bureaucratic culture, the managers are running things, not the engineers.
And so A person moves up the line of command.
Even if they started out as an engineer, they're now in the management position and management concerns become the primary driving force of whatever is accomplished.
So if an engineer says, look, we think there's an engineering problem, the management concerns take the foreigner.
And the orbit that Columbia was in, and that's one of the other things they're addressing with the shuttle program to try to avoid this accident from McCrane again.
It is very unlikely they could.
It's almost impossible they could have done anything about it.
Had they known, it was almost impossible, which is one of the reasons I think they took a nonchalant attitude towards it.
They didn't at that time have any real solution to this.
So what's the point of pursuing it very aggressively?
Yes, there was some conversation, but it was downplayed.
It was low-key.
They basically told the crew, we noticed there was an impact from some foam.
We're checking into it, but we don't think it's a concern.
We've asked our engineers.
We don't think it's a concern.
That's what they basically told the crew.
And they left it at that.
And they didn't really pursue it very aggressively.
There were engineers trying to get the management people to pursue it, but they couldn't get those management people to do it because they had other things on their mind.
There were concerns that some engineers had in NASA.
And they were trying to follow up those concerns because they were concerned.
But those concerns weren't followed up, so no one knew.
So when the shuttle starts to come back into orbit, and they start to get the sensor readings that are indicating there is an anomaly, the people in mission control at the time really were not aware of the concerns the engineers had, and they just weren't responding to the data they were getting, and then suddenly the shuttle's gone.
Well, you see, this is one of my pet peeves because as tragic as the Columbia accident was, I think we're doing spectacular for rocket science and exploration.
We launched a little over 100 shuttle missions.
And in that time, we lost essentially 2% of those missions.
And you could say we've lost 40% of our fleet.
We built five shuttles, and we've lost two.
That's one way to look at it.
But in actual launches, we've launched over 100 and lost about 2%.
And I mentioned this on my last appearance, but I'll say it again.
When the Clipper ship existed as the epitome of the sailing ship, 5,000 years of technology, on an average, they lost 5% of their best ships every year.
And that was the best technology.
The shuttle is a prototype, first prototype reusable ship.
It's the first spaceship that's ever been built that's even partly reusable.
And for that reason, it's an extremely experimental, and it's been incredibly successful in that respect.
I was once asked at Electra, isn't the International Space Station an accident waiting to happen?
I'm not saying, yes, I'm trying to include everything.
They're all risky endeavors, and the astronauts know this.
They take that risk on because they recognize that the benefits far exceed the risks, and they're willing to sacrifice their lives for the benefits for themselves, for the nation, for the human being.
And it's very non-trivial as far as I think that for a long time we've needed goal and reason, and the space program gives that to us, unlike a lot of other things.
The Soviet Union ended up to be basically a disaster in the end, and it fell.
It fell apart.
But the one industry that came out of the Soviet Union that is respected worldwide and is the one great achievement that the Soviet Union brought to the world.
Well, actually, you know, I spent, for writing my most recent book, Leaving Earth, I spent a month in Moscow interviewing a lot of people and talking to a lot of engineers, a lot of cosmonauts, a lot of scientists involved with the program, both in the Soviet days and today.
And actually, it's not hard times.
That's a boomtown right now.
Things are really straightening out.
It's taking them time, but they are really getting their act together.
Yes, but if you actually look at the amount of money for their gross national product that they devote to the maintenance of the ICBMs that, by the way, are pretty much aimed this way, you'll find it's appallingly short.
And the condition of these rockets and ICBMs is appallingly old.
I'm focusing on what the space program, on what did work, and I think it's because they went for the, in this respect, their space program, their specific trying to explore the universe to bring their dream, their nation, their culture into space and make it dominant in space was a great thing.
And that was them trying to do the best they could be.
It's a question of whether the United States wants to be part of it or not.
And I think that it would be a very bad mistake if we chose not to be part of it.
The question really is now, how do we become a part of it?
What's the best way to do that?
And that's really the bottom line.
And I think the discussion, I've been on several radio shows recently, and the hosts have been telling me that their calls have shifted.
They were expecting opposition, the same kind of question you raised.
What do we get out of it?
And they said that wasn't the kind of calls they were getting.
Instead, they were getting a lot of arguments about how to do it, disagreeing with my ideas, which is okay, but a lot of argument about how should we do this, because it seems we have no choice.
Yeah, you know, it's an interesting thing from my perspective because I've been on shows where the audience is very clearly hostile, what you'd think would be hostile to space.
And that's one of the things I've noticed, is that they're not arguing hostile to space as much anymore.
They're just arguing about how to do it.
And even with your audience, I think that we have to really think about this because, and we can now talk about George Bush's proposals about how to do it and what's good or bad about that.
Yeah, I mean, I break it down into several different parts.
His proposal, I think, is just like we said at the beginning, it's the right idea.
You've got to have the courage, the brave, to do these great things.
At least he's dreaming the right things.
Let's go and do it.
And that's the courageous part of his plan.
The smartness of his plan, it's very smart in a lot of ways.
He's decided to finally get the manned program focused on what it should be.
It's not doing science research in the International Space Station.
It's not being a commercial hauling service for satellites.
It's exploration.
If you're going to put people in space, it's to explore the solar system.
And he's focusing on that now.
So for example, and this is really one of my themes in Leaving Earth, he's going to use the International Space Station the way it should be used.
Anytime you put human beings on a vessel in orbit around the Earth at this stage of our technological development in space, you're really learning how to build interplanetary spaceships.
So those space stations, I think that name is a misnomer.
You know, all things considered, the trouble the one rover did have, we're having a whole lot of success right now, apparently, with the rovers on Mars.
They're, I think, down both now and gathering information, photographs.
We're going to find out about what are on Mars.
It's pretty big in the space program, and that's what Robert Zimmerman is here talking about.
So we'll ask them about the rovers in a moment.
The Rovers in a M. All right, Robert, we've got them on the ground.
I was just, in fact, during the break looking at pictures again.
Both landers landed in places that no landing has ever gone before on any other planet.
I mean, the first one, Spirit, landed, when those pictures first came out, it's completely different than any of the other landers on Mars because it was like a sandy beach with little cobblestones.
And the stones looked like the kind you'd see in a stream.
It got kind of smoothed out, which is very interesting because water, wind, interesting.
And they were scattered.
There weren't a lot of rocks.
It didn't have that jagged, crumbly look that rocks have.
They looked solid.
And then opportunity, it lands dead center inside a crater.
You couldn't have done better.
And the crater is interesting.
Not only do you get a first bedrock wall, you know, because the layers.
They've seen layers, cross-cutting layers, into wheat and the joints, which implies much activity.
But then you've got, it's very dark, which means it has what they call the words, hematite, which is a mineral which is produced in one of two different ways generally, geologically.
One, either through water processes or through lava flow.
And they don't know exactly which it is yet, but they're hoping it's from water.
And that would tell them some information about the water history of Mars.
The odds are, if you were making a bet, you'd win, because there's water on Mars.
There's no question of that.
I mean, there's lots of water in the poles.
It's frozen.
There's other areas in the planet where it's frozen.
The spectroscopic work that's been done by both Mars Odyssey and Mars Global Surveyor have both indicated that there are areas where there is frozen water underground.
Pretty likely.
Which means you could get underground ice caves.
You could get water flows in the caves.
The temperature is very cold, but nonetheless, you can get these kind of things.
So the water is there.
The water tends to sublimate directly into a gas.
So you don't get flowing water on the surface as far as we can tell anywhere on the surface.
But there is evidence that flowing water has existed recently within geological time and possibly recently within human history.
Recently like within the next decades, it might have been.
And I say unfortunately, I am speaking for every scientist at JPL, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and every scientist at NASA who's involved in the project, and every scientist who dreams of winning a Nobel Prize.
Because if they saw any artificial evidence at all, if you thought they jumped up and down in joy when the thing landed, they would hit the ceiling in joy.
Do you know how much money that would bring to them, too?
I mean, the enthusiasm, if we saw artificial evidence, artificial structures there, if they could get a picture of that, my God, they'd be so happy beyond words.
And I would be, too.
We all would.
But unfortunately, no, they're not seeing anything like that.
We're seeing geological formations.
They're interesting, and there's some mysteries going on that are not explainable by Earth's geology.
I mean, I talked to Mike Mallon, who basically owns the company that runs the camera on Global Surveyor that's been orbiting Mars now for almost 60 years, taking pictures.
And he told me, you know, when they took the close-up of the face, he really wished he'd seen a structure there, but it wasn't.
It was a mesa.
And it was a very strange mesa.
It definitely was geologically, totally inexplicable by Earth processes, though wind, some form of wind and erosion was going on.
But it was not like what you see on Earth.
But he was really actually disappointed.
He said, I wish it had been artificial.
It wasn't.
That's the unfortunate, you know, so no, unfortunately, no.
I haven't seen anything, and neither have they, and they wish they could.
It's like asking someone, you know, I can't really predict that.
They're going to, I think, find evidence that there was that.
Everything they've looked at seems to indicate, and they've landed in places where they think heavy flows of water did occur based upon the orbitable photos.
Yes, I mean, as they take the sam, do the, as the rovers take samples, and when they say taking samples, they're basically just scraping the rock and then doing spectroscopy of the scrapes.
They're going to start getting real solid data, and they'll be able to pin down whether the hematite minerals there were caused by lava flows or by water.
And the southwest of the United States is one of the more beautiful places, Grand Canyon.
Well, I've seen some pictures from Global Surveyor of some of the canyons on Mars that are probably some of the most spectacular places in the solar system to hike.
And I would love to go there.
I mean, obviously, it's going to take a great deal of technology to make it livable.
Well, no, it's it's it you know, this is one of those great fallacies.
I've been upset about Hubble getting abandoned now for about seven years because the scientific community, I think they're kind of hypocritical right now.
Scientific community made a decision in 1996 that after the 2004 repair mission, which was the one that got canceled, they were going to abandon Hubble.
Hubble's still operating, and it'll still continue to operate until something goes badly wrong, and they will try to keep it alive as long as they can.
It'll probably get a minimum.
I mean, I'm being, you know, something can go wrong tomorrow, but if things continue to operate as they have been, it'll probably get anywhere from three to five more years of operation.
It may be, you know, if things go bad, it could fail in two weeks, but they're hoping for three to five more years.
And they'll keep using it every minute because the thing was an incredible facility.
But one of the consequences of the Columbia accident and the Columbia investigation is that they do not, and this is one of the other solutions they've come up with to try to make the shuttle so safe nothing can ever go wrong, unrealistically, I think, is that no mission should go into an orbit that is an orbit you cannot dock with the International Space Station.
You have to be able to dock with the International Space Station if you're going to go into orbit so that you have a place to stay in case something goes wrong.
Well, Hubble's not in that kind of orbit.
So you can't go to Hubble without breaking one of the criteria of the Columbia investigation to make the shuttle safer.
I spoke to some people at Goddard, and there is talk in the NASA circles about making a robot mission to get up there and maybe boost its orbit and keep it around for a while, and then have a controlled re-entry when the time came, finally.
But, you know, I think that's really pie in the sky for a lot of reasons, one of which it require a robot docking.
And there's only one nation in the world that's ever successfully done that, and that's Russia, and we haven't.
We've always done it manned controlled docking.
So us suddenly coming up with a robot that can do a manned docking, an unmanned docking like this, I think is just being unrealistic.
I wrote that book because I felt that that mission, which had become forgotten in the ensuing decades with the landing, I thought that mission was actually the most important Apollo mission.
And if you talk to a lot of astronauts, they say the same thing.
They think that's the most important mission, both historically, culturally, and in terms of winning the space race.
It was the mission that actually did win the race to the moon, because the Soviets were trying to get to the moon up until that mission.
And as soon as that mission happened, they canceled all plans.
So we won the race with that mission.
It happened at the end of 1968, which in many ways was one of the more significant historical years in the United States for the last half of the 20th century.
That was the year of Martin Luther King's death, Kennedy's death, riots.
And at the end of that year was the Apollo 8 mission, which was the first time human beings actually went somewhere in a spacecraft.
They were going to another world.
And they did it Christmas week.
And they got into lunar orbit on Christmas Eve.
And from lunar orbit, they read from the Bible on Christmas Eve to the world.
And why they did that, I thought, was really, I want to find out why they did that.
And it was, I think, a very old-fashioned American attempt to express their goodwill to everyone else and why they chose what they chose to read.
And then the images that they took of the moon was that dark, stark, almost skull-like landscape.
I think shook up the world and the United States, especially, in terms of exploration, because it made us kind of like almost afraid of exploration again because it didn't look like a very inviting place.
And I think that shook us up.
It also made us, they took the first Earthrise picture, the first time human beings saw the Earth rise above the horizon of another world.
And it's ironic that it didn't really, to them, their eyes, it didn't rise above the horizon.
It actually came out from right to left because they were orbiting a planet world.
Robert, wouldn't you think that of the first men who would go and leave Earth, actually, and go to the moon, that there would be some moments of intense reflection and going right down to your very roots and thinking about all the cosmic questions we don't consider much of the time.
I mean, it would force you into that kind of thing, wouldn't it?
Everyone at NASA believed it was about a 50-50 chance of success.
They went Anyway, their wives told them they had to go.
They all asked their wives and they said, Yeah, you've got to do this.
This is for the nation, for the world.
Now, in retrospect, we now know the odds were probably better because the Apollo systems is a really good system.
But nonetheless, it was very risky.
Jim Lovell told me: to him, God is, you know, there's the spiritual stuff, but to him, you know, it doesn't matter if you go to the moon or go to Earth.
He's everywhere and it's going to be the same.
So he really didn't change spiritually.
He just felt, you know, I wanted to go to space.
unidentified
I was always wanting to be a spaceman who explores space.
You know, maybe man is not meant to be in space at all.
Some suggest that.
Not meant to be in space at all.
It's a hostile accident waiting to happen.
and with the government actually does seem like that's exactly what it is By the way, Robert, Ron from Vancouver, Canada sends me on the computer.
I get these messages.
Move to Mars?
Can't ever come back?
Do I get 14 virgins?
No, Ron, you don't.
Now, just thought I'd toss that in.
We were actually in the middle of a pretty serious discussion about change in astronauts.
And it leads me to ask you about why so many astronauts have, after their experience, had such stress manifesting itself in various ways beyond the norm one would think.
I'm not sure the marital difficulty is actually a reflection of the space program as much as it was a change in our culture.
Because the Apollo 8 mission, that's an interesting one in this respect, too.
It's the only Apollo crew, which all three men are still married to the same wives, all of whom were high school sweethearts.
And that's an unusual thing.
All the program, all the astronauts had that problem, but I think that's more a reflection of our society than anything else.
I'm not sure it was the space program.
What is interesting, and I learned this in my third book, Leaving Earth, and discussing long missions in space, is the challenge of trying to survive in a spaceship for a very long time in orbit, especially if the spaceship is small and doesn't have a lot of adequate facilities.
By the way, have the Russians shared all of the really important biological information, physiological readings and information from their very long missions with us?
Yes, you pretty much can find out what they learned.
All you've got to do is ask them, and there's a lot of it that's been published.
What they don't share completely, and I don't blame them in this respect, they won't share with us completely the solutions.
For example, I spent three days interviewing Valery Polyakov.
He has the present-day record for the longest space flight.
He was 14 and a half months in space.
He is also a doctor, and he focused his whole life on space medicine.
He wanted to prove that it would be possible to go, spend like 10 months in weightlessness, and then immediately be able to work when you got to Mars.
You know, you can't just simply be helped around when you get to Mars like they do when they come back from long missions in orbit.
You've got to be able to get there and start taking samples and walk around.
And he wanted to prove you could do that.
And I spoke to him for three days, and he told me pretty much everything, all the results, how much bone he lost, bone density he lost, and I could go into that and how he solved his medical problems.
But he told me very bluntly, we have figured out that exercise will reduce the bone loss problem.
Exercise can reduce the muscle deterioration.
We figured this out.
But I'm not going to tell you the specific exercises.
That's where I get paid my money.
You want to get that information?
I'll consult with NASA and tell them, but they've got to pay me.
And I think that was just fine.
I have no problem with that.
And he wasn't saying I'm not going to keep it a secret.
He's saying, you know, where's the moolah?
And I think that's a very fair, that's a very capitalist approach.
And I think it's perfectly reasonable.
But they're very willing to tell you what the results were.
There's no question of that.
In fact, they want you to know because they want to show how their research has produced results and can teach us things.
Of all the people you know, and I know a few myself, Robert, who are planning private enterprise missions into space, and I mean completely private sector here.
We're talking hotels and things across that line.
So if they didn't want to see Tito up there bounding around, how are they going to feel about a five-star hotel?
I think right now that's where we started to talk about Bush's proposal, and I think that's the one area of his proposal that is the biggest failure of the proposal.
He basically didn't, you know, the problem, Columbia accident and the Columbia Investigation Board's results clearly showed that the American space program needed to be shaken up, cleanhouse, rethink how we do things, not so much to come up with a new project, but to rethink how we do things.
And That's what Bush failed to do.
He basically went with the status quo.
He asked NASA what should be done.
NASA told him what they would like to do, and he decided to say, okay, we'll have NASA do it.
And he's not going to give NASA very much money to do it.
And being a government agency, they're going to need five times as much money as any private company would.
And so, unfortunately, it's one of the weaknesses of that proposal.
We need to shake up how we do our space program.
unidentified
When you talk about private, I'll use the ex-pride.
Robert, isn't the funding for this way down the line?
Isn't it one of those things where you get to announce the beginning of it, sort of put a token little amount toward it, but the real bill is going to be paid by another president somewhere.
I'll use the International Space Station as an example.
Reagan proposed that around 84, I think it was.
I always confuse it.
84, 86.
It was 84.
But they did the same thing.
It was a very small budget to begin with.
So they basically spent the next 10 years doing blueprints.
And after he wanted it built by 1990, when 1990 rolled around, they were going to build it for $8 billion.
They had spent almost $4 billion in only drawing blueprints because they stretched the money out.
And they hadn't built anything.
The only reason that the space station ever got launched at all is because Clinton forced it through as a foreign policy initiative, and that's the only reason it got built.
He wanted that foreign policy project with the Russians.
I mean, I mentioned Polyakov, 14 and a half months in space.
What the Russians learned over time, and what we started to learn with Skylab, but then dropped the ball, is that if you're going to travel long distances in space, you have to deal with the problems that weightlessness causes on the human body.
In addition, you have to learn the engineering involved for building the spaceship that'll get you there.
And that doesn't mean making the air system recyclable or the water recyclable, both of which, by the way, the Russians have succeeded in doing.
But you also have to learn how to make the spaceship repairable by the crew.
And that the Russians also learned on Mir.
They figured out how to do that.
And we also are learning how to do that on Skylab.
And the trouble with the International Space Station up to now is we haven't taken that point of view.
And so the engineering of the International Space Station doesn't allow repair very easily by the crew.
Well, he wants to start focusing on medical research, which I think is a smart move.
The engineering aspect of building spaceships to go to Mars, unfortunately, the International Space Station can't really do that because it's been designed already and built.
And so it's going to be what it is.
And unfortunately, the American half of that station is not built with that engineering project in mind.
So it doesn't have closed systems of air and water.
It doesn't really provide facilities for a crew to live on a station for a long time very well.
The Russian half, though, does those things because it's basically that the Russian half is essentially their Mir 2, what they were going to build after Mir, and they're basically putting that up now.
The two systems are very closely integrated, so they work together so that both mission controls in both Moscow and the United States and Houston can operate.
But no question, the two systems are independent.
You can separate the two systems.
And our system is not self-sufficient, so it depends on the Russian half.
Well, you know, there's political reasons why they might do that, and there's political reasons why they might not.
In terms of if there was competition between the two nations, then you might actually get more results.
When we try to cooperate, we tend to not do anything.
That's those are separate issues.
But for them, they're very smart.
They want to have the ability and the flexibility.
If we fall down on the job, which is maybe so, they can pull out and still have their station.
And they are thinking about building that station so that it is independent as possible from Earth because it's designed with the idea of making it into, of learning how to build those interplanetary spaceships down the road.
That's their thinking.
So they have closed water, closed oxygen.
In other words, the oxygen produced from the urine so that they can actually provide the air for three guys forever.
The water comes from the atmosphere.
They pull it out of the atmosphere and they purify it and you drink it.
You don't need any other water brought up.
Which are the two main ingredients.
They're doing plant experiments on the station where they're actually growing plants to eat.
Now, that's on their half of the station.
In fact, NASA forbids American astronauts from eating any of those plants because they might screw up their diet.
But the point is, what the space agriculture stuff is trying to do is if you can grow your plants in space, not only are you growing your food, which means you have a resuppliable stock.
They want to have the NASA astronauts have very clear idea of what they've eaten so they know exactly their medical experiments, when they do their medical research, they know exactly what they've eaten and they can keep track of what they've eaten so that there won't be any confusion about what they've eaten.
The Russians have under, because of their long-term program of many missions, they've learned you've got to let the astronauts in space dictate how to do things.
What ends up happening is that American mission control tends to try to tell the astronauts in space how to do everything, when to do it, to schedule every minute of their time.
They keep trying to do that.
And the astronauts up there want to tell them, no, go away.
I'll decide when to do things.
The Russians have learned this.
You let the guys in space figure out when to do things at their own pace.
And Americans have learned it at Skylab.
This is the same lesson that was learned at Skylab.
We forgot it.
We're trying to relearn it again.
And the Russians have been training us again that you leave the guys in space alone.
While you're considering your new possible future home on Mars or in space, maybe in orbit or something at a five-star hotel or whatever your plans might be, I noticed that Robert, what he sent me, has promised to include hair-raising but little-known events that have occurred in space over the last 40 years.
So, no doubt his reciting some of those will help you make your decision.
Rest assured that at the top of the hour, I shall deliver Mr. Zimmerman into the loving, caressing arms of the larger audience out there.
In other words, we'll begin to take calls.
But I do want to get into some of the hair raising, but little-known events that have occurred over the last 40 years in space will help people decide where they're going to live.
Well, you know, most of those little-known events generally occurred on the Soviet-slash-Russian space stations.
They did some incredible things, including construction in space, and really don't know much about it.
I mean, one of the best stories to my mind is three weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union, on Mir, they had a project to build a 45-foot-tall girder on Mir.
So they wanted to add this engine, this thruster at the very top of this tower.
But they also wanted to test construction technologies in space, because if you're going to have a spaceship traveling to other worlds, you've got to be able to do construction.
And they wanted to see if this alloy was going to work in orbit as well in weightlessness.
So these two guys, this is in July of 1991, they go out there, and one of them gets a great idea.
You know, he says, I'm a construction worker.
I'm building a girder in space.
So I'm going to do like every construction worker.
He goes out and he buys himself a hammer and sickle flag.
And he's going to put it at the top of this girder when they finish building it.
It took them about four spacewalks.
They built section by section.
On the outside of the station in spacesuits, they would assemble them.
They had actually a work table they set up outside the station.
And they would assemble the pieces.
And then they hinged it upwards so it was vertical, 45 feet.
And then he decided, look, I've got to get the flag up to the top, and we want to also test the rigidity of this girder.
So he climbs up to the top.
Now, you have to understand that the Russian spacesuit at that time only gives you about seven hours per space walk before you run out of air.
And so he's climbed.
They've been already out about four hours, five hours.
He climbs up to the top, and he puts the flag there, the hammer and sickle.
And then at that point, the thermal system in his spacesuit fails, which means that it fogs up.
He can't see anything.
Here he is, four and a half stories up in the air on top of this girder on a space station that's 250 miles in the air.
And he's quite a distance away from the airlock.
He's got to come down the girder and then cross two modules to get up to where the airlock is.
And plus that he had a video camera and the wires got tangled up.
So his partner climbs up to help.
And meanwhile, the cosmetic, his name was Ossibotsky, he rubs his chin at the base of his faceplate.
So he can get, like, if he tilts his head down, he can kind of like get a little area.
His chin clears the window.
He can see a little bit.
And it takes him about two hours to get him back inside and close the hatch, which is just in time.
They really were just about right of there.
What I found most ironic about the story is this hammer and sickle.
In terms of every loss of human life in space, we knew when it happened because we had to know because the guys up in space, they announce it, and then their first loss, Carmarv on Soyuz 1, he dies on the parachute landing.
And the second crew on Salyut 1, all three men were up for 28 days.
It was an incredibly successful mission.
And on the return, the atmosphere in their capsule escapes and they suffocate.
So everyone knew they were up in space.
There's no secret there.
What they did keep secret is the failures in test programs to a certain extent, the stuff that doesn't get publicized.
It was stuff that happened, let's say, either test programs on the ground.
It might be fires.
It might be a plane accident.
But even there, they didn't keep it as secret as we think.
I mean, Gagarin died in a plane accident.
that was pretty much revealed almost immediately.
It's interesting, if you go back and look at old Soviet press releases, it's really interesting.
They really don't lie about anything.
What they do is not, they avoid topics.
Well, later on, they'll explain the problem after they've fixed it.
Nowadays, it's different.
They really will tell you almost anything you want to know.
They really will.
It was really interesting.
What you do have a situation is the military cosmonauts, their program is, their cosmonauts are split into two groups, the military half and the civilian half.
And every mission has one of each.
They always have two crew members.
There's always a military guy, and there's always a civilian guy.
I was able to talk to almost every civilian guy who I wanted to talk to.
Well, you know, there's some things that happened that in later years we got a little bit more detail out of, but it's mostly because it wasn't reported in great.
For example, on Skylab, a lot of people will know about this, about how Pete Conrad and Joe Kerwin and Paul Weitz had to repair that station.
When it was first launched, there was damage to a heat.
They lost a heat shield, and one of their solar panels was lost, and another one got tangled up in straps.
And so they had to do a repair mission to get the one solar panel that was still there untangled and opened.
Well, what a lot of people don't know is they were not in contact with the ground when they were doing the final release of that solar panel.
They had to use rope to pull it, to pull it free, so it would come out.
It would unhinge itself.
And what people don't know is when they finally got it to release, there was a lot of tension on the line.
As soon as it released, that tension went away, and both men went flying out into space and had to pull themselves back on 45-foot-long tethers.
And they're not in touch with the ground when this happens.
They pull themselves back, and they did it.
It was great.
And when they got back on the ground, they said, we see, we got power.
You fixed it.
And he said, yeah, yeah, it was pretty straightforward.
And later on, in later years, they did tell in debriefings what happened, but that didn't get any press.
I only found out about that later.
That's kind of things, details.
When our astronauts were on Mir, however, there was a lot of secretness in the American NASA that didn't want to, there was spin.
They didn't want to tell the truth.
So, for example, when Jerry Leninger was on Mir and there was a fire, it was very difficult for him to get anyone on the ground to take the problem seriously.
Yes, and in the process of our occupancy, with the money we gave them, they were able to actually refurbish the station.
And by the time the Americans left Mir, Mir was actually in better shape than it had been when we arrived.
It had new power systems, new solar panels.
It was really in really good shape.
That one module that had been hit by the Progress Freighter was still out of commission, but they were getting power from three of its four solar panels, and they were working.
Mir actually functioned reasonably well by the time we left, and most of the astronauts that went to Mir, they were not terrified by the situation on Mir.
Jerry Leninger in particular, he was very unhappy with what went on on Mir, but mostly because of the difficulty he had to get NASA to take the situation on Mir seriously.
That's getting, once again, that communication problem between the ground and the men up in space, the men and women up in space.
Could not get them to listen to him.
In fact, he was on Mir before Michael Fole, before the collision.
And this is two months before that collision, the Russians decide to do a test docking of a Progress Freighter.
And it's an almost collision.
It's a failed docking.
And Leninger cannot get anyone on the ground to even know about it.
In fact, NASA takes the word of the Russians who wouldn't, at that time, was not communicating very well at the very beginning of this program.
And they wouldn't tell us what was going on.
And they swept it under the rug.
And Leninger's trying to tell them what happened, and they won't listen to him.
And so the end result of that is when they decided to do a second test docking three months later, when Michael Fole was there, it failed again, but this time it turned into a collision.
And that was partly because Leninger could not get the ground to understand that the Russians were using some poor judgment in some of the things they were doing, and he wanted them to be aware of it.
We were talking at the beginning of the program about the reasons to go.
And for the pragmatists out there, Robert, I really think you ought to take a moment and nevertheless outline the real hardline money benefits we can realize by going to space, or potentially realize.
Any American investor worth his salt would want to know the possible upside of a venture.
Well, I can give you one in particular that is directly beneficial to people on Earth that a long-term space flight connects with, and that's bone loss.
When you're in space, if you don't exercise in space, you're going to lose anywhere from 1 ⁇ 2 to 3% of your bone density in the weight-bearing bones per month.
Very similar to osteoporosis, which I have myself personally.
It's a problem.
And a lot of people have on Earth.
So you lose bone density.
And weightlessness causes that to happen.
And the research to try to reduce that bone loss is crucial to be able to go to Mars, but the result of learning how to prevent the bone loss is going to be directly applicable to curing optimism.
What they have found, and I mentioned this with Polyakov, what they have found, and this is an interesting, once again, cultural difference in the United States and Russia.
The Russians have flown the missions.
They've had four people who've been in space more than a year, including Polyakov, and they've done innumerable missions longer than six months, and we've now done a few since we've had the ISS.
And what they have learned is that if you do certain exercises and a certain regiment of diet, but mostly exercise, and that includes anywhere from 90 minutes to two hours of exercise per day, and it's got to be specific kinds of exercises, you can reduce the bone loss pretty routinely to about a half a percent a month, which in space is tolerable for getting to and from Mars, without question.
No, not much beyond, but then you get to Mars, you know, you do it step by step then, maybe.
But then maybe, you know, and they're still looking at other solutions.
Now, it's interesting to me, talking to American doctors and American scientists and astronauts, they don't want to listen to the Russian results.
They say, oh, no, the exercise doesn't help.
But they haven't done the work.
And I don't understand how they can just dismiss it.
The Russians seem to be pretty confident about this.
However, if we're going to go to Mars to really understand the problem, you're going to have to go 18 months maybe, or even 24 in orbit to see the consequences of that and how you can reduce the bone loss even more.
And once again, that's directly applicable to osteoporosis on Earth.
And it's, once again, the medical results from every space, long space mission, especially our Skylab missions, was immeasurable in terms of medical research on Mars.
And he's talking about using the space station to learn about long-term weightlessness.
And you see, there's two components.
If you're going to go to Mars and set up bases on Mars, you have to learn two things.
You have to learn how to travel to Mars.
That's one problem.
And you have to learn how to live on Mars, and that's another problem.
And to learn how to live on Mars is what you do on the moon.
And some of the problems that will exist on a low-gravity environment, we don't quite know yet.
In fact, we don't know because we haven't done it.
One of the issues, it's going to mostly, I think, have to do with engineering to build the residence, the facility that you live in, to make it, once again, a closed environment that's habitable and reasonably pleasant to live in.
And thus, once again, an engineering question that has to be learned over time.
And I think that's where the moon comes in, because it's close.
You can do the research without having to go nine months one way just to get there.
You know, it's the same question that you could have asked Columbus.
It's the old cliché, but it's really true.
There was no way of knowing where the profit was going to be.
I'll use better yet, the British settlers.
When they first came to Virginia, they thought they were going to find gold everywhere.
And of course, gold was not where the profit was.
In fact, the first six or seven years of the Virginia colony, they lost a fortune and they lost a lot of lives.
Almost two-thirds of the colonists died.
Until they discovered, and this was a discovery that happened after they got there, they discovered tobacco.
And then they started to make a real profit from Virginia.
Later on, in the North American, the English colonies, the New England colonies, they didn't come with the same goals, but by then they had learned how to colonize a new world so they could actually just create self-sufficient colonies for people to live in.
Well, we've obviously got a very strong advocate for the U.S. space program on our hands here, Robert Zimmerman.
So it might be sort of interesting, I thought, to ask him about the growing army of people out there.
Some of them citing all kinds of technical things and photographs and all the rest of it as evidence that we never went to the moon.
I wonder what Robert would say to that group.
There is an entire army of people out there, Robert, who, well, they'll cite technical details and photographs and do all kinds of things and tell you and convince you we have never, we never went to the moon.
And I see this as because we haven't accomplished great things, we're willing to denigrate the achievements of others to make it seem less achievement.
Well, I think as what I was just saying, I mean, our generation has not accomplished very much, and this is almost like, well, we can't do it, so maybe no one else ever did.
And let's make believe that didn't happen.
And it really is absurd when you think about it, because, you know, millions of people, people went to Florida over and over again to watch the Saturn V launch.
And, I mean, this is a big thing.
Where did it go?
I mean, it's absurd to just send it up into orbit and not go anywhere.
Okay, so then you're trying to tell me then that the reason you think people are doing this is because they think they can't do it, and we can't do it now, and therefore it never could have been done.
I hate to over-psychoanalyze people, but I just think, but yeah, to my mind, that's part of it.
But I just think it's really tragic.
And it's also tragic for another reason, which is, and this gets back to the kind of exploration that's going on on Mars.
There's a lot of focus on what I consider to be fringe fantasy stuff when the actual research going on itself is fascinating.
The real stuff is amazing.
And the same thing applies to the man exploration.
You know, the space station exploration research that's been done has involved some daring do and some really courageous acts by a lot of men and women.
And instead of focusing on that, we're trying to make believe that past achievements haven't occurred.
And I think that's a shame.
There's really great stuff going on, and there's people willing to do even greater stuff.
And rather than give them the wherewithal to get it done, we're kind of like trying to make believe we didn't do anything in the past so that it can't be done in the future.
Actually, the unmanned program that NASA's got going right now is actually a very, very well-coordinated, smartly designed program.
They kind of like, it took them a few mistakes and a few failed missions to finally get the thing organized.
Their inevitable goal is to bring a sample back.
What they're doing is every two years the orbital arrangements of Mars and Earth make it convenient to send probes there, and that's why they all come in bunches.
So what they're doing is they send orbital missions, and they did that two years ago, and that takes photos, and that takes spectroscopy, and it finds out where they should send the rovers.
And then two years pass, and now they're sending the rovers, and what the rovers do is they land where they think the good stuff is and do the research to try to prove that what they're seeing in the orbital photos is what they think it is.
To be fair, but nonetheless, they were able to do it.
And I don't see that as a significant engineering challenge.
It's just a question of sitting down and doing it.
What our space program, our unmanned program is doing, though, is it's not going to do that mission until it has a much clearer idea of where to land and what to look for.
And that's why they've set this program up.
And they're not planning any sample return mission till after 2011 in the program as they've got it now.
There's going to be another set of orbital missions in two years, followed by a much more sophisticated set of rovers two years after that.
And then at that point, they might start considering where they're going to send their sample mission.
And it's definitely in the plans.
It's just they haven't settled on where and how it's going to be designed yet.
and antibiotics there's a tenfold increase in the yield in some antibiotics grown in space Does it turn into enough dollars to justify what we put into it?
As I mentioned before, this is, we're not at a stage yet where we're ready to do that kind of factory work in orbit.
We're not really there.
We need to build and design our engineering so that people can live in space for long periods of time successfully.
And that engineering is not just not there yet.
We have to focus on building those vessels in orbit that people can live on for a long period of time and solve all the problems involved with that before we can even start thinking about the science research.
That doesn't mean the science research cannot be going on at the same time, but it shouldn't be the be end and focus of the program.
And that's where the ISS has been screwed up.
It shouldn't be the focus of the program.
It is, like I say, it would be like, they did grow protein crystals, by the way, on one of the Apollo missions to the moon, but it would be like making that the main reason you create the Apollo capsule.
And of course, that's foolish.
And it's the same thing with ISS.
So all the things you're mentioning are good, and they all should happen, but they shouldn't be the priority.
And in fact, because they aren't the priority, a lot of that research is now going to be put aside for a while, because we need to first find out how to make it possible for people to live in space long enough so they can get to and from Mars.
And of that time, most of it is going to be in weightlessness.
And the question that Polyakov didn't answer, because when he got back after 14 and a month, he was able to stand immediately, but he could not walk without help for at least an hour.
Now that's better than most people, but is it good enough on Mars.
In fact, the heart and blood systems, which do get redistributed in space, your blood doesn't pool to the legs.
You feel like you have a head cold all the time because it's like you're hanging upside down in a chin-up bar in space because the blood rushes to the head, and that's all the time.
But it redistributes itself, it takes a few days.
Your muscles come back.
The balance takes a little longer to come back completely, but it not horribly.
It takes, you know, pretty much within a day or so, everyone is pretty much normal, more or less normal.
They can work.
They can manage.
Especially if they've done the exercises appropriately.
Once again, 18 months is not the same as 14 months.
And we don't know.
I think that it's absolutely absurd to think, you know, when we went to the moon, we made sure we did a two-week mission before we sent anyone to the moon because we knew the missions were going to be at least 10 days.
I think it'd be foolish to send the crew to Mars without having done a 24-month mission in Earth orbit and find out, well, do the exercises work over that length of time?
What about bone loss?
Does it get really, really bad?
I mean, these are questions that happen.
And it would be very nice to combine that mission with landing on the moon.
So you have an interim gravity for a few days.
How do you respond after nine months in weightlessness and then you land on the moon?
That would be a really perfect experiment to learn what would happen when you get to Mars because it's very comparable.
If a rover took a picture of a creature walking across the face of Mars, no matter what it looked like, and that picture was there, they would be quite excited and they would be putting it on front pages.
And the fact is, the policy that NASA does have with this kind of damn stuff is that the raw images get released immediately, and there are too many people involved for any picture to be kept secret.
The policy is the raw images.
And you can go to the web and see the raw images from both Spirit and Opportunity, and there's hundreds of them.
You know, one has to imagine that a really good show would be to get Robert Zimmerman together with one of those advocates for We Never Went to the Moon.
Here's a couple of computer messages.
Real quickly, Corey from Minnesota says, this guy's full of himself and NASA.
Ask him how the moon missions ever got through the Van Ellen radiation belt.
That's one of them.
You know where that comes from.
Or Jeff in Sarney, Ontario.
I take offense to your guest comparing the belief of an Apollo moon hoax to the belief that the Holocaust never happened.
I hate the idea of a moon hoax, but some of the evidence of it cannot be easily explained away, in my opinion.
Well, I mean, the first point, the details, it's very frustrating because it's just the Van Allen Belts, they know the radiation levels there.
When they went through the Van Allen Belts on Apollo 8, they were checking them very carefully with about a half a dozen unmanned space probes in a solar orbit as well as Earth orbit.
There's all there is to it.
It's a higher level.
They know what the RAVs are, but it wasn't unreasonable.
And it was definitely survivable.
It was not a, you know, it's just not a non-non-issue.
There is an issue you have to deal with, but it's not.
In fact, the truth of the matter is, a long-term mission to Mars, you have to deal with making sure you have certain shielding.
And actually, that problem was solved by the Russians as well.
Because you're going to have batteries to store your power from the solar panels, and you're going to have water tanks to store your water that you're recycling.
And those two units block radiation.
And actually, Polyakov, what he would do is he would sleep in the module where most of the batteries and the water tanks were.
And he had, he got no, what happens to all astronauts, they get what they call cosmic ray flashes in their eyes.
Your eyes open or closed, it doesn't matter.
A cosmic ray comes through, it causes a flash in your eye because those get to you in space.
Well, he didn't get that when he was sleeping there because he was protected.
They did try to, you know, the previous lander that failed, that disappeared, was supposed to land on the polar cap, near the polar, at the edge of the polar ice cap, for that exact reason.
And why they didn't go back there is because I think they decided to study some of the geology in the middle regions of the planet where there is evidence that water once flowed and get a better idea of the geology at that point.
The poles are more risky because the geology there is more unstable.
It changes all the time.
And it's very likely the reason Polar Lander was lost is because it landed in rough terrain and was not able to unfold and make contact with us.
And so I think they made a cost-benefit decision to try to be a little safer, but go places that could answer major geological questions.
And later rovers will have much greater range, and so you maybe put them down, once again, maybe put them down much closer to the pole, but not at the pole, and actually travel to the pole.
That would be less again.
Now, in terms of manned versus unmanned, I think this is always a strawman debate.
You need unmanned missions to do the scouting that's necessary.
You need them.
They're cheaper.
They're simpler.
They can get you the basic knowledge you need for when you want to go with men.
And we did this with Apollo.
We had landers, we had orbiters to figure out where we wanted to land and to find out what the surface was like.
But it is a mistake to think you can ever, for the same amount of money, for less money, learn as much with unmanned probes.
It actually will cost a lot more and take a lot longer to try to equal what humans can do at the same time.
Robert, let me ask you a science fiction-y kind of question.
But it's not really so outrageous.
I mean, Mars is, oh, I guess by comparison to other planets, almost hospitable.
Yes.
So almost is the key word here.
Now, that's a little facetious, but I guess I want to ask you if you think someday it will be possible to terraform a planet, to start a planet on some kind of course that will eventuate in an atmosphere or some other goal you might have for that planet.
Europa could be actually, of all the globes in the solar system, planets and moons, Europa actually has maybe the best chance of actually having life.
Because it not only has water, we think it might have liquid water on the inside.
And you combine liquid water with energy, and you very conceivably could have life in that internal ocean.
This is a great mystery.
I mean, Europa has lots of lines, fissures all across its surface where the ice crust has cracked from orbital mechanics.
But in those ridges, they see red material coming out.
And they don't know what that red material is.
And I'm not going to speculate what it is, but it sure is interesting to think what it might be.
Because we don't know what comes in from that ocean underneath.
We don't even know exactly how much of an ocean there is, but it's likely to be there because tidal forces from Jupiter are probably going to keep the water liquid.
Well, if it's volcanic, then there could be life down there somewhere because we've got it way down at the bottom of our oceans all around these weird volcanic vents.
Mr. Zimmerman, real quick, have you ever heard or do you know of NASA ever trying, since we have so many problems with nuclear waste, trying to put something on the moon or just singing out into space?
Is there problems with that?
I mean, would that ever be a problem?
Has it ever come up with NASA to take the nuclear waste out of our planet, either take it to the moon or to send it out way out?
Because why would they ever think of that or have they ever thought of that?
This is getting back to the third aspect of space exploration.
I mentioned you've got to learn how to get to another planet, and then you've got to learn how to live on the planet.
Well, the third aspect of that is how to get off the Earth.
And that's the biggest problem of all, because cheap access to space is still a problem.
And the reason you don't use space as a method of dumping out nuclear waste is we don't have a really good, reliable, and cheap way to haul it up out of orbit.
And the reliability is very important, because if you're taking nuclear waste up on a ship and you have an explosion, you've now caused a much bigger problem.
So this is not an unreasonable, down-the-road possible idea.
But once again, Americans love to really think far into the future.
Yes, I just have a theory concerning the space junk, the 8,000-plus objects that are zinging around our orbit in space and data whether the data that we've accumulated tracking those items may be used to detect gravitational waves.
How big a problem is space junk now, both to our satellites, satellite constellations we have up there, and boy, we've got a lot of them right now, and to a manned space station.
And how much of a danger in general is all that junk?
My impression of the situation is it just needs awareness at this point more than anything else.
And it also depends on where in orbit you are.
I mean, if you're in geosynchronous orbit, it's not so much junk that's going to hit you, it's just that there's just so many slots up there for geosynchronous satellites.
So there's kind of a fight to get who's going to get what slot.
In terms of lower Earth orbit, it's mixed because, once again, you've got a range of different orbits.
The problem, I don't think, at this stage of the game is serious, but it definitely bears watching because you do get objects flying about that have to be tracked.
To a certain extent, but you've got to understand that there's a cycling going on.
You're also losing more all the time because their orbits decay.
I mean, you've got to understand at low Earth orbit, about 200 miles, 250 miles where the space station hangs, there is an atmosphere, and that atmosphere does slow the rotation and they do decay.
They come out of the orbit.
It's a process.
You get some new ones, but you get So because of that, I think if anything, the problem might actually become less.
But, you know, it's something you have to be aware of, because we used to just nonchalantly throw gloves away and stuff like that.
Right, but you also have to recognize this, that, for example, if at the International Space Station a guy loses, actually this is a good case.
There was in Mir, they had a crane that they would move manually to move equipment and men from one point to the other on the surface of the thing, and it had little handles to do it.
Well, I've said this, I'll say it very fast since I know we're out of time.
If you took the $12 billion he wants to offer to the space program, which is too insufficient for NASA to build it, and you fired everyone at NASA, all those great engineers, and they are great engineers, fired them.
But if you keep the $12 billion and you offer it as a prize to the first private company that can build a vessel that can take crews back and forth of the International Space Station, that's cheap access to orbit, you'd have a dozen companies formed by those same NASA unemployed engineers who have the reputation and can raise capital.
They build it.
And you'd have dozen companies building it very fast.
The XPRIZE is doing the same kind of thing, but it's a low orbit.
It's a suborbital, 100 kilometers, bring people up to 100 kilometers, bring them back, and then repeat the scene with the same vessel three weeks later.
If you do that, you win.
I think it's $8 million.
And it's privately raised.
And Burt Rutan's company, the guy, the first guy to fly a plane around the world non-stop, He's very close to winning that price.
He's done drop tests with crews on it piloted and he's very close to winning and my idea is that the government could we need unfortunately some government subsidy to get this business started but the government should get out of it as quick as possible.
So if we just reserve $12 billion to award the company that can succeed at doing it, then the government's out of the business because at that point you'd have competition.
You'd have many private companies with vessels selling tourism to the science.