We're talking about the future of
NASA in this addition of
Let's Make America Smart Again.
(Music)
I'm your host Neil deGrasse Tyson.
I've got my co-host Chuck Nice,
tweeting @chucknicecomic.
- Thank you sir, yes.
- All right, and I've got with us, since
we're talking about the future of NASA,
we've got somebody who has just been
working for NASA for the last several
years in the capacity of Chief Scientist.
I've got Ellen Stofan here.
Ellen- - Hey.
- Thanks for coming. - Nice to be here.
- Not your first time on StarTalk.
- Not my first time,
but always happy to be here.
- Excellent, excellent, we love this.
And so, Chuck,
you've been soliciting queries.
- Yes, I have from all over the Internet.
- About the future of NASA, so let's see.
And in this, again, our goal here is to
imagine a smarter America going forward.
So, let's see, what do you have here?
- All right, so
Anna Jesus coming to us from Facebook,
would like to know this (Cough).
What is the main difference between
NASA and SpaceX, in terms of what they
would like to achieve in space exploration
in the near and far future?
And, let me add to that,
what is the chief purpose of NASA?
Or, what is NASA's mission statement?
- Well, I should be able to quote NASA's
mission statement from memory,
but I can't.
But it's basically to understand our
world, our solar system, our universe, and
to use technology to move humans
beyond Earth.
That is really, if you want to sum it up,
that's NASA's mission,
exploration knowledge.
So- - Cool, cool mission.
- SpaceX is a contractor to NASA.
NASA has lots of industry partners,
SpaceX is one of them.
They launch cargo up to
the International Space Station.
Starting next year, they'll launch crew
up to the International Space Station
from Florida.
So, they're one of many contractors.
Now, obviously SpaceX has obviously stated
that they want to see humans on Mars,
NASA wants to see humans on Mars.
So, our goals are actually really aligned
and we have a partnership
with SpaceX to help them land one of their
Dragon capsules on Mars.
And I'm excited, because they've done
a lot of work on entry descent and
landing that will hopefully make it
able for us to land humans sooner.
- You said earlier that one of
the challenges is that
Mars has a thin atmosphere.
Could you detail
why that's more of a challenge to EDL,
entry, descent, land than on Earth?
- Our atmosphere is much denser.
So if people haven't
seen there's a great video that JPL put
together before the Curiosity Rover.
- The Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
- Before the Curiosity Rover landed
called Seven Minutes of Terror.
And it basically takes seven minutes when
you're coming in
from a trajectory from Earth to get from
the top of the atmosphere to the surface.
So, you have to slow yourself way, way,
way, way down.
- You've got good speed to get there, now
you've got to eat up that speed somehow.
- Yeah, and to absorb that speed,
the atmosphere is just not helping you
very much, but it's heating you up,
which is bad.
So, you've got to find some way to slow
yourself down.
So, Curiosity weighed one metric ton, and
we used a combination of-
- On Earth!, (Laugh).
- (Laugh) On Earth.
- Unless if that's the mass,
the mass of a thousand kilograms.
- Yes, so, we used heat shields,
parachutes, this bizarre thing called
a sky crane to land it on the surface.
We estimate, for humans,
you're going to need 20 to 40 metric
tons landed on the surface.
And the more you can bunch that
into single landings, the cheaper it is,
so there's issues with that.
So, how are you going to slow
yourself, coming down?
You're going to have to use something
called supersonic retropropulsion,
which basically means
that- - Sounds like it hurts.
- Yeah. (Laugh) - It does,
because you're firing retro rockets while
you're going at supersonic speeds,
which causes all kinds of turbulence.
Everything you're shooting out the back
comes back at your spacecraft at
supersonic speed, so it's a crazy thing.
SpaceX has actually been working on it.
- That's right.
So, if you're moving supersonically, and
you try to put retroexhaust in
front of you, you overtake the exhaust.
- Exactly.
- That's so wild.
- Yeah, yeah, that's wild.
That's wild. - So, it's complicated,
to say the least (Crosstalk).
- You can't roll down the window and
stick your hands out to slow down?
(Laugh) - And
it's not that an insurmountable.
My gosh, we can't ever send humans to
Mars, it's too hard.
And it frustrates me sometimes,
I'll see commentary of saying,
we just need to stick at the moon,
Mars is too hard.
Mars is not too hard,
we can figure it out.
- Yeah, just any engineer would froth at
the mouth to have the opportunity
to- - Exactly.
- Solve these problems.
- Exactly, and again when you solve tough
problems like that,
you're stretching technology,
you're stretching computational skills.
- You're patenting.
- You're patenting stuff.
- You're inventing, yeah.
- You're spinning off stuff
into our economy right here on Earth.
- Give me another one.
- All right,
here we go this is Jeff Saustourettes and
Jeff says, Chuck,
you have butchered my name too many times.
(Laugh) - That I'd like to clear
the record, it's sauce like spaghetti and
Tourette's like the syndrome.
Saustourettes.
Thank you, Jeff, for
phonetically clarifying your name.
Here is what he wants to know.
What is the average age and
education of a NASA employee?
Is the demographic getting younger, or
older over the years?
So are we attracting people to NASA?
- By the way, we all saw the video of
the launch and return of the first stage
in the SpaceX, Rocket.
And you see mission control for SpaceX.
There's nobody there over 30!
There's one old
fart who's 40 in the corner.
(Laugh) - Looking around like this.
Everybody else who's jumping and
hooting and hollering?
If they're 35, that skews young,
it looks to me.
- It does skew young.
And if you look at our NASA centers,
which again we have nine NASA centers,
plus our federally funded research and
development center,
the Jet Propulsion Laboratory may contend,
around the country.
- FFRDC.
- Is that how it rolls? - If you're in
the loop.
- FFRDC.
- Exactly.
- No, you still struggle,
you still stress out.
- It almost rolled off (Laugh).
- It's hard to get it to roll off.
- I need to know more about the FFRDC.
- The average age is about 52 to
56 depending on the center.
Now, part of that is,
because we have people who don't want to
leave.
They love what they do.
They're still productive.
We've had scientists who were still
writing significant papers in their 80s.
So, that does tend to hurt
your statistics.
On the other hand- - I noticed in
the 60s everyone just died at age 60.
That was it.
- Right, it's kind of.
(Laugh) - We have people who don't like to
retire they love what they do.
- It's the ham and the smoking,
a lot of smoking and
a lot of ham consumption.
- (Laugh) Ham was a big part of American
diet back then.
- Big part of American diet.
- It was.
- Every holiday, everything.
- Everything, yeah.
And then, when you didn't have ham,
you had Spam.
- Really?
(Laugh) - But we're healthier now.
- I told my son that Spam was food and
he said what daddy, what?
- Dad, you're eating emails that you don't
want?
What?
- I'm sorry go on, where were you?
- So, we've also had
periods of time where the federal
government has hiring freezes on.
And NASA downsized when the shuttle
program ended.
So, all of that's combined to make
our federal workforce older and
we need more younger people in there.
- When you have a hiring freeze, but
it applies to NASA, it's a brain freeze.
- Nice!
(Laugh) - Was that good?
- Yes, exactly.
- What do I get a B plus?
- I'm going to give
you a B plus on that one.
- C.
- You said C?
- Okay, B.
(Laugh).
- No, no, no, yeah.
- No, no it's a brain freeze.
It's a brain freeze, if
it applies to NASA, it's a brain freeze.
Because you're not bringing in fresh brain
blood.
- Which means that those resources
are being allocated some place else,
most likely Wall Street (Laugh).
- Right, and
the other thing is though, you really want
that mix of ages, because we've got people
who really know how to land on Mars.
We have people who know how to
keep humans up in space safe.
So, you need that wisdom and
you need the fresh blood coming in that's
going to carry that forward.
- But you also need a culture where fresh
blood who is not biased by how you always
did do it can be open to a new idea.
- Exactly, and that need for innovation is
something that we worked on a lot over
the last couple of years at NASA.
How do we ensure that we're the most
innovative as a 50 year plus old agency,
you really do worry about are you being
the most innovative?
And NASA worries about that.
- Interesting.
- I know the age of NASA, because it was
founded the same week I was born.
- 1958.
- So, I feel the pain.
- Yeah, a lot of people do.
- I feel.
(Laugh) - A lot of people don't know this,
but- (Laugh) - He feels that lack of
innovation (Laugh).
- Yeah, whatever Neil calls NASA
the message is, I'm your father.
- (Laugh) All right, here we go.
- Do the sound again.
I am your sibling.
That doesn't work.
- That doesn't work.
Here we go.
Brad Karako from Facebook would like to
know this.
Does NASA have a future solution to
the growing space junk problem?
So are you guys, working on this?
- NASA's working on it.
- Wait, where does space junk come from?
- Space junk is, because over the last 50
plus years we put a lot of stuff up there.
Some of it has broken off, so
there are actually even old stages of
rockets, pieces of spacecraft.
There was an occasion a couple years ago
where two spacecraft ran into each other,
and it created a whole
lot more pieces of debris.
So, there's just a lot of stuff up there.
Now, it slowly, slowly deorbits, but
we do worry about it.
A couple of times a year, they have to
move the International Space Station
slightly to avoid space junk,
other satellites.
We have to watch when we launch things
to say is there anything else on the path.
Now, space is big, so
this isn't anything to panic over, but
space agencies around the world, and
private companies are looking at how do we
literally vacuum that stuff up?
And people, I've seen proposals- - Back
up, wait, the Space Station is
not a particularly nimble thing.
- No, it is not.
- And it's not even sort of structurally,
I mean, this- - I like this.
(Laugh) - I like this.
(Crosstalk) - Neil is doing
the Space Station dance.
- No, so, my two arms are like the solar
panels, right.
If you push over here, this will like,
bend, but
you're not going to push the whole thing.
So you're telling me
they do avoidance maneuvers
with the International Space Station?
So they don't run into somebody's shoe, or
whatever piece of debris
was left in space (Laugh).
- They do.
And they've even have rare occasions where
they realized there was debris approaching
the Space Station, and they haven't had
time, because obviously to do a maneuver,
you have to plan this out.
This isn't something that you want to be
like, yeah, let's move, you know,
so- - It's not the Millennium Falcon
who can just.
- No, so there have been times where
the astronauts have actually retreated
into the Soyuz capsule, and
waited out a potential debris encounter.
Don't you love the way that's phrased?
A potential debris encounter,
something crashing into the Space Station.
(Laugh) - Right, death, yes, yes, death,
NASA for death.
- But it's avoided, I mean, the Space
Station if you looked at it closely,
it's got little pings, and pock marks all
over it from little tiny pieces of
debris hitting it at 17,000 miles an hour.
And so, that creates little problems, but
so far- (Laugh) - But
to come back to your questions, yeah,
no problem.
- 17,000 mile an hour debris.
- Yeah, that's all.
- But that's why it's getting old and
at some point we will have to deorbit
the Space Station.
Right now it's funded through
about 24 by about 28, this for example,
the (Crosstalk).
- 2024.
- 2024, so by about 2028, a lot of
the systems will be degrading, especially
the solar panels, which are getting pinged
by this microdebris all the time.
- So, when we deorbit that,
who puts a new one up there?
When do we do that?
- That's a great question.
So, there's this big,
what is going to happen to low earth
orbit after the Space Station?
If you talk to NASA,
they would like it to be the commercial,
the private sector that moves in,
private space stations.
A place for private space companies,
Blue Origin, SpaceX, Orbital ATK,
let's find the private sector
going to low earth orbit.
- As imagined in the film 2001.
There were Howard Johnsons up there,
Pan Am ran the shuttle.
Pan Am, for
those of the younger of our audience.
- Right.
- A former airline company.
- It's the Virgin America before
America was a virgin.
- (Laugh) That's good,
but basically what it was, yeah.
- If you really get underneath that.
NASA spends about $3 billion a year on
the International Space Station.
And if we want to send humans to Mars we
want to take that $3 billion, and
start building what
will be the Mars transfer vehicle, what
humans will go in on that journey to Mars.
If they have to keep spending it on
the Space Station there's not going to be
no money to go beyond low earth orbit.
- Can we just have another $3 billion?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah,
that's how I would look at it.
- That would be a great solution,
wouldn't it?
Then we wouldn't have to worry about this,
but as it is there's not
enough money to do both right now.
There is not.
So, NASA's budget plans for moving humans
to Mars count on the Space Station budget
declining through the mid 2020s, and
zeroing out in the late 2020s.
- Okay, I'm sorry, I have to ask this
since you were there, and this all sounds
highly political to me, because you're
talking about budgetary issues.
But isn't there a way to take
the billions of dollars
that are going into Lockheed Martin
making a fighter jet that we do not need.
Or tanks that we are building that
the military has said, we do not want
them, but yet, because it's a jobs
program, we have to make them anyway.
Couldn't we just find a way to just shift
this money over to NASA so that, I mean,
there's clearly inherent benefits, and
discovery, and technological advances,
that will be wrought from going to Mars.
As opposed to a tank that we're
never going to use, because we're never
going to fight conventional warfare again.
We now have nuclear war,
anybody who we're going to fight
is going to have a nuclear warhead too, so
we're not going to do that.
So why can't we just
find a way to politically get the senator,
or the congressman and say, hey,
look, we'll give you the money,
you just gotta build whatever
you're going to build over in my district.
- Chuck Nice 2020.
(Laugh) - I was going to say,
are you ready to go up there, and make
America appreciate science more again?
I can't remember your-
- Make America smart again.
- There we go, there we go (Laugh),
(Crosstalk).
- What is the process at NASA to
talk to these people?
- Well, NASA can't lobby congress,
that's not actually allowed.
So, outside supporters can talk to NASA-
- I am flabbergasted.
- NASA can't even advertise.
- You, guys, are killing me,
are you kidding me?
- Wait, wait, just to be clear.
What the military does when they have TV
commercials during the Superbowl,
that's not technically marketing.
- They're recruiting.
- No, no, yeah, they're recruiting.
- So, what happened was when I was on one
of my commissions, we were approached by
an ad agency that wanted to create sort of
public service spots for NASA to recruit.
- Right. - To recruit scientists and
engineers in the spirit of the Army,
Navy, Air Force, Marines, recruiting, and
that way you can justify
commercial time for it.
And they were some of the most beautiful
commercials I've ever seen, and
it was just, the tradition to do that is
just not there.
- God, that is so sad.
I mean, it's almost as if our government
has stacked the death against what we
should be doing.
- No, no, but, if, this sounds good
the way it is, but imagine that in
a limit, where it's out of control.
Because all it says is, we taxpayers elect
officials who then establish budgets for
agencies.
The agency can't then market itself.
- To ask for more budget.
- Okay, that makes sense. - Because it's
a completely external activity from it.
- I understand that.
- So, that's why. - That make sense.
- And while we all feel good about NASA
should be able to do it,
in the limit you really don't want that
happening in government, that's all.
- Okay, I gotcha, no, that makes sense.
because yeah, I don't want the agriculture
department doing the same thing.
(Laugh).
- You know what I mean?
- You want just NASA to do it (Laugh).
(Laugh).
- I only want NASA to be able to do it.
(Laugh).
- So, we gotta take a quick break.
When we come back, more cosmic queries in
the Let's Make America Smart Again edition
of StarTalk.
We'll be back with Ellen Stofan,
former chief scientist at NASA.
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