All Episodes
Previous Next
March 2, 2017 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:02:18
Edition 288 - Space Special

Science writer Dr David Whitehouse on the new Exoplanets... also Space Shuttle CommanderBrian Duffy...

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world, on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, thank you very much for all of your nice communications and as ever for keeping the faith with me and my little show in the UK.
I'm very, very grateful you know that.
Some of you have said some very nice things recently and it all means so much to me as I plod on in my little way over here.
So thank you.
If you want to get in touch with me, by the way, I will be doing some shout-outs on this edition.
You can send me an email through the website.
Theunexplained.tv is the website designed by Adam at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
Thanks, Adam.
Just follow the link from there and you can send me a message about the show, guest suggestion, whatever.
And when you get in touch, please tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use this show, because it's always good to know.
That's theunexplained.tv.
Follow the links from there.
And if you can make a donation to the show, that would be great, too.
Remember, this is a very, very low-budget operation.
Very, very low-budget life, actually.
Now, on this edition, we're going to hear about those seven new exoplanets, which was last week's huge news around a single sun, some of which may be inhabitable or habitable, I think is the word.
I'm going to talk to one of this country's leading science journalists, a man who's steeped in astronomy.
His name is Dr. David Whitehouse.
He's a former BBC head of science, science editor.
So he is a man very well worth hearing.
I had him on my radio show over the new year, and he is just the best.
So you'll hear him.
You'll also hear Brian Duffy, former NASA astronaut and currently ambassador for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.
I'm going to be talking to him, amongst other things, I hope, about this new moon mission, the SpaceX one that was announced this week.
Two people who've paid, as we say in the UK, a shed load of money to be flown around the moon.
There is a certain amount of risk involved, of course, and a lot of people saying, how is he going to do this?
Well, we'll discuss that and other issues with Brian Duffy, former NASA astronaut, coming soon.
Let's do those shout-outs, though, now.
Kevin Kaysen, thank you so much for a very kind email.
You say you're a great fan of the podcast, and you compare me favorably to the great art bell, which is kind.
I am not worthy, but you know how much I admire the man and how I believed he is the pioneer in all that we do and the benchmark, I think.
So Kevin Kayson, thanks very much indeed for kind comments.
Stu, thank you very much indeed for telling me the story of Bordesy Manor in Suffolk and your granddad who worked as a radar operative a long time ago back there.
I'm going to try and follow this up and I've been in touch with you separately.
But Stu, thank you for that.
From David Dent, I've been listening from the UK to your talk radio show and your podcast since about last October, so comparatively new listener.
You say, David, I love the eclectic mix of science and the paranormal.
Thank you for that.
We do our best and thank you for your suggestion.
Karen in Florida, nice to hear from you.
You heard Dark Waters, our last edition.
You say he is certainly intelligent and entertaining, a great storyteller, which he is.
I could relate to this guy right away because although I didn't grow up in exotic and romantic New Orleans, I experienced paranormal activity in our home the entire time I was growing up.
Thank you, Karen, for everything that you said.
Aiden, thank you for your kind email, Aiden, and I do hope that your life continues on the uptrend.
Susan in Bournemouth, kind thoughts.
Thank you, Susan, for getting in touch.
Pete, thank you for your good thoughts.
Janine in Scottsdale, Arizona says, a listen to your show would love for you to interview Ruth and Friend.
Ruth and Friend in the U.S. She's written a few books and has a unique life.
I think you know her, don't you, Janine?
So if you can help me to get in touch, we'll take that further.
And finally, Cameron, Cam in Sydney, Australia.
You know I love Sydney.
And one of these days, if I ever get the money, I really want to come back and spend more time there.
You know, I did two radio shows where we were in Sydney for a while.
And you never get time to see it properly.
But, you know, the warmest, kindest, nicest place that I know, it's fabulous.
I love Australia.
So, Cameron, thanks for getting in touch.
See, I love your show.
And I've been listening every night to one episode or another for the past half a year now.
Thank you for your fine commitment and your approach and your soothing, calming voice.
Well, I hope so.
Do my best.
And Cameron, thank you very much indeed.
And good A to you in Australia.
Like I say, if you want to get in touch, go to the website theunexplained.tv.
You can send me an email from there.
So, coming soon, a NASA astronaut will be talking about space matters.
But first, the BBC's former science editor, David Whitehouse, Dr. David Whitehouse, man of science, fabulous communicator, prolific author.
And we talked about those seven new exoplanets on my radio show.
And I thought you'd like to hear that first.
And there are things happening now and discoveries being announced, like the one we talked about at the top of the news here, that we couldn't have envisaged when we were kids.
I'm talking about we assuming that you are maybe somewhere in the ballpark age range that I might be, and that's a big assumption to make.
You might be in your teens or 20s, like my producer, for example, who's in her 20s.
But if you're anywhere north of kind of 35, 40, which is going to fit an awful lot of us, discoveries of the gravity, not to insert a pun here, of the kind that we've had.
I don't think we could have envisaged them.
This week, we've got a guy from NASA telling us that it's not a question of if we're going to find a second Earth, it's a question of when.
Now, there were people poo-pooing that.
I can remember interviewing them and those sort of thoughts as recently as, say, 15 years ago, because I used to do interviews with them.
But now it's all looking like it's going to be reality.
A man who was on our New Year special at The Unexplained, Dr. David Whitehouse, is with us right now.
David is a former BBC science editor and a prolific author and an all-round good guy.
David, thanks very much for coming on.
Thanks for the build-up.
My pleasure, David.
If you're working on a book, you get a chance to plug it at the end because I think it's only fair, but I know you're always working on something.
So this news that everybody got so excited about, I looked at the BBC's website, it went mad, so did Skies and all the newspapers seemed for once to understand the enormity of what we were talking about.
Seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a single star.
This is the biggest of big news, yes?
It is very important news, yes.
It's not entirely unexpected because we've found Earth-sized planets around similar types of stars, perhaps more than one of them.
But you're quite right to find seven of them.
Three of them were found a few years ago and they found four more is quite remarkable, not only because these are Earth-sized, not necessarily Earth-like, but also they orbit a very different star from our Sun.
Our Sun is a yellow dwarf and it is very bright and very stable for about 10 billion years and ideal for a planet like our Earth to sustain life because we have a constant source of energy.
The red dwarf stars around which these seven Earth-sized planets revolve are very different.
They're very much fainter.
These planets have to be much closer in to be warm enough to possibly have liquid water.
And they don't get as much energy.
These stars don't give out as much energy.
But what they do have in their favor is that they're incredibly long-lived.
No red dwarf star born in the universe today has left its infancy.
They're going to be, when all the other stars are gone, there are going to be these red dwarfs left.
And there are a great many of them.
So the thing for me, which makes me think about this discovery, is that it may well be that we know of life on planet Earth around a yellow dwarf star and we think that's common.
It might be that the majority of life in the cosmos orbits a very different type of star and lives on a very different type of time scale than we humans on planet Earth orbiting a yellow dwarf star.
And that is going to be something that we will have to eventually get our heads around and of course the media are going to have to learn to explain.
Well, these are always very difficult things to explain because you can on one hand it's always difficult to get the balance between the punch and the content, particularly on television.
Television is often very slick but doesn't have much content inside it.
And sometimes when I look at television science reports, I think, yes, but there wasn't much there.
It looked nice.
And I think that's a very difficult thing to get by.
Radio is much better actually because the pictures are better, as they say.
And also, if you're skilled at it, as you are, and I hope I am, you can portray a great deal in a short amount of time because you're not having to dress it up with pictures.
So, yes, I think that, as in many stories like this, some people go overboard, some people don't have all the details.
But let me tell you the background to this story.
It's very interesting.
Because the way this story came out is because it was in the journal Nature.
And Nature on a Monday morning sent out a tip sheet saying this is what's going to be in on our journal this week.
It's embargoed till Wednesday evening.
You can have lots of time to interview the scientists, but don't say a word until Wednesday evening, because otherwise we won't send you the tip sheet anymore.
And then NASA comes along on Monday afternoon and says, we're going to have a big press conference on Wednesday evening.
And these are the scientists who are going to attend.
Now, anybody in the science field would look at that list of scientists.
They could Google them and you'd come up with the idea as to what they're going to say pretty easily.
Especially bearing in mind that the person in charge of that news conference was Thomas Zabrukin, who was the man who was in charge of this sort of exploration.
That's right.
So you have an interesting time.
And this is not, I don't agree with Mbargo's this, because you have an interesting time whereby the major journalists, the BBCs, the ITNs, the newspapers, know about this story but can't say.
And then you have everybody else who've worked out what the story is, but are disencouraged from saying about this story on Tuesday or Wednesday morning because there's this embargo going on.
So it means that it's counterproductive, particularly in this country, because it means that you can't say anything until Wednesday evening.
And often news programs have decided what's going to be Wednesday evening six or seven hours before, before that you can talk about this story.
So it's very unsatisfactory for such a brilliant, wonderful story like this.
It ends up as being a bit of a mess.
But that is the process of science communication not working properly.
How would you do it?
If you were having to put out an announcement of this import this week, how would you do it?
I mean, we're both media experienced, you're ex-BBC, and I've had experience with the BBC.
How would a big organization handle this?
I hate sitting on a story that my viewers or listeners should know about.
If I've got a story on my desk and somebody tells me you can't say anything about it till the embargo lifts on Wednesday, I hate it because your viewers and listeners deserve the best, the first, instantly.
So if I've got a story, my instinct was, when I worked for the BBC, to put it out.
And you get in awful trouble if you break embargoes.
But there are organizations, and I think large organizations that I've sat on news desks where we've cursed other organizations who've broken an embargo.
Yes, that's right.
It works as a herd.
You all have to agree to do the same thing.
And I don't like it.
So what I would do is I would just have the situation whereby NASA says, or the journal Nature says, this is the story.
We're publishing details on Wednesday, but this is the story.
Go with it now.
And it has been said that these, you know, knowing about this story that's going to come out in a few days is good because it gets everybody the chance to get up to speed so they all know what they're talking about when it comes out.
Well, actually, baloney to that.
Who wants a level playing field in journalism?
You all want to be first.
You just want the good story.
That's what I want.
You want the good story and you want it first.
So embargoes, particularly for science stories, are a bit strange and a bit counterproductive.
And it does mean that, you know, you know, these wonderful stories that are coming out.
And another thing it does is it cripples scientists.
Because if you go to a conference and you see a scientist give a wonderful presentation about a certain subject and you go up to them saying, I'm from so-and-so, I'd like to interview about this.
They say, oh, no, no, no, no.
It's going to be under embargo.
You can't talk about it.
So Joe Public can go to a conference, journalists can go to a conference, but you can't actually write about it until it's done the works.
And this to me is unsatisfactory.
And so on the one hand, you've got this wonderful stories and what it means for life in space.
But it illuminates the fact that getting these stories out there is often very messy and not very good.
Just before we get to the nuts and bolts of it, my one thought about it was we got the news and it was sort of all singing, all dancing, and then it went away very quickly.
And then it was somehow rehashed the next day because of, I think, when it broke over here.
And by then, this fantastic, possibly life-changing story had lost some of its steam and momentum, I thought.
That you're quite right.
And that is the problem because the journal Nature has its embargo Wednesday evening.
And it's designed, as is the science journal, which has an embargo the next day, it's designed for American outlets.
It's designed so that American outlets can run it at lunchtime and then have a big head of steam to run it in their evening.
It's not designed for British outlets.
And therefore, we often have to cover the story late on a Wednesday or late on a Thursday for science.
And you're quite right.
By the time you get to the morning news, it's a little bit dead.
Other things have happened.
There's not quite the same enthusiasm.
We do not get a full day at this type of story from NASA.
And you could argue, well, NASA's American, so it favors America.
But this is a story of import to the world.
And I just thought it was fragmented and a great story was in some respects other than to those of us who know what this is about and have a sense of it.
It was a bit chucked away.
This is terribly important stuff.
Let's talk about the detail of it if we can.
Yes.
The fact that we're able to do these things and discover these things is down, isn't it, to improvements in the telescopes that we use?
It's what astronomers can do with their optical telescopes and radio telescopes, X-ray telescopes, infrared telescopes, it's exquisite these days, absolutely exquisite.
You're able to look at the light of this red dwarf star, which is 40 light years away, and you're able to detect when a small planet, much smaller than the apparent size of the star, passes across it and gives you a very tiny dip in the brightness.
So it's a transiting planet, and by measuring how often that occurs, should it all align up in your favor, you can get an idea of the orbit of this planet.
But that's easy when, if you like, there's one planet, but there's seven in this world.
So you've got seven dips at irregular spaces as each orbit takes, each planet's orbit takes across the face.
And how do you unwind that?
How do you unpack that?
You have to know your telescope intimately.
You have to know what your telescope's doing to the light it collects from space.
You have to know where it's going, how it changes it.
Every single reflection or alteration in that light, the temperature of the components, the way the components move as the telescope moves across the sky.
You have to know everything in order to extract that tiny little signal.
And at the end of the day, after a bit of computing, you say, yes, I believe there are seven planets orbiting that particular star.
And this wasn't possible until about 25 years ago.
I remember before then, we were talking about not knowing if there were planets out there.
We had one particular tiny star next to us called Barnard Star.
And we were arguing for years as to whether that star was wobbling a little as it moved through space due to the presence of an unseen companion.
And it wasn't very good.
Nobody could convince themselves.
But 25 years ago, 1992, people had enough knowledge of their telescopes to really pick out what they were seeing.
And that is the biggest story, I think, in astronomy in the last 25 years, the discovery of exoplanets.
Do you realize that 25 years ago, we didn't know whether there was a single planet out there?
Now we estimate that in the universe, based on the statistics we've got, there are 10 to the power 25 planets.
That's one with 25 zeros after the end.
That is a big number.
That's a big number.
Staggering piece of maths, or math as the Americans might say, daily.
But we haven't got to kid ourselves that our knowledge of what we have discovered isn't that great.
As people were saying during the week, those commentating, I think including yourself, I heard in various places.
You know, we're not going to be able to see football stadiums or branches of IKEA on these things, but we'll only, for the moment, have the roughest idea of what they are.
You're quite right, yes.
We have hopes of better observations, particularly with the James Webb Space Telescope, which is being launched next year by an Ariane rocket.
And this should be able to pick up the tiny bits of light from each of these seven Earth-sized worlds.
And once we get that tiny bit of light, you can start talking about temperatures on the surface.
You can talk about what's there.
Does it have an atmosphere?
Is there evidence for water?
Is there evidence for chlorophyll or something like that?
But you're right.
Which just for those who are not scientific is what that's to do with the growth of plants.
Chlorophyll would be the way plants turn sunlight into food.
If you found the chemical signature for that in an exo-world, that would light up everything.
Because, well, finding life out in space, we're either going to get it by analysing the light of a planet and saying, look, yeah, there are some indications that there could be life there, or it's going to talk to us.
It's going to send us a beacon.
It's going to communicate with us, or we're going to pick up a beacon, or it's going to arrive in Earth orbit.
These are the only two ways we're going to find out about life.
These planets are orbiting this star, this red dwarf 40 light years away, may or may not have a civilization on them.
It's a much younger star than the Sun.
It's only 500 million years old.
Might take a bit longer on such stars.
But the fact we're asking these questions and we're talking about it shows how far our species has come with our imagination and with our hopes and dreams and how much we have to, as you say, have to dream about what we can do in the future.
And the picture that we're getting of them, we haven't got to forget, is not a picture of what is happening there on the 26th of February 2017, Earth time.
We're only going to be aware of what happened there at a distance across a space, a span of time, aren't we?
Yes, it doesn't particularly matter for this star, TRAPPIST-1, named after the observing program which found it, because it's only 40 light years away.
David, how long would that take to travel to if we had a spacecraft capable of reasonable speed?
Now, if you had, well, current spacecraft, it would take you over a million years.
So it would be a multi-general generation spacecraft.
Unfortunately, Paramount is the only one with the patents for faster-than-light travel.
So you can imagine, you know, if you could travel faster than the speed of light, and that would cause you a lot of problems.
And if you could travel near the speed of light, you could obviously get there much sooner in your experienced time.
But you can never come back because by the time you got back, much a longer period would have elapsed on the Earth.
This is special relativity.
But the problem with interstellar travel like this is that so you set off with a spacecraft that can travel at 20% the speed of light and you're going to TRAPPIST 1.
500 years later we develop a spaceship that can travel twice as fast.
So you set off then and you overtake the ones that have set off first.
And then a thousand years later you develop a better spacecraft and you who's going to want to go if they're going to be overtaken by future generations.
This is an interesting thought about traveling between worlds at the speed of light.
Well you have to have a special kind of dedication to put yourself up for that.
To see what you could.
That's right.
You either have to be a multi- This is one of the great grand themes of science fiction.
You know, when you travel between the stars and you do it realistically, not with faster-than-light spaceships, which probably won't be possible.
You either have to put yourself into suspended animation.
There was a great film recently, wasn't there, about this pair on a ship going, taking 120 years to get to a habitable planet.
You either put yourself in suspended animation, you either have a multi-generational spacecraft where you live on the spacecraft, or you send your DNA and you reconstitute yourself when you get there.
But the interesting thing about it, and that the big puzzle about traveling between the stars, is that the life of the galaxy is very long.
And even though it might take a long time in our time scales, in human lifespans, to travel between the stars, compared to the age of the galaxy that it is, that's a short time.
So if any civilization anywhere in the galaxy found a way to travel between the stars, however slowly, in cosmic terms, they would instantly inhabit the whole galaxy.
The whole galaxy would be inhabited by them because galaxies live a lot longer than the tiny length of time it takes to travel between stars.
And that leads to the question is, where are they?
Has anybody done this?
Where are they?
If it's easy to colonize the galaxy, why haven't we seen them?
Why haven't they been here?
Some people would argue they have, but I don't think so.
And what about the thought that they may be us?
We simply don't know it.
That the scale of what's out there is far, far larger than we can ever, even now, envisage.
And actually, we might be descendants of or related to something that's already out there.
That's another grand theme of science fiction and I suppose what you call parascience, that humans did not develop on Earth and that we are somehow, somehow the Earth was seeded perhaps, or evolution of life on the Earth was influenced by great cosmic travelers who passed by this way and haven't got round to passing by this way again.
I don't actually believe that.
I think that the only way to understand life on Earth and the evolution of life on Earth is to see it as a basically isolated system and the emergence of different species with different abilities and different forms of life come from a primitive Earth in which there was primitive life which evolved.
I don't think there's any evidence that we've been visited.
Oh, having said that, it's not impossible.
But as I said to you at Christmas, I'm one for the evidence.
You can have great stories and it's not impossible that the Earth, when it was very young and almost lifeless, or during the age of the dinosaurs, that aliens orbited our planet and looked down and thought, that's very interesting.
We'll come back and look later.
But I don't think there's any great evidence that the evolution of life on the Earth has been interfered with.
If ever we did, then that would open up an enormous realm of speculation.
But I don't think so.
But that's not to say I don't believe there's life out there.
I think that, although nobody's real proof, you've got to put your money on the fact that we're not the only ones.
It seems now a certainty.
That's a heavy word, but it does.
Now, the team of scientists at NASA who made the announcement the other day, Tuesday or Monday, whatever it was, were like dogs with two tails.
They were very excited, but they were as excited in telling us that there are going to be better telescopes coming soon that we'll be able to see more.
That's right.
Whatever time a person becomes an astronomer, and I hope there are lots of young people listening to this who want to be astronomers, Because it's a wonderful thing to do.
I was an astronomer for many years and I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Every generation that comes into astronomy thinks this is the generation, this is a wonderful generation, because we have new telescopes, new discoveries, things to move on with.
But this generation does seem to be a very special generation because the telescopes we are planning and building on the ground, huge telescopes with huge mirrors, able to collect a great deal of light from the faintest objects in the universe, telescopes in space like the James Webb Space Telescope that's being launched next year, the Super Hubble, the replacement for Hubble.
These are going to do remarkable things in all areas of astronomy, not only in studying the planets, but also in studying the galaxies and the most distant objects in the universe.
And with the availability of computers, which we didn't have when I was an astronomer, the computers we had weren't as good.
I mean, when we got hold of a good calculator in our hand, we thought that was brilliant, because that was better than many of the mainframe machines we were using.
The computers and computational power and the demonstration of data and the visualization of data, data mining that scientists have got these days, coupled with these magnificent new telescopes, are going to change so much about what we understand.
And it may well be that great mysteries these days, such as dark matter and dark energy, might be solved or might not even be approached the same way, understood the same way, as a result of this new generation of astronomers with these wonderful telescopes.
So we're going to need more scientists, aren't we?
And we're going to need more funding for this research because if we're discovering more, there are not going to be enough people to number crunch all the data.
It's always an argument, isn't it?
How much do you need science?
And how much should you spend on science?
Argument, I remember when I was a young scientist, there was arguments in America over a particle collider, which is the thing that takes subatomic particles, the things which make up atoms, and smashes them together to see what the structure of matter is.
And somebody got up in Congress and said, well, what use is that?
You know, what use is that to our nation?
And the scientist's first answer was that what it contributes to the defense of our nation, it makes the nation worth defending.
This is the type of thing an advanced civilization does.
Its exploration is important to us as the people coming out of Africa, struggling across the landscape to see what's there and if they could live there.
That's a great point at which to park this, I think, David.
Thank you very much for giving me your time.
You remain one of my favorite people in the unexplored world.
Very quickly, are you working on a book or something that we need to know about?
Well, my latest book was called Journey to the Center of the Earth, which is a scientific journey between the crust and the core of the earth.
And I pinched the title from Jules Verne, of course.
I have another book come in progress, which is about the whole universe.
But that's not quite ready yet.
So I'll have to tell you about it another time.
And we'll have a conversation.
David, have a good night and thank you for doing this.
You're welcome.
As ever, my grateful thanks to Dr. David Whitehouse.
Hoping to hear more from him in future editions of The Unexplained.
He is a great communicator, and now you can hear why, wherever in the world you happen to be.
Right now, let's get on to a man who formerly worked as an astronaut for NASA.
Fancy putting that on your curriculum vitae, as we say here in the UK, your resume, as you say in the States.
Brian Duffy.
He is ambassador for the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex currently locked, I guess we're going to get through with him.
So let's connect to Brian Duffy now.
Brian, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
I wonder if I can ask you first about something that, of course, was in the news yesterday.
And I guess anybody who's interested in or working in the space field is going to be massively excited by the announcement by SpaceX that they are going to send two people, take two people, on a round trip around the moon.
When you heard that news, and it wasn't entirely unexpected from Elon Musk, how did it make you feel?
Well, at first, my first thought was one of them needs to be me.
Because I'd certainly be willing to go.
And I mean, I always dreamt of going to the moon.
At one point in my career, I thought we were actually going to do it, but it didn't quite work out that way.
But, you know, it's amazing.
It shows you that space is interesting to people and exciting, and people are willing to take some risks to explore.
And that's really what it's all about.
When you think of the enormity of this, I mean, getting man to the moon the last time around with the Apollo missions, and I was lucky enough to interview at length Edgar Mitchell, one of the people who walked on the moon.
So, you know, I understand a bit about this from his side and from your side.
It was a massive commitment back then, a commitment that was first of all kicked off by John Fitzgerald Kennedy and had the backing of the United States and the entire world behind it.
Now these things are private.
How do you feel about these things going private?
Do you think that the private sector, even if they do have Elon Musk's money, can actually achieve these things?
I do.
I think it's a natural progression of the government investing in things that can't be invested in privately in developing them and then maturing them so that they can be used commercially.
So this is actually a natural progression in my mind.
And as you said, for anybody involved, there is a certain amount of risk.
I mean, SpaceX has had some difficulties, as you know, with rockets recently.
NASA had its own difficulties.
It just goes with the territory.
But do you think that the people have signed up and paid their estimated reported $100 million, whatever it is, do you think that they will fully understand what they are in for?
I think before they launch, they will.
At the moment, I don't know.
Okay, and in your estimate, and I know that the moon was not your thing, the shuttle, and we will talk about that was, what do you think those people, and they're not being named, we're being told they're not to do with Hollywood, that's about all we do, though.
You know, what sort of preparation do you think they're going to get?
Oh, they're going to need a lot.
They're going to need to know, you know, it's going to be multiple, probably more than a week trip, I think, but to get there and come back because it's three days each way.
It depends on what they do when they're there.
And, you know, so they're going to need to know how to live in the environment, you know, how to eat, how to, you know, you're going to be going to the bathroom up there.
I don't know what kind of system they're going to have.
But they're going to have to know how to exist.
If I were them, I'd want to know how to, you know, if certain things broke that were important and they could be fixed or something.
I'd want to know how to do that.
And so I would expect they probably would as well.
Well, that's a very good point, isn't it?
Because the people who went before to the moon and around the moon, maybe they didn't land, the early missions didn't.
They, of course, were engineers.
They were aeronautics experts.
They were people who had specific skills.
Here we are talking about civilians.
So they're not just going to be able to sit there and say, wow, isn't that a nice view?
Well, they might be able to do that.
But let's just say if I were them, I would want to know more.
Right.
Okay.
And do you think that we will see, now that we've had this announcement, do you think that we will see the private sector wanting to put together a mission that will actually land on the moon?
And is that a good thing if they do?
I believe that'll be an international effort, and it's already being talked about, actually.
So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised at all to see people, you know, an international team developing a lander and landing on the moon.
And then there are other people that are talking about, you know, setting up mining operations and commercial operations on the moon itself.
So maybe someday there'll be a hotel there that you can go take a holiday to.
Now, you're at the exciting end of it, all, of course, the astronautics, but the people behind NASA and organizations like it and governments, this is the difficulty, isn't it?
That when you go to the moon and you start mining there, you know, it becomes a territorial issue.
There are rights disputes, I can imagine, resulting from this.
So space is going to become what we thought when we were younger it might one day in science fiction become.
And that is a territory to be exploited in many ways.
And we're going to have to do it internationally, I think.
It's not going to be a tug of war between different countries.
It'll be an international thing.
But, you know, space law, I believe, already exists as a portion of all the legal spectrum.
And it might just come more important.
I promise you I'll talk about the shuttle missions and about the visitor center in a moment.
I don't know whether you heard the report earlier this week.
I think it was on American radio that I heard it.
That somebody, and I think it might have been a British guy, has invented, you talked about one of the things that the members of the public always ask you, I guess, is, you know, how do you go to the bathroom in space?
There's a guy who's invented, and I think he's won some award for this.
I need to check this out, a new kind of, it's almost like a nappy.
It's almost like a toilet that you can use more effectively in space.
I guess for any astronaut, that's good news.
It would be, I guess.
Depends on how long you're going to be in that suit, right?
You know, I read the same article.
It was an Air Force flight surgeon in the U.S. that did that.
And he won an award for, there was a competition, I believe it was a NASA competition.
And an Air Force flight surgeon came up with his own design and with less than $100 worth of material, was able to do a prototype, and he ended up winning.
Well, good for him, and I'm sure it's good news for anybody who's going to be going up into space.
I mean, this is the thing, isn't it?
When you're on a mission, whether it's a mission to the moon or a mission to Mars or it's one of the shuttle missions that were so successful over the years, you have to be a team player, don't you?
Because you're doing all of those bodily functions and living your entire existence in a hostile environment with people you just got to get on with.
Yeah, but you do get on with them.
In fact, when we hire astronauts, one of the things we look for is that they're team players because not being a team player would actually rule you out.
Because it's just too important.
As you mentioned, you're in a closed-in, small environment.
In the shuttle case, we had seven of us in the space of about maybe two minivans is how much room we had.
And we were there for about two weeks or so.
All right, let's talk about you and the shuttle, because I know that your experience of the shuttle goes back to 1986, according to your biography.
How did you become a shuttle astronaut?
That's a job that a lot of people would, of course, dreamt of and would never be able to achieve, but you did.
Fortunately, did.
To my great fortune, yes.
Thanks.
Well, I was interested in becoming a pilot when I was young.
And although I watched and followed the space program, I never really expected to be part of it.
But I thought I could be a pilot, in particular, maybe an Air Force pilot.
And so I went to the Air Force Academy and went to pilot training following graduation and did well there.
So I got an F-15 assignment.
So I flew the F-15 for a couple of tours and had a chance then to become a test pilot.
And I go, that's fun.
It's like getting a PhD in flying.
So I became a test pilot.
And that's what I was doing when in 1985 NASA made an announcement that, hey, we're going to have a selection for space shuttle pilots.
And I thought, wow, that sounds like the ultimate test pilot job to me.
So I applied along with thousands of other people and was fortunate enough to be selected.
That story, even though you were three decades after him, is so similar to Edgar Mitchell's story because he was a test pilot himself.
And one of the things that he told me, and I guess you're going to tell me something similar in a different era, is that being a test pilot teaches you to cope and be calm and deal with just about anything.
Yes, you can't be rattled there.
You try to do all the planning and the training that you can so that when something happens, you expect it.
You're not surprised by it.
And then you just keep your wits about you and just react in the appropriate way.
So, yeah, he was right.
I knew Edgar, and he was a fine gentleman and a wonderful man.
And how do you, I mean, he absolutely was, and it's very sad that we're losing the Apollo guys now.
It's inevitable, but sad because these are the people with the direct connection to the first landings on the moon.
Your emotions, though, you know, when you're going through difficulties, and maybe you could tell me about some of the things that happened to you, perhaps in training or perhaps in missions that were not so nice.
You know, is it difficult to keep your human self away from the technical tasks that you must perform in order to sometimes save your skin?
Well, sometimes you have to do that, and that's just, and if you're going to be successful, so yeah, you have to learn how to do that.
If I could comment back on your thoughts about us losing the Apollo guys, yeah, you're right.
We lost John Glenn and Gene Cernan here recently along with Dr. Mitchell.
And, you know, they're all the early pioneers that we all know and I certainly respected.
And, you know, at the Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex in Florida, they're not far from Orlando, there's a new exhibit, and it's called the Heroes and Legends.
And it looks back at all of those early pioneers.
It has their stories there.
And actually inside the building is also the Astronaut Hall of Fame, of which they're in.
So while we're losing them, kind of one at a time, I guess, but their memory is going to live on, and it's going to hopefully be there to inspire the next generation of space explorers.
Did you personally know these people?
Absolutely did.
John Glent was my hero, and I got to know him.
When he came back to fly on the space shuttle at 77 years of age, I had a chance to spend quite a fair amount of time with him there and get to know him.
He was just a wonderful gentleman.
Gene Cernan and I have done many things together.
So, yeah, I hate seeing it happen, but I guess life goes on.
Were you on the mission with John Glenn, the shuttle mission that he actually went up on at 77?
I was not, but I was at the Kennedy Space Center for launch and for landing when he was there.
But I didn't go with him.
I wish I had.
That would have been fun.
I mean, you really do have to have, I know they called it the right stuff, and they even called a movie after that phrase.
But you do have to have the right stuff in order to do this.
It is a very special breed of human being, as it will be reflected, I'm sure, in the stories of those men that you will tell at the visitor center.
But you have to be a very special kind of person to be able to do this.
You know, a lot of us are a lot alike.
I do know that.
We're well trained and we're trainable so they can teach us what to do.
And we don't know everything.
But then when things happen, you have to be able to react.
You asked a little bit about something that I could share with you on my last flight.
We were going to rendezvous and dock with the International Space Station to add two pieces to it.
So in order to be successful in the mission, I had to dock with it.
And we use a rendezvous radar normally to tell how far away we are and how fast we're approaching it.
And the day before my rendezvous, my radar broke, so I had to do the first ever no-radar rendezvous in the space shuttle program.
And that was a bit dicey.
It didn't go as exactly as planned.
My, I can't imagine doing that without the instrumentation that you would need.
But that's real Seattle Pants test flying, isn't it, really?
That's exactly what it was.
So I had to, at the end, I had to save the rendezvous just visually, just looking out the window with my flying, as you said, seat of the pants.
Sadly for people like me who only ever get to watch the movies like Gravity and various other movies, I'm not sure what you make of the way Hollywood portrays these things.
I am not going to have any idea of what it's like to be up there.
Can you just give me a sense of what it is like to be on a shuttle mission and having got through Earth's atmosphere and then be floating around the Earth and looking back down on it?
What is that experience like?
And what does the whole thing feel like?
Well, in general, it's euphoric and it's surreal.
When you're floating there, looking out the window, say, looking backwards through the payload via the space shuttle over the tail and watching the Earth rotating underneath you, you're floating, touching nothing.
You think, is this a movie?
Is this real?
You know, is this really happening?
Am I really here?
So in a way, you're a little incredulous about what's going on, but it then becomes almost routine.
You know, after you've been there two days floating, it's as if you floated your whole life.
But the skin surrounding you, the actual material that the shuttle was made of, and any space vehicle is made of, is incredibly thin.
Did it ever, perhaps in moments of being off duty, and I know you had to have some of those when you could sleep and rest and just unwind from it, did it ever scare you, the thought that there was only that between you and the void?
Yeah, it didn't escape my thought.
I realized all that.
In fact, sometimes, you know, you'd look out the window of the vehicle or the window of the airlock and you go, you know, there's vacuum on the other side of this window.
I'm sure glad it is that the window is holding the pressure.
And I presume, I know it's a thought that I would have if I were, you know, I will never be in this lifetime be lucky enough to do this, but I guess you have to accept that there is a certain amount of risk involved and you're never quite sure what's going to happen.
And I suppose you have to be very comfortable with yourself and maybe have the thought that, look, everybody has to go some way sometime, and this would be a hell of a way to go if that has to happen.
Before you ever get on board that vehicle, you have to have come to that conclusion.
Otherwise, you wouldn't be there.
And were you actually in command of the mission that you were on?
Yeah, the last two I was the mission commander of, which means I was the boss, basically.
Right.
And how did that feel, Brian?
You know, what is, you know, being on the mission is one thing, but being in charge of it is a whole other issue.
Yeah, especially when you become the commander for the first time.
I'll never forget the feeling I had when we got in the simulator, the motion-based simulator, to practice launches.
And I had my crew with me for the very first time.
And I realized I had, it was me on the flight deck with three rookies.
So I thought, okay, so the entire, you know, I felt the weight of the world on my shoulders at that point.
But that was a year before we actually launched.
And over the course of the year, of course, we all developed into a great team.
That's why we train as long as we do, actually, to become an efficient team.
Teamwork is what it's all about.
I mean, now they're talking about going to Mars.
And the one thing that, you know, even the private missions, I think it was, is it Mars One?
Yes, the boss of Mars One, Baz Lansdorp, was talking about the fact that the people they are going to, they would like to be able to send up there, the most important aspect of what they are going to have to be about, because that's a whole other issue.
That's a long, long way.
And, you know, it's a big, big thing to do.
You have to be able to get on with each other, and you've got to work as a very, very finely coordinated unit.
I completely agree.
And in fact, that should be, if not a, you know, if not the main selection criteria, a very important one is that the people have to be able to work together because being locked up in a small volume for the six-month trip to Mars, yeah, you need to be able to get along.
And you're all accomplished people.
That's why you get selected.
It's not everybody who gets selected.
You have to be very special in terms of your abilities.
What sorts of psychological testing do they put you through?
When you were involved in the shuttle program from 85, 86, presumably they do psychological testing with you just to make sure you're not going to do anything crazy when you're there.
What do you have to go through?
So they do some screening.
When you're invited to the Johnson Space Center for an interview for the astronaut program, the interview is a week-long process of which only one hour is with the panel where you're being evaluated.
The rest of it is medical and psychological evaluation.
So we use that in the screening process.
And then after that, of course, they're available to help you if you need any assistance.
But for the most part, most people don't because people that are selected initially are, you know, we're ready to go.
And when they, presumably they occasionally have to weed somebody out of the system, if they say, we've discovered that you're not really, for one reason or another, not quite what we're looking for.
How do they do that?
How do they manage them out of the program?
I think it's happened a few times in the past, and those people generally self-select themselves to remove because they realize, hey, this isn't what I really wanted to do.
It's not what I expected.
So it's not, you know, they leave voluntarily.
Right.
And when you're actually on the launch pad, thinking back to the shuttle missions, what does that feel like?
What does it feel like in the sort of 10 minutes or so before they start counting down?
And you're sitting there and you know that you're going to go.
Yeah, you actually don't know that you're going anywhere until the boosters light.
Because any one of a million things could stop the shuttle from launching.
A single sensor going bad or an engine problem at engine start or any one of a million things.
One time I scrubbed because there were some container ships had sailed into where the boosters were going to splash down in the ocean.
And so that was actually on my 40th birthday.
I was trying to launch into space on my 40th birthday and got scrubbed because of container ships.
So when we're out there, we know that, hey, once we get inside of 31 seconds, when the countdown clock goes from 31 to 30, that means the Kennedy Space Center computers that have been controlling us to that point had just handed over to the onboard computers, and the space shuttle used to actually launch itself.
And so once the clock went to 30, then I would tell my crew, because there were three people downstairs that didn't have any clocks or displays, I'd just say, okay, it looks like we're going to give it a try.
And then, you know, because then it was a matter of the engine starting correctly, coming up to full thrust.
And then once the booster's lit, you were going somewhere.
And I imagine the feeling, I mean, you probably got a million technical things to do at that time, but I imagine somewhere in the back of your mind is the feeling, geez, this is not a rehearsal.
Oh, yeah, you definitely know it's real.
But you really stay pretty busy mentally throughout the whole process.
Because as the commander, I had to know at any point in the ascent during the eight and a half minutes, what I would do if I lost one engine.
And then what would I do if I lost two engines?
And then what would I do if I lost three engines?
And that changed as we climbed throughout the ascent profile.
So to say that my CPU of my mental computer was whirring would be an understatement.
That's a lovely way of putting it.
You know, the shuttle, of course, no space mission, no space enterprise is without risk.
I was a very young man making my first trip to a relative in New York on the day that the Challenger disaster happened, and this is the time that you were coming into it all.
You know, that was a terrible time for the program, wasn't it?
What was it like to go through that?
I mean, I can still see those people now.
I was watching with my uncle Billy in Clifton, New Jersey, CNN that morning.
The other networks had decided this is just so routine now, we're not going to cover it.
So he sat me down.
He said, just have a look at what America can do.
And I'll never forget seeing those people prepare themselves to go and then the looks on the relatives' faces when disaster happened.
You know, that must have been a very difficult thing to bounce back from.
It was.
Those are horrible days.
Of course, those were my friends.
We'd been there for six months at that point.
And yeah, that was terrible.
But my wife and I had just built a house and that challenger happened on A Tuesday.
On Monday morning, they had delivered our household goods and boxes there.
So we had a house full of boxes.
And when the challenger happened, my wife stopped unpacking and looked at me and said, So, what are we going to do?
And I said, Well, you know, they'll find out what happened and they'll fix it, and then we'll go, we'll get back to flying.
And that's exactly what happened.
But yeah, it was a hard thing to do, hard thing to live through.
And it was very sad.
Same is true with the Columbia accident there.
I mean, that is part of the territory, but it's a terrible, terrible thing.
And especially if you're involved in the program.
And it brings me back to this point, really, doesn't it?
That it is a team.
And on those occasions when things go wrong, then you are part of that team.
You are at the head of the whole mission.
But you have to be sure that everybody behind you, that is the people in mission control, the people who had subcontracts to build things, everybody has to be delivering.
And it all has to be 100%.
Otherwise, something is going to go wrong.
It's true.
We have very little margin.
But still, if you notice, we still do it, though.
We trust the people that are doing that.
And they put their hearts and souls and all their effort into making sure things are right because they don't want to see anything happen either.
Did they teach you anything about the possibility of, I don't think there was possibility, but the possibility of being able to escape from that if something went wrong?
Yeah, it's a pretty low probability of being in a situation that you could escape from.
That's why we're so particular about being precise on things because you just have to do things right.
Absolutely.
Did you get to do a spacewalk, Brian?
I guess the commander doesn't.
Commander doesn't.
They want you to know where you are at all times.
They want to keep you inside.
Did you feel cheated, but you didn't get the chance to have that experience?
Not at all.
Not at all.
I would have loved to have done it, but that's fine.
I got to do so much more than I ever dreamed I would do.
When I was a youngster, I dreamt about spaceflight.
And we did not have, by the way, at the time, there was no Kennedy Space Center Visitors Complex there where I could go inspired, get inspired.
But now the youngsters can go to the visitors complex and see what goes on in the space, what has happened in the space program, participate in it.
If they want to think about going to Mars someday, there's an astronaut training experience that they can use virtual reality to go see what it would be like on Mars.
And that might inspire them to do that.
If they wanted to see what it was like to ride a space shuttle, we had a ride called Space Shuttle Launch Experience.
And that's an exhilarating simulation of what it was like only much safer.
So when you're talking about managing risk, go ride a little simulator rather than riding a real ride.
Now, you said it was exhilarating, and we know that aircraft simulators like 747 simulators are very realistic.
How realistic is this one?
It's pretty good.
It gives you as close to the real experience as it can on the ground.
Education, terribly important now because we are learning so much about space.
It's enormously exciting, isn't it, that we're discovering so much about the possibility of planets that have life.
Only last week we had the announcement that seven exoplanets were discovered far, far away around a single star, and possibly one of them might have the elements capable of supporting life.
There is so much to take on board now and so much to learn.
Will the visitor center take on board all of these new developments and discoveries?
It's constantly changing.
Yes, as we learn more and more, more things are brought on.
I can just imagine when the James Webb telescope launches and we start getting information from it, the visitor center will incorporate what we've learned into new displays.
And it's so easy for people to get to also, the visitor center is.
If people are in Orlando, which a lot of people find themselves there for one reason or another, it's only a quick 45-minute drive, almost a non-stop over to the beach to the visitor center.
And it's the best value that people could get.
If they ever bring youngsters over there, you're going to leave with a very inspired and happy youngster.
Now, you know, it's marvelous that that kind of thing is there now.
I remember I was five years of age, Brian, walking to school, my sister taking me to school, holding me by the hand and taking me to my primary school.
And she said to me, what do you want to do when you grow up?
And I said, I want to be an astronaut.
And it's wonderful that, you know, in my day, we only had books and annuals to read about these things.
But isn't it wonderful now that kids today can actually have the experience and then decide for themselves if they really do want to be an astronaut?
At the visitor center, it's called Lunch with an Astronaut.
There's an astronaut there every day.
And youngsters can have lunch with an astronaut.
They can ask questions of them.
They can have their pictures taken with them.
That's a very, very popular program.
So I know if I'd ever met an astronaut when I was young, that's something I would never have forgotten.
Gee, Wiz, how do they brief you guys for the kind of, I mean, kids are kids, for the kind of, you're going to get asked every kind of question.
You know, I think I've heard them all over the years.
I've been doing this now for, what, 32 years, I guess.
Now, as we come to the end of this conversation, and Brian, thanks for making this amount of time for me.
It's fascinating.
I talk to you all day and all night about this.
But at least one of the people I know who is connected in terms of space, once worked for NASA, thinks it's a terrible shame that we don't have the shuttle anymore because just at the point where we got the shuttle to perfection, we got it to the absolute nth degree of being refined, the whole program is passed into history.
Do you miss it in that way?
Absolutely.
I absolutely do.
You know, it was an amazing capability.
We could carry 25 tons to orbit and bring 25 tons home.
And nowadays, even with our new rockets that we're building, the Space Launch System, it'll be able to launch 100 tons eventually.
But we don't have the capability to bring back much more than we can put in our pocket.
So, yeah, I do miss the space shuttle for that reason.
And do you miss space?
You know, I'd go back in a heartbeat in a minute.
I do miss it.
It's, you know, give me one more orbit, please.
Look, I know that the cost of it will probably fall over the years.
If it became possible in the next couple of decades to buy a trip into space, would you want to do that?
Would you want somebody else with their hand on the steering wheel?
No, I'd rather drive it.
Yeah, so maybe I'll pull a John Glenn and I'll go back when I'm 77.
But you know, I suppose once you've done that, and you can tell me this, and it's a question I've always wanted to ask an astronaut.
I never asked Edgar Mitchell, and now I can't.
When you come back here, is the rest of life a massive anticlimax?
It's not, but you think differently about it.
When you go to space, you realize I think differently about the planet, how small we are.
When you look out into the universe, when you're on the dark side of the orbit and you're looking away from the Earth, you look at it and you go, I don't think I can understand, comprehend how massively large the universe is.
Last question.
You will have read, and you probably see all the time, as I see all the time, reports that various shuttle crews encountered aliens or UFOs on shuttle missions.
What do you make of all of those reports?
And they are around all the time.
You know, I've never heard anybody say that about aliens, that they had anything real to do about it.
So I'm afraid I can't comment.
I don't know.
I never had any experience, and I never personally heard anything.
But I keep looking at stuff that comes up online, various people commenting about space saying STS mission, whatever it was, there was some kind of light flash past the craft.
Do you chuckle to yourself when you hear those things?
Yeah, I think it was probably something natural that would surprise somebody.
I used John Glenn's flight when he launched it.
If you remember him talking about fireflies around it, what those were, those were the when the RCS, the reaction control system, jets fire, there's two chemicals there, and sometimes they don't burn completely through.
So you were just seeing the ice crystals is all they were.
Brian, it's been a pleasure to talk with you.
I do this show in the UK.
I would love to be able to do my show out of that visitor center one of these days.
I don't know whether they ever plan to have broadcasters out there, but I think it will be a tremendous thing to do both to promote it and to promote space.
But, you know, it would be a fantastic experience for everybody listening and everybody doing it, I think.
We could make it happen.
All right.
Well, I think we, if it's possible, we need to stay in touch about this because I would love to do it.
Okay, Hard.
Brian, thank you so much and take care.
All the best.
Bye-bye.
NASA man Brian Duffy, thank you to him and thank you very much to Dr. David Whitehouse.
Before him, if you have guest suggestions, please get in touch with me.
Send me an email through the website theunexplained.tv.
Designed, devised, owned and maintained by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot.
Thank you for all of your kind thoughts.
Please keep your emails coming and please keep the faith with me and this show in the United Kingdom.
So until next we meet here, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please stay safe, stay calm, and above all, stay in touch.
Thanks very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection