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May 18, 2019 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:06:06
Edition 395 - Joe Pappalardo

Popular Mechanics' journalist Joe Pappalardo on the future of Space Travel...

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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.
Very nice weather here as I record this beautiful sunshine, early evening time, and the trees are green, and, you know, what's not to like, as they say, as we coast into spring here.
I know that if you're in the southern hemisphere, it's a different story, but, you know, all things in balance, the sun will come back to you in due course.
But let us have it for a bit.
Thank you very much.
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We've got a raft of great guests coming for you here on The Unexplained.
We'll be talking about the story of the Apollo space missions in a future edition.
So that is one to look forward to with a man who has extensively and intensively researched those as we come up to the 50th anniversary, of course, of man's landing on the moon.
50 years since that happened.
This edition, we also talk about space, but in a different way, with a man called Joe Papillado, who writes about space and other matters for popular mechanics and has some very interesting views about space and the way that these days we are exploring it and the way that we're going to explore it in the future.
He's got a book out, Spaceport Earth, and we'll talk about that and about his thoughts on space missions as we conceive them now, because a lot of things have changed in very recent years and even more will change as we look forward in the way that we reach out and explore space.
And also our reasons for going there are differing.
And a lot more organizations, countries, and individuals are getting involved in what we used to call the space race.
So Joe Pappolado, the guest on this edition.
If you want to get in touch with me, remember, as ever, tell me who you are, where you are, and how you use the show.
It's always nice to hear from you.
Theunexplained.tv, I'll say it again.
That's the website.
And you can communicate with me from there.
All right, let's get to the U.S. now.
Let's speak with Joe Pappolado.
Joe, thank you for coming on the show.
Well, thank you very much for having me.
Now, Joe, there's a bit of a story.
You're in Texas on the coast there, South Texas, aren't you?
We had a real difficulty trying to get a digital connection.
So we are connected by old-fashioned telephone, which a lot of people like Art Bell used for years, and it worked well for them.
But we have somebody to thank, don't we?
Yes.
I am in a delightful bookstore in Portland, Texas called Books Inc., and I'm using the good old-fashioned landline standing amidst a lot of great used books with that used book smell.
And it's all very delightful.
So I appreciate them letting me hang out in the store and talk about the space and space flight.
See, an awful lot of these things come down to cooperation in this world.
Okay, tell me about you.
Now, listen, my father was a big one for doing car repairs, and he used to get various car repair magazines, and I'm sure one of them was called Popular Mechanics.
And that's the publication that you write for, isn't it?
Yes, I was on the staff for 407, seven and a half years, and I'm still on the masthead as a contributing editor, which sort of a glorified freelancer.
And yeah, the magazine's been around since the 1800s.
So there are a lot of people who got their first exposure to engineering and cars and aircraft and spaceflight, some reading the magazine.
So, you know, there's some rooms where you walk in and you're a popper mechanics writer and you're a celebrity.
Those places are garages and fleet hangers and factory floors and things like that.
You can walk into a spring brake bar or something and no one would care.
But in some places, it really carries weight.
But I love it when there's an astronaut or an engineer or someone who says, oh, yeah, I read popular mechanics when I was a kid because we get letters from PhDs and we get letters from 10-year-olds.
And the 10-year-olds are usually asking questions, and the PhD is usually complaining about something.
So when the 10-year-olds email or reach out, we always try to answer their questions because you never know.
They could be the first person on Mars.
I mean, you don't really know who you're talking to with these kids because they get exposed to it and they grow up to be your engineers and your pilots and such.
Well, and listen, I'm really pleased to hear that, Joe.
So we're saying that interest in, among young people, in things that are mechanical continues to be as strong as it might have been a few years ago.
I thought it was all computers these days.
Well, everything is a little more complicated, that's for sure.
And explaining how things work, which is the reason for the magazine's existence, is a little bit harder now.
You have to go into the digital.
You have to understand big data, artificial intelligence, and bring all these sort of cutting-edge technologies to bear.
But at the end of the day, it's engineering.
It's building something that works.
It's testing it till it breaks, figuring out what went wrong, and building it better.
And that never goes out of style.
That's just the way that human beings do really complicated things with our thumbs and our brains.
And of course, as you say, a lot of the engineering, the nuts and bolts mechanics stuff, the stuff that involves the moving parts and the grease, that stuff is being controlled these days by computer systems.
And we've only got to look at the problems that Boeing has had with the 737 MAX to know that these two technologies sometimes have difficulties working together.
The biggest problem sort of these days is not that things go wrong necessarily, but that when they do go wrong, they go wrong catastrophically.
So back in the day, you could have a minor accident or a minor problem with an aircraft, and you have to fix it.
But it could be a very minor incident.
When things go wrong these days, they go wrong big.
Not as often, but big.
And with this magazine and with aviation and engineering in general, any kind of catastrophe means an opportunity to make it better, to make it safer, to realize what happened, what went wrong, and again, make those adjustments to fix it.
So that is as old as Archimedes.
That's not going to change either.
But the tools have changed.
The complexity has changed.
The level at which a hobbyist can work on these things has changed.
The skill sets are a lot.
It's a little steeper and harder to get into.
Except for maybe Harley-Davidson's, it's hard to do your own repair work on a car, on a modern car, unless you really have the wherewithal to understand not just how the engine works, but how the digital component works, how the brains of it work.
So the game has changed a lot, but that basic human impulse to understand something and make it better, understand how it works and tweak it to make it better is still very much alive and strong in the human race.
And of course, that impetus and that whole drive is magnified when you talk about space, because everything becomes more complex, not only because of the kind of engineering that you have to do and the kind of propulsion systems that you need to deploy, but also you're working in a hostile environment, too.
And that always adds another dimension.
And that is absolutely true.
The power that's required is a lot bigger.
The amount of money that you need even just to test and to figure it out and the stakes of spaceflight are always very high.
There's no casual spaceflight.
There's no one who wants to launch a satellite that doesn't have a huge emotional and financial stake in it.
Even the small sats have that to a certain degree.
So every launch is important, and the margins are extremely small.
And you're right, not just the space environment is hostile, but the launch environment is hostile.
I mean, you're going up on a chemical rocket at high speeds through the atmosphere.
I mean, it's a horrifically violent event.
If you've been to a launch, you hear the air tearing before the rocket.
And, you know, that part of it is hostile as well.
So these things have to be designed to survive the trip to space and operating in space where no one can fix it.
So you're starting to stack up a lot of variables that make things very challenging to engineer launch vehicles and spacecraft.
Are we going to be as dependent on rocketry into the future as we were?
I say that for a reason, because on your own website, I read a very interesting little piece just before we started recording this about the development of and the possible potential future of not lithium-ion batteries, but lithium-metal batteries, which might be on the way to solving some of the issues we've had with electric propulsion.
Yeah, that's a very interesting breakthrough.
And you mean with batteries, you always have to sort of take it with a grain of salt.
There's been decades and decades of battery research in laboratories using exotic materials and systems to make a better battery.
But how do you scale it up and bring it into the real world?
And this, instead of the lithium-ion, the lithium metal batteries are pretty easy to retrofit the existing battery production lines to fit that in.
And they are more stable, they last longer, and they weigh less.
So that's a perfect application for aerospace.
And space needs batteries.
They need lightweight batteries and more reliable batteries without flammable or as flammable components.
So it's a great application for that.
And a lot of these emerging technologies are really informing spaceflight, artificial intelligence and processing power, 3D printing.
All of these things are, you know, you start looking at how they can affect the factory floor, and then you start thinking about how they can affect exploration.
If you put a 3D printer on a moon base, all of a sudden you've got an organic capability to make new parts instead of shipping them there.
You can make spacesuit components that are tailored to whoever's going to be using it.
That kind of thing.
It really opens up all these possibilities.
And we don't know all the possibilities.
That's what makes it so much fun to cover it right now.
Or indeed, as we recently read, the possibility potentially to produce something that may be used medically, like a heart.
I mean, they've actually been on the way, I think it's a team in Tel Aviv, in the last few weeks.
They have created, they say, a 3D printed or something that's on the way to being a 3D printed heart.
Now, once you start being able to do that, then your ability to put yourself in the most hostile places in the galaxy suddenly increases.
What you find when you talk to the people who are, and I'm fortunate enough that I get to do this, talk to the people who are trying to think through how to put a permanent colony on the moon or a permanent colony on Mars.
And the self-sufficiency has to be there.
And medicine is a huge part of that, obviously.
And telemedicine and can you get a, you know, do you have to have a doctor there?
Do you have to have spare organs there?
What happens in an emergency?
And the flexibility of the 3D printing and the tissue printing and everything you're talking about.
And robotic arms that can do delicate surgeries controlled from Earth.
Things like this, laser communication to make that even possible.
All of these things are coming together at a time when there's a business case, there's a customer, not just NASA as well, who are interested in applying those things to these sci-fi sort of applications.
So it's very exciting.
And the advances that they work on have applications on Earth that are shorter term as well.
So it's not just chasing these fanciful ideas.
The more you learn about 3D printing on Earth, the more you can apply it to space and vice versa.
And there's some things you can do in space medically that you can't do on Earth, grown protein cells and this kind of thing.
There's a lot of work being done currently.
And all that stuff comes back down to Earth in the form of new drugs, new materials, all the things that they learn.
So there's a benefit that comes back down to Earth too from these things.
So does the scope and availability of advanced technology and presumably falling prices for being able to do these things, is that what has fueled the fact that I know you talk about in this book that you've written to a large extent, the fact that we are now getting more what we would call private organizations, corporations, companies getting involved in the space race, the likes of, for example, SpaceX and Elon Musk?
Yeah, the really interesting thing is the way that the U.S. government was able to loosen the grip on the ownership and the operation of spacecraft and launch systems.
And the ripple effect that that's having is pretty astounding to watch.
And the big difference, I try to explain it as simply as possible to people.
So NASA used to not just buy a spacecraft and a launch system, they would buy the blueprints for it.
And they would, you know, if they changed their mind about something, they would have the final say and their engineers would be in the production floors.
And they had the, you know, and it was inefficient.
And now those, NASA goes to a private space company and says, we want to deliver something to X-Orbit, we want to deliver some of the space station, but you get to keep the blueprint so you can sell those rides and operate it on your own from your own mission control to anyone else in the world when we're done.
So that's a huge change that created an entire industry.
And SpaceX took that opportunity, crashed through the gates, and really was a trailblazer for that.
But Blue Origin is close behind.
There's a lot of small companies that are looking at different launch vehicles and satellite manufacturing, low Earth orbit with small satellites and small launch vehicles, another huge opportunity.
And now deep space.
NASA's saying, hey, private space industry, give us a lunar land or we want to get back to the moon.
And then you own the, then you own it.
If someone else wants to go and land on the moon, they can rent a ride on there too.
Or just zip around it, like must sold a ticket to a Japanese billionaire to do a trip around the moon on a rocket that hasn't been built yet.
I mean, these are the new and interesting sort of things that you could never have imagined would have happened even a couple of years ago that are happening in real time now with hundreds of millions of dollars being put towards them in some cases.
But there is more technology available, but that isn't to say that any of it is easy.
And we only had proof of that in April when a SpaceX crew Dragon capsule had a problem during a test of the Super Draco escape engines.
They're designed to get astronauts away from the thing in the event of a launch emergency.
Now, thankfully, when this thing happened, nobody was hurt.
But it just goes to prove, doesn't it, that you have to build into whatever calculations you do that it's not going to be a straight road.
Things are going to go wrong.
And it doesn't matter whether you're the richest person in the world or whoever you are or whether you're a government.
That's just a fact.
It's not even the fact that things go wrong.
It's how you react to things going wrong that really defines if you're going to make it or not make it in this business.
And SpaceX has suffered calamities before, losing payloads, blowing up rockets, and their review system has proven pretty robust.
NASA and the military, which are two pretty tough customers when it comes to launching their very important one-of-a-kind payloads, and the communications satellite companies as well, they've all given them a good bill of health to relaunch.
So their post-accident or post-incident or post-anomaly, they'd probably say, processes are pretty good.
And I imagine it would be the same thing now.
The delays on this one are especially unwelcome considering that the United States has the rent rides and the Russians and Boeing's program also suffer delays.
So then this is a very politically sensitive sort of program.
So it's not good news.
It's terrible news.
And it'll cause delays.
But the positive spin on it is no one was hurt.
They certainly found something wrong that they're going to need to fix.
And we haven't heard a lot of details about what happened.
But those engines are new, and it's a reusable spacecraft.
So did that play a part?
There are lessons to be learned, which is the way engineering is supposed to work.
But engineering on a timeline with the entire world looking at you feels a little bit different.
Well, but it was ever thus.
It was that way for NASA, wasn't it?
There were times in NASA's history, especially at times in the Apollo sequence, but also with the shuttle, when NASA was under the spotlight, it was having to deliver something.
And those things always put you under pressure.
And I guess the engineers involved have to be very adept learning the lessons of history and resist that pressure when they can.
It didn't go well in the shuttle program, especially when the fatal accidents really made that launch system in the grand scheme of its life, and it was a great, there's a lot of nice things to say about it, but it didn't do what it was supposed to do.
It was a net failure in terms of being a regularly launched, reusable, affordable pickup truck to bring things up and down to space.
It did all those things, but not at the cadence it was supposed to.
And again, the crew loss numbers are pretty awful.
So when NASA talks about crew safety and things, I mean, yeah, they have a lot of experience and they're pretty tight about it.
But when they're running the show, a lot of astronauts died.
So I think those lessons for those who remember it is put the engineering first.
Don't look at the timeline, think about the big picture, and think about how awful it will be if you actually killed astronauts and how to avoid that.
And if they laser focus on that, you kind of can't go wrong.
But again, there's a lot of opponents to SpaceX out there, and there's a lot of opponents that commercial crew are still floating around Congress.
And they'll see it as a failure and opportunity to kick SpaceX.
And they're used to it.
But again, with this program, it's all extremely sensitive.
And why would there be opposition?
The only reason that I can think well, there are two reasons.
There's national prestige and pride, and you want something that's linked to the government being to, you know, being able to do that because it makes you look good.
But the other reason is that if there is a harvest and a bonanza of some kind to be had out there in space, then you don't want people who've come to it fairly recently, private companies harvesting that bonanza, if that's not a mixed metaphor.
Well, it depends on who you ask.
I mean, the current administration has really doubled down on the previous administrations, too.
Bush and Obama both.
We're supporters of commercial accruing.
It survived through these three regimes in America.
Not a lot of programs can say that or policies for that matter.
But opening up the economic advantage in space is something that a lot of people down on earth are excited about on the state level, on the federal level.
Governors are creating innovation funds to open up spaceports in a lot of states.
And it's a point of pride to have this industry in your backyard.
And their great jobs are educated, the people who swallow your tax base.
So there's a lot to be said.
But this is Congress we're talking about.
And the parochialism, if you've had Lockheed Martin or United Launch Alliance in your backyard, and there's a new, leaner, better way of doing things that forces your constituents out of that game, it's a very parochial view, but that's the one that they have.
And that seems to be the places that have the most entrenched traditional era of space, who don't have a seat at the table for private space, are the ones who are leading the charge against it.
And there are still voices out there, and some of them are in positions of real authority.
And it's across the aisle.
I mean, you can't kick one party or another for it necessarily, which is almost refreshing these days.
It falls on a lot more pragmatic lines usually than that.
We talked about a lot of the organizations that are nothing to do with governments getting involved in this.
And one of the most ambitious was the Mars One organization, where they were trying to raise money for Mars One.
Bat Landsdorp in Holland, I've spoken to him a couple of times.
I haven't been able to speak with him recently.
Mars One seems to have hit the buffers to some extent recently.
We may hear more from them.
I don't know.
But it was always a very ambitious project, that one, wasn't it?
Too ambitious, obviously.
But the only thing that it really proved, which was instructive, especially at the time, was the number of people that were interested and the people that got on Twitter saying, I'm a Mars 1 candidate, and here's why I want to go, even though I think it's one way.
I know I have a kid.
There's one woman on Facebook that I know, and she's saying, I have a kid, and I'd like to see the kid grow up.
I'd go to Mars anyway, and here's why.
So it was good to kickstart the conversation on why go?
What is that human impulse to explore?
What would people get out of it?
But as an actual program and a plan, it's not the way it's going to happen.
Not yet anyway.
You got to get the rides.
If you don't have the big ships, you can't do the big colonization.
You need to get the launch costs down.
You need to get a safe system that people can rely on having a good better than average odds of actually surviving the trip.
So these things take time.
And it was a good show of enthusiasm, but absolutely zero chance of actually returning into anything.
That's a shame.
I mean, I love the whole idea of we're going to partly fund this by selling the rights to the entire story to some media conglomerate so that they can tell the greatest story ever told.
I mean, that was a great tale to tell to people in the media like myself.
But ultimately, maybe the issue with Mars One and anything that requires people to go to Mars and not come back, you may say in the abstract, yeah, I'm going to do that.
I'm going to make my life on Mars and I'm not going to come back and I can talk to you and send you an email.
20 minutes later, it'll arrive on Earth, so we're still in touch.
But when you get to the point where after the training and after the talking and after all of that, you get to locking the capsule door, I think an awful lot of people would say, I can't do this.
It's very romantic until you realize that you're basically trapped in a submarine the rest of your life.
And those things that you like to do, like taking a walk or taking your dog for a walk or going for a swim in the ocean, whatever that is, you have to understand you'll never see that again.
And there's no hope you will.
And there's a lot of studies that are done on the psychology of spaceflight and colonization and living in these conditions.
And every one of them says it's harder than you think.
And crew selection is becoming such a scientific process that you wonder what would happen if you just opened it up the tickets to anyone who could afford it.
And those early days are going to be so awful, so difficult.
And they'll be busy, but they'll be busy doing work, setting up the colony.
So the idea that someone would buy a ticket and think that they're going to sit out on the surface of Mars and stare at the sun coming up.
It's going to be a lot harder than that, dangerous, and in a lot of ways boring.
Windows are a really hard thing to think about life without windows.
If you're on the moon living under shielding the whole time and living in that alien environment, it's not easy and it's not fun and it won't be for a long time.
So that's why the Mars One, the mass colonization thing, eh, not so much.
I mean, if you're on a cycler and you can draw, you know, your spacecraft goes past Mars, you jump off, hang out, it comes back around, you go back out and you come back home.
That's my kind of trip.
Then all of a sudden you've opened it up a lot more.
But to do that in any kind of a way means that you've got a mature Launch system, you've got mature infrastructure on the surface, you've got hope of survival, and you've got a real industry there.
But doing the one-way ticket was just dramatic, but I think it was mostly just for show, a good show and a fun show, but at the end of the day, hopeless.
You know, it's not exactly a suicide mission, but it's a mission that is one, you know, it's one way.
There's no return.
There literally would be no return.
So you'll never see them again.
That's a big step.
I mean, people have a hard time saying goodbye at an airport.
Imagine saying goodbye to spaceport when you'll never be seen again.
Now, go back in time.
They would be a little more resilient.
That would be par for the course.
Hey, I'm leaving Ireland.
I'm going to the New World.
I'm going to New York.
I'm going to make my fortune.
You'll never see me again.
And the scale of human history, that's how human beings have been most of the time.
That's how we were able to colonize this planet.
So we may have to recapture some of that willingness to destroy the family and the social network to jump out and do something new.
But of course, you have to be there.
If there's an opportunity there, there's no reason to go.
In the era of poverty in the United Kingdom, in Europe, when people went to America to try and find a better life for themselves, of course, they're still doing that.
But, you know, for example, my own grandfather, Leslie, he jumped ship.
He was a mariner, seafarer for a while out of Liverpool, where so many people were.
He jumped ship in New York, but he came back.
There was always the option if you go to live in another country that you can come back.
But if you go to live on Mars, unless they devise the technology to hop on a passing freighter and go home eventually, then you are stuck there.
And you have to, assuming you arrive there, you have to accept the fact you're going to die there.
And the Cortez method of inspiring his troops was to burn the ships.
Hey, there is no going back.
Don't even think about it.
Just think about what's in front of you.
There's no rearview mirror on the spaceship.
We're only going forward.
That's a pretty tough thing to sell.
And in this day and age, when, yeah, you can come to the United States, for example, and try to find a better life and you'd be separate from your family, but you can still send money home.
You can still send emails home.
Video chat.
I mean, it's a lot easier, but the expectation is proximity.
The expectation is good communication.
The expectation is you're there at a snap of the fingers.
And that's not going to be what life is like there.
It's going to be a lot more crude.
The technology will be better, but the living is going to be rough for the first people there.
And that's just the reality of colonization, the reality of being in an alien environment.
And people will die.
I mean, you can't do this kind of thing without casualties, is my opinion.
So how are you going to handle that?
If you don't want to be selling tickets to something there, it becomes high risk, and then it's not sustainable.
So you've got to walk before you can run.
And part of walking is getting astronauts to the space station, getting rovers and landers on the moon and Mars that have been developed by private companies.
These are the things we can do right now, today, that are actually happening right now, today, that are really sowing the seeds and laying the foundation for these grander plans that are coming.
So, you know, you can extrapolate it out.
And if things go well, it's going to happen sooner than a lot of people thought, but it's not right now.
And a lot of countries, more countries than ever before, seem to be jumping on the space bandwagon.
We hear more about the Japanese and their plans.
The Israelis sent a probe that very nearly got down onto the surface of the moon very recently, within the last month or so.
Yeah, we got down faster than they anticipated.
And definitely made it.
not in one piece, unfortunately.
But, you know, it was a—I think, as we Brits say, you know, it was a great— I think America's more about you have to absolutely make it.
The Brits tend to reward the triers as well.
And that was a great try.
Maybe next time they're going to get it.
But then there's China.
It's not that far is an amazing achievement.
I mean, making it to the moon at all is an amazing achievement.
And being that close makes it sting.
But again, you try, you break, you learn, you try again.
Why are the Americans talking about going back to the moon?
I guess it's a complicated question, but the most simple answer that makes the most sense is that we have a space program and it has to go somewhere.
And as stupid as that sounds, we've had a long, long stretch where we didn't have a destination.
We can't build spacecraft and space missions if we don't have a destination.
The destination kept shifting.
Bush wanted to go back to the moon.
Obama cancels that.
He wants to go to an asteroid.
You know, that gets shut to the side.
And now the latest plan is moon, then Mars.
And that's something everyone can kind of agree on.
And there's enough groundsfall and there's enough work being done from private space and within NASA to make that work.
It's a good legacy.
So the moon is a great, you know, the more complicated question is that we can learn a lot from the moon.
We can learn about how to live in space somewhere that's a lot closer.
If you're on Mars and something goes drastically wrong, you're a lot farther away to get help.
You're not close on the moon by any stretch, but you can get back a lot faster.
You can have a lot more contingencies.
You can send things back out there in an emergency.
Everything is easier when you're closer, and the moon is a lot closer.
Plus, you know, I mean, no offense to Buzz Aldrin, who thinks that, hey, we've been there, let's not go, which is his line through the Obama administration.
You know, we don't know a lot about the moon.
You know, the lessons you can learn on the formation of the solar system, you compare some of the information that you get from the moon to some of the more recent missions, to some of these asteroids, and the things we're learning about Mars, we're getting very close to a cohesive picture of how the solar system formed.
And the moon is a huge component of that because it informs a lot about how the Earth formed.
So, you know, there's a scientific possibilities of setting up a telescope on the dark side, things like this are legit.
They're legitimate reasons to go.
Also, there's a lot of water there.
So if you want to think about an economy in space, water is going to be the new oil, right?
That's oil for space.
So if we can figure out ways to extract water and oxygen from the lunar ice, then you don't have to ship it from the planet.
You've got a commodity that you'll need.
You can make rocket fuel and life support uses for it.
So there's an economic sort of reason right there as well.
An enable is something that would enable humanity to really spread out through the solar system for human beings, actually crude missions.
So those are some reasons why you'd want to go back.
But just having a destination is almost an advance enough.
That's how bad off NASA was for a long time.
Of course, once we get to the moon, we can use it as a staging post.
I remember when I was a kid, there was a TV series called UFO, and part of that was about a moon base.
And the moon base was there not only to detect threats to this planet, but was also, I think, for exploration as well.
So I guess if we get to the moon, then it's almost like having a bus depot there.
You can park your transport, make your plan, and then set off for somewhere else.
That's exactly right.
And what the hardware that they're talking about, not just NASA, but more countries are signing on with interest is this lunar gateway idea where they have a communication system.
They've got a small, sometimes crewed.
It's able to, the idea is that people could stop in there and actually get out and use it as an actual crewed space station.
But more importantly, it could be a depot for supplies.
It could be, and maybe most importantly, a communication relay between the surface and the Earth and ships that are, spaceships that are going to other destinations like Mars.
So it's a vital, and you can move it around too, which is cool.
So this lunar gateway is sort of that idea where it's the place you can stop in and then keep going from there.
It's some infrastructure that everyone's supposed to be able to use, commercial, space companies, and other governments.
So it would be for use for everybody, put up there by the United States and some of their partners.
So that's exactly what that plan would be.
And I like that part of the gateway plan.
I like the idea that some people think, well, it's not needed, but it's something we can put up there quickly.
That's why we're doing it.
That is true also.
But it could be a very useful piece of hard work there, especially if it means that another country or a space company can design something that could rely on that to do something a little bit more ambitious.
So in terms of an enabling technology or an enabling system, I like that idea.
And that is going to be the first things that are launched up towards the moon are components of that gateway.
We talked about the countries.
Surprising in some cases who have developing space programs.
The Chinese, you would expect that.
The Indians, maybe less so, because they have many issues that they need to be dealing with maybe here on Earth.
But they have a space program.
The Japanese, we said, are very interested in, for example, asteroids, bits of space rock, finding out about those.
Something that you wrote about on your website fascinating me because I didn't even know they had a space agency or a space program of any kind.
The Brazilians.
Now, they've had not the greatest of history with it, but they had or have a space program, which I think America is now helping them out with.
Yeah, well, we'll see if in Brazil they— So it's a perfect place to put a spaceport.
You've got the Earth spin enables you to launch more mass for less fuel.
You're launching east and right on the equator.
You sort of get that slingshot from the Earth's gravity.
So that's a good thing.
You know, the Brazilian space program has some of the worst, most fatal in terms of body count accident when Alcantara exploded and killed a lot of people who are working on the ground.
It wasn't during a launch either.
So they've got a long way to go.
But when I think about international spaceflight now, I think about more places that instead of, all right, where we can launch from a new spaceport in Brazil, I think more, all right, I'm Nigeria.
You know, I've got some extra money.
I'm not going to build my own space program.
But, hey, look, here's this American company.
It's SpaceX of Blue Origin or whoever.
I can use a fraction of the cost and get Nigerian astronauts up and have that kind of space program.
They're doing that with satellites now.
I mean, that's sort of par for the course.
But the idea that you could sort of rent these rides and put foreign nationals in them to do their own sort of deep space missions, they may have to launch in the United States and there'd have to be some kind of smoothing out of some of the export restrictions probably.
But I think it's a much bigger deal.
And I don't think that Americans particularly realize that what's happening in Florida is the entire world can rent these things.
You wonder what the reaction would be if the Iranians would probably like to have people in space.
What if they wanted to rent a ride?
So that's what you have to start thinking about.
It's not going to be a uniquely American crew by any stretch.
It'll be an international crew.
Anyone who wants to buy a ticket can go.
And the same thing with the small satellites and the same thing with the cheaper geostationary launches and the rest of it.
So it really is a global change that's being spearheaded in America.
And I think a lot of the space ports And space infrastructure, space programs, building satellites.
I don't think that a lot of other countries are looking at the launch part.
They're thinking, how can I get in on the space industry, the space economy?
How can we, you know, we've been stymied for so long.
We go to the United States, you can get a great education.
You can't even get a job in these space companies if you're foreign national and have to go back home.
They're looking at the commercial space business.
How can we get in on this?
And if they don't have to worry about paying tens of millions of dollars for a ride or develop their own spaceport, which is hundreds of millions, then all of a sudden they're enabled by this private space revolution.
And that's a global change.
And I think that might be some of the most exciting stuff that comes out from this and least appreciated.
Well, your book is called Spaceport Earth, and it does seem that these days everybody wants a spaceport.
There's even a plan, I think, at the moment for Scotland, you know, here north of the UK to have its own spaceport.
So, you know, the spaceport, the idea that we're going to develop a spaceport, it'll be everywhere.
That kind of, to me, that sounds good.
It sounds like it's a democratization of space.
It certainly makes it more interesting for more people.
And one of the things that I found when I was looking at the book, and all these spaceports were popping up, was that people didn't understand that the launch vehicles are changing so much that you can put a spaceport in, you know, outside of Houston.
You know, it's not going to be launching rockets vertically.
There'll be airplanes that carry spacecraft up to altitude and launch from there.
There'll be, you know, some places just want to enable a space plane to land with experiments.
That makes your industrial park, because every spaceport is an industrial park with tenants as well as a launch pad.
So if you are, you know, if you have a laboratory or something and you want to do some space experiments, you're an aerospace company, you want to test components, you want that thing to land at your municipal airport on a space plane, there you go.
You'd have that ability.
And that is the way they're thinking about some of these spaceports is that some of them are, not all of them are vertical launch, very few of them are actually.
But launching air launch rockets and smaller systems, that's all changing where space can happen, right, or where space flight can happen.
And that is very democratizing, and it's very exciting.
I mean, the idea that Waco has a spaceport is at the technical school is really interesting.
I mean, they may never see a launch, they may never see a space plane land, but they're enabled regardless.
And it puts them on the map for cutting edge, you know, as a cutting edge research spot or someone that's looking ahead, and it helps them attract other tenants.
So there's sort of a business case for this as well that has very little to do with launch, but everything to do with economy and economic development here.
But what about the idea of control?
Because the technologies you're working with are powerful technologies.
They can be used for many things.
Also, access to space.
I mean, we can't just have anybody going up into space and spilling junk out there.
There's enough junk floating around up there as it is.
But also, we need to be knowing what people are doing up there.
If somebody's planning to launch something that could be used to deploy weaponry up there, we certainly need to know about that.
But if you think about it, the possibility exists that somebody can maybe schedule a satellite launch from a spaceport somewhere in the U.S. or somewhere in Europe or somewhere in South America.
And the thing will be up there doing whatever it's doing before we know about it.
Or is there a plan to regulate these spaceports?
Well, the regulations are already really tight.
And getting an FAA permit is a multi-year process.
You have to tell them what you're launching.
You have to talk to the FAA.
You have to talk to local airlines.
You have to talk several environmental permits.
You have to make the business case.
What are you launching and who are you launching it for?
What are the fuels?
Because that all sort of informs the ground infrastructure at the spaceport.
But what happens if you're in Bolivia or Tierra del Fuego?
What happens if you're in Bolivia or Tierra del Fuego and you want to put a spaceport up and start getting clients for it?
It's all bets are off then.
I mean, the only hope that you have, really, is that your irresponsible actor is going to be less irresponsible because they don't want space to be polluted either.
So if you're putting something up into space, you want that environment to be safe.
And so you wouldn't want to put something up that would be in the way that someone else can collide with.
I mean, you need those things to be tracked.
Now, having said that, the space situational awareness, as they call it, the space radars and things are getting better.
There's a space fence, they call it, that's going up in Kwajalein.
The idea you can sneak something up and people wouldn't notice is pretty tough.
There are one thing that the Russians, the United States, are particularly good at is tracking launches from planet Earth.
And we've got satellites up there that can detect the plumes, the heat signatures of plumes from launches.
That alone, and then with the space radar.
And there's armies of international satellite watchers who, you go on their web boards and threads, they are looking at everything that they can up there and tracking the TLEs, they call them, the data of where the satellites go.
It's not as easy as you might think to sneak something into space these days.
Now, it's not impossible, but you usually have to do some kind of subterfuge like masking a small satellite as space debris so you can log it into the, you know, there's international directories of space objects, you know, that the United States military runs, but other countries certainly have seats at the table.
And they all sort of inform each other.
You can track satellites with lasers.
There's a lot of ways that you can figure out what's going On in space and try to keep it safer.
But if you don't care, if you're North Korea, for example, and you've got missile technology and you could put something up that could detonate in orbit and take out a lot of satellites, well, what do you care?
You don't have any satellites.
So that's the kind of dangerous system that someone with just enough technology to mess it up with nothing to lose.
And everyone else who's in space has something to lose.
Even when they do eight anti-satellite tests, they try to do it in a way that causes the least amount of debris.
Any debris too much, but at least they go for the lower altitude satellites.
So it can get real messy real quick, that's for sure.
And one incident can cascade into many.
So there's no such thing as a small incident in orbit because of the way that they can propagate and the damage can spread.
And you can have a real problem with a couple of satellites get taken out and spread more debris and more debris and more debris.
So it's a real serious problem.
But, you know, you're not going to get around it by regulation.
I mean, they regulate themselves to a certain degree, but sooner or later someone's going to screw up.
And we need some way to cleaning up space debris in an emergency situation as well.
And I think we need some kind of international coordination to put the block on some of the crazier plans.
I mean, a few months ago, I think the guy is Russian.
I think he's an entrepreneur with deep pockets.
And I think the idea was floated to put advertising in space.
Now, I don't want to look into the night sky.
And as much as I may love Sony or whatever corporation it might be, I don't want to see their logo there.
I want to see the stars.
There needs to be regulation of plans for space, doesn't there?
Common sense may be the final regulation for that particular dumb plan.
But there are other plans that are contentious.
And there are international rules in place now that prohibit some things, like placing weapons in space, for example, that are aimed at Earth.
Nuclear weapons is you can put weapons in space.
You just can't put nuclear weapons in space by treaty.
But breaking a treaty is pretty easy.
And what if you're not a treaty holder?
So if signing a piece of paper is not going to stop a bad actor from doing a bad thing, what's going to do that is better space situational awareness, better cooperation between the legitimate spacefaring nations and organizations.
And honestly, if you make the space tracking system civilian instead of military, it could open it up to more people and more places and be a little bit more dynamic and self-reporting.
So those are a couple of steps that you can get.
Because honestly, right now, when you talk about space treaties and, you know, the Chinese, the Russians, and the Americans are not going to cooperate on anything because of the militarization of space is going so gangbusters right now.
It's considered a, what there's a phrase, like a contested ground, right?
So, you know, right now they can't even agree on how to classify something as an anti-satellite weapon.
If it maneuvers and can look at a satellite that's ailing and say, okay, here's how we can fix it, that's peaceful.
But that same maneuver can collide with it or shoot a laser to dazzle some of the sensors or be aggressive.
It's dual use.
It's the exact same technology.
It's the exact same process.
So how do you disambiguate that one from the other?
It gets really thorny, and that's what they're wrestling with now in the United Nations.
They have been for years.
So if you think that group is going to make a consensus on how to do the rest of it, you might not want to hold your breath.
That's a bit of a worry.
But look, there's a flip side to all of these things.
And there is the development of the industry, and it will become an industry, I'm sure, of space for fun.
You only got to look at Virgin Galactic.
I have a friend here, Nigel Henbest, who has invested his life savings into a place.
And I think he's number 200 and something on one of Sir Richard Branson's first flights up there, first few score flights up there.
I think that Branson has a spaceport that's built already, and they're training people to go up there.
So the industry of space for fun is beginning, isn't it?
It is.
I mean, in some ways it's exciting because it's here, and it does seem like it's opening up the industry a little bit.
But in a lot of other ways, it's a smaller, less, it's exciting, but it's less impactful than some of these other programs, mostly because it's suborbital.
And you're barely in space, and you come up and you come down, and that's extremely exciting.
And I would do in a heartbeat, trust me.
But the other applications for that are testing components in microgravity briefly.
I mean, you're only up there in quote-unquote space for four or five minutes.
So the other uses of that sort of joyride are, it's hard to make a wider economic case.
Now, if you talk about point-to-point travel, going into space and coming back down, traveling the world in a half an hour, okay, now suborbital starts making a little bit more sense in the long run in terms of its trailblazing something else.
You see spaceports in Dubai that are with Virgin.
You see the U.S. military looking at suborbital delivery in terms of, hey, we've got to rush something across the globe.
And so instead of an ICBM dropping a nuke in 30 minutes, hey, let's drop a capsule with humanitarian supplies or Marines or, you know, ammunition or whatever you need.
So they're looking at that.
They've been talking about that.
So even the suborbital has some sort of future to it.
But to me, I kind of wish that didn't come first because the idea that a billionaire set up a spaceport that is purposely built just for him, they have all their tenants now, but the reason it's there is because they put it, people voted on a tax,
but they live in the, you know, some of The poorest counties in the entire United States voted to pay or help pay for a spaceport for a billionaire to launch multi-millionaires onto space trips that have no real utility.
So, you know, that was a bad look at this at start.
And then he delayed and delayed and got delayed.
And, you know, people died in development and all this and that.
And the thing just sat there unused or virtually unused.
Other tenants moved in.
A lot of military programs moved in because it was so quiet.
The poor spaceport couldn't even talk about the people who were using it.
Is this the one in Waco you're talking about?
No, no, this is Spaceport America in New Mexico.
Right.
So this is the downside, isn't it?
If you fire the starting gun for a kind of modern-day Klondike gold rush, and you say, let's build a spaceport here, it's going to be great for business.
We're not quite sure what we're going to do with it, but we'll bring all kinds of businesses here, and rich people are going to want to travel from here one of these days once we work out the technology.
Problem with that is, if you start from the wrong end of a premise, which that seems to be it is, you're going to run into problems, as you said.
And it's, it, it, it, you know, their problems spread to the other parts of the industry where, you know, all right, this is a playground for millionaires and billionaires.
And other people who are watching it saying, yeah, but wait a minute, there's, you know, if we bring the price of launch down, all of a sudden, everyone, all these other launch companies are going to have to keep up.
And we're going to make it easier to go to space.
And things are going to be getting, you know, this could really democratize everything.
And look what it can do if instead of suborbital, look at low Earth orbit and the way you can wire third world nations or parts of first world nations that don't have good connections using space for that, using space to help power your sort of personal electronics and embedded electronics.
And some of these things that could really have a benefit to the layperson, that was all pushed aside for Leonardo DiCaprio buying a ticket on this five-minute joyride.
And how excited can you get about that?
So SpaceX really, by their record of achievement, neutralized some of that.
I mean, the fact that he is launching satellites for the U.S. military and that he's launching stuff for NASA and he's launching stuff for the commercial satellites, which are some of the hardest sales to make, and actually putting stuff into space was so huge.
It really showed that a company could take on these challenges and succeed.
And Blue Origin is setting up a great network and a great foundation to build on, great hardware, great engineering, but they haven't launched anything in space.
So without the doer, the person who actually did it and demonstrated, which is SpaceX, and Gwen Shotwell deserves as much credit, if not more, than Elon because she really kept that place on a very even keel during a lot of challenges.
And they're reaping the rewards for that now.
And they're going more aggressively into the whole Mars thing and crewed spaceflight and putting humans in space.
And hopefully the record will continue to be good.
But even if they folded Shot and NAT, they've changed the entire pricing and hardware and launch dynamics globally.
So that's not such a bad legacy for a space startup.
And of course, there is an imperative here that it's not nice to think about.
Some people talk about it from time to time, but it's worth thinking about.
You know, we are being told that our climate is changing and we only have a limited amount of time to stop this planet being tipped on its head one way or another and people dying and species disappearing at an alarming rate.
Well, they're already starting to disappear.
You know, one degree temperature rise we have so far, if it goes much beyond that, we're going to have a big problem.
Do you think some of this planning for space, even though it isn't verbalized and articulated, might be to do with finding us somewhere else to live, just in case?
Well, there are two things.
One, if they really were worried about climate change that much, they wouldn't be building so many spaceports on, I know, that close to the water.
But in a larger sense, that's always been the case.
I mean, you're talking about a bunch of science fiction geeks here.
And I say that as one.
And the one thing you can say is that we always have an eye on the end of the world.
And you know what?
It always happens.
And it has happened repeatedly.
And, you know, between climate, asteroids, you know, strip, human pollution, you know, nuclear war, just go ahead and name it.
You know, volcanoes, plague, it doesn't matter.
And at the end of the day, we're doomed here.
The species is going to die on this planet, forgotten, except for a bunch of radio waves that are spreading through the galaxy, the universe, basically.
There's got to be a better solution.
And ensuring the survival of the human species by getting us the hell off of this worthless rock is not such a bad plan if you're a billionaire who worries about these things.
So from the start, I remember interviewing Musk early on in this process.
And he said, what are the things I can do that can really help the human species?
And he thought working on batteries and electric vehicles is one of them, but spaceflight was another.
And making humans interplanetary as a species is the only way to guarantee that we're going to be left kicking around after this planet gets out on us.
And one of these days it will, either by our own hand or nature just tends to clean house.
And we don't want to be there for that because civilization is nice, but when it collapses, it's not going to be pretty.
But it's not going to be like queuing my dream of getting off the planet is real.
It isn't going to be like queuing for the Greyhound bus in Galveston, though.
Not everybody's going to get the chance to go.
In fact, very few will.
Well, that's true, too.
By the time something bad is happening, it's not going to be a crash course.
Let's get off the planet, see how we do, because then we'll fail.
and then they'll just be bones and artifacts on a couple of different planets instead of one, or on the moon and Earth.
So if you really want to do a successful migration, you have to, to somewhere that's hostile, you have to set up something there that can contain X amount of people.
And you can maybe scale it up if you have enough time.
But, you know, human beings are pretty good breeders.
So I think if you get a certain, and people have done the calculations on how many, you know, people it would take to get off.
And I don't know the number.
I wish I did offhand.
But to get, you know, a couple of generations and get a good gene pool up there.
But don't forget, we've got, you know, with genetic technology and cloning and, you know, you freeze what you don't need.
So, you know, freeze a lot of embryos, freeze a lot of cow, sheep, goat, and people.
And then you've got a, you know, you've got a very small footprint with a very large capacity for producing more people and more, you know, plants.
And, you know, you've got to get a seed bank and a gene bank off of this planet, even to start thinking about really colonizing somewhere else.
And then, you know, honestly, you need a friendly planet.
You need an Earth-like planet.
That's why some of these space telescopes are really amazing at the number of planets that they're finding.
More and more and more exoplanets.
How many planets in the habitable zone there are.
So, you know, you pick a destination, you get there.
You know, if you've frozen enough life and you've got a planet to establish it there, which has its own, you know, again, you can write a science fiction book based on the problems of that.
But if you don't have that, then why?
why even try so but you got to get the launch cross down you got to figure out how people can live in space and then you have to figure out your destination if you really want to colonize somewhere that's that's going to keep this species kicking after a huge calamity this conversation is going to go out in may 2019.
So speaking as of effectively May 2019, Joe Pappalato, what is the one piece of space technology or upcoming research that excites you most?
Oh, you know what?
This beat's been so great lately that it's almost a weekly, you know, you should almost try.
So what's going to be happening then?
You know, one of the things that I'm going to be really keeping an eye on is the attempt to not land, but do a touch and go on a very small asteroid called Bennu.
And they got to Bennu, they being, this is NASA and Lockheed are doing this.
And with, you know, with the usual crop of schools that designed it as well for the science end.
But they're flying a small probe called OSIRIS-REx, and it's going to do a sample return from this asteroid, kind of asteroid it's never been to before.
And they got there earlier this year, and they're right now orbiting, it's actually in the Guinness Book of World Records, of the smallest interplanetary body ever to be orbited by a spacecraft.
And it's, what they're finding is that it's really rocky.
The terrain is not like anything that they thought it was going to be like.
So they're right now trying to pick a spot to sneak in, put the probe down.
It's only going to be touching the asteroid for, you know, three or four seconds, hoovers up some material and flies away from it, which is a, you know, very delicate maneuver, fraught with peril.
Well, when you think the relative speeds of these things, when you think of the speed that it's traveling at, and if you're orbiting it, then you've got the speed of the trajectory of the thing you're trying to land on.
And then you have to set your speed to orbit this.
And then you think you're going to land on it.
Then you have to get something to scoop up a sample.
Then you have to get off.
How many places where this could go wrong are there?
Wow.
More than I even care to think about it.
Every time I see a new image from the spacecraft beam down, they're showing, A, it's exciting from the geological perspective, because there's so many different kinds of rocks and sizes and powdery and hard.
I mean, it's already a bounty of science information.
But where would you sneak in there?
And when they do, and they have, you know, three or four attempts to do it, but, you know, that's going to be extremely exciting as that unfolds.
One, because if it works, it'll be, you know, and if the sample returns successfully, it's going to be studied for, you know, for probably decades by the time all the science comes out from it.
And then the things they'll learn will be fairly revelatory in terms of the formation of the solar system.
But just from an engineering and technical standpoint, it's going to be a white-knuckled kind of a space mission.
It's great when it can go wrong because you're really, you know, that means you're exploring.
If they knew what it was going to be like and they didn't have to do any of this planning on the spot, fine.
You know, they did an amazing job of engineering something that could even try to get the sample returned.
So there's a good chance it'll work, but it's not guaranteed, and that makes it extremely exciting.
And no sign of Bruce Willis on this one.
No, and even better, no Ben Affleck.
We like both of them, but not on this one.
Fascinating conversation, Joe Pappalado.
sometime you have um a great website that i was looking at extensively before we recorded this conversation what's that website called it's uh popularmechanics.com uh it's you know the it's not just what's in the magazine but uh breaking news and um you know guest essays and and uh analysis i mean some fun stuff you know um i just uh you know you know the the thing about popper mechanics that's so
kind of cool and interesting is that some magazines think that you should be empowered by having better abs or something, and they try to get you to pick up the magazine because you feel like, "If I don't pick up this magazine, there's no way I'm going to have good abs." Well, with proper mechanics, it's like, how can you live in a modern world if you don't know how things work?
You don't have to be the one fixing it, but how could you even be conversant if you don't know?
So, it's a place to get smarter without having to go to school.
And— greatest adverb i've ever heard it's a place to get smarter without having to go to school who would not want that joe thank you very much and what's the name of that cafe you're in now again oh books inc in uh portland texas and they do sell uh spaceport earth here signed copy so if you're in south texas um well if anyone listening is in south texas have uh jennifer here call me i'll come over and say hi in person just around the corner.
Okay.
And if I get a chance to visit that place, I'll get a copy of the book, sit down with a coffee and a fudge brownie, and I'll be a happy boy.
Joe, thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
It's been a great treat.
Joe Papillado, and I will try to include a link to him and his work on my website, theunexplained.tv.
Thank you very much for being in touch.
Please keep the emails coming.
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And thank you very much for being part of this journey that we've now been on for all these years.
If you go to the website, you'll see how many years.
More great guests in the pipeline, and until next we meet.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I am in London.
This has been the Unexplained and please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm, and above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
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