Robert Zimmerman critiques NASA’s 2014 manned CEV timeline, calling its cautious approach a "lack of the right stuff" despite Congressman Bollard’s safety-first stance. He highlights private spaceflight—like Rocket Plane’s $200K suborbital tickets—as more viable than NASA’s delays, predicting orbital tourism by 2010 and lunar bases using moon craters with hydrogen and sunlight. Mars rovers Spirit/Opportunity confirm past liquid water, with 75% of scientists believing life once existed there, while Zimmerman argues the moon should be prioritized for sovereignty to protect U.S. interests amid UN space law restrictions. Private commercialization in space, like Coca-Cola ads on Mir, could drive progress faster than bureaucratic NASA, he insists, urging a shift toward bold, self-funded exploration. [Automatically generated summary]
Good morning, good afternoon, whatever the case may be, whatever you are in the world's time, all of them, covered like a blanket by this program postpone.
I'm Arbelle, honored, and privileged to be escorting you through the weekend.
And what a weekend it has turned out to be.
Listen, there is something that I think I ought to get on right away.
I don't think there's anything coaxy about this.
There have been over 3,000 earthquakes within 72 hours off the coast of the northwest U.S. 3,000 earthquakes in 72 hours.
The story is catching fire, I guess.
There are a lot of people on their way up to the Seattle area trying to figure out what's going on.
It's all underwater.
Maybe an underwater eruption?
They don't really know.
But 3,000 earthquakes in 72 hours means something is moving under the water there.
Maybe it'll come to something, maybe nothing, but be warned.
Also, in the category of hoax, as you know, last night I passed on to you this plan that was on a blogger site hosted by Negative Zero.
Well, as soon as I discovered it, it disappeared, of course.
But now they're back, and their new plan is to try and conduct a hoax.
They say now either the original date, which was the 19th, or next Saturday, that would be when I'm on the air, or some other, and they're going to vote on when best to have this giant UFO hoax, which we'll be well aware of and tracking right along with, so I really wouldn't bother, but they seemed to, I mean, you're just absolutely, you know, it's funny, the page disappeared after I nailed them.
Just went away.
However, there's continuing follow-up pages yet today, and we'll continue to follow it.
We have many sources.
A left-wing journalist, Juliana Sprigiana, claimed American soldiers gave no warning before they opened fire and said Sunday that she could not rule out that U.S. forces intentionally shot at the car, carrying her to the Baghdad airport, wounding and killing the Italian agent who had just won her freedom after a month in captivity.
An Italian cabinet member urged her, who writes, by the way, for a communist newspaper that routinely opposes U.S. policy in Iraq, to be very cautious in her accounts and said that the shooting would not affect Italy's support for the Bush administration.
This is a wild story, I think.
Sony Corporation has named Howard Stringer as its chairman.
It did so Monday, now Monday, in Tokyo, a decision that marks the first time, indeed the first time, that a foreigner is going to head a major Japanese electronics firm and comes as the company seeks to improve results at its faltering core electronics business.
Springer, vice chairman at Sony and chief executive of Sony Corporation of America, replaces the Japanese leader who has been leading now for a decade.
So an American is running Sony.
And is that a wild turn of events or what?
Would you ever have imagined, I don't know, five or ten years ago that an American would be leading the Sony Corporation?
Yikes!
A leading Republican senator is proposing to raise the Social Security retirement age from 67 to 68 for max benefits.
Reasoning that Social Security is in trouble and reasoning that people are living longer these days, he's saying now people ought to wait until they're 68 and maybe that'll save Social Security.
The militant group Hezbollah, largely on the fence since anti-Syrian protest erupted in Lebanon last month, switched gears Sunday and threw its weight behind Syria and its allies, calling for massive rallies in Beirut to show loyalty to Damascus.
As mercury spills in schools disrupt classes, teachers and environmental groups want to get rid of student labs of the versatile but dangerous metal.
In recent weeks, mercury was found in stairwells and corridors of a high school in the nation's capital.
The building had to be closed twice for decontamination.
And still more traces were found Sunday, even as cleaning crews were wrapping up their work in preparation for reopening the schools on Monday mercury poisoning.
Mercury, well, you know, a lot has changed.
When I was a kid, mercury was cool.
I mean, heck, we took mercury and you'd put it on your finger and you'd put it on a dime or something, you know, like a dime and you'd rub the dime and the dime would get incredibly shiny.
And that was fun.
Fun with mercury.
and now of course we know that it's uh...
poisonous back in the day it was nothing more And I was one of them.
Yeah, so that's what happened, huh?
We'll be back with more open lines directly ahead.
right there.
One more item before we get to open lines.
Whitley's site, unknowncountry.com, is keeping as close a track on this flu thing as I have been.
And his lead story this hour is, the director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control has warned that the outbreak of bird flu in Asia is the single biggest threat facing the entire world today.
Right now, bird flu can only be caught directly from infected birds, usually chickens, for example.
But there are now signs that the virus is evolving and may soon be able to be passed from person to person.
Should that occur, we could have an epidemic very similar to or rivaling the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed millions of people around the world.
Researchers don't know for sure that the H5N1 strain of bird flu will evolve into a form that can be passed from person to person.
Right now, the bird flu has a fatality rate of about three out of four.
75% who catch it die.
So if this form of bird flu spreads throughout the world, obviously it would be an international health disaster.
The longer the bird flu virus is around people, the greater the risk it might mutate and learn how to defeat the human immune system.
A vaccine has not yet been developed for the bird flu, but researchers are working overtime to try and get one.
The prescription medicine, Tamiflu, manufactured by Roche, is effective against avian flu, but if an epidemic begins, Tamoflu stocks will quickly be depleted, and the company may not be able to manufacture enough of the drug to fill worldwide demand.
As with AIDS drugs, we'll see patients in rich countries being treated, and of course those in third world countries suffer and die.
Let us proceed to the lines.
Wildcard line, you're on the air, top of the evening, morning, or whatever.
I would question whether the story about Jimmy Carter at the book signing for the caller called in initially anyway, if that was the reason that he looked at him rather, and started crying.
it absolutely could have been and that that was a caller of course who once called the program said that he went to a book signing with jimmy carter and of course carter was quite famous for having said that when if elected uh...
he would demand all the evidence on u_f_'s that our government had and then the follow-up to that was a caller this man mentioned call the show and said he wants went to a book signing you know after president carter had left office and that uh...
he asked about what uh...
president carter found and carter said something slightly dismissive and then he pressed him and it ended up with the turners in his eye and didn't talk about it fairly compelling i would say was to the rockies you're on the air below hi hi this is probably i'm calling from portland oregon hi colby how you doing that are
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you i was calling to you you your opinion on the blue book on the menu in a project or or or or or uh...
you're asking about the abc special and how they handled blue book or are you asking about blue book itself how they handled it on a special well arm they gave it pretty short uh...
a pretty short shrift i would say there and uh...
in in the case of roswell of course they'd be pretty well dismissed roswell is nothing more than a myth and uh...
sir you're going to have to raise your voice a little bit mark lane mark lane with the who was uh...
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one of the major of research uh...
researchers into uh...
evidence of c_i_i_ uh...
involved in the kennedy assassination wondered why he had been bashed by the media and he uh...
finally uh...
for a lot of suits got his freedom information act well from the c_i_a_ and it turns out that the director of plans the c_i_a_ had been ordering all of its agents and all of its assets throughout the media to discredit him and even gave them the types of uh...
uh...
talking points they should use and among them were that he was a conspiracy nut he was just in it for the money uh...
that uh...
any uh...
any uh...
a newspaper would be uh...
glad to have this because it would be such a jimmy olsen type of we would never cover this up exactly the kind of cliche if i heard from your guest last night from bob popular mechanics and i also know when uh...
the guests last night sir only commented on scientifically investigated items sixteen of them in fact well that's not true part because that is true i was a dog program i know he closed off by saying that this was a not about independent commission certainly
it was an independent commission everyone around the 9-11 truth family 9-11truth.org families have completely protested the conflicts of interest of that hand-picked panel by the Bush administration the conflicts of interest of certain developers take a breath my guest last night hardly even referred to that report he referred to the article in popular mechanics that's why he was here and that's what he was discussing
for three hours well it really did he made a lot of political comments about the motivations the psychology of those supposedly hating he did say that he did say that he thought it was politically motivated and i think it is too well i think uh...
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i think they are politically motivated for a cat i uh...
hard i believe you are because of you you claim that the subjectivity that you have disagreements with bush but sure supposed to disagree with us to be more bush that i did not war warm water i did not vote for president bush and i'll tell you why uh...
because president bush is going to put nuclear waste here in about a whereas the other candidate had promised that he would not let it most politics there is local and if you lived in about a you might well with felt i'd really the way i did i agree with you on that issue but the point is on everything every um...
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murderous frame of a wall of countries for these are unprovoked uh...
preemptive words around the world flow from this uh...
fabricated version of nine eleven all of that depends and that you have the extra you have a little missus show your agreement with every one of those uh...
military invasions and attacks going back from vietnam to afghanistan to iraq so you have a dog in this race no i did not i did not i did not hello sir i did not agree at all with the invasion of iraq and said so adamantly before it began well i i i certainly have heard uh...
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other things that i would like to mention operation northwards and if you don't believe that that's capable of for a
elements in this government to kill Americans on that scale this is brought out by James Bamford the NSA expert yeah yeah I know I've heard tell me do you believe that President tell me do you believe that President Bush ordered the 9-11 attacks I don't know whether he knew or not but I believe it's very possible that people like Sinister Carl J. Keney Wolfowitz and the rest of them have that that ability to reprise this Operation Northwoods which had a
plan to show you something I think it's reprehensible those people as a matter of fact it is absolutely reprehensible those people who think that Bush ordered somehow this whole operation and the airplanes, I might add, to attack and kill thousands of Americans, that our own president did that.
I'm not a big Bush fan at all.
On the other hand, I'm not a big Bush opponent either.
However, as I said last night, and I'll reiterate right now, I don't for one second think that this president or any other president ordered an attack that would kill thousands of Americans.
And I think it's sad for those who did die that it is represented by some.
I mentioned the rent site last night, so I'm going to carry through with it right now.
This is the kind of thing that I'm talking about.
I just took a picture of a headline from a story that came from the rent site.
That's why I mentioned it last night.
This was originally printed 9-17 of 04, and you'll be able to read the headline for yourself.
Government Insider says Bush authorized 9-11 attacks.
I think the headline should be clearly legible for you to read.
So if you go to coasttocoastam.com right now, you'll be able to see exactly what I mean in a moment or so.
From the high desert, this is Coast to Coast AM.
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We'll be right back.
We'll be right back.
You keep on fire, but you really don't know why.
See when you need a smile to help the shadow in the way Come to me, baby, you'll see The love you're pretty, baby Who's gonna hold you through the night The love you're
pretty, mama Who's always there to me Who's gonna love you, love you Who's gonna love you, love you Who's gonna love you Who's
gonna love you To talk with Art Bell, call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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From coast to coast and worldwide on the internet, this is Coast to Coast AM with Art Bell.
I was wanting to call in and respond to a lot of the criticism you've been getting because of last night's show.
Frankly, I don't think it's fair for people to jump up and down and start rioting in the streets simply because, in all fairness, we simply listen to another point of view.
Now, I'm telling you, brother, that's sad for America.
When a lot of people start to get to bleeding, the president sat down and I had a paper in front of him, I'm sure, a secret naturally, and said, well, what we're going to do, Mr. President, we're going to have these jets pile into the World Trade Towers.
And then, oh, yeah, I think we'll have the Pentagon hit with one, two.
And just to make sure, we're going to add a missile on here and some explosives to make sure.
And please give me a break.
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And also here, Mr. President, is the memo to let the Miami Dolphins win the Super Bowl and also to raise gas prizes this week.
There is a conspiracy mania sweeping the country where if anything we do not understand or if there's some tragedy that unfolds, people start jumping up and down and screaming, oh, the government's trying to kill us.
I tried to point out last night that any number of individuals had their shot on this show for hour after hour after hour on the other side of the question, but dare speak one word on this side of it.
And these people who are screeching about openness just become, I don't know, they turn red and they hold their breath.
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Yeah, it's a case of open mouth and closed mind, I believe.
First of all, I do think that you and George put on a great, great show, and it's nice to have something out there that us insomniacs can be entertained with.
And what I want to get to is my friend and I are really avid lovers of conspiracies and of supernatural phenomena.
And what we really are looking forward to is eventually when we can get up the funds for it, we're going to go to the Pine Barrens and basically just set up as much surveillance stuff and do as much as we can to at least get some evidence on this.
And I was just thinking, we've done a lot of research on it, too, so we know what's the best thing to do.
And apparently, from what the Mayans tell us, something bad is going to happen in 2012.
I don't think the world's going to end, but I think there might be something.
And we do know the Jersey Devil usually appears before a natural disaster, if it's real.
So I was thinking, what do you suggest we should take?
Do you think we should go with tranquilizers or just photogra cameras and stuff?
Or do you think we should go before 2012?
Or do you think we should just head out as soon as we get the chance?
I mean, you know, I called about three times on that, and finally I got my answer.
I read something in Scientific American and was possible that where you have some, you know, you have some solar batteries and solar power that you can get it up to that speed.
And I'm not a trained scientist, but like a lot of your listeners, I'm very interested in science and technology, and I've got a theory about what happened to the water on Mars.
And since water seeks the lowest level because of gravity, on Earth, the only reason that the oceans haven't sank below the surface here on Earth is because we have a hot core.
And when the water seeps down through the fissures and the cracks in the Earth's surface, it's forced back up by the heat from the core of the Earth.
It can never sink.
It can never actually reach the lowest level because of the heat from the core of the Earth.
That's a pretty interesting and, I don't know, fairly logical theory, I guess.
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And on Mars, I think the core is cold or cold enough to allow the ocean to sink through the cracks and the fissures in the surface down below the surface.
I think all the water is still there, but it's below the surface because the core is cold and it allows the water to sink below the surface.
Yeah, I don't have to vote in your elections, but I do take an interest.
I always have an interest in politics since I was about 12.
So, I mean, one thing about George Bush, I noticed I do look at people a lot, and I've had a number, and I always thought George Bush had a very honest look about him, more than most people.
I can't believe what people are thinking about him and saying about him.
I mean, I'll get through to you again, but I want to say that I love you because you're so honest, and you search for the truth.
It's obvious the way you talk and you think.
And I want to say one thing.
People have said in the past that Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein didn't know each other.
And I read after the attack, 911 attack, I was reading about bin Laden in the Canadian newspaper.
I forgot the name of it now, but anyway, it said that he lived in Iraq from 1996 to 1998 and that Saddam Hussein, this is before I ever heard of anything going, there was no point, no talk of Iraq at the time.
But it said he lived in Iraq and that Saddam Hussein taught him how to dig underground, to live underground.
I just like the way you take your stand on this thing, and I have a feeling that most of the people that have this conspiracy theory probably never spent a minute in a different country.
But what I do have a little question for you is, I think Big Brother hiccuped on 9-11.
Well, that means to some degree, see, that they win.
The terrorists win.
If they turn America into a police state, if they cause us to revise our own Bill of Rights and Constitution and remove the freedoms that were inculcated as a result of it, then they've won.
He's an award-winning space historian, writing articles and books on issues of science, history, technology, and culture.
He also writes a weekly column on the aerospace industry called Space Watch for United Press International.
That's prestigious.
His most recent book, Leaving Earth, Space Days.
Hello, Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel was awarded the Eugene M. Emmy Award by the American Astronautical Society for the Best Popular Space History in 2003.
In 2000, he was co-winner of the David N. Schram Award given by the High Energy Astrophysic Division of the American Astronomical Society for Science Journalism.
In a moment, Robert Zimmerman.
All right, here is a space historian, Robert Zimmerman.
You know, I think we're about to finally, without equivocation, in fact, without anything able to stop it, we're about to start the real grand adventure of settling and colonizing the solar system.
All the pieces are in place.
The gears are beginning to build up.
The momentum is beginning to build real strong.
Not just in the United States, but across the world.
I mean, big picture, China is now the third country to put humans in space.
Come this fall, September or so, they're going to do a second-manned mission, they say.
And I have no reason not to believe them.
Two-manned mission for at least five days.
And the truth, right now, they have the best manned space capsule of any nation, because we don't have anything, and the Russians is not as good as this.
Russia, just last week, said they're going to try to do a flyby of Mars by 2014.
And based on what I wrote about in Leaving Earth, they have all the pieces in place.
I mean, it's going to take a long time and a lot of resources to get to Mars.
Arguably, in a flyby, they're not going to gather any more information, certainly, than our photographic robots and or our little creepy crawlies have gathered by flying by Mars.
You see, you have to distinguish between two forms of knowledge, the robots and a landing.
If your goal is just scientific knowledge, then you're right.
They won't be gaining much knowledge.
But if your goal is the engineering knowledge necessary to learn how to settle the solar system, travel to other planets, then a flyby is priceless because it teaches you how to live in space long enough to get from one point to another.
Not just how to live there, but how to build a vessel that can keep you.
Do you think that the Russians and previously the Soviets had learned so much about how to keep people in orbit in weightlessness for extended periods of time that they're ready to get away with it?
Well, they're not quite ready, and they admit it, but they are far closer than anybody else.
I mean, they've done the research to do long-term missions.
they have four people who spent more than a year in space already and they have the medical data to see what the consequences are.
And on top of that, Oh, there are definitely consequences.
I mean, I talk about that at great length.
You've got the bone density issue.
You lose about one half a percent of bone density per month.
But the Russians are very convinced that with certain medicine and exercise, they can keep that loss of bone density in the weight-bearing bones to that rate, if not less.
Yeah, but they're not going to go for that initially.
When they built Mir, Mir was basically an interplanetary spaceship that could get you on a flyby to Mars.
It was built with that in mind.
And the only thing it lacked was the engines and the navigational, well, the engines mostly to get it on a flyby mission.
Now, they were planning to build what they called Mir 2, and they wanted originally, the Soviet Union planned to launch it in the early 90s.
They ran out of money.
The Soviet Union fell apart.
But Mir 2 is in orbit right now because they got the United States to pay them for their half of most of their half of the International Space Station.
And the actual hull of Mir 2 is what they used for the habitation module, Zezda, that's in orbit right now.
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And their half of the International Space Station is going to be Mir 2.
And the original plans with Mir 2, and they haven't changed from those plans, was to upgrade Mir to a level where you could add the engines and use it as an interplanetary spaceship.
That's their plan.
And they have said they're going to complete their half of the International Space Station by 2010.
And they're making it self-contained, their half.
They could detach it from our house and it would still function.
So 2014, for them to do a flyby, it's possible.
It might not happen, but it is definitely a possibility.
And in that grand picture of this great, the larger picture of the grand adventure, that's exciting.
Plus, you have Japan is reassessing its space program because it wants to compete with China.
You have the Indian.
India is aggressively, in the last year, decided it wants to have its own very successful space program.
It slows things down and things become bloated and not very effective, as is in the International Space Station.
And you actually end up building up friction between people and hostilities and resentments because people are trying to work together and neither is getting anything accomplished.
But competition, peaceful competition, such as capitalism, really gets the engines fired.
And you could see that with the X Prize last year.
Now, if you're talking about the actual program that Kennedy did and how it makes, from experience, it would make you skeptical of whether Bush's proposal can accomplish anything long-term.
I respect that skepticism.
In fact, I've written on my UPI column extensively about how I have, there are doubts about whether NASA can pull this off.
However, I do repeat, his proposal is unusual in that it, unlike Kennedy's or any other president's, it is the first thoughtful, long-term, open-ended proposal that is carefully worked out, that is incremental in growth, that doesn't have any particular one-stunt achievement that then ends things.
It's open-ended.
As Bush said, this is not a goal, but a journey.
And that's the right idea.
So from that respect, it's a good thing.
And I sound like I'm a NASA lover here, and people who read my stuff, I have a lot of problems with NASA, and I have a great deal of doubts whether NASA can pull this off.
I think it's very likely the private American industry come 2010 will be in a position to kind of like wave goodbye to NASA as they head off to the moon.
I hope that's the case.
But once again, this is just that longer vision.
And your first question on, if you look at all these factors, I wrote a column in which I compared the response.
George Bush Sr. in 1989 made an almost identical proposal to his son.
And his proposal hit the ground like a lead balloon.
In fact, it just vanished in less than a month from any discussion, never even got anywhere.
The political atmosphere at the time was just not into it.
Of course, you had a Democratic Congress, which Democrats generally oppose this kind of spending, and that's their political position.
Today, you have a very different atmosphere, and it's not just that there's a Republican Congress, I think it's the nation itself, even among scientists.
Scientists have, since the 70s, opposed generally manned space exploration.
They think it robs their unmanned research stuff.
That's right.
That's changing.
I have looked into, I've talked to a lot of astronomers and a lot of scientists, and there's still that knee-jerk opposition.
Here I get a lot of guys in Ground who say to me, well, you know, we're curious.
Scientists today are worried that the man program is going to rob the science research, which means you won't get the science students into the program, and you'll lose a whole generation.
They say this over and over again.
They haven't lost that generation for decades.
In terms of science education and new scientists, America is booming.
But what you do have in the United States, because we haven't pursued the engineering knowledge I mentioned earlier with going to Mars, we have had a terrible gap in engineers now for the last 15 years.
don't have it anymore, but they don't have what they...
But they don't have manned space exploration and the engineering innovativeness that makes people excited about becoming a rocket scientist.
Well, if you shift to the manned program, you bring that back.
And the truth is the scientists cannot do any of their work without the engineers.
The engineers have to come first.
And though the scientists say we need the scientists, they have tend to be a little short-sighted about the need for engineers.
And this is one of the things I've noticed.
It's changing.
They're beginning to recognize that maybe they shouldn't be so focused on just their own needs, that there's a grander, wider vision necessary to explore things.
So once again, I see we're about to, you know, and then the robots that are bringing back data are just invigorating the whole world, the whole world.
And so, no, I'm extremely optimistic about the next few decades.
Whether it'll be Americans first, I don't know.
But the competition is absolutely gearing up, and it's a great thing.
I think it's more likely it'll be the Russians to surprise us just because they have the knowledge and the experience and the infrastructure ready to go.
But it doesn't mean it won't be the Chinese.
I've said this story on Coast to Coast before, but I want to reiterate it for Americans to know.
We see this wonderful picture of the Apollo 11 landing site with the American flag standing there.
What most Americans do not know is that flag is not standing there.
It hasn't been standing there since 1969 when they took off their exhaust from the LEM ascent module, knocked it over.
And the American flag lies on the ground.
And what most Americans have to accept, and I'm giving the American perspective here, even though there's a lot of non-Americans listening, is that when foreigners finally show up to take pictures as tourist astronauts, they aren't going to pick the flag up.
And I think we have an obligation just as a nation to have a greater vision and to pick that flag up again.
And I think it's really beginning to gear up.
If it's not going to be NASA, it's going to be private enterprise.
You know, I can give you a quick historical analogy because my original historical background is actually early American history.
And Britain is a great analogy to this.
In the early 1570s, now I'm going to drop the century number.
In the early 70s, they sent a colony to try to establish Roanoke.
It failed.
And they kind of lost interest through the 80s, through the 90s, through the odds.
And then around 07, they said, you know, we can do this.
We want to compete with other countries like Spain.
Let's set up a new set of colonies.
So they went in 07 to Jamestown.
And in 20, they went to the Plymouth Rock.
And boom, it happened.
So in terms of human generational development, it's very comparable.
We had it in 1969 going to the moon in the 70s.
We kind of lost interest for a few decades.
And now we're into the arts again.
And we're saying, hey, we want to do this.
And I think we're about to gear up to a really grand adventure.
I go to congressional hearings all the time, and a lot of them really like to wine.
No, even that's changing.
I heard a congressman actually say a few days ago, about a week and a half ago, that a NASA administrator said, we want to have absolute safety in launching the shuttle.
And this guy took him to task.
He said, this congressman said, Vernon Ehrlers, actually, this is a congressman.
He actually said, you cannot have absolute safety.
Your safety record is something to be proud of at NASA, but you will never have absolute safety.
And if you want absolute safety, you're never going to go back in space.
And I think that's a terrible approach to this.
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You should instead accept the fact that people are going to die.
The shuttle is one of the most brilliantly designed, first-generation, first reusable prototype spaceship.
If you, you know, you build a reusable spaceship, it's a first design, you figure out what works and what doesn't, then, hey, let's turn it around and build a new version that's even better.
And this night with Robert Zimmerman, who is a space historian.
We're kind of touching on the shuttle right now, and I'm going to resume with that, and then we're going to talk a little bit about Hubble.
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lot of congress dot holland whether it's going to stay up there or deep orbit and burned to a cinder and and and All right, Robert, let's talk about the shuttle a bit.
Well, I would say we don't have the next generation set to go, and we're very far away from that.
When Bush made his proposal last January, he said we should retire the shuttle by the end of this decade.
And he proposed replacing the shuttle with a manned vehicle he called the crew exploration vehicle.
And that vehicle would be a modulus setup.
It wouldn't just be one vehicle.
It would be modulus, cargo in separate modules, additional modules to attach to a capsule so that you can extend its capability.
That was just a very, very basic concept.
And NASA spent the last year working up what they call a request for proposals, which they put out on the street on March 1st, about, what is it, last week.
And that request for proposals is basically asking industry companies, and the industry company, industry, airspace industry, a whole range of companies were involved in working up that RFP request proposal for proposals.
So the RFP went on the street, and now they're asking by early summer, they want to make a decision.
They want to get proposals in from all these different companies on what they envision the crew exploration vehicle will look like.
And what NASA's plan is is to reward two contracts, two contracts, sometime in September to two different companies to build a prototype and fly it unmanned by 2008.
And what they're doing is the guy in charge of the exploration department at NASA is a guy named Admiral Chuck Seidel.
And he came out of the military and was involved in the Joint Strike Fighter Program.
The Defense Department was not very happy with the kind of results they were getting for their procurement contracts.
They needed new jets, and they weren't getting them.
They'd give out the proposals.
The winner would get the contract, build something that wasn't very good or useful, but they'd been paid anyway.
So they started to come up with this idea of having flyoffs, having two competitive companies compete for the contract, and then they do a prototype, and then they pick the company they like best.
And that increased the chances of success.
And actually for the military, it's been reasonably successful.
There's a lot of criticisms you can make about it, and it's, once again, government program and bloated, but it's worked.
So NASA has brought people in from that military end, and they're starting to copy that.
So they're going to have a fly-off in 08, and that will be exciting in itself.
And then the plan is that the winner that fly-off will then build and fly a manned mission by 2014.
Now, having laid that out, I can lay out several projects to that framework.
Congress will be, NASA will be paying them money periodically as the contracts unfold.
But this way because it's competitive and they both want to get the full or long-term contract, NASA's more likely to get a successful vehicle flown in 08 rather than something like the X-33 where NASA spent more than a billion dollars and given it to Lockheed Martin.
The concept that NASA's got is that it won't cost a lot more money.
It won't have to increase NASA's budget gigantically because they're going to phase the shuttle out by 2010.
So as they ramp up the crew exploration vehicle, the CEV, they'll be ramping down the shuttle.
That's part of their thinking.
Now, there is some logic to that, but I'm skeptical.
I have to admit, I'm very skeptical that's going to actually happen, partly because the shuttle has to finish the International Space Station for a lot of reasons.
That's one question mark.
Will the money be there?
And Congress has been skeptical.
There's no doubt about that.
The second aspect that makes this whole program somewhat of a problem is that the International Space Station is going to be assembled by 2010, and then we have tired the shuttle.
And then what?
And then this crew exploration vehicle, the CEV, doesn't fly manned until 2014.
Well, from 2010 to 2014, how are we going to get humans to our own space station?
According to them, that's a question that NASA has not clarified yet at this moment in time.
We cannot go to the Russians because the Iran Proliferation Treaty outlaws paying Russians any money for this kind of technology until they certify they will not provide nuclear weaponry or nuclear technology to Iran.
And Congress and Congressman Bollard, who runs the House Science Committee, said at a recent hearing, he said, look, I have to tell you, I consider whether we get blown up much more important than NASA's budget.
And so they can't go to the Russians.
So how do we get out?
So that's another gap in this plan, without question.
It is possible they could accelerate the program of the CEV.
It's very drawn out.
I mean, they fly a prototype in 08, and they don't fly a manned mission until six years later.
And I always go back to the American Gemini program in the 60s.
They realized they needed a mid-program between the Mercury and the Apollo program.
So they decided in late 1961 that they're going to create a third mid-ground program called Gemini in late 61, and they were flying their first mission in 1965, less than five, four years.
That's pretty amazing, and that's a lot shorter than six years after you built your first prototype.
Well, the we there is very important to distinguish because what you're really referring to is where the NASA and the government has it.
That's right.
And what Burt Rutan and Scale Composites and the XPRIZE proved is that Americans, there are Americans that have that, and there are Americans that are enthused by it, and it can happen very fast in other places.
Now, NASA might get its act together.
I'm not going to say they won't, but there are questions in my mind.
Now, we've been talking about the next generation, the shuttle's replacement.
We haven't talked about the shuttle itself.
The shuttle will fly.
It's scheduled now on May 15th for a return to flight.
And I think it's really short-sighted to just dismiss this technology.
It is available.
It is a very useful spacecraft.
Even if you retire it around 2010, that doesn't mean you...
It's absurd.
These space vehicles should be used either as a heavy lift module that goes into orbit and is permanently there for use, or as the engines and the solid rocket boosters in the external tank can be combined to create a completely new module that can go up to the International Space Station, or even be used, and we'll talk about Hubble later, be used as a way to make a mission to Hubble safer.
If you recall what happened to the monstrous engines that got us to the moon, when we decided to abandon all of that so quickly, I think they just rusted, didn't they?
One, the scientific community decided back in the late 90s that they did not need an optical telescope to replace the Hubble Space Telescope.
They decided that the next generation telescope, the James Webb telescope, would be an infrared telescope so they could do deep space cosmology.
And so I want to put to rest right now anyone on your show that ever says, well, they'll get the James Webb telescope and that'll replace Hubble.
They are lying.
It is not an optical telescope, and it has no optical, it does not work in the optical spectrum, so it does not provide you optical pictures of space objects.
It gives you infrared pictures.
Now, infrared is good, but you know, to do good research, you need the whole electromagnetic spectrum.
And Hubble gives you a very wide range from the ultraviolet to the infrared, and then other telescopes supplement that.
While Congress appears to be scrapping the funding for a costly manned or even robotic repair mission for the Hubble telescope, a new option has arisen, dubbed the Third Way.
The Hubble Origins probe pictured, and they've got a picture of a proposed lightweight space telescope developed by an international team led by John Hopkins University astronomers, supposedly with instruments that would have been the fourth Hubble servicing mission, all the new instruments with Japanese collaborators, blah, blah, blah.
It is a much more expensive and less capable instrument that could not get launched very quickly and probably there'd be a gap before it's launched and the Hubble that's in orbit right now fails.
It is not...
Every other solution will cost more, money that NASA does not have, and provide less capabilities.
The robot mission, it steps out the window.
By the way, what you were reading is incorrect.
Congress has not scrapped money for Hubble.
In fact, Congress has allocated in last year's budget that NASA is to spend $300 million on a rescue servicing mission of Hubble, and that money is still allocated, and Congress has audited.
So NASA's saying we're not going to spend that money.
They're not the ones that make the decision.
NASA's the one that says we want to drop any spending for servicing of Hubble.
The biggest problem NASA has right now, and this has to do with the CEV and Bush's proposal, is it often strikes me that they don't have the right stuff, that they are timid, that they are fearful, that they want to try to cover their behinds in every way possible to try to avoid anything going wrong.
Now, granted, you do want to do that on this stuff.
It's dangerous stuff, and you want to try to do as best as possible.
But they sometimes take an attitude that prevents them from accomplishing anything.
And this attitude in terms of Hubble is an example of that, because if you're going to go to the moon, back to the moon, how can you convince anyone that you're going to do it, including Congress, where they need the money, if you're afraid to send humans to Hubble?
The risk is infinitely, not infinitely, I'm sorry.
In fact, in my most recent UPI column, I talked about this very specifically.
When asked the question, they say, no, cost was not a factor, and it's true it's really not expensive to send a shuttle mission to Hubble.
They've admitted, no, it's safety.
The risk is too great.
And if you analyze and toss out the actual risk of just sending a shuttle mission as they've done three times before, sorry, four times before, what you find is that the risk isn't really that great as it is.
But they have not even looked into ways to reduce the risk for a shuttle mission, and there are ways that can be done.
I can explain that in some technical detail, actually, without being boring.
It has gyros, and it has right now, it has six gyros to begin with.
One has completely failed.
One is in safe mode, and they don't really trust it to work anymore.
There's four left.
They need three to do good science.
They have tested and have actually done some tests that can do some science, reasonable science, with two gyros.
Those gyros only have such a certain life expectancy.
And they've done a lot of tests, and they've had a lot of experience with this already with the 15 years it's been up.
They expect that they will be down to two or one gyro by end of 2007, almost certainly.
The other problem is batteries.
The batteries on Hubble, they have slowed, they're the most, they're the greatest, as one engineer told me in the Hubble control room, these are the greatest rechargeable batteries ever made.
They've been recharging the Hubble in every orbit since 1990.
So you're talking about tens of thousands of recharges.
I can't even give you the number, and they work, but they're slowly to slow decline.
And based on the decline, they think they're going to fail sometime.
They originally used to say 08.
Now they're beginning to say we might actually be able to stretch it to 09.
They're really working that well.
Now the gyros, if the gyros fail, you can't do science, but you can put the telescope in safe mode and bring it back to life.
If the batteries fail, within 15 minutes, it becomes a pilot junk.
Because they need to heat the structure of Hubble to keep it precise.
Once the batteries are gone, they don't have the power to heat it, and basically the hot and cold of orbits would just tear it off the telescope.
Well, the plan in either a plan, if they sent a shuttle mission, they would either replace the batteries or they would bring new batteries up and attach them to the telescope, one or the other.
And they've done...
First, they've replaced batteries.
One of the reasons that's proposed is that several instruments for Hubble already are sitting at the Goddess Space Flight set that's finished, ready to go, including a new camera and a new spectrograph.
So those, an asteroid mission, can be quickly and easily installed in Hubble and improve the telescope immeasurably without losing its other capabilities.
And in fact, tell the astronauts to even repair some of its other capabilities.
We're at the top of the air and we'll be right back.
We'll continue with the current Hubble trouble.
Hubble's been troubled since it's been up there.
Remember all the Hubble trouble headlines?
Cute, huh?
Anyway, to let it deorbit, to let it fail, or to get a replacement up, what do you think we ought to do?
It's money out of your pocket, too, from the high desert in the middle of the night where we do biz.
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If that's all we got, Robert, that would be great.
But the trouble is we've got a Congress that won't cut loose with the money, for the most part, for the kind of dream missions that you and I both wish for.
But putting them aside, there are companies that have actually reserved, people have paid for and reserved tickets for flights, suborbital flights, sometime in the next three years.
At least three companies.
One is based out of Oklahoma called Rocket Plane.
They have a very sweet tax deferment deal with the state of Oklahoma, and they have an airport to work out of, and they have operations, and they're building their plane.
There's Burt Rutan Scale Composites that's putting together their deal with Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic to do it by 2008.
I mean, is this going to turn into, are we more likely to have a space industry with hotels where for a medium kind of price eventually you'll be able to, I don't know, spend a weekend in orbit or a week in orbit or something like that.
Enough rooms in space to accommodate something like that.
Or are we going to have a real mission to Mars and or beyond?
You see, now the interesting thing about the space tourism industry, these private companies, they're doing it to make money.
But they're also visionaries.
They love space exploration.
So what they're going to want to do is they're going to want to make a lot of money, but they're also going to plow that money back in to improve their capabilities, not only to make more money, but to be able to do more in space.
And before you know it, they'll go to the moon because they can set up tourism.
You know, I did a column a few weeks ago about the moon itself, where we go when we first go back.
And we're likely to go back to some southern craters.
And there are going to be robot missions over the next few years to actually study the moon very closely, to pinpoint landing sites.
There are craters on the south part of the moon.
It's a very unique place.
There is evidence that there's hydrogen locked in some chemical in the bottoms of those craters in the south pole that never see sunlight.
Probably that hydrogen is locked in water, ice, because there's no light that reaches those craters, bottom of those craters.
But what's interesting about the place is that the rim of the craters are mountains that are in eternal sunlight.
Because they are, once again, the high pole and the sun never sets.
You've got a place where you've got 24-hour solar power with water nearby.
And the water will provide you, and they have estimated from the previous probes the U.S. sent orbiting the moon, you could have 6.6 trillion tons of water.
And so you've got oxygen, you've got hydrogen for power, and you've got solar power.
It's some of the basics.
And you're going to need, of course, to supplement it.
This is not a simple thing.
I don't want to make it sound like you'd just be there tomorrow, but that's the basics.
Once you get setting that base up, well, then you can start exploring the moon and start going to some really spectacular places that tourists are going to want to go to.
One of my favorite examples is the rim of Copocanus, the crater.
It's just spectacular looking at those lunar orbiter pictures from the past.
You know, they have been actually, there was an actual study done of the tourism industry in which the company that did it, Futron, decided, let's go to likely people with high incomes and tell them all the bad things that could happen.
Okay, but like all the TV ads I've ever seen, Robert, they'd say that at the bottom, you know, very quickly they'd add slight nausea and bone loss and some of them possibilities.
No, no, they would tell it very clearly up front because, you know, there's actually safety issues here.
You have to let people know, and there's now a congressional, there's now a law that says you have to let them know.
So they're going to tell them it says nausea possibilities.
You have issues, you know, you have to adapt to weightlessness.
These are the bad things, you know.
If you go for a week, those are basically the only issues that you have to worry about.
If you go for a week, though, you will experience weightlessness in a long term, which is in itself a great, interesting, and Dennis Tito had none of those problems.
He had a great time from day one and right to the end.
You will be able to look at the Earth from space.
And that is something that everyone who's been in space cannot express clearly how incredible that view is.
And they all talk about how they can't help, but just keep looking at the Earth all the time when they're in space.
So those are two things.
And then you get to participate in this great adventure.
You help not only finance it so it goes forward, but you get to be a very unique individual.
You've been in space.
And I think those are the main points, the very main stroke points.
You're going to have to get some training because there's no way you can go to these kind of habitats without having some understanding of the safety issues so you can help yourself or the crew if something goes wrong.
Robert, if something, well, aside from something going wrong, what do you imagine, once it's a little bit developed, 10 years downline, the price to go to orbit might be?
It's not nearly so much as people have already paid to do it.
$20 million.
That's right.
So a couple of hundred thousand.
And after you'd written the here's what you got to worry about parts, the good parts would be you're going to get to see the earth as you have never seen it before with memories that will last your entire life.
You know, the lawyer for Bigelow's company, a guy who works in D.C., one of his lawyers, Mike Gold, gave a presentation recently in D.C. in which he pointed out why are we trying to regulate this industry?
We let people do things like bungee jumping, skydiving, millions of extreme sports, which they such.
Go climb Everest.
We don't try to restrict people from doing that.
It's just equal situation.
Why do people climb Everest?
You know, pay thousands to be one of the people who've stood at the top of Everest.
Well, they do it for the experience.
And that's the bottom line, it's the experience.
And, you know, if I could afford it, I would do it in a minute.
Oh, yes, that's the market studies that have shown, without question, when you tell people all the negatives that are involved, they easily still get a solid market at those kind of prices.
It could be a mechanical failure, but you know, is there any legitimate argument that we have seen a lot or a high percentage of what's worth taking photographs of?
There are actually people who have made that argument, and it's the most absurd argument I have ever heard on this subject.
Good.
It's absolutely ridiculous, and the scientists know it.
What the scientists did, the astronomy community did, the astronomy community does these decadal surveys.
Every decade or so, they get together their biggest, most important people, and they sit down in a committee, and they try to figure out how they should structure the program over the next decade, and then they make recommendations to NASA and the National Science Foundation.
And most of their recommendations are accepted.
And in the 90s, they made a decision that they didn't want to focus on optical telescope work.
They thought that Hubble would be maintained through at least 2010.
And they thought they could live without it after that point.
Or they didn't even think clearly about the lack.
And now suddenly that they realize they're going to lose an optical telescope, they are gathering together a lobbying effort to try to save it because they really need that ability.
You can't understand much else of what's going on in the other wavelengths in astronomy without having the optical image to give us something to look at.
We really need that.
And it gives you a perspective.
So it's absolutely silly.
And I've seen this kind of comment from scientists repeatedly, and it's like it's laughable.
You know, you take one Hubble Deep Field in the northern hemisphere, it looks at a speck the size of a grain of sand from like six feet away in the sky, and that tells you what the rest of the sky at that depth looks like.
And it's absurd because then they did it one in the southern hemisphere, and they found it wasn't quite the same.
A lot of us have completely forgotten what it was like before 1993, before Hubble was fixed.
And one of the reasons there was all the disappointment as well as excitement when Hubble was launched is because everyone understood then, having it's like we never saw the far side of the moon until the Apollo 8 mission to the moon.
This is the same thing.
We'd never really seen the stars and the galaxies clearly until Hubble got into orbit, and everyone knew it.
All right, so how much better is Hubble, given its date of birth and technological improvement since, how much better is Hubble than ground telescopes?
First of all, Hubble is not the instrument that was fixed in 1993.
Because of the manned servicing missions, they have now replaced almost every instrument on that telescope has been replaced in the ensuing years and made each time 10 times better.
And there's been several multiple replacements, so the actual optical camera is 10 times, 10, x, 10 better than the first camera they put in.
That's totally a non-issue because they initially put spectacles in, and then later cameras that they sent up, they put the corrections in the cameras itself so that they could remove the spectacles and put another instrument in place.
And actually, that's what they intend to do if they ever get another servicing mission on it.
Well, they have confirmed without question that Mars is a place that had water, significant liquid water on its surface in the past.
And that's a fundamentally important discovery because it means that geologically the planet has changed over time.
It also means that it very likely, well, how can I phrase this properly in terms of science because we don't know yet, it very possibly had life once and almost possibly has life now.
The Europeans have an orbiter right now called Mars Express, which recently took these incredible pictures of an area on Mars called Elysium.
And it's in the northern lowlands of Mars.
And Mars is half of its planet is very low and smooth and flat.
And the southern hemisphere is kind of higher and rough.
And the theory by many scientists is that there might have once been an ocean on the northern hemisphere.
Well, Elysium is kind of off the coast, but in the ocean section of the northern hemisphere, about five degrees north of the equator.
And they took photos and they saw what looked like a field, frozen icebergs trapped in a frozen sea that's now kind of coated with volcanic ash, which kind of protects it from subliminal way.
Now, what's important about this, the reason I bring it up, is because there was a recent conference about Mars Express's discoveries, and they polled the scientists at this conference, and 75% of them said they think that Mars once had life.
And 35% of them at the conference said, you know, it's still probable, it probably has life now, based on the data they're getting.
That's incredible.
And that same place in Elysium is where they're getting, Mars Express is getting readings of methane.
There is no evidence of, you know, they have now had several years of photographs of its surface, and even comparing those photographs with early Mariner and Viking photographs, there is no evidence of any significant change.
No evidence of dust changes.
You know, dust devils and things like wind dust storms cause slight changes to the visual surface, but no evidence of any kind of volcano.
Well, what happened is there were a bunch of different experiments.
Vikings' sole goal was to see if there was life on Mars.
And in a sense, it was a misconceived mission because to send two craft there and land to try to find life, it's not really the best way to do science.
Your odds of success are too slim.
You're better off trying to learn what the planet is like, which is what we're doing now.
But they said three experiments.
One experiment was supposed to see if there was organic material, the leftovers of life, and it found none.
But another experiment, they took some soil and they dumped basically in a nutrient bath, like really a good soup of food.
And it suddenly burst with the production of carbon dioxide.
And it didn't do it exactly the way a life form would do it.
You know, if you suddenly life could breathe and prosper, it would start to have waste product, and carbon dioxide is one of them.
And so the thought was, well, maybe that's life.
But it didn't do it exactly the way life would.
And there are some scientists who come up with chemical reactions that could explain it.
And most scientists dismissed it as evidence of life.
But a few scientists have never accepted those explanations.
And they bring up valid indications that say the chemistry, you know, inorganic chemistry doesn't explain it.
So that's the one experiment that indicates something on the surface that we don't quite understand.
But it doesn't say life, and at this moment in time we have not seen anything that is life.
So scientists, if they speculate, if 25% of them think there is life there on Mars, it's merely an opinion, and as a scientist, they would immediately agree that we don't know.
Some of the photographs I saw, and many in the audience saw, had what appeared to be, I don't know, channels where water had obviously eroded away, geography, that kind of thing.
Is that a sure thing, or are they not sure about that either?
What the rovers have found, the rovers landed, both rovers landed in places which looked like might have had water because of those streams, those meandering streams.
The spirit landed in the middle of a crater that looked, by orbital pictures, like it once had been a lake.
It had a meandering stream flowing into it.
And because of elevation change, it looked like that stream had once filled the crater.
The irony is that at the lowest points where the spirit was, they found it's just lava.
It's a lava bed.
It doesn't show any evidence of water.
But as spirit climbed up the hills, up Husband Hill, named after one of the Columbia astronauts, it immediately crossed a geological barrier that was a change, less than two feet across, actually.
And now once it gets higher up, it's finding evidence of water.
Evidence not of water, but of water processes that produced the geology we see today.
And in fact, recently, they found evidence of what looks like salt, which would be a leftover from water left behind by evaporated water.
They make some educated guesses millions of years.
But to be honest, they don't know.
and they realize that because they haven't done any carbon dating, so they really don't know anything on Mars about when these processes...
But they don't actually know when they started and ended.
They just know one was earlier than the other.
And they won't be able to pin those years down until they get to Mars with some carbon dating, and that's really not probably going to happen for a while.
You're talking about a much more challenging mission out to Jupiter or Saturn.
We at this moment in time, remember, we can't even put humans into low Earth orbit.
So to even think about going to Mars is a challenge.
And Jupiter and Saturn are far beyond.
It's going to be a while.
Mars, though, is beginning to gear up to much more realistic because we're now beginning to get an armada of satellites in orbit and on the ground studying the planet.
And so we have a much better, fuller understanding of the whole planet.
And that puts us in a better position to go there.
And so once again, to get there, what a lot of people don't understand is that there are two things you need to learn how to do to be able to go to Mars and land on it.
You first need to learn how to build a vessel to get there.
And that's what I talk about in Leaving Earth.
It's you need to understand how to build those long-term interplanetary spaceships.
That's what space stations will give you that knowledge to do.
The other thing you need to do is how to learn to live on another planet.
And that's why going to the moon again right away makes sense, because then you can get, it's a short trip, you can start to learn the technologies for establishing bases on other worlds.
This is established bases there to learn the technology to go to Mars.
And I think that's the right attitude.
And because of the other international pressure that's building on it, you have a situation that we won't just go back and step on because everyone else doesn't want to just go and step on it.
They want to go and stay.
So you've got an international competition.
It's very similar to the 19th century and 18th century competition between the European powers to try to colonize the rest of the world.
They each had a vacuum and they had to fill it.
And here, there's no native population for conflict.
It's whoever gets there first and possesses the territory.
When the time comes that people are starting to possess territory, that law will, people can step back out of that law and countries will start to do it.
Secondly, if you start to have a thriving colony on the planet, the colonists are at some point going to say, we don't care what the UN and Earth countries decided.
We want to have our own nation.
And they might be multiple different nations who compete with each other.
So that law, I actually think the UN law is a hindrance to the future.
I think it would be much better if the United States got out of that law and said, we're going to the moon to claim territory.
And that not only would increase the competition, but then it would protect the American citizens that are eventually there because they know they're going to be part of the United States and our laws to back them up.
Right now, based on the UN treaties that we have signed, American citizens on the moon are really almost forced to live under UN jurisdiction.
Yeah.
So let's just leave it at that.
It's not a great thing.
But in the end, it's going to go away.
It's going to be one of these things that will last for a while, but sooner or later, push will come to show us.
Yeah, well, I'm going to, there's an international, the National Space Society is actually going to have a conference in Washington in third week in May.
And it's going to be pretty cool.
I'm going to be there giving some talks on historical stuff about why some of the things we're doing now might not be good based on what has been done in the past and history.
So I'm excited about that.
The International Space Development Conference by the National Space Society is pretty exciting.
What really is exciting to me, though, about this conference is I have not had a chance yet to actually meet and interview Bert Rutan.
And he's going to be there.
And what makes it even more interesting is that NASA has decided to co-sponsor the conference with the National Space Society.
Yeah, and this is really cool because that means some of the guys who are trying to create the crew exploration vehicle are going to be there.
And so you might have a situation where it has a face-off.
You get to see what the private guys are proposing versus what NASA's proposing.
And I'm very excited about that because I think the National Space Society has actually been one of the best advocates of going into space.
And the best thing about this conference is it's going to be going on when the shuttle is in orbit, when the shuttle returns to orbit.
So those things combine.
This is one of my talks that I'm going to be giving in which I'll be discussing how in the 60s, NASA and the Congress passed laws that they thought would help private communications in space, and they ended up squelching the American space industry for decades.
And that's kind of happening now with the private space industry, with the new space law, in my opinion.
And I want to express why I think that's happening and try to get clarity so people understand how we are restricting the future of space exploration with the laws we've been passing.
Why was NASA, and why was, in fact, our government, so freaked out over the possibility of civilians, just regular people, getting a few days on the shuttle?
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The other thing about my approach is I like to take as an objective and clear-minded, thoughtful look at the situation rather than just be an advocate for this agency or this agenda or this company.
So, you know, if NASA can get it to happen, great.
But I look at them very with a cold eye.
And I especially look at them with a cold eye because as bureaucrats, the agency does tend to play games with the truth.
Well, you know, in the end, that's going to happen.
Because in the end, just like the United States revolted from England, and so did all the other countries, sooner or later, the citizens of the planets that are out there are going to say, we're going to set up our own sovereign nation.
To say that the politics will never be there at all is silly and naive.
Human society needs some form of governmental structure to make a civilization function.
And it's better to recognize that and be honest and objective about it and thoughtful about it than to just make believe, no, no, no, we can live in a fantasy land, which is what the Soviet Union tried to do, and that sure didn't work.
You know, it's an interesting thing, Art, but in doing my research on leaving Earth, we already see that pattern going on with the space stations that have been built.
Because there's a consistent pattern with every space station that the people on the ground do not understand what it's like to be in orbit.
And they try to tell the people in orbit how to do things, and the people in orbit eventually tell them to go jump in a lake because they know better.
Yes, both the Americans, when they went to Mia, especially NASA people, it was like they had no idea what happened on Skylab, and they made all the same mistakes again.
The Russians have spent a lot of years learning these mistakes, and they've kept, at least at this point, they seem to understand what to do, and they let the people in the space station run their situation.
But I will say that we always see indications of that.
It's very difficult for us on Earth to dictate to the people in space, and sooner or later, they're going to tell us to go drop in a lake, without question.
If they get the capabilities of space really good, down the road, eventually, they'll get to a point where they can bring an ice-bearing asteroid from Saturn to the moon, drop it onto the moon, and you've got trillions of water again.
I think the United States has the capability of absolutely dominating the future in space.
Whether we will have the will to dominate the future in space is the unknown.
I think that the times they are changing for the positive, but there is no guarantee that it'll happen.
The advantage we got, though, is that we have a very rich, solid culture based on the concept of freedom.
And as much as many Americans have forgotten that or are trying to abandon that idea, the richness of the culture is one of the reasons people like Bert Rutan succeeded recently.
And their success can lead to greater successes down the road.
Leaving Earth is essentially a history of manned space exploration since post-Apollo.
It doesn't really talk about the Apollo missions.
Because a lot of Americans don't really know what happened since then.
And it's very important to understand that, and I've mentioned this already about space stations and interplanetary spaceships, but it's one of the premises of the book, and that's why I call it Space Station's Rival Superpowers and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel.
Space stations are not scientific laboratories, at least not at this time.
When you call them that, you confuse the situation, you make them boring.
You also make them less useful.
What a space station is and has been for the last 30, 40 years, and the Russians have known this, and Werner von Braun when he built Skylab knew this.
They are prototype interplanetary spaceships.
If you're going to put humans in orbit for a long period of time at this stage, it's to learn how to build a vessel that can carry them to the planets.
That's what they're for.
If you put it in that context, suddenly everything being done on International Space Station can make sense because you're starting to build a vessel that people can live in for a long enough time to get to other planets.
So I wanted to tell the history of the work that's been done for the last 30 years in secret almost, not intentional secret, sometimes for political reasons in secret, to learn how to do that.
Most of that history has been the Russians because they have had an extensive space station program now since like 1970.
But it did include some American stuff.
And in the process, not only am I talking about the engineering and the problems that we're facing to do this and how many of them have been solved, I also talk about how the politics interfered with that effort.
Because you have this interweave between the United States and Russia that is really fascinating.
Yeah, for example, I would like to know how much, I understand that Russia learned a great deal because they spent so much time in orbit compared to us.
But how much of that has been legitimately shared with America?
A good deal of it has been, but a lot of it has not.
And for perfectly legitimate reasons.
Why should they give up what they spent hard?
Look, I'll give you an example.
I spent three days interviewing Valery Polyakov for leaving Earth.
Now, a lot of Americans don't know who this guy is.
Most Americans don't.
But he holds the record for the longest space flight.
He was in orbit for 14 and a half months.
He's also a doctor who has focused on space medicine his whole life.
And so I spoke to him for three and a half days, and he says one of the big problems, the biggest problem about long-term weightlessness is the bone density loss.
I mentioned it earlier in the show.
Well, Polyakov says that he has worked out the exercises and equipment to reduce the bone density loss to less than 1 half a percent a month, which makes it possible to get to Mars.
You know, he tells you a lot of the specifics, but he then says, you know, I will be glad to be a consultant to NASA and tell them the rest.
And I think that's perfectly reasonable.
You know, he's earned the right to say, you want my knowledge, you pay for it.
And so a great deal they have told us, because we insisted if we're going to work with them, but a lot of the details they have not.
And then there's a cultural thing.
A lot of people at NASA, and Americans in general, have a certain arrogance and contempt for the Russians, which is not called for.
And I've seen this repeatedly from NASA people, how they just do not can take what the Russians have done seriously.
First time calling the line, you're on the air with Robert Zimmerman.
Hello.
unidentified
Hi there.
I wanted to bring up some points that you're...
the future of our species.
And it seems like if we limit the potentials of this, even in the short term, moving beyond the practical issue of getting there immediately, to sort of our existing political and social realities and concepts, that we may be limiting the possibilities of our vision for this.
And I refer specifically to, you know, I see a sort of like with the X-Prize business and Which I was really excited about, but a kind of almost market fundamentalism that suggests that the alternative is between government and business only.
And my concern comes because I'm calling from North Florida, and this is a part of the world where we're seeing on a daily basis in both our human and our natural environments, the effects of negative effects of untrammeled private enterprise.
And my concern is sort of, am I going to see a McDonald's sign staring down at me from the moon someday?
And some might not necessarily call that a bad thing.
Well, you know, one of the fundamental questions I asked in leaving Earth is the decisions we make today will determine how future generations live in space, what kind of societies they have.
And it's a question that we as Americans used to ask routinely because we came from a series of colonies that all were experiments, and we recognized what worked and what didn't.
And one of the reasons the nation grew so successfully with new states is because we had applied successful experiments to the new territories, and they were able to join the nation prosperously.
We don't ask these questions anymore, and we don't seem to want to apply the same rules we have on Earth to the people who live in space.
Now, in terms of on the Earth, space exploration is not going to destroy the Earth.
Let's dismiss that right away.
That's not.
It's not going to destroy the environment of the Earth.
In fact, as time passes, the best, most efficient energy source you can have to go into space is actually the main engine of the space shuttle, which takes hydrogen and oxygen and combines them to produce steam and a lot of energy.
It's the most efficient chemical reaction.
So I'm not particularly worried about the environmental effects of space at all.
You know, America used to be proud of the fact that we were a little bit garsh and commercial and innovative and creative and so what if you had a little bit of billboard here and there.
It said that was showed productivity and excitement and creativity.
And, you know, I don't worry about that so much.
And I think it's a mistake to worry about that so much.
And the Russians don't, you know, once again, a good example.
The Russians want to make a living at doing this.
And so when they went private, one of the very first things they did is start to sell billboards on their rockets.
There actually is restrictions in the Commercial Space Act, which says that Americans cannot do that kind of commercial advertising from space.
So it's almost a moot point.
It brings up to me a certain aspect of American culture today that worries me, which is we kind of like to immediately jump in and restrict the freedoms of others.
I think that it's much, that kind of thing is not a real worry for a lot of technical engineering reasons.
There are a lot of things they can do that are more effective and have been doing, like Coca-Cola and Vesti have done repeated commercials in orbit with the Russians.
I think that it's becoming more obvious that those that ask that question are speaking from ignorance rather than knowledge instead of the other way around.
I think that's...
The battle is becoming won, is the way I look at it.
I'm an optimist in this respect, but I actually think, based on my experience, that these questions are...
Robert, if I was to give you an open check and you had two choices, one to write for how many billions of dollars for the space program versus the education of our children, which would you write it to?
It's not as if the education, you know, it's kind of like a straw man argument.
The check isn't coming out.
The check you're offering me isn't coming out of the educational program.
If I have a blank check, I would go into space.
And I brought up that issue earlier.
We have the Hubble Space Telescope and the astronomical research that's been done in the last two decades has inspired a whole generation of Americans who want to become astronomers.
And it has definitely fueled that educational program.
And scientists worry that if they lose the astronomical program, they're going to lose the next generation of scientists.
But because we haven't done space exploration in the last two decades, we have lost two decades of engineers.
And there's a shortage of engineers in the United States right now.
A serious, serious shortage.
And we need that engineering talent to move forward.
So if you do a space program, you inspire a whole new generation to do that.
Robert Zimmerman is my guest from the desert in the middle of the night.
This is Coast to Coast AM.
unidentified
Good morning.
Ain't got no trouble in my life.
No foolish dreams to make me cry.
I'm never frightened or worried.
I know I always get by.
I love the goodness.
Something gets in my way, I go'round it.
Don't let life get me down.
Don't let take it the way that I found it.
I got music in me.
Yeah I got music in me.
I got music in me.
I got music in me.
Ooh.
They say that life is a circle.
A circle.
A man in the way that I found it.
Gonna move in a straight line.
Keeping my feet.
Furby on the ground.
I hit up.
I got music in me.
They say that life is a circle.
A circle.
A man in the way that I found it.
Gonna move in a straight line.
I hit up.
Furby on the ground.
I got music in me.
Ooh.
They say that life is a circle.
Keeping my feet.
A circle.
A man in the way that I found it.
Gonna move in a straight line.
Ooh.
Keep in my feet.
Keep in my feet.
Cherry on the ground, I hit up, down, down I got words in my head so I say them Don't let life get me down Catch a hole when I'm losing this dream To talk with Artfell.
Call the wildcard line at area code 775-727-1295.
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And one of the officers, I don't probably want to tell you his name or nothing, but he was talking about how the Air Force was going to take over the moon program that the president wants to do.
unidentified
And that it's already been being bid out by civilian contractors to build it.
There are people who are concerned that Bush's proposal is actually trying to shift the space program into the military.
But I think those people are tend to be partisan Democrats, to be very honest.
If you look at he just released, for the first time in almost a decade, a new national space policy, which very clearly says that he wants to shift this into private commercial operation.
Now, what happened is the Air Force developed, in the last few years, has developed what they call the evolved expendable launch capacity.
They want to have a better rocket to get their satellites into orbit.
And they paid for that.
And Boeing and Lonkey developed heavy-lift vehicles, the Heavy Delta and the Atlas V, for doing that kind of thing.
And so NASA now is looking into possibly seeing if they can use those heavy-lift vehicles for their future work with the crew exploration vehicle.
He just meant it was going to be their job, that NASA was going to take over the domestic issue, and they were going to make the moon, making a base on the moon a military matter.
That's not true.
It's just not true.
The military program in space is large and robust and has its goals.
But its goals are not to go to the moon because the moon does not have any, at this stage at least, military value.
So the Moon has strategic value, but from a civilian perspective now, and I was talking about that earlier, you know, the competition to gain territory.
But that's not necessarily military at this stage of the game.
Yes, I was checking on AOL News yesterday that under the science category that Japan has announced plans to build a rocket launch base on the moon.
And also recently that China has been testing long-distance space rockets to take their, what they call Teichlox, which means space in Chinese, to also land on the moon as early as the year 2012.
I believe that both China and Japan, as well as a few other developing countries, but I use the two Asian countries, for example, have the most technology, the most funding, and the most enthusiasm.
Anyone who tells you it's impossible, they're wrong.
It actually is doable, but is it doable at this moment in time?
No, I would put priorities first, other things first.
I think, though, that Titan is one of the more mysterious places in the universe, in our solar system.
And it is a place that carries with it almost undoubtedly information we need to understand the process of how a life-giving planet like the Earth develops.
But the photos that came back from Huygens and Cassini of Titan are incredibly tantalizing.
They say, they show things that are amazing, but to understand what they're showing at this point is really difficult.
They don't know if the dark areas are water or frozen.
Not water, I'm sorry, frozen lakes of carbons or whether they're actually liquid.
They don't know if it's mud.
They're really unsure of a lot of things, but they know they've seen something that's incredibly mysterious.
We will go back.
And rovers, I think that's hard, because you don't know what the surface is going to be like at this stage.
You need to send orbiters there, do a lot more reconnaissance first, to have a better idea of what kind of...
And landers that just land, to have some idea of what you're dealing with, and then you can deal with the...
Let me throw a scenario at you and let's see how you handle it.
Robert, tomorrow, some astronomical observatory gets confirmation, and they would never announce this without it from another or multiple observatories, that in five years, something a mile wide to five miles wide is going to have a high probability of hitting the Earth.
Could we stop it?
Could we stop calamity, the end of life on Earth virtually?
Based on what the surveys they've done, it's highly unlikely they will find an asteroid that large that will hit us in five years.
However, it's very likely they will find, it's not unlikely, it's probable and possible they will find an asteroid significantly small but dangerous that could hit us any time in the next 10 to 20 years.
And I think in that time frame, we could put together technology to fix it.
It's going to depend on the asteroid, because there are different kinds.
The rubble piles would be very difficult.
An iron, solid iron-nickel asteroid would be much easier in the sense that you could latch onto it and you can actually treat it like a ship and push it.
unidentified
But a rubble pile, it just kind of like dissipates.
I mean, I assume at least we have think tanks working on this kind of problem and what our planned response might be, what a logical response would be.
There have been scientists in the planetary research community that have written papers on the subject, a variety of papers.
They mostly are those that do research on asteroids themselves because they're trying to understand what asteroids' makeup is, density, shape, all those things.
And so when they get some sense of what those facts are, they then extrapolate and ask, well, how do you deal with the problem?
And there have been papers written.
But our knowledge of asteroids is vastly improved in the last five years because we've actually had an asteroid orbit and orbit and land on an asteroid.
That was the NEAR probe.
So our knowledge has improved, but we are lacking in a great deal of specific knowledge about what the makeup of a lot of asteroids will land.
There has been an aggressive effort paid actually by NASA and the National Science Foundation to do a very detailed survey of the near-Earth space to put together a census of all the asteroids that exist.
And the results have been very positive.
They, five, six years ago, were predicting a certain number of asteroids existing that they didn't know where they were yet.
And the survey, after a number of years, they're beginning to realize that, you know, they actually have gotten a good count.
And the numbers of unknown asteroids that they think are there, they think are much reduced.
And I think in the next 10 years or so, we will be in a position to say that we probably have spotted better than 90% of all the asteroids out there.
Well, in the more recent years, that's been going down, and it's more likely they've been coming up with a lot of asteroids that they see from a distance, figure out the orbit, and realize they have a probability of maybe hitting us in 30 years.
They then do further studies and realize, no, they're not going to hit us.
And there have been a lot more of those kind of results in the last like 10 years.
I was 13 years old when we first landed, and I remember the pride and the awe that everyone seemed to feel over that event, even though much like today, you had an unpopular war, the country seemed to be tearing itself apart from the inside.
But people seemed to come together on that and share a sense of pride.
But there's a couple of things about the moon that I've read by some authors that are heavy hitters, Lear, Hoagland, Jim Mars.
Mars stated that on each Apollo mission, they planted an extensive array of seismic sensors, and that when the Lamb would leave the moon and they would jettison the rockets, when they would slam back down on the surface of the moon...
There have been a lot of seismic studies of the moon using those seismic readings, and they hit rockets, which gives them a basic understanding of what the moon's internal workings are like.
And they think, and there's actually disagreement now, but they think the moon is mostly solid.
There's no more molten core.
There's some scientists now that are beginning to think differently.