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Feb. 1, 2004 - Art Bell

02:51:21

Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell - Robert Zimmerman - Space Exploration

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50:52

robert zimmerman

01:22:18

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Speaker	Time	Text
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		And who is he?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
	Anyway, I said open line, so let's deliver.
	Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hello, my name's Randall.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		You were talking about the article that was on the UK story.
		Global warming will plunge the UK into ice age within a decade.
		Yes.
		Now, Whitley Street was talking about doing some helpful tips, and one of them was to minimize the greenhouse gases, wasn't that correct?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		Well, wait, there's a caveat.
		If you recall, he said that there was a plan for planting trees.
		But that the discovery was, and the truth was, that they emitted more carbon dioxide than they absorb.
		And so ultimately, that plan was thought to be not viable.
unidentified		Well, it seems that the greenhouse gas is the major contributor is what's being emitted from vehicles, diesels, and cars.
		So if that's the case, you had a guest speaker on the ninth day of, what was it, September 2003, Gary Pratt.
		It would be interesting to get him on because he had some new technology covering that that you had, and he was only on for an hour on that day.
		And I think it would be very interesting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Briefly, what did his technology do?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was not an interview that I did.
unidentified		Yeah, that was with George.
unidentified		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What did the technology do?
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm sure he appreciates that plug.
		That's interesting.
		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.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
		Art?
		Yes.
		How you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm doing.
unidentified		Well, I've got a cute little story about my cat.
		Your cat?
		She's four years old, and she rescues animals, dogs and cats, and brings them home.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yes, so far I've found a home for two little dogs, and now I've got another cat sleeping on our back porch.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, does she just like come wandering in with a dog trailing behind?
unidentified		No, no, no.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		With eyes of expectation?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, how does your cat do this?
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, see, she did do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's what I was asking.
unidentified		And it was so funny.
unidentified		She came and sat on the porch with him and just looked at me like, well, aren't you going to do something?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Those would be, okay, there you go.
		Those are the eyes of expectation.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Storm Stories on the Weather Channel is one of the better programs on TV.
unidentified		I watch the Weather Channel all the time.
		And I've never seen the web of promoting it now.
		I believe I heard the words, are we headed for global catastrophe caused by catastrophic weather changes?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't it make sense to you that storm stories on the weather channel would latch onto this like that?
unidentified		But I mean, you know, so suddenly.
unidentified		That's what's weird about it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, that's what's weird about the coming global change.
unidentified		I got a premonition, you know, suddenly.
		1996.
		We're headed for a big change.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're definitely headed for a big change.
		I agree with that.
		What astounds me is that something of this world-changing magnitude is sort of, I don't know, not mentioned.
		Barely mentioned.
		It's a gigantic story.
		Modern America, right?
		First time caller line.
		You're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi, Art.
unidentified		This is Zach in California.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Zach.
unidentified		How are you doing tonight?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fine, what's up?
unidentified		Well, I'm calling for my friend Natasha in Austin, Texas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
unidentified		She had a question she'd like to ask you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes?
unidentified		Do you think that in your lifetime, the question of aliens will be answered?
unidentified		Yeah, answered common knowledge?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You know, let me think about that.
		Do I believe that?
		You know, I wouldn't make a prediction.
		I guess all I could say is I hope so.
		I would like that question answered in my lifetime.
		I would love that.
		Wouldn't you?
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
		I think it's really building the undercurrents in the media, the television.
		It's really in our collective unconscious now, I think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
		So I don't know anything else to say.
		I'm sorry.
unidentified		That's it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I can't give you a prediction.
		I'm not a prophet.
		Would I like it?
		I would love it.
		I really would love it.
		Even if we could just contact another civilization.
		Forget the spaceships landing for a moment and aliens here, whether that is or is not.
		Simply contact with another civilization would be really cool to know about while I'm still on this Earth.
		How do you feel about that?
		Even if it was light years away, Jody Foster Light received, you know, the radio telescopes suddenly begin getting a signal from somewhere out there.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Right now?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, on the air now.
		Turn your radio off first.
		Okay, fire away.
unidentified		I was just wondering, you keep lately you've been mentioning about the pictures from Mars.
		Yes.
		And you're not very impressed with what we've been seeing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I'm trying to be honest.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What I see so far are rocks.
unidentified		I was just wondering, what did you expect to see?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		And what's your opinion on that soil up there?
unidentified		Doesn't it look like kind of clay or mud?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really weird.
		It's totally weird.
		Could water be that close to the surface with that kind of texture?
		I don't know.
unidentified		You would think so with that texture.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The whole thing is fascinating, sir.
unidentified		Very much so.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they're rocks.
unidentified		They're rocks, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much, and take care.
		I just don't see anything else yet.
		Attributed generally to my only two-dimensional vision.
		East of the Rockies, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Are we on the air?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, when I say I take unscreen callers, baby, you're on the air.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's how it works.
unidentified		That's right.
unidentified		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, it was Whitley Streeber.
		Sean was on for the balance of the show.
		Oh, sorry, he was on the second hour, yeah.
unidentified		Yes, that's right.
		I had it back to front.
		Anyway, I recall him saying that he predicted that the Panthers would win the Super Bowl by three points.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		20 to 17, I think.
unidentified		20 to 17.
		He almost got the points, Brad, right, but unfortunately, it was a reverse outcome.
		And so I'm not certain what I think of his predictive abilities.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, having said that, hold on a moment, all right?
		We're going to take a break, and then we'll be right back.
		It's the bottom of the hour.
		We must do these things.
		They absolutely insist on them.
		From the high desert in the middle of the night, doing what we're supposed to be doing, this is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified		Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go.
		Oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go.
		Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, you don't have to go.
		Hi, hi, hi, hi.
		I'm Nakahola.
		Thank you.
		You get a diver in the dark, get some rain and in the park.
		Meantime, time of the river, you're stopping your hole.
		Everything is going fixing, double phone time.
		Feel alright when you hear the music play Music I like step inside, but you don't see too many things.
		Coming in out of the rain, they hear the chairs cool down.
		Drop a picture, get on my face.
		But the home is going that sound.
		Hey, everybody, it's half-time of the first hour.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, no, we won't do that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But here are the numbers.
unidentified		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from East of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From West to the Rockies, call ART at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I could read stories like, oh, here, this one's interesting.
		U.S. eyes space as possible battleground.
		That's right.
		In other words, we're getting ready to fight battles in space.
		You might want to read about that.
		Came from Yahoo News.
		But of course, there's Janet.
unidentified		It's time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, where were we?
		I believe this caller was just suggesting that Sean had flubbed the Super Bowl, even though it's close, he flubbed the score.
		And so you have no faith in what he says.
unidentified		Is that about it?
unidentified		Well, I guess somebody could have lost a fair bundle if they'd gone with his prediction.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they could have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They certainly could have.
unidentified		Yes, but the only time I recall hearing an advanced prediction of his was just before Bush invaded Iraq.
unidentified		And he was saying that he thought that when that happened, that the North Koreans would do something like come across the DMZ.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was that Sean or was that someone else?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It could have been Ed Dames.
unidentified		It could have been Ed Dames.
unidentified		Although I think perhaps Sean had something similar to say, but as I was having a conversation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, how much did you bet on the game?
unidentified		Oh, I didn't bet anything.
		You didn't bet anything.
		No, no.
		Actually, I'm not even a football fan, so I watched bits and pieces of it because there wasn't much else on.
		And I missed the unveiling of Janet's ups.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Will you miss that altogether?
unidentified		I would think I was on the phone or something.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I really need an opinion, and that's not going to be you, I guess, huh?
unidentified		No, I guess not.
		But, well, to me, that wouldn't be upsetting.
		But although I can think of other breasts that I might like to see other than Janet's.
		But anyway, that aside, I also wanted to say something about what you and Whitley were talking about last night.
		And you are absolutely right.
		There has been like zero coverage.
		I'm calling from Toronto, by the way.
		And we have a guy up here who does a news bit.
		He's like one of the original founders of Greenpeace.
		His name is Bob Hunter.
		And he does a three-minute bit on the morning news where he kind of like highlights some of the various stories that are in the daily newspapers.
		We have like three or four major daily newspapers in Toronto.
		And he hasn't mentioned anything about this, which means that there's been absolutely no coverage in any of the papers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's going to be interesting to watch, sir.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, thank you.
unidentified		Okay, bye.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right, take care.
		Yeah, the whole thing is protective in a way.
		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.
		West of the Rock.
unidentified		Do the wild thing at 775-727-1295.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, hold on.
		We've got to start fresh here, buddy.
		We're not allowed to give last names on the air, so let's just take your first name only as Tony, right?
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		Right, Tony, unless I'm KFI.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
unidentified		They still have you on, thank God.
		Anyway, you were earlier talking about, there was a gentleman on talking about ways to clean the air.
		Is that not right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, that is correct, yes.
unidentified		And I wrote to you a couple of times about a technology I found out about that was invented by a former physics professor in Pasadena in the 70s.
		It's called Energy Towers.
		And basically what it is, is a large air scrubber, and it has some pretty big dimensions to be efficient.
		So it has to be pretty tall, you know, 3,000 feet tall.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we could make gigantic air scrubbers.
		That could be done.
		I'm not sure you could do it on a scale that would make any difference, but I'd be interested in hearing about it.
unidentified		Yeah, I'd really hope you get Dr. Mel Pruitt on.
		He's a former Livermore physicist.
		He's got 19 new current patents on fabric-skinned energy towers.
		And really what it does is it creates a downdraft that cleans the air.
		It also creates a wind at the bottom.
		So you ring the bottom of this tower with wind turbines that run all the time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's really fascinating.
		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.
		First time caller line, you are on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hi there.
		Hi.
		It's that's from Bennett, California, 640 KFI.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		KFI.
unidentified		We have a big problem here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know all about it, of course, as you well know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've made my statement about it.
unidentified		Well, if I'd like to go forward and I may, with your kind permission, sure that's with you and your audience.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		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.
		We're deprived.
		And I mean that in the most serious fashion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, and they made the most serious mistake, as I said.
unidentified		Well, okay, so here we go.
		I understand that I've reviewed my sources, and I'm duly pissed.
		Thank you.
		So here's what I am imploring all of your listeners.
		And when I say that, I mean all of those.
		All of those.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're imploring what?
unidentified		Just listen up, please.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm listening.
unidentified		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.
unidentified		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they are, because I've seen the responses.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So yes, I'm going to.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
unidentified		So, if I may, go forward.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But you may not give out an address on the air.
unidentified		Oh.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		No way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know you wouldn't, because your heart is no doubt good.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And your mission a great one.
		But I can't let you do it.
		But I will make some comments for you.
		All right.
		And it was a terrible programming error.
		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.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello, Art.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, hi.
unidentified		Yes, I'm Adam calling from River Falls, Wisconsin.
unidentified		Welcome.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Happy to have you.
unidentified		I have some questions regarding your ice age.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		My ice age?
unidentified		You've been talking about this?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Not my ice age.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This, sir.
unidentified		Not your ice age.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It would be our ice age.
unidentified		Our ice age, you're right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		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.
		But that was him.
		Well, now I'm listening to yours.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, well, now, see, there is this thing about woolly mammoths.
		Now, woolly mammoths were big, old, hairy beasts, you know?
		Really, I mean, just beyond anything that even would play in the NFL.
		They're big beasts.
		And they were found frozen in place with little green things and buttercups in their frozen, stiff mouths.
		You see, now, that meant that these monsters were in an instant frozen and remained frozen, I might add, for thousands and thousands of years.
		That would appear to be irrefutable proof that the climate can change that way.
		Just ask the mammoth.
unidentified		Right.
unidentified		I also have one more question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Yes.
		All right.
		This, along with all this climate changes and stuff, and the freezing and all that.
		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		East of the Rockies, you're on there.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, hello.
unidentified		Yes, sir.
unidentified		This is Jack from Dallas.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, hi, Jack.
unidentified		How you doing?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fine.
unidentified		I listen to you whenever I get a chance.
		I finally got retired, so I keep it on now.
		My grandfather was in the Navy in the Pentagon for quite some time.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		And when he died, he gave me a briefcase.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
unidentified		And I opened it up, and the thing was full of papers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What kind of papers?
unidentified		It took me three days to read them.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes?
unidentified		It's all stuff the government's never told us.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		About?
unidentified		Well, you're talking about the ice age, about outer space and all that, and aliens.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And it's all about that?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And what have you done with this valuable briefcase full of stuff?
unidentified		Well, a friend of mine's a major in the Navy.
		Yes.
		He said, man, you better keep your mouth, shit.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And so here you are on a national talk radio program.
unidentified		I know that, but I didn't tell you the right state either.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I see.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You lied about the state you're in.
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I didn't think you sounded like a proper Texan to me.
unidentified		I'm from West Virginia.
unidentified		I've been through there, but I wouldn't live there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So what are you going to do with this little jewel of the briefcase of documents?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you going to whisk them off to me?
unidentified		Well, I was talking to this Colonel the other day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think that was a yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, and what did the Colonel say?
unidentified		He says, he's asked the same question.
		You said, what are you going to do with them?
		Right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		An obvious question.
unidentified		And I asked him, I said, what do you think I'll do with them?
		He said, I'd put them out to the public.
		I said, man, that'll shoot me.
		And he said, well, it's a possibility.
		I said, I need to die for that BS.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I see.
		So rather than die, you're going to sit on your briefcase.
		All right.
		Well, if you change your mind, call or email me.
		In the meantime, I guess you're sitting on it, buddy.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air.
unidentified		Hey, Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hey, yes.
unidentified		One of my favorite people in the whole wide world.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		I am kind of hyperventilating.
		I get to talk to you.
		So I have, you pick your story.
		Let's see.
		Aliens in the cropsicle.
		A cat that was a soul, or energy, people power.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You mean I get to choose those topics?
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's pick the cat.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What about the cat?
unidentified		Okay, my sister was four years older than I, and she went off to college four hours away from where I lived.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And she brought home this cat when she was five years old.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		It was 14 when she was in college or whatever.
		Anyway, the cat was named Caesar.
		It looks just like your cat, excuse me.
		And anyway, Caesar, he kind of came home with his old jaw pulled out.
		And he was in such a bad shape that my dad went out and propped him once.
		That's the way you did it in the old days, right?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Popped him once.
unidentified		Never mind.
		Anyway, we put him out of his misery.
		Anyway, poor Caesar, you know.
		And my sister called up the next morning and said, Mom, I dreamed Caesar died last night.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Right.
		And that was the night that he came home and he, you know.
		But my sister was away at college, you know.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was the very night that Caesar got popped.
		That's a heartwarming story.
		Thank you for that.
		The night Caesar got popped.
		First time calling Live here.
		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Speak up good and loud, because you're not too easy to hear.
unidentified		Okay, I'm sorry.
unidentified		First, I just wanted to know if you've ever seen the movie Phantasm?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, I have.
		i was unable to stick with the entire saying it got a little corny Yeah.
		Corny comes to mind.
unidentified		Yeah, well, the acting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But, you know, the first deaths were really cool.
unidentified		Yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		but after that with everybody everyone on the show that them like one thing Yeah.
		Yeah, that was really cool.
		But then, I don't know.
		You can only take so much of the head-boring.
unidentified		Oh, so you didn't get to watch the end of the movie?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, I don't believe I did stick with it.
unidentified		That's a shame.
unidentified		The reason I say it or mention it, I just saw it again for the, I thought when it first came out.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How many times have you seen it, Sarah?
unidentified		Twice.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Twice.
unidentified		Yeah, once back in 1980 or so, and then tonight.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Watching that more than twice could be hazardous to your health.
unidentified		Yeah.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Your mental health.
unidentified		Could be.
unidentified		The thing is, if what people are saying on this show and predicting with the aliens and whatnot, that's based on a true story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, what is?
unidentified		That movie Phantasm.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, come on.
unidentified		If you were to watch the end of the movie, it'll all fit into place.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
unidentified		Well, I mean, I could tell you, but it would be kind of like.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, you should never tell the end of movies.
		I have a rule against that, too.
		But if you really mean it, then somehow I will force myself to return and get a copy of Phantasm and skip out to the end.
unidentified		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It has a trick ending.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		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.
		Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach ART by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The very same.
		Good morning, everybody.
		How you doing?
		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.
		Robert, welcome to the program.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'm so glad to be here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Glad to have you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You come to us from, what, New England or New York?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, everyone who listens to me and knows anything about accents has maybe, oh, he must be from Brooklyn.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		That's where I lived most of my life, but I live the last five, six years, I've lived in Maryland, near the D.C. area.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you're in Maryland?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm in Maryland.
unidentified		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		I do recall that best from the show prior, that there were about, I don't know, four or five times when I went, what?
		We did what?
		Anyway, we are here talking, of course, on the first anniversary of the Columbia accident.
		And so that, I guess, is a good place to begin all of this.
		How much of an impact has that accident had with regard to what they're still doing?
		In other words, we're not yet flying again, which means they're still, what, dissecting, thinking, figuring out how not to have it happen again?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		What?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, NASA had scheduled the next flight, return to flight, to be September of this year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And just this week they've pushed it back to October of this year.
		And there's real questions right now whether they can actually fix the technical problems that were identified as the cause of the Columbia accident.
		In this case, the foam breaking off the external tank.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, okay, what are we up against?
		I mean, that is what happened, right?
		I think everybody's pretty clear on that it was the foam and all the rest of it.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are two components to trying to fix it.
		One is trying to figure out some way to reduce the foam from breaking off, and from what I can gather, they pretty much don't think they can do that.
		It's almost impossible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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're still struggling with that.
		They haven't really solved it completely.
		They're really having problems.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Robert, I have a question for you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Was there anybody that knew how much trouble Columbia was in before it began to re-enter?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		There were engineers at NASA who were very worried about the problem.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much had they learned?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		If they had full knowledge of what was going to happen.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I wouldn't say full knowledge.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I didn't say that.
		No, no, no, listen.
		I said if.
		If.
		Even if they had full knowledge of the damage that had occurred to Columbia, could they have done anything about it?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I'll tell you that.
		This, no, no.
		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?
		Had that happened?
		We can't solve anything.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Had there been communication between the spacecraft and ground about this potential problem?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There was nothing in space that could have been utilized to try and get a picture of the shuttle.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Not really.
		I mean, you could have used there could have been some satellite photos from military security stuff, both on the ground and in space.
		It might have told them something, but then it might not have.
		They might have been able to get an answer.
		I forget which day of the mission, but early in the mission they saw the radar now shows that something moved away from the shuttle.
		I don't want to say broke off because we don't really know, but something moved away from the shuttle, an object.
		And had they been worried about this, yes, they might have been able to take close-up pictures and maybe been able to identify that.
		But you've got to understand that the nature of the Columbia mission itself was a science mission.
		It didn't have any capability for spacewalks.
		There wasn't really the suits or the equipment on board or the training to have done a spacewalk.
		And then on top of that, they didn't have any kind of repair material on board to make any kind of repairs.
		So it really was a doomed mission while it was in orbit.
		There's no doubt about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But they didn't know it.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No, they did not.
		They didn't really know it.
		There were worries by engineers.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You can't hear it anymore.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		They're cut off, and we all see the contrails breaking up as the thing falls apart.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How are we doing in the casualty and risk versus benefit category with our manned space program?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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?
		And my response to that was, yes, it is.
		So is the Soyuz, so was Mir.
		So is the Apollo.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Based on what?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And an accident.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		This is dangerous stuff.
		It's exploration.
		That's the bottom line.
		The astronauts know this.
		They accept the risk.
		They know what they're doing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But the way you said that, you made me think there was something extraordinarily obviously fatal about the space station.
		You're just saying they're all at risk.
		Of course they're at exploration.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, you know, right away, a lot of the audience, I can hear them, they're throwing up their hands and they're saying, what benefits, damn it?
		What benefits?
		That's what you hear.
		So fulfill it.
		What benefits, Robert?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll tell you, the standard answer is, oh, we get all these technological spin-offs, and that's true.
		But I don't make that argument as a first argument.
		I say, if you dream small dreams, you're a small person.
		You'll become that.
		You won't really grow.
		If you dream big dreams, you become greater than you are.
		That's my mantra.
		You have to think big, dream big, and you'll do great things if you do that.
		On top of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Or you get great failure, but at least you went out and did.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
unidentified		You try.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		You have to try to do the best you can.
		I mean, otherwise, what are you?
		And on top of that, on top of that, it's fun.
		It's exciting.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So, in other words, your first argument is a human spirit argument, right?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		So, yeah, that's high on my list, too.
		I agree.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		You know, I'll give you another example.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They make big rockets.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, they make big rockets.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And they make them well.
		They have taken the commercial market away from Boeing and Lockheed.
		They've won that market because they make good...
		They went for the golden ring, and they got it.
		And I don't see any reason why we did the same thing with Apollo.
		And, you know, a lot of people complain.
		You say, well, we love Apollo.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That was the people's go.
		We worship the ground.
		But, Robert, that was the people's gold ring.
		You know, the communist gold ring.
		And, of course, that's the one thing they did, and it's still there, sort of the remnants of it.
		But, you know, they're not even keeping their missiles up to snuff.
		You know, their ICBMs and all the rest of it, they're in hard times over there.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Ultimately, they'll be fine.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think they're actually doing very well right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And the condition of these rockets and ICBMs is appallingly old.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Part of the reason for that is that they've refocused their energies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes, indeed.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		They're not looking anymore at world domination.
		They just simply want to make their own garden grow properly.
		And so they're focusing their energies on trying to make a living and being productive and creative in their own way freely and using capitalism.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They will ultimately succeed.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		They'll do it.
		They're doing it right now.
		I believe that.
		And I think their space program proves it because they're really trying to make a profit and they're succeeding.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're making a profit.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		There's no question of that.
		For one thing, just the tourist industry that they have tried to establish in space, that they have actually made $40 plus million dollars on.
		They have a whole range of customers in training right now to go up to the International Space Force.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But I don't know how you balance this, Robert, because an awful lot of money was spent by the USSR on defense.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, enormous amounts of money, by percentage, so much more than we do against GMP.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		You mean them, yes, absolutely.
		And it went bankrupt.
		That's the part that went bad.
		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.
		And in that respect, they succeeded.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Chinese are going for it, too.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Say again?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Chinese are going for it too.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Japan, just in the last two days, have announced they're reconsidering putting their own manned program together.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		The Indians have, India has signed an agreement with China, and they're planning to try to put a manned program in as well.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		So, I mean, the world is going to do this.
		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.
		We have to do it because everyone else is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think you'd get a lot of argument about wanting to go, wanting America to continue into space.
		Not from this audience.
		You might get a few who would decry the expenditure when we see what's going on on land around the world going on.
		But that's probably about as bad as it would get.
		This audience would be, I tend to be pretty pro-let's rock and roll up there.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, let's start with how seriously do you take what the president said?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, actually, it's not a question of how seriously I take it.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's a question of how realistic I think his proposal is.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Translate it to that if you want to.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		They are prototype interplanetary spaceships.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And he wants to use the International Space Station for that kind of research and focus all the work on it in that.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And that's very smart.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hold it right there, Robert.
		We're at the bottom of the hour.
		My guest is Robert Zimmerman, and we're here talking about the U.S. space program and space in general.
		And he's really got some stories.
unidentified		Stay right there.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		They're doing, it would seem, incredibly well.
		The Mars rovers, what do you think so far?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it's quite exhilarating.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Odds are pretty good for water, aren't they?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there's no question of that.
		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.
		We don't have that fact, but it's possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You could be right.
		With very rapid changes, why?
		You just never know.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, exactly.
		I mean, if something happens fast, it happens.
		You could have taken a picture of it a week after it happens, and you might not be able to tell it happened a million weeks ago.
		And there is evidence of what looks like water flows that could have happened 100,000 years ago and might have happened a million years ago.
		It's hard to tell at this point.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Have you seen that about the robots all the time?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you've been a pretty good student of the photograph so far.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I check every day.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Every day.
		Have you seen anything yet that would suggest to you anything?
		Unrock-like?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		You mean artificial?
		Yeah.
		Unfortunately, no.
		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.
		This is, they would.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have to agree with that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I think they would.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But nothing yet to suggest ever intelligent life, machines, tools, pottery.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Sadly.
		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 strange stuff, though.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, okay, so then we're going to come away.
		Excuse me.
		Hold on, Rob.
unidentified		Hold on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're going to come away from here.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you believe we'll come away with absolute evidence that there was recent above-ground water on Mars?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		That's speculation.
		I don't know.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, are there any tests coming up that will be a watershed moment in the cause of finding that out?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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 that'll be a significant discovery.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Let's say, just for argument's sake, that there's water on Mars.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What does that mean for what we might do?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's the same thing that applies to the moon.
		The possibility that there's water on the moon applies the same on Mars.
		It gives us as colonists the resources we need to live there.
		It's like finding, being able to plant plants when you come to the New World.
		Water produced gives you oxygen, it gives you hydrogen, which gives you energy, and it also gives you water to drink.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there anything you've seen in the photographs from Mars yet that would make you want to move there?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		I've got to tell you, looking at the outdoors.
		I do cave exploration.
		I don't know if you're aware.
		And I love out hiking and stuff like that.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But it does look like a hiker's paradise.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you that.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, without question.
		And in some way, you know, obviously it's a hostile environment right now.
		Less hostile in many ways than the moon, but nonetheless, extremely hostile.
		You're talking about temperatures that are very rarely above minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit.
		So it's very cold, and you have very little atmosphere.
		There's almost no, there's no water in the atmosphere compared to the Earth, let's say.
		It's a very dry, desert-like environment, but still, yes, there are places that look Technology is, you know, we're a tool-bearing species.
unidentified		You come up with a solution and you solve it, and then go do it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I've done cave exploration and so on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You actually would, just for the sake of asking you this, you would do what you would have to do to move to Mars.
		I mean, given the opportunity, you're going to go to Mars and you're going to live in the following circumstances, and there it is.
		It's pretty Spartan, but you can do it, but you can't come back.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		For the chance to go where no one has ever gone before, I think many Americans would take that choice.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You really think so?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, without question.
		You ask that question of audiences, and routinely, a large percentage of the audience, if not everyone, raises their hand and says, yeah, I'd go.
		People are willing to make one.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		This is a good idea.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Obviously, when we're going, finally, we're going to have the knowledge on how to do it.
		And that's getting back to Bush's proposal, how to learn how to do that.
		Once we go, we'll have the skills to make it possible to do it with some reasonable comfort and practicality.
		Maybe somebody else will enjoy it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe some of my audience will comment on whether they would actually move to Mars.
		I'd love to hear those answers.
		And the Hubble Space Telescope, did it take the last of the good pictures that you could get out there?
		I mean, now we're going to abandon the Hubble, right?
		And did we get all the shots we wanted to?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		They were going to just basically let it die.
		No more maintenance.
		They made that decision themselves.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, my question was, have we taken enough?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		One maintenance mission, wasn't that significant a difference to Hubble's fate?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's going to now be in orbit until it fails.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, all right.
		My initial question remains.
		Have we taken all the good pictures there are to take?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No.
		No, of course not.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I would prefer it.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		We kept fixing it.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I've got you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And therefore, Hubble will eventually be allowed to die.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's right.
		At this stage, now there's talk at NASA.
		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.
		And I don't think it'll happen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You have written of the Apollo 8 mission.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		My first book was called Genesis, the Story of Apollo 8.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you give us a highlighted capsule version of Apollo 8?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		You had the Democratic Convention riots.
		It was a very significant year.
		The entire world was that year.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The whole world changed in that year.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		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.
		They weren't on the surface of the planet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it would force you into that kind of thing, wouldn't it?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, it's interesting if you consider the reactions of the three men that went on Apollo 8.
		The captain, the commander, Frank Borman, he's an action-oriented type of guy.
		And to him, his response to that mission wasn't spiritual.
		It was mostly his family.
		He realized the risks involved were too much.
		It was causing too much turmoil with his wife.
		And he felt his family was more important, and that's why he retired after that mission.
		And Jim Lovell, I asked him, and Jim Lovell is famous for Apollo 13.
		He was the commander of that mission.
		And what we don't realize is that he was also on Apollo 8.
		Had the same thing happened on Apollo 8 that happened to him on Apollo 13, he would have been dead in 60 minutes.
		It was a much more risky mission, Apollo 8.
		They actually thought they had about a 50% chance of failure.
		It didn't have the lunar modules, so if something had gone wrong as they left orbit, they could not have survived.
unidentified		Were they told a 50% chance of?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		That shocked me, too.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Did you find that to be generally true also of the others?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, that was Borman.
		This is Lovell.
		The third guy, Bill Anders, he did change.
		He was a very devout Catholic before he went on his mission.
		And he told me about one moment in particular on the mission in which he was listening.
		He had given the ground, Mission Control, a whole bunch of tapes, audio tapes, music to play for the astronauts in the capsule.
		So they'd pipe up music for these guys.
		And some of it was Herb Albert and the Tijuana Brass.
		But he also gave them a whole bunch of Christmas carols to play as well because he was a Catholic.
		It was Christmas week.
		And all three guys would like to hear that.
		It makes them feel good.
		It makes them feel like they're at home.
		And at one point, it was playing a Christmas carol like a Hallelujah chorus.
		And the spacecraft, he himself was, they were turning the spacecraft, changing its orientation.
		So in the process of doing that, the communication signal got weakened.
		And it sounded like you take a record and slow it down.
		And Andis told me it was like he didn't realize at first what was happening.
		It was like the world was ending.
		And he came back from that mission saying he doesn't, not that he isn't religious anymore, but he doesn't believe in any particular religion.
		Religion says, human beings are like ants on a log.
		How can any particular religion know what the right way to practice right and wrong is?
		And he was very changed by that mission.
		His wife told me, I'd never seen a person change so much in terms of his philosophy of life.
		I mean, he's still a decent guy.
		He's, you know, he was.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, that's incredible.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Very different.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Incredible.
		Hold it right there.
		I want to do more on this when we get back.
		Sort of the stories behind the stories about what actually happened to the astronauts as a result of their experience.
		I don't know.
		Think about it yourself.
		You see the Earth shrinking behind you until finally it's eclipsed by the moon, which you're in orbit around.
		That would be a moment.
		That really would be a moment.
unidentified		It's the night, my body's weak.
		I'm on the run, no time to sleep.
		I've got to ride, ride like the wind, to be real again.
		And I've got such a long way to go.
		So some more to go.
		I'm on the run.
		I'm on the run.
		But I tell myself that I'm doing alright.
		There's nothing left to do at night.
		But don't bring me on you.
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from east of the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From west of the Rockies, call 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, it depends.
		I mean, to the Apollo astronauts, per se, they actually didn't have a great deal of stress.
		I think it's been exaggerated.
		I mean, you had situations where some of them, such as Bill Anders, went through some life change.
		Edgar Mitchell was another one that went through life change.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, he sure did.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		But more than that, they didn't.
		These are really down-to-earth.
		They're jet pilots in the Apollo program.
		They're very straightforward guys.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but others had marital difficulties.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And I mean, it did manifest in a number of ways.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's interesting.
		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.
		It's not easy.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, you heard me in the beginning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We're not meant to go to space.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't agree with you there.
		Once again, I think we are a tool-making animal.
		We figure out how to solve the problem and then solve it.
		And in truth, the Russian program over many years has figured out, has solved most of these problems.
		Some of those problems, by the way, were solved by us in our first space station, Skylab, and then we kind of forgot the solution.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that totally shared now?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		The data is mostly shared.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So then we've only become partners until it gets to the dollar.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, without question.
		We want them to be communists and give us everything for free because we're all in this cooperative socialist endeavor.
		They, however, are capitalists.
		This is very perverse.
		It's my mind.
		It's like we've traded places.
		They say, no, pick us the bucks and give us the bucks and we'll provide you the stuff.
		We'll sell our services.
		And I think actually they're right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I certainly recall when somebody bid to get on and the Russians sold a seat at the International Space Station.
		The United States got all out of joint.
		NASA got out of joint.
		Everybody got out of joint.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I think it was appalling, actually.
		Here was Dennis Tito, a free American.
		He's earned his money legally.
		He has the cash.
		He wants to go into space.
		He has the cash.
		He's willing to buy a ticket.
		He's in physical shape.
		He can do it.
		The Russians have the capability and the training.
		They've been putting up foreign astronauts in their space stations now for more than 30 years.
		They know how to do it.
		And they're willing to sell him the ticket.
		I think that's a perfectly free enterprise, liberty-oriented approach to things.
		And who's the ones who object?
		We do.
		And Americans are even asking the question, is space tourism should it be allowed?
		I mean, are we free?
		Freedom says it's not my place to tell him what's allowed.
		If he wants to do it, he should do it.
		And I thought it was very plain.
		And that's another theme of Leaving Earth.
		This strange transition between the United States and Russia, like with two ships passing in the night, and they become us and we become them.
		It's very sad.
		I'm ashamed of my country sometimes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, well, I've been trying to figure out where our objection was, and I still haven't.
		I really haven't.
		What inner part of America objected to that?
		Was it?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'll tell you, Aud, it's very strange, but it's coming across the same thing.
		Americans today seem to want everything to be command from above.
		I was on a radio show the other day, and I get one call that says, no, no, the government should run our space program.
		No one else can do it.
		And another caller says, no, no, the government shouldn't do it.
		We should have a corporate board dictate terms.
		And my answer was, no.
		We should have the citizens should do it and no one should tell them how to do it.
		But people seem to want it to be centralized from the top.
		It's very strange.
		I find it very baffling.
		We're supposed to be freedom-oriented and citizens choose.
		Instead, we want our centralized bureaucracy.
		It's really strange.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Robert, isn't the funding for this way down the line?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Which means it won't get paid.
		Isn't that right?
		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.
		He wasn't interested in space exploration.
		He wanted a foreign policy project.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much does the president's announcement change the mission of the space station?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, it changes it drastically.
		It finally gives it its proper focus.
		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.
		In fact, it's dependent on the groundwater.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What part of the president's articulated mission happens at the space station?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		What part of the story?
		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.
		And they're making it a closed system.
		And they're not making it independent.
		They could separate it from their half.
		The half would fall to the ocean.
		No half would function.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Now, that's something I didn't know.
		I really didn't know that.
		I mean, I have no idea.
		It's like there was a line drawn down the middle of the station, their half and our half.
		That's really the way it is.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
		You're too.
		Absolutely true.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		So you're saying in a mission-critical situation, the Russians could pull the big lever and separate the whole damn thing?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Not at this moment in time, but eventually, yes.
		When they get the whole thing, their whole half finished, yes.
		Our system can never be separated from theirs.
		Wait a minute.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're building in what that will facilitate a separation of the station.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you see, once again, it's based upon what they learned with Mir.
		So it has a closed, their system, their part of the station has a closed water system.
		They take the urine from the crew, they separate out the...
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Why is that?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I can tell you that story.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's a really incredible story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The actual research...
unidentified		What?
		Fresh plants?
		Yes!
		Yes, yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's a salad bowl.
		Gail Bingham out of Utah State University is one of the major space agricultural researchers in the world.
		And he's been trying for many years to do this kind of research with NASA, but the bureaucracy is too difficult.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What the hell are they worried about?
		That something will mutate in the tomatoes?
		No, no, no, no, no.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		A lot of it is just power.
		You want to have the experiment controlled by NASA.
		And in this case, it's not.
		It's a Russian experiment.
		The deal is that the Russian cosmonauts, on their personal time, not during work time, tend the garden.
		And they get to eat half the plants.
		The other half gets sent back for the scientists to study.
		And you'd say, it's a greenhouse that's built by Americans, but it's not on the American half of the station.
		It's a deal with the Russian half because the Russians say, you know, let's make it happen.
		It's incredible.
		NASA, Bingham told me that if he wanted to do this through NASA, it might take him 10 years to get one experiment approved.
		With bureaucracy.
		With the Russians, he's already done almost a half a dozen experiments, and they've been eating these plants in orbit.
		In the Russian half, they eat the same.
		I have videotaped.
		It's very funny.
		Your tastes get kind of bland when you're in space because of the weightlessness.
		So fresh fruit and fresh vegetables are really, with good taste, strong taste, is really precious.
unidentified		I would say that's the same thing.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		So you see these guys with this leaf, and they're like, oh, it's like the most wonderful thing I've ever seen.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Instead of squeezing that tube full of whatever it is, roast beef in a tube, right?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and basically our guys eat that.
unidentified		That's right.
		Is that what we're still eating?
		So while the Russians are having breakfast, they use low-fried stuff.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And it's not bad.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Seems logical.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		But on top of that, it's producing oxygen, which means you have less of a need to, your system is more closed.
unidentified		Well, on what official basis are our astronauts not allowed to eat their tomatoes?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Part of it, well, it's not tomatoes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's not.
unidentified		Whatever.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		But it comes down to, once again, it's power.
		NASA wants to control the experiment.
		If you're not doing it, you better not touch it.
		Secondly, they have this vision.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And you never know what a Russian might eat.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Right, which is silly.
		It's absolutely silly.
		And I know for a fact, I know that the astronauts don't say this publicly, and of course they will always deny it.
		But you don't think the Russians are kind.
		They'll let them have some of those leaves and salad.
		Why not?
		It's good relations.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know what to say.
		I had no idea this was going on up there, and God knows what it could lead to.
		I mean, eventually some grumpy astronaut or cosmonaut drawing a truck line right down the middle, forbidding the other side to step across.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		What's likely to happen is that the astronauts themselves on both sides will team up and tell the people on Earth to go away.
		Because the biggest cultural divide actually isn't between the Russians and the Americans.
		The biggest cultural divide is between the people in space and the people on the ground.
		Because it's very hard to understand the alien environment of weightlessness.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do they learn to hate their masters?
unidentified		Well, it depends on who the masters are.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		You let them run the show.
		They don't know that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Mission control in Russia, mission control in Houston, do they learn to hate these people?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there a tension?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No, no, no, no.
		No, no, no.
		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.
unidentified		So it's not a matter of fear.
unidentified		All right, all right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		We've got a break here.
		We've got a break here.
		Hold on a moment.
		Sheesh.
		But it's absolutely fascinating, isn't it?
		Did you have any idea that this was going on on board the space station?
		I certainly didn't.
		Matter of fact, it's a first.
		It sounds like more than just a friendly rivalry.
		Comradeship perhaps lacking a little bit as a circle.
		From the high desert in the middle of the night, I'm Art Bell.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Leave me this way.
		I can't survive.
		I can't stay alive without your love.
		Oh, baby, don't leave me this way.
		Oh, baby, don't leave me this way.
		I have to give, why did it have to stop?
		You're blowing all sky high by telling me a lie without a reason why.
		You're blowing all sky high.
		To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
		The first-time caller line is area code 775-727-1222.
		To talk with Art Bell from East to the Rockies, call toll-free at 800-825-5033.
		From West to the Rockies, call ARC at 800-618-8255.
		International callers may reach Art Bell by calling your in-country sprint access number, pressing Option 5, and dialing toll-free 800-893-0903.
		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Stay right there.
unidentified		Stay right there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		That's about four and a half stories tall.
unidentified		A girder.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And they were going to assemble it in ore, but they were using actually a strange alloy, which when you heat it, it remembers its original shape.
		So they were like sleeves that they made a little bit larger.
		They originally made them a small size, and then they expanded them.
		And then in space, they would heat them, and they would squeeze together to act as a joint.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's very interesting.
		It's a heat memory.
		It was an alloy that remembered a previous shape.
		And they would actually use it.
		They lose electricity to heat it, and it would get back to its original shape.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What were they doing?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		What?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What were they doing?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		They were building a girder that was 45 feet high.
		And the purpose of the girder, this tower, essentially, was to put an engine at the top of it so it would be more efficient to rotate mirror.
		Because if you have an engine at the outer axis, away from the axis, you use less fuel to get the thing to rotate.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Indeed, yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		All right.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Three weeks later is the fall of the Soviet Union.
		That was the last hammer and sickle to fly anywhere.
		It stood up there for another year before they finally got it.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's incredible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Where did you get this story?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I got this story from the horse's mouth.
		I interviewed both cosmonauts.
		Artybovsky, and Sergei Krikulev.
		Krikulev was the last Soviet citizen on that same mission.
		He was the guy that got stuck up there when the Soviet Union fell for an extra six months.
		And I interviewed him for like three days.
		He's very fluent in English because he was the first Russian to fly on the shuttle.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much was there that you asked him about in that interview that he couldn't or wouldn't talk about?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Nothing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Nothing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Any question?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		He wouldn't talk.
		Nothing.
		Any question I asked him, they would talk.
		And he talked to me for hours.
		We spent about three days together.
		You've got to understand the way the Russian society is, they're still somewhat closed, but not anywhere like they used to be.
		They really want people to hear this story.
		And some of them are like any normal human beings.
		Some of them are a little more suspicious than others.
		Some of them are more old school, but they also want to tell their story.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There's also an awful lot of death involved in the Russian space program that the world doesn't know about.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, actually, I don't think, no, that's not true.
		Oh?
		No, I don't, that's not true.
		They really, they don't, there's not, no, there's not much secretiveness there.
		For example, there was never a cosmonaut that was dead in orbit that no one knows about.
		That's not true.
		That's an old rumor I get asked.
		I'll cut the question off right off the bat.
		They never lost anyone in orbit that we don't know about.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		At the times that it occurred, we didn't always know about it right away at all from the Russians.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		But this is not the same thing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's actually what I was referring to.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I just want to make it clear.
		It wasn't stuff that happened in space.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're talking about the Russians.
		You're talking about the Russians.
		What about the Americans?
		What do you know has happened on our missions that we're not fully aware of?
		Is there much, or did we know it all?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		He could not get them to listen to him.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How terrified were some of the American astronauts after spending time on Mir?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No, they weren't terrified at all.
		I mean, all of them tell me Mir was a really good vessel, actually.
		It had technical problems at the time we were there because there were sections of it that were old that needed overhaul.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But there were stories about that, though.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		There were problems there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But there were one or two that came back expressing some trepidation.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I clearly.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that would be politically difficult.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Poor judgment is very politically difficult.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		In this particular case, too, Art, because remember, that mission was a foreign policy initiative by Clinton.
		And to say bad things about our partner in that foreign policy initiative was politically incorrect.
		And he did not want, the Clinton administration did not want to hear any of that.
		So they were willing to look away from any possible dangers.
		And that's a similar problem that's happened with Columbia and Challenger.
		Management concerns overrided the engineering concerns.
		And when you're in space and you're trying to learn how to build ships in space, engineering has got to be the boss.
		And that's a problem.
		And it's a problem our space program has right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know if the Russians completely conquered the problem?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe Mars, but not much beyond.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How would you be, from a continuing medical point of view, Robert, if you were living on Mars?
unidentified		Well, in the same field.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		In terms of bone launch exact, that's not a problem.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		As soon as you put some gravity there, the problem goes away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so if you were living on Mars, this wouldn't be an issue.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		The bone launch itself is no longer an issue.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are issues, of course.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I mean, what you have...
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is there something so valuable on the moon or Mars potentially to make all this profitable?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Don't know.
		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.
unidentified		Well, tobacco.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		They came to practice religion.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Tobacco, however, will not serve even rare Martian tobacco.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No, that's true.
		The point I was trying to get at is that they didn't know about tobacco when they came, and we don't know what Mars will get us there.
		One of the things I think the space is going to bring us is minerals.
		Because, I mean, for example, not so much Mars, but the asteroids.
		You get an iron, a stony iron asteroid.
		You can pull out pure iron in quantities more than has been mined in the history of the human race, very quickly.
		So there's actual real minerals to be mined that could be very useful for both industries on Earth and as well as space.
		On top of that, there's always the energy question.
		space has gobs of free energy coming from the sun and that can be, that can be, that It's how to turn that energy and get it down to Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Collect that energy and then perhaps microwave it to Earth or something along those lines.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And this is not a difficult problem, but it does requires the engineering up in space to figure out how to do it.
		And that, once again, is learning how to be in space.
		And then there's the scientific benefits, which is learning about the universe.
		And it's learning about the Earth.
		You know, you learn how Mars became the way it is.
		You learn how Venus became the way it is.
		Venus is a hellhole.
		It's, you know, it's sulfuric clouds.
		It's 900 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface.
		It's 900 pounds per square inch atmosphere.
		It's really a horrible place to even dream of going to.
unidentified		But yet, the planet is almost exactly the same size as Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, Robert, hold it right there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When we come back, I want to turn you over to the audience.
unidentified		Sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		They're going to have lots of questions about all of this, I'm sure.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I can answer them all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I know you can.
		All right, stay right there.
		Robert Zimmerman Is my guest, and he's up for you now.
		So, when these phone numbers come winging your way here in a few moments, listen very carefully.
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		From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It never happened.
		It's Hollywood.
		It's baloney.
		It just never happened.
		What do you say to those folks?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I think it's despicable.
		I think it's no different than the Holocaust revisionists who say Hitler didn't kill 11 million people, mostly Jews.
		I think it is.
		There are astronauts who died.
		I've spoken to people who, they're relatives, to make it possible for us to go to the moon.
		And it's a horror to my mind that Americans, it's almost like Americans can't deal with reality anymore.
		And what it comes down to is this.
		Our generation, the post-Apollo generation, has really not accomplished that much in the United States when it comes to space exploration.
unidentified		Or exploration.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		We haven't done great things.
		I'm very disappointed.
		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.
unidentified		Robert, you asked a real hard question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Take a deep breath with me for a second.
		And explain to me what you think is the psychology behind these people that's pushing them in this direction.
		What's driving them?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		That's pretty wild.
		A lot of this is psycho-babble.
		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.
		And that's really tragic.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's a pretty weird psychology.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It is a very weird psychology.
		I don't understand it.
		I mean, I don't understand it.
		I mean, it doesn't take much research to find out very clearly that we went to the moon.
		You don't have to do much to really the evidence.
		It's just not possible.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The people who believe that are every bit as passionate as are you.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, well, that's fine.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		You know, all I'm saying is that I know people who have relatives die to make it possible just to go to the movie.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm kidding.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I'm sick of all to try to denigrate the honor of their memory.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And I'm sorry, I will say that bluntly again and again and again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have no problem with that, and I appreciate your response.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		First time, CallerLine, you're on the air with Robert Zimmerman.
unidentified		Hey, it's Mark and Jaggs from the Oklahoma Super Bowl 39.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Hey, Mark.
unidentified		Hey, I first wanted to say you're one of the least pretentious fellows on radio, and I highly respect you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		I hope you never retire.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		For your guests, well, I think it was novel for GW to encourage this Mars proposal at such a time as this.
unidentified		But in the interim, what would it take for a Mars probe to collect a sample and return to Earth with that?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's a good question.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How do you think they could mechanically get a sample back here?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How could that be achieved?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, part of the problem there is you have to work out the key is getting it off the planet.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		So what you're going to have to do is figure out you have to create a little lunar lem that has an engine that can fire and go up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's not going to be a matter of time.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Actually, that's not such a difficult thing to do.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But it's not as little as the one for Mars because there's very little gravity on Mars, or on the moon rather, but more on Mars.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		More on Mars, but it's still significantly less than Earth.
		It's a third of Earth.
		Plus it's got an atmosphere which can be maybe used.
		Well, you basically have to put an engine there.
		It has to be able to launch.
		So what you do is you create an arm that reaches down, grabs some samples, drops them into a hopper, close itself up, and takes off again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I'm making it sound really simple.
		I'm not an engineer.
		You know, the Russians, the Soviets did this on the moon.
		They were able to send a robot to the moon, get a sample, and bring it back to Earth.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Again, though, not the same degree of difficulty as Mars.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No, actually.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, excellent.
		All right.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Robert Zimmerman.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, this is Jeff calling from Los Angeles.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello, Jeff.
unidentified		Hi, Robert.
		I, too, am a big advocate of the Space Station program and the Space Shuttle program.
		And my question to you this evening, you talked a little bit about it.
		What are your top three or top five products or processes you see coming out of the ISS?
		Here's a couple that I like.
		Protein crystal growth, they're much larger and much higher yield in space, much purer.
		Zeolite crystals can be much larger and much more purely grown in space.
		Glass fibers are clearer with less defects and easier to produce in space, including Z-bland fibers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, you know, I actually am not a big fan of the science research going on on ISS.
		I mean, I am and I'm not.
		I'm very conflicted.
		I think the science research is valuable.
		It's worthwhile.
		But I think we're missing the main point of the station.
		And this would be kind of like we go to the moon, but we make believe the Apollo capsule is really just a science laboratory.
		We're going to grow proteins on the moon.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is it we're missing?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		We're not interested in really landing.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		What is it we're missing?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I think that's the first prime thing I have.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Shouldn't the Russians have accumulated most of that needed information?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Some, yes.
		But once again, Polyakov's mission was only 14 and a half months.
		If you're going to go to Mars, a realistic mission is probably a minimum of 18 months, more likely 24.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		For an hour.
		And then what about a follow-up to that, Robert?
		How did he do in the next days and weeks and months?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		He recovered remarkably well.
		Within an hour, he was walking on his own.
		And he did better than almost anyone has ever done after a long mission like that.
		And actually, the other three guys that have been up more than a year that the Russians have sent all managed to be walking within an hour.
		But that first few minutes, they needed help.
		When you get to Mars, there's not going to be anyone there to help you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that's still not a lot.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, did the follow-up show any other serious consequences?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No, absolutely not.
		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.
		That's what the Russians have learned.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, we're downloading 14 months.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		What happens at 18 months?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we're downline here far enough so that if there had been secondary consequences, we would have seen them and haven't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that correct?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's unknown.
		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.
		All right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		East of the Rockies, you're on the air with Robert Zimmerman.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hello.
unidentified		Hello.
unidentified		This is David Colling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Hi, David.
unidentified		Hi.
		I'd like to thank you and Robert for a very informative show.
		A couple questions for you, Robert.
		First one, has any experiments or anything been or hypothesis been formed on asteroid valve between Mars and Jupiter as to its origin?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, the volume was low, so I didn't quite get the question.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, he's talking about asteroids between the Earth and Mars.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that correct?
unidentified		Yes.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And he's speculating that a planet once may have exploded, the Van Flandren theory, that a planet once exploded there.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that correct, Color?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Between Mars and Jupiter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that correct?
unidentified		The asteroid belt?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The asteroid belt, Mars and Jupiter.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you're talking about, Color?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, that's correct.
		No, actually not.
		What the scientists think happened in that case is that the gravity of Jupiter prevented any planet from ever coalescing in that asteroid belt.
		In other words, before any planet could come together, the strong gravity of Jupiter would kind of break it apart.
		So all you get is the remnants of a planet.
		And there's not that much there because over the eons, Jupiter's gravity has more or less swept it out.
		And so what's left is not very much, actually.
		It wouldn't make much of a planet.
		And it wasn't that it exploded.
		It just never was able to form.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Gotcha.
		All right.
		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Robert Zimram.
unidentified		Hi, this is Brandon from Seattle.
unidentified		I'd like to thank you guys for this great show you've been putting on.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It is hot stuff, really.
unidentified		Welcome.
		Yeah, I'd like to ask him a few questions about some of the interviews he's given to some of the astronauts.
		Have they ever talked about extraterrestrials or anything of that sort?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It's a fair question.
		I know that certainly things were seen, Robert, in space.
		And there were reports of, oh, I don't know, two or three different pretty wild incidents, angels, and there were some wild stories.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		What about it?
		The astronauts I've spoken to don't talk about that.
		They have not seen anything.
		I've talked to a lot of guys and gals, and they don't really report anything spectacular like that.
		What they do say is, you know, you do see the things you see in space are space things, which have to do like the Aurora Borealis.
		You're seeing it from above.
		You fly through it on the shuttle, so it looks different, and it looks spectacular.
		The fuel that spills out of the craft, or even ice, it becomes sparkly stars all around your ship.
		It's really spectacular.
		But I haven't come across any astronaut at this point that's spoken to me about seeing angels or extraterrestrials.
		I'm sorry to say that.
		Once again, if that could be found and seen, it would actually be to everyone in the space program's benefit because it would get us going.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I'm not sure.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know about angels.
unidentified		Well, angels, yeah, that's a little bit more difficult.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that might be a little over the top.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But on the other hand, so would little creatures of any other description be very over the top.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I heard you say that with great enthusiasm earlier in the show.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Are you sure such a picture would, without interruption, consideration, and phone calls being made, get to the American public?
unidentified		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I have no doubt about that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I don't know about that.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I have no doubt.
		I mean, once again, I've spoken to the guys who handle the cameras, and they want this.
		If they saw that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, I know that.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You certainly can, but there is a period of time, I believe, when they go by Mailin before they get distributed on the web.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, in this case, not Mailin, because he's global surveyor.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
		Or somebody like Mailin.
		It doesn't matter.
		Somebody.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		But the point I'm getting at, though, is no, I'm sorry.
		If that happened, he would have a press release out the next minute.
		The only reason we delayed is so he could write the press release.
		He would not want to hide that.
		It just doesn't pay for him.
		And this is, once again, getting back to government and bureaucracy, this brings money into the bank.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, so you're saying then that NASA's official policy on this is if they ran into an alien, by God, we'd know about it right away.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No question about it.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		They could not keep that secret.
		Not a chance.
		Not a chance in a million years.
		I'm sorry.
		I don't believe that's conspiratorial stuff.
		I think it's silly.
		There's just no way to keep it secret because people talk.
		And too many people, Americans just assume they have the right to speak.
		And too many of those scientists are going to be talking very quickly.
		It just can't be kept secret.
		There's too many press guys who are going to be wanting to know, including me, and who talk to them.
		It just can't.
		There's no way.
		I'm sorry.
		I mean, I know a lot of your listeners aren't going to agree with me and they're going to say, ah, nah, he's part of the conspiracy, but I'm sorry.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I just can't.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't accuse you of that.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		However, you've noticed I'm not shy about telling what I think.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		No, you're not.
		You're not.
		No, and that's fine.
		Listen, hold it right there.
		We've got a break.
		This is an awful lot of fun.
		We've got lots of people who want to talk to Robert Zimmerman, so just hang in there and you'll get your chance.
		From the high desert, I'm Art Bell, and this is Coast to Coast AM.
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art bell ▲ ● ▼		A very strong advocate for the space program.
		That's what we have with Robert Zimmer, as Yoda would say.
		Anyway, he's an awful lot of fun.
		He's got a lot of stories to tell and things to say that you may never have heard before.
		If you have a question for him, we're deep into the phones.
		Be right with you.
unidentified		Be right with you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Robert?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It's a non-starter non-issue.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		It wouldn't be something you could pass through frequently.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Would you have to launch a mission to Mars during a solar minimum?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Could you not risk launching near a solar maximum?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is getting back to one of the things we need to find out.
		The solar maximum has risks involved, but once again, this is an engineering question.
		Can you put the safety shielding in a ship practically?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Can you put that much in the middle of the ship?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And since you need to bring batteries and water tanks up to the station anyway, they're there.
		So they likely protect you from most of that stuff.
		But I'm not the engineer.
		There is certain very careful calculations that have to be done to make sure of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		There are indeed certain dangers.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, if there was a super flare directed right at them, there are those who suggest you couldn't live through that.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I'm not sure it would be quite that bad.
		I don't know the exact numbers, so I'm not going to say that's wrong, but I just don't know.
		I would say, though, that based on what I do know about solar flares, the shielding for that is far from difficult.
		It's just a simple engine.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okie-dokie.
		Wildcard line, you're on the air with Robert Zimmerman.
		Hi.
unidentified		Hi, Rejet Tim from Cool Lake, Overto, Canada.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, you're going to have to yell at us, little Tim.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're not too loud.
unidentified		Okay, I've got a question for Robert.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		And it's to do with the rovers that are sitting on Mars right now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, sir.
unidentified		I'm a proponent of these unmanned missions.
		I think going back to the moon where you guys have already been or going to Mars would be just a colossal, huge investment of money.
		It would be like building the Saturn V all over again.
		I don't think you'd be able to afford it.
		But why did they...
		But speaking of ice, the Mars, why didn't they land the rovers closer to the North Pole where the ice is, and they could actually take a look?
		Because the ice is, you know, maybe that was the last ice where the water flowed when whatever event happened to create it.
		The water flowed into the North Pole and the ice was flowing.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Let me answer the last one first.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Or is that too godlike for you?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		No, I actually think that, you know, of course.
		I mean, what's the old saying, when a scientist says it's impossible, wait for it to happen?
		I mean, no, I think there's no, this is going to be down the road.
		It's going to happen.
		But I think it's a mistake for us to focus on that right now because we really don't even know what it's like to live on a low-gravity planet at all.
		We don't have the engineering at the moment.
		And I think the people who will solve that problem, because they'll have a need to solve it, will be the people living on Mars.
		And they will solve it.
		Because it is definitely doable.
		You've got the ingredients on Mars for making the atmosphere you need.
		And it's just a matter of figuring out how to do that.
		But you've got to live there to figure that out.
unidentified		And we're not at that pay of stage yet.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And oh, by the way, your caller mentioned Europa.
		Boy, I would love to get the Europa.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if it's volcanic.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Water as volcano.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		There is life.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I'm trying to figure where you'd fit in as a crew member on a Mars mission.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I'd be the poet.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he used to the Rockies.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		You're on the air with Robert Zimmerman.
unidentified		Hi.
unidentified		Good evening.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Morning.
unidentified		How are you doing?
unidentified		Good morning.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
unidentified		Mrs. Zimmerman, how are you doing?
		Oh, I'm doing great.
		First of all, I want to tell you, I really love your show.
		It's the first time I talked to you, sir, and please keep it up.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
unidentified		Don't ever stop.
		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?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		So just let me make sure I understand the question.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		You're asking, could we use space as a dumping ground for the nuclear waste on Earth?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's right.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		As it stands, the dumping ground's going to be miles from me, Yucca Mountain.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I can understand the concern.
		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.
		And I tend to like to think really near future.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		When we get to about 50 cents pound, maybe.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yes, we've got to bring it down to about 50 cents a day.
		I think that's about right.
		I would love it.
		That would be great.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		West of the Rockies, you're on the air with Robert Zimmerman.
unidentified		Yeah, how are you doing, Robert?
unidentified		Art?
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Fine.
unidentified		How do you see it?
		I've got a question concerning gravitational wave detection.
		And are you familiar with the LISA project?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		The worst thing to get you.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		The what, the LISA project?
unidentified		Yes, the LISA project.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know anything about the LISA project?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		The name actually rings a bell, but you're going to have to remind me.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		I know the name, but I do know what it is.
unidentified		I think the air meter space antenna to detect gravitational waves.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay, yes, yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		LIGO and LISA, yes.
unidentified		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.
unidentified		Do you think that's possible?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		That sounds like actually not a bad idea because they do track the space junk in orbit very precisely within inches.
		They really need to know every item that's there, and they do have a very precise sense, and so that actually might not be a bad idea.
		I leave the math to the scientists.
		I just translate their work so that we can understand it.
		I'm not sure about the math of that.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And how much of a danger in general is all that junk?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's an issue.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's an issue that has to be dealt with.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		How much of one?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It depends on who you talk to.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Don't we get more of them every time we launch?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And that's not really a good idea.
		And they know that now.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Because if a glove hit you hard enough, it would put a hole probably in your space.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
		One of those handles at one point floated away.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yes.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		And they actually had to postpone a repair mission because they had to send up another handle.
		Now, that handle floated away, right?
		So you think, oh, it's dangerous.
		But in a sense, it isn't because it's flying at approximately the same relative speed as Mir.
		So even if it laps Mir in orbit, it's coming back at a relatively slow speed.
		You could brag, if you saw it, you could just reach out and grab it again.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		That would be true for that spacecraft.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		But for another spacecraft, it could be a very, very different story.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's actually right.
		So yeah, but you have to, once again, bounce it.
		This is an issue that needs to be watched.
		I'm not trying to downplay it.
		It's just not as if you stand out there and you're going to be splattered like rain hitting you.
		It's not, I don't think the problem is that serious, but it is something that has to be taken seriously.
		And it's only in the recent years that they have finalized.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, look, I'll talk to you about something that has to be taken seriously.
		The program is ending.
		So you've got a couple of books, and you've been a real trooper.
		Plug the hell out of your books.
		I mean, how about it?
		You've got several, right?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, the most recent one, Leaving Earth, it's basically a history of space exploration since Apollo, and therefore it's about 80% Russian.
		And what it does is I'm telling the history of space exploration in the context of why it was going on with the politicians on the ground.
		And so you see a cultural change in the United States and Russia.
		At the same time, you're learning how and what needs to be done to build interplanetary spaceships.
		And I covered that history very detailed.
		And some of the stories I told come right out of that book.
		My first book was Genesis.
		I told you some of that about Apollo 8 missions.
		And then I have an encyclopedia, which is basically a chronological encyclopedia of every single mission that went into space.
		Not just simply science or manned, but also the military, the communication satellites, and what was learned or accomplished.
		So example, you can find out when the GPS system was first installed in orbit.
		You can find out the first military surveillance photos that were taken.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		I have a question for you.
		Is the space race, Robert, back on?
		Yeah, because we've got the Chinese out there and the Russians doing lots of work and everybody jumping in.
		So in a way, the space race is reborn?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		It's reborn, but the question is whether we are in it.
		And that is the big question.
		And I'm not sure Bush's plan, I haven't gotten a chance to talk about this, but I don't think Bush's plan is going to succeed tragically enough.
		I think it's failure at this point is going to finally wake us up that we have to do things in a different way.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Including commercial interests?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there are some aerospace efforts underway privately in the U.S. You know about them?
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah, there's the XPRIZE.
		That's my inspiration for this idea.
		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.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		All right, buddy, you made your point.
		Well, we got to go.
		It's been a pleasure.
		Thank you.
robert zimmerman ▲ ● ▼		Thank you all.
art bell ▲ ● ▼		And good night.
		Robert Zimmerman.
		And you might want to check out his book, Leaving Earth, Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel.
		God, that's a weekend, folks.
		So fast.
		From the high desert.
		It has been an honor.
		Good night.
unidentified		Midnight in the desert, shooting stars across the sky.
		This magical journey will take us on a ride.
		Filled with the longing, searching for the truth.
		Will we make it to tomorrow?
		Will the sun shine on you?
		Good night in the desert.

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