Off-Nominal - 04 - In The Year of Our Lord Steve Squyres

Episode Date: January 9, 2018

Jake and Anthony drink a beer that has been to space, discuss the recently-announced New Frontiers finalists, and propose their own flagship-class missions. Huge thanks to Ninkasi Brewing Company for powering this episode! Beers Ninkasi Brewing - Ground Control 2017 Ground Control (2017) - Ninkasi Brewing Company - Untappd Ninkasi Space Program - Home Topics Future Planetary Exploration: Proposed New Frontiers Missions NASA Invests in Concept Development for Missions to Comet, Saturn Moon | NASA Dragonfly Dragonfly: A Proposal to Explore Titan, Saturn's Largest Moon, via Quadcopter - YouTube Picks SPACE 1: We're Going To Space : Planet Money : NPR Amazon.com: Forever Young: A Life of Adventure in Air and Space eBook: John W Young, James R. Hansen: Kindle Store Follow Jake WeMartians Podcast - Follow Humanity's Journey to Mars WeMartians Podcast (@We_Martians) | Twitter Jake Robins (@JakeOnOrbit) | Twitter Follow Anthony Main Engine Cut Off Main Engine Cut Off (@WeHaveMECO) | Twitter Anthony Colangelo (@acolangelo) | Twitter

TLS is go for main engine, start. Welcome to space. Do we open this giant bottle? Yes, I'm so excited for this. It's hard for me to buy a beer and then sit on it for a long time. This has been, what, two months and a half in the making? Just about a month, I guess. Yeah, I'm trying to remember.

They hit us up like the day before we were ready to record the last one. Yeah, yeah, they talked to us before. but the beer didn't get here in time. Give us a little background as I pour this. Okay, so, well, they went on, they approached us on Twitter, I guess. Who's they? We gotta say they.

You know, I'm just realizing it, I don't know how to pronounce this brewery name. Is it just Nincassi? Ninkasi. Ninkazi? I think it's Nincassi. Nankasi? Okay, well, Nincassi.

And so there. based in Eugene, Oregon, and they make this beer. What they did is they, well, essentially, they just put yeast into a rocket, like a sounding rocket, sent it to space, and then brought it back and cultured the yeast, and now they make beer out of it. It was on, what's it, UP aerospace, up aerospace. Yeah. Well, the second one, right? The flight that they were on. The second, the one that, Yeah, the one that we're drinking. Yeah, because the first one they lost. That sucks.

This is thick beer. This is super thick beer. Yeah. Well, you've got the right glass for it. No, so that was the other half of the story here. So we're drinking this one, but I've got it in a glass. Because by the way, the bottles of these are giant. What is this?

Well, this is normal for me. One pint, six fluid ounces. that's the that's what I've got on mine here you see a metric thing no I think it's probably 650 milliliters so it's pretty sizable

so I got a glass but I've got a cool glass with a little story I'll try to show you without spilling it on my laptop Meantime Brewing Company yes so last week I was in last week two weeks ago

I was in London and we took a little trip out to Greenwich to see the Royal Observatory and all that fun stuff. And there's a brewery there called the Meantime Brewing Company. So we went there for lunch. Got a little glass, bring it back. Awesome.

So it's a little bit of nerd stuff right here. That's awesome from the observatory. I've been there. It's pretty awesome though. Yeah, it's great. They've got all the Harrison clocks there from figuring out longitude. They've got multiple different observatories from, you know, all the different guys that were there trying to figure some things out. So there's like four meridians.

there's like the real one George Aries his line got picked but there's you know the the Haley's line and all these other different ones that you can go in and look inside the observatories they still got some of the telescopes there in place which is pretty sweet and then they've got the main one which is

observatory 0-00 in the IAU codes of observatories it's like first in place which is pretty rad so I got to go in there poke around a little bit it was a good time yeah it's such a pretty park I love the whole area around it and everything.

I think when I was there, oh my God, it was like 15 years ago. I think I was there. So a long time. That was before Thor fought there. Around then, yeah. It was right before the Battle of Greenwich, I think. Yeah.

So anyway, that's what we're drinking. What do you think of it? That's flavorful. It's got a lot. I don't know if you're kind of not so much into the thicker stuff, are you? Not usually, but this is like the first one that I've like, oh, like I'm into that. It's pretty good. Yeah, it's got, they sent like some like promo sheets.

What does it say? It's like a special kind of hops and stuff. They named the hops. So the hops are Apollo, Bravo, and Comet. I thought that was cool. But there's basically like cocoa and hazelnut and the star in yeast, which is like the sambuca flavor, liquorish flavor, right? Yeah, it's rich.

It's really rich and it's strong. And it's 10% alcohol, yeah. We're going to get wasted after this. Yeah, so that's cool. So, I mean, so thanks to Nincassi Brewery for sending this to us because it's really cool. I think it's probably the most apropos beer we could ever hope to have on this show. There's no other beer that will be more appropriate. Yeah, there's not.

I mean, go ahead and try anyone that wants to send us beer. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, we're open for more free beer, so please send it our way. that we started at the top. Yeah, it's cool. This is delicious. I like the label two's got the, the astronaut on. There's like a nice cool kind of illustration.

I can see Mars in the background, like a little base. And yeah, it's totally rad. I love it. I was so stoked when they said they would send it to him. I'm into this, yeah. And you, I don't want to get too into it, but you had a circuitous route to pick this baby up because of customs. Yeah, apparently you can't just ship beer across the border without, you know,

cutting red tape, I guess. So luckily, I actually live about, I want to say it's about 20 minutes from Washington's border. So everyone in Canada who lives close to the border has a mailbox service right on the other side of it because shipping in the United States is so much cheaper for every possible thing. So I basically had it shipped to my private mailbox in Blaine, Washington, and then paid two bucks to pick it up basically. that's the trick that we do. That's messed up.

That's so dumb. Yeah. Thankfully, the Canadian Customs Guard didn't dame me on it. So. Because they can get unruly if they want to. But most of time. Yeah, that's like probably something that, you know, someone's having a bad day.

They can really ruin yours. It really depends because like sometimes, you know, this one we came across and they're like, how long you've been gone? I was like, I don't know, 14 minutes. Like, it's not really like, what did you get? I'm like, this one bottle of beer. they're like, okay, just go through.

Like you were a crazy person. Literally not worth my time. Yeah. Like the amount of tax you would get to make me go into the building and stand in line. But I've also gone across the border once in my home province in Alberta. It's very rural by the borders. Like there's no towns or cities nearby. And so we crossed over this once because my wife's farm, her family farm was over there.

And we wanted to go across just to buy some brand of pop that we couldn't get in Canada. And so we like drive over the border. drive like 20 minutes to this grocery store we load up the trunk with like 80 cans of this like i don't i can't remember it was like cherry mountain dew or something like that and uh we drive back and it was like i got 60 cans to pop in the back and this lady this border guard if you imagine it's like a huge flat prairie with nothing like it's you know it's montana alberta there's there's no hills there's no trees there's no people there's no it's like a road and a square box and one lady in the canadian border guard and she's like she kind of looks at us she goes okay

pop the trunk, right? And then she like came out and counted every can and then charged us the five cent deposit on on the cans. So we paid her like, oh, we just lost the Anthony. Do you know what words I lost you at? I want to know what words I lost you at. She's like and it was just right there, like the exact moment of the punchline. Okay. So you're out there in Illinois. It was a pretty good. It was a pretty good job. I guess I have to listen to the show to get the punchline. So she came out and she was like, you know, what do you have? And we're like, 60 cans of pop.

And she's like, okay, pop the trunk, came outside, counted every can. And then we pay, I don't know if you do this in the States, but in most provinces you pay a five cent deposit on any can. And then you get the deposit back if you recycle it. So she charged. Yeah. So she charged. Doing math of your exact amount. So we paid her like $5 in deposits or whatever, and then I guess drove on.

I was like, wow. Wait, they even make you do that when you bring stuff over? That's kind of weird. Yeah, I don't know. They like to encourage you to recycle, but most of the time we just, in my area, at least, you can just put it in a recycling bin outside, and someone who wants the money will come pick it up and take it somewhere because I just don't want to drive to a bottle depot, and I just don't care enough.

I'll pay the tax. All right. Anyway, that's my Canadian border guard crossing story. A classic. Most of the time, they're very nice. I love the CBSA. I'll put that out there. They're very nice most of the time,

even when I bring in Cuban cigars by accident. It's a good story for another time. Yes, for a non-recorded time. All right, so what are we getting into today? We are going all over the solar system today, I think. Yeah, we've got some new frontiers. news-ish. It's about a month old at this point.

Oh, shit. Do we want to do email again, though? I keep thinking that emails at the end. All right. Unless it's follow-up, it's at the end. That's my rule. Okay, new rule. Welcome to episode four of Off-nominal.

The new rule is emails at the end, unless it's follow-up. All right, so what we're going to do, you want to start with like some new Frontier's basics? Yeah, okay, so what happened is NASA down-selected to new frontiers missions. So this is a competitive mission selection process. So new frontiers are kind of like the mid-sized missions. There's smaller ones, there's bigger ones.

These are the middle-of-the-road-sized planetary missions. And they start with a whole bunch of different topics. People submit proposals. And then NASA kind of gives you a little bit of money, and then you go further. you a little more money and they go further and they down select until they get one one or two final missions however they want to do it so uh in december we got i went down from what was it like six that they had going and then they went down to two 12 or 12 12 there's a lot they had 12 and there were some that we didn't even know about like there's some that are holding their cards pretty close to

their chest of the 12 right yeah because i noticed because i read an article a couple months ago about it and like some of the names have changed and like certain things are yeah it's interesting i think the one that you're thinking of is the one that was republished on the planetary society's blog that like ran through everything really deeply yes yes uh so these yeah mid-sized missions so they're like uh they're basically a billion bucks it's a bee it's a bee to launch one of these things um and uh so what they were targeting with this uh round of competitive selections were a different recommends. So they, you know, this is all based on the Decadal Survey. So, we talked, we talked about, I can't remember which podcast talked about Decadal Surveys on,

but we've talked about it, I think, right? Yeah, one or two. It might have been a pre-off nominal. Pre-op nominal. Or a We Martians podcast, maybe. Right. That's, that's what I mean. One of the ones that we've done that are not this property. Okay, so the Decatural Survey basically is the guiding guidebook every 10 years they put it out and it has all the science objectives. And so that Decatal survey said, we really want to get new frontiers to head to places like a comet sample return. The South Pole, the moon was a big priority for sample return. Ocean worlds are on there, Saturn probe, some asteroid stuff like the Trojan asteroid stuff. And then Venus is always kind of a perennial new frontiers candidate as well.

So these proposals have been in for, oh man, I think about a year ago, they put it out. out there and then every principal investigator submits their proposal and then we had the 12. I don't think we should go through the 12. There's quite a bit of the no no. And some of these have been in the running past this single down select. Like there's a lot of these Venus ones have been in past New Frontiers rounds or similar missions have been in discovery rounds. Like the one of the ones we're going to talk about has a life longer than just this particular proposal. So this is kind of like These are our best ideas right now.

The ones that get down selected to keep pushing forward. The other ones kind of, you don't just throw these plans away. You still have these in your back in your mind. The principal investigators and the teams are still working on these things. And when the next one comes up, you'll probably see some of these ones in that next round. And in fact, the two that were selected, which we'll talk about in a second, aren't the only ones that were selected. There were two that were selected for technology development contracts, which is smaller amounts of funding that is meant to push forward a particular piece of a project. So the NASA team said, we really like this proposal, but there's this one piece that needs a little more work.

Here's some money. It's an important thing to work on. Go work that out. And then see what you can do in the future. One of those was the Enceladus life. It was Elsa H, right? Enceladus life signatures and habitability. And what was the other one that got the-

The Venus one, right? Oh, the Venus one, yeah, yeah. Was it Vichy? I think that's correct. Yeah. Yeah, the Venus Insitu. composition investigations. So the Enceldus one, the technology development that they're going to work on is basically,

can you figure out how to detect life? Which is like, okay, we'll probably need a little more money than that to figure that one out. And then the Venus one was to figure out just to push material sciences a little farther to make sure that when we do finally get the next Venus mission, it lasts as long as possible in the environment. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting because, like, you're right. Just because you lose one of these competitions doesn't mean it's the end.

And, you know, because you get the first round of money a year ago, you know, all these 12ies got a little bit of money. And so you can use that to develop your concept. But it's not always just about the quality of your science objective that helps you determine if you get this. Because the maturity of the technology is super important, you know, the feasibility of the operations. Like depending on when the mission is going to launch, obviously that can dictate how successful it might be. right? So there's lots of cool ideas at least, even if not same spacecraft, but the heart and soul, these concepts kind of bounce from proposal to proposal until they get caught or they die off, right? So, yeah, it's interesting. It's sort of the benefit of the competitive process, right?

And that's another thing about New Frontiers is that within NASA there's two types of missions. There's the strategic ones that are assigned to a particular, you know, that's assigned to JPL or some particular center, Goddard in the case of James Webb, I think. And then there's these competed ones, which are open competition across all NASA centers and other institutions. Like one of them was from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. So it's competed. So it's a bunch of different teams. And it's not just like, let's pick the one mission we want to fly and then decide where that's where that's going to be run. It's actual teams putting their energy into these proposals.

Yeah. I kind of like to think of it as sort of the like the commercial space of planetary, right? Like pretty much is, yeah. The large strategic missions are like, are like SLS and then these competitive ones are all a little new space companies. Absolutely. Rock it in, right? Yeah, because you have this budget and you've got, you know, you can, you are basically

have to do the same kind of trades where you're saying, okay, we have this much money. What if we spend this amount in that particular area and this amount in that particular area? And you've got to figure out how to balance the return on investment in the same way that you would if you're trying to, you know, invest in it. with private money. So that's a very apt description of it. And it's good.

I'm taking the analogy further now. I'm thinking of the like, just like the new space companies that we love talking about, they're sort of like one person, you know, the principal investigator who's like at the head of each one of these. And some of them, it becomes kind of like a cult of personality, right? It's kind of like there's like this.

Some in particular. Yeah, some in particular. It's interesting to see that. Yeah. Okay. Cool. All right. We've made a, we've made a,

we've made our connection. Yeah, boom. We just brought in all the people who are here for the rockets. Oh, we'll get to that. Sure, we'll get to that. Yeah, we'll get to a few rockets. Okay, so do you want to talk about some winners? So we both picked one to talk about.

Do you want to go first? Sure. This is like, I think this is my favorite space mission. Like, end of sentence, period. And the more you read about it, it gets so much cooler. Like just the possibilities expand. I purposely read nothing because I wanted to be loud by you. The last week that I've been reading all their papers and watching their videos,

I've just been losing my mind because it's so cool. And it's one of the proposals that there is a lot of content out there about it already. Some of these are very tightly held. This one in particular, Dragonfly. They've put out a lot of papers. And they've done a couple of posters at conferences and a couple videos. talking about the plan. So there is like a 15-minute video

by one of the team members that goes through the full concept, which I'll have in the show notes. It's pretty awesome. Anyway, so Dragonfly, this is the nuclear-powered quadcopter that's going to go to Titan and try to plant signs of life.

The show's over. It's like the coolest thing. And I don't think there's any more like late 2010 space mission. Like if you have, were like, what is the space mission that describes your current decade? A nuclear-powered quadcopter is like the maximum 2010s you could get. But let me explain why this is really cool. Because it's operationally makes a lot of sense. You know, the way that you would actually operate this mission is

very conducive to a very good and successful mission. So the basic idea is that Titan is very interesting for this kind of mission because it is much lower gravity than Earth, but a much denser atmosphere. So it is incredibly easy to fly. Like, it's always been said, you could strap wings on and flap your arms and you would fly. Like, you the human, you the six foot, whatever human you are, would fly on Titan. So when you're thinking about, you know, I think you think of drones and you're like, oh, the crappy $20 drone that I got for Christmas five years ago that flew for 20 minutes and then it died and it never was able to charge and all that.

like not what this is. This thing is pretty beefy. It's got eight rotors, so it's like four sets of rotors, double rotors on each counter-rotating. So there's a little bit of redundancy built in. It can lose a rotor, lose a motor,

and everything's fine. The rotors themselves are one meter in diameter. So that gives you a little bit of a sense of scale. So think of it kind of like a maybe what's two or three meter long rectangle that has one meter diameter rotors on it. And on the back, there's a small RTG powering it.

That's pretty big. That's bigger than I thought it was. When I read one meter, I was like, whoa, okay. I thought this was like kind of a smaller thing, but one meter is a pretty substantial aircraft. Well, especially when like considering that you need such little lift, like I would expect them to be smaller, right? So with that in mind, the operation is pretty great because Titans days are 16 Earth days long. So at night, eight Earth days long of night, you're sitting on the surface charging up. and Titan is tidily locked, so the same side of Titan always faces Saturn.

So at night, you're facing Saturn away from Earth, and during the day, you're facing Saturn, facing Earth, facing the Sun, right? Because you're in daylight, so Earth is always towards the Sun from Saturn, so it's very conducive in that way. This is direct to Earth communication, so when you're in daylight, you can talk to Earth, more or less. Sure, there's way more to it than that, but in general, the operations are eight Earth days to charge at night, and it charges up a battery that can then be used for multiple hours of flight that can travel tens of kilometers. So a single flight, you can travel tens of kilometers. So in like less than a week, you can go farther than opportunity. I know you love opportunity, but.

But it's slow AF. It's slow AF. It's been, what, 12 years? 13 years? Coming up on 14, coming up on 14. 14 years. So in like a week, if you were to just, well, a Titan week, not an Earth week.

In a Titan week, you could travel, you know, more than that distance, which is interesting not because you're just traveling. It's not a distance contest, but it gives you access to a lot of different geography. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, you know, you could do flights that fly up, the nominal science altitude would be four kilometers high. So this thing would take off, fly up four kilometers, do some atmospheric science while it's up in the air. It's got cameras to scout landing sites for its next ground mission when it goes down to

land. It does some in-place scientific research there. It's got, let me pull up the list of experiments that it's got and cut out all this dead air. Is it mostly like, is it mostly like atmospheric science is trying to target or is it ground science? Like what's the both, both is the idea. So there's four main scientific payloads on this thing. There's the camera suite, which is good for obviously providing context to the rest of your science, but also for, um, landing site selection each night. And then there's meteorology and geophysics sensors. So they're going to be studying atmospheric conditions.

And then seismic activity, not as good as like Mars Insight, but at least enough to know if there is seismic activity on Titan. And then there's mass spectrometer for surface research. And then there's a gamma ray spectrometer for subsurface research. So the idea is fly up, do some atmospheric research, scout the, the geography, see where you want to investigate next. And, you know, maybe you do some scouting missions, so you fly up and you return to the spot that you left, since that's a known area, and you pick out where you want to go next.

Next day, you fly up, you traverse to somewhere else, do some surface science, and then repeat. Interesting. So there's a couple really cool parts of this that stuck out to me. I guess we should have prefaced this better for anyone who's not a Titaner. but Titan is the only other body in the solar system that has liquid bodies of water or hydrocarbon on its surface. So there's methane lakes, methane and ethane lakes just sitting on Titan.

That's always like super crazy for me to think about. When you look at the pictures, man, it's like, it's wild to look at the pictures and just and you, it takes a while to be like, am I not looking at like Lake Powell in Utah or an Arizona area? Like that, those kind of lakes? Because it has that very similar vibe. And in fact, there's some rivers leading into these lakes that are going through canyons. Very much earth-like stuff. Well, the Titan canyons are those crazy ones with the super sheer cliffs, right?

Like, they're very, very cut. Yeah, about a kilometer wide, half a kilometer deep. So it's pretty wild. I always want to think, like, I know you can't do this, like, well, for a number of reasons, but I always want to just like, what would it be like to dip your hand into liquid methane? Like, what would it feel like, you know, besides freezing cold? No, yeah. You know, besides the fact that my hand would just turn to ice and crack away.

But I just like, I wonder, I just like, I can't think about what, you know, what is a gas here? It's so, like, familiar, but yet completely alien. Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty crazy. So, yeah, the geography part of it is very cool because, I guess, so, yeah, liquid exists on the surface. There's a couple of different types, though. So in the equatorial regions, it's a very deserty kind of environment, and there's some lakes

there that they're pretty sure are fed from aquifers. So almost oasis like this is lake in the middle of a desert fed from underground. And then in the polar regions are these really big lakes you know the size of the great lakes or so here in North America.

Wow. So they're pretty sizable and that's the ones that we've seen the most from so far. It's pulling up some other stuff. So as I said there's you know methane-ethane-based lakes So there's a lot of potential for biochemistry on Titan,

and that's one of the things that make it really interesting because it is one of the most habitable-looking locations in the solar system. We've got liquids on the surface. We've got a lot of the compounds that you would need to make life, a lot of complex compounds and stuff like that that we'd want to see to find life. So that's the idea is that this is a very... And then also when the sun's a red giant, this looks like this would be the next best place to go for us.

So that's kind of fun too to think about. But it's interesting scientifically for that reason. And that would be the main goal here is to figure out, you know, where in the timeline of chemistry, of biochemistry, does tighten sit? Is it a very early on thing? Is it complex? We don't know all that much about it because the atmosphere is very hard to look through. It's very dense and certain parts of it are completely opaque to us.

So we know enough to an extent where we could see through the clouds or something like that. but there's a lot of unknowns, which is why dragonfly would be so good, because you can get down on the surface, see what's going on, scout some new locations, fly around, and you've got a lot of mobility once you're down on the surface. So some of the really cool operational stuff, like I said, it was eight Earth days is one day, eight Earth days is one night. So they don't have to be in a crazy rush

in the way that some Martian souls are for teams to jam all this activity in a very tight window of time. you've got a pretty leisurely amount of time here. And that extends the lifespan of Dragonfly quite a bit because even when the RTG starts generating less power, you can just wait a little longer to charge up because it's all battery operated. They're not operating straight off the RTG.

They're just charging their batteries for the next day. So they need to wait two tightened days. It's not that big of a deal. It slows down a little bit, but in the long term, you know, view, yeah, okay. You're really not lessening your lifespan. Basically, like, you start to be coming to a place where you charge for nine days and operate for seven and then charge 10 days and operate for six.

So you still get sauls. Right. You still operate in the same window. It's just like, you know, shifting when in that window. That's really genius. I love that stuff. I don't know what it is about operational stuff, but I just, I love it. That's really cool, though.

My question would be like, if you operate at four kilometers altitude, I know the atmosphere is super, thick and dense. Can you see the surface from there still? I guess that's my trying to figure out like what's the, how high up can you go before it just becomes fog, right? That's a good question. I don't know that that's been specifically answered yet, but from what it sounds like, because your flight time is so long, multiple hours, there may be a scientific phase where they're flying up to four kilometers to do the atmospheric science they need, but then coming down to, you know, a couple hundred meters to fly around, scout some new locations, see what's going on.

And like I said, you can always return to where you know and do some, you know, scouting missions to figure out where you want to jump next and just kind of, you know, work your way across the surface and that way. So it sounds like there's got to be some really pretty advanced autonomy on something like this, right? So yes, absolutely. And on that note, I should have mentioned up front, dragonflies run out of Johns Hopkins. Go Hop, my wife went to Hopkins, so that's a little bit of pride.

But they're working with a bunch of different people, and one of the people that they're working with, one of the people, good sentence. They've got a half-scale model that is built by Penn State. Go Penn State, that's also my area thing. So this feels like a very homegrown kind of thing. But Penn State, there's like some, I forget in the video, it was like the Center for Excellence in Vertical Lift or something crazy sounding like. that. They've built a half-scale model of Dragonfly. And that's what they use some video of that

in the proposal to show like, hey, we've got this thing kind of build already. And that's already fully autonomous. They've got it flying, lifting off, flying to certain GPS locations and returning to where it left from in this case. And then the plan is now that they've been selected to build a full-scale model that will look much like Dragonfly and it will kind of be their engineering model for a lot of the software bits that go into this. So, yeah. This is also maybe, the sky crane is freaking amazing. But this may be cooler.

It does sound really cool. No, because you got to see the EDL sequence on this, entry descent and landing. Oh, geez, I didn't even think about that. Imagine it's typical looking interplanetary entry most of the way. So very much in the curiosity. Direct entry, right? Direct entry seems like, I don't know if that's, yeah, entering directly, yeah. Similar kind of set up to all the Mars landers that there have been where you got a cruise stage and then you got the back shell and the heat shield.

Same kind of dynamics there with a drogue shoot and then a main shoot. So imagine Curiosity's entry all the way up to the point when the sky crane separates. Instead of a sky crane separating, this lander is just popping right out and it's using its own rotors to fly. And then it just lands on its landing skids. It'll do some initial signs right there on the surface and then charge up for the next eight days or so until it hits its new operational phase. But I think this is much easier than the sky crane

because the entire EDL sequence. I think we're talking about that huge dense atmosphere here. The entire EDL sequence, take a guess on how long this thing's going to be. Curiosity was seven minutes. Okay, well the atmosphere is thicker, so it's going to slow down faster. So I'm going to say it's shorter than seven minutes, maybe three minutes? It is an hour long.

No, I was opposite wrong. Because the shoe is just generating like so much lift that it's actually got quite a lot of time, which is really good because it's got quite a lot of time to do that analysis of a landing site. Right, so then, so the the blunt body entry is going to be fast. Right. And then once the shoot opens, it's just going to like hang. It's got like 45 minutes to just hang out. Hang in the atmosphere for, okay.

I didn't think of that. So yeah, it'll figure out, you know, it's got radar and Lidar, and it will find its landing site, and then it will detach from the back shell, turn on its rotors, and gently land on the surface, which is just wild. When's this going to launch? So both of these are, in the press releases I was reading,

It was a selection in 2019 and then launch would be 2025-ish, it sounds like. I think the window for Dragonfly was sometime towards the end of 2025. And both of these would operate well into the 2030s at this point. What's the transfer time to Saturn, I wonder? That's like... Let's see here. So the problem is that Jupiter is not in a very helpful location right now. Yeah.

I don't know if this has the exact times in it, this little... Hmm. I should have this somewhere. I'm super prepared. Yeah. Oh, I forgot to mention that this is, the craft can travel up the 36 kilometers an hour, about 22 miles an hour for U.S. listeners out there.

So this thing's, you know, moving at a pretty good clip when it wants to traverse. That's not so bad. Yeah. When you watch the video of the little half-scale model flying around, it's kind of amazing. It's, I was always like, you know, when I first started learning about Mars rover,

and stuff. I was always so disappointed by how slow they went. You want to imagine this like rover like, you know, because you look at the lunar rovers from Apollo and they're just like doing wheelies and going off jumps and stuff. And the Mars rovers are just very list like, it's like when a cat is like, you know,

when you put like a collar on a cat and they're just like, yo, and it's very slowly moving across. That's what the Mars rovers are like for me. It's just like these slow, crunchy inching across the surface. So this will be exciting. This will be like,

yeah, this will not be that at all. Clipping through that nitrogen. and atmosphere. That's so freaking cool. The more I read about Titan, man, I just get so pumped for this mission. Yeah. You know, I was firmly in the camp of the mission that I got to do before you talked to now.

Now it might be a little more even. I don't know. So the one thing I'll say is it's an incredibly ambitious mission. You know, when you just give the elevator pitch, it's like you've got to be kidding me. But when you do think about things like how long the Titan days are and how thick the atmosphere is and how low the gravity is, when you think about the operational elements, it really starts to make a lot of sense for why this is achievable, you know, right now, given where we're at in technology, which is a strange dichotomy because I feel like there's always, oh, this is too ambitious of mission. We're not ready for that yet. This is one of those ones that's like so ambitious and yet it feels like we're so ready for this. Well, it sounds like it's well thought out. Like, you know, and we just, we talked about right at the beginning how the, the valid,

like the validity of your science objective is not the only thing that determines whether you win this competition. Like you have to be, your technology has to be mature. And as you've now pointed out, your operations have to be well thought out. And it sounds like they've got a pretty good handle on how this will work, right? Yeah, absolutely. So that's maybe, that must have contributed to their success. Almost certainly.

Because this seems like a mission that. there's a lot going on in this and it's something that you know in past years I feel like even the sky crane landing was a big jump for NASA to to take on something like that and they were kind of forced to because of the physics at play but in general this seems like one of the concepts that we would all be bummed about that got left on the drawing board and uh but in this case it looks like it's got a little bit longer life yeah it feels like it's going to go up there next to nuclear rockets and that kind of stuff right hmm Cool. Awesome. I'm, I don't know, I don't know which one I want to win anymore. Can we do both? Can NASA pick both? They pick two discovery missions. That's true. Maybe Congress will be like, you know, there's just a lot of good stuff coming out of NASA.

Yeah, I'm not quite sure that that'll be how good. We're going to add another, we're going to add another B to the budget. Well, it is. So in that vein, though, everyone was expecting NASA to pick three of these. for this phase. They only pick two. So they don't necessarily, you know, maybe they see something different coming down the pipe and they're like, you know, if let's push these as far as we can, these two and really invest in these

before we get to the next round. I don't know. Yeah. But what is the other one? Well, so before I get to it, I just reminded now, because I went back to read the Decatur survey to refresh my memory as to like what sort of guidance was given. because it was all the way back in like 2010, 2011, all the way to its publication in 2013, right? So one of the things that I find so funny that a Cato survey is they provide a recommendation,

and then they provide sort of a second recommendation that's like, hey, if you don't get all the money you want, here's like a budget version. But they also add like, hey, if there's some sort of weird NASA windfall, this is what you should do. And it gives you like a budget surplus version. Now I'm just thinking maybe they're hopeful for the double new frontiers mission is in that category, right? Okay, so my mission was one that changed names, which is why I got super confused because I went back to that Planetary Society article to try and find it and then it wasn't on there. And then I started to read a little deeper and it was called something else.

But mine is called Caesar and it's the Comet Astrobiology Exploration Sample Return. And it's super cool. So first fun fact that I found out of this. I know why you picked this one. I now just realized why you picked this one. Tell me. Steve Squires. Steve Squires,

PI, principal investigator. So Steve Squires, of course, is a very famous Martian. He is the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rover program, opportunity and spirit. So, yeah, he's kind of a legend in the planetary society. I thought you were being nice and giving me the super rad.

base mission, but now I realize that you just wanted this one. A little bit, a little bit. I was also being nice. I thought that that one played better to your strengths. Thanks. Yeah. All right, so what is Mr. Squires got for us? So Squires has got this pretty cool mission,

and this is the one, it's like the opposite of yours, where, like, it doesn't have, to me, at least, it doesn't have a very, like, shiny front end to it, where you can just say Titan quadcopter, and everyone is like, where do I sign the checks? Yeah. Yeah, this one is just like, so this one's going, it's a sample return mission from a comet,

and it's going back to one we've been to before. It's going back to 67P, which is, I'm going to try it. It's Churiamov Gerasa Manko. How's that pretty close, right? So there's a theory if you say it fast enough, nobody can pick you apart. Yeah, exactly. And I've already gone through half a glass of this 10% beer,

so it's helping slur the syllables together a little bit. Yeah, so that's the comment, if you remember, that the European Space Agency sent the Rosetta probe to, and they landed the little Phile lander, bounced around on the surface a few times and got stuck behind a rock. But they did a ton of awesome science with it, you know, and they mapped the whole thing in orbit, and then they landed the orbiter on it before they ended the mission, which is super, super cool. So they decided to go back to this one. And, you know, at first I was kind of like, well, that sounds kind of like, you know, why? why not go somewhere new and gather more information? But the more I read about, the more the more this made sense to me that why you want to go back to 67P, because this is a comet that's, you know, if you think of a long period comet, something like, you know, Haley's comet, which comes by every 76 years, this is not one of those ones. This has got a six, six and a half, yeah, six and a half year orbit or so.

So it's kind of coming around pretty often in terms of a planetary body, right? So this is something we have an opportunity to explore a lot, not just now, but also in the future. You know, if I'm thinking about humans, spaceflight, even 30 years from now, this could be the kind of comet that we could visit, right? Like, this is the one that would be interesting to see that way. So, yeah, they picked this comet to go back. And as I'm reading about it, you know, the questions that they want to learn from comets are pretty much the same. We want to find out about building blocks of the solar system, right? So comets are supposed to be these these like ancient, ancient pieces of proto-solar system

that still exist and never turned into planets. So this is kind of the stuff that Earth and all the other terrestrial planets would have been made of. So that's why it's so important to study, right? There's a chance that organics originated from a comet. So if we think one of the theories for Genesis would be like, some, you know, weird carbon molecule or something from a comet smashes into Earth. I'm doing this.

Like, that's how you'd hold. I'm rubbing my fingers together. It's how you, that's how you signify it. It's doing the international sign for money, but apparently it also means comet organics. It means like when you squeeze organic chemistry between your fingers and it makes a squishy sound.

So it could be the source of organics that maybe seeded the earth with life, right? So there's a lot of, um, important questions to ask about comets and they can answer them. And then why you'd want to go back to one that you would have already visited is that you can ground truth it. So you can actually build upon all the data that Rosetta gathered. We have this comet entirely mapped. We know all the nooks and crannies of it to a pretty high resolution.

We've observed it on basically almost an entire solar cycle. It's like an entire comet year, if you will. So when we design. Caesar, we can build the spacecraft around the environment we know a lot about. That lowers your risk tremendously and you can get like really, really focused in on some of the information. So when I kind of, that clicked in my brain that started to make sense like, wow, this is a really cool idea.

So what they're kind of do with this is basically it's a sample return, right? And they want to get 100 grams of stuff. And it's going to be kind of a more focused sample return. Like we had one a while ago, the Stardust mission was sort of a sample thing, but it was really, really primitive in terms of sample return. They basically had like this chunk of, it's like an arrow gel. It's like basically like a cube of jello that hung on the outside of the thing. And then dust from the atmosphere like stuck into the jello and then they brought that home. Yeah, we basically flew a jello bowl through the tail of it.

Yeah. And just hoped we got the stuff we wanted. Yeah. And they got a bunch of stuff back. but it was like kind of compromised and they learned a little bit. And there were some interstellar dust in there, which was super cool. But,

but that, I mean, that was the first time we had done it. And, and, uh, it really kind of underlined the fact that we want to get a better sample return.

So this time, it's actually going to go, you know, do this sort of touch and go thing where it'll actually go up to the comet and pull out a piece of it, um, into the, uh,

into the capsule and then bring it back. Um, so this would launch the same time, 2025. That's kind of like I said, the same launch window for both missions. It would be a pretty long route for them to get there, get the sample, and get all the way back to Earth. So the return is like 2038 and just out of complete random back. Yeah, 238. I started to think about like, wait a minute, like how old is Steve Squire is going to be in 2038? Because he's getting on and he'll be 82 when the sample gets back. So if he hangs on through

his whole mission, that's a pretty good, pretty good, you know, retirement gift for him, which is kind of an interesting way to think about it. Osiris Rex gets back a couple years before that, right? Like, only a handful

a year, or is that 2020? It can be sooner than that, yeah, because they're getting there this year. Yeah. Okay, maybe it's 2020s, I forgot. Yeah, because Beni was like basically pretty close to Earth, right? Pretty close, yeah. Whereas this one is, is,

got a still the timelines are just wild like yeah you know it's crazy yeah they are it's wild yeah um 238 well i mean they think about how long rosetta took to get to 67p right because they did that super circuitous route i remember it out what i think it was like yeah launch then earth fly by mars fly by second earth fly by some other body visiting third earth fly by then another body and then finally it's 67p it took 10 years to get to the comet. So this one will probably be, I couldn't find the trajectory anywhere,

but it's got to be something similar. There must be an inclination. I didn't even look at that. There must be an inclination change. Oh, yeah, seven degrees inclined. So you got to change the inclination. I'll probably swing on by Earth again or something,

which Osiris Rex did as well. Yes, it did. Yeah. For the inclination change, precisely that reason. Yeah. Interesting to note that the Japanese space agency is

contributing the return capsule for this one. So it's the same Hayabusa, which is their sample return capsule. So that's coming back on the same thing. So it's kind of a nice cooperative mission, which is really cool. And then, yeah, we'll get a piece of 67P back. So, I mean, again, I want to kind of highlight that.

Like, you think about all the scientists from Issa who have contributed to the Rosetta mission, gather all that data. They're now experts in this comet, and then NASA is going to be able to deliver a sample from that comet, they can compare that data. So I always like to think about the data in planetary science is always like greater than the sum of its parts when you put it together, right? Like take one mission and take a second mission from the same place, you put it together.

You kind of got like two point one missions worth of data. It's kind of how I like to think about it. So you get a lot of, maybe it's even more than that. You get a lot of extra to kind of, you know, spice to your data if you can get it together. So that's very, very exciting. We can, we can, we can we can get that information back. I'm stoked for it. And like, the other factor is there's 20 years of technology development between right now and when we would get these samples back. Yeah. Like, think about if you, you know what I mean?

Like, there's always the famous thing that a lot of the Apollo samples are still completely untainted and not haven't been open. They're waiting for future scientists and all that. But like, even this one, there's 20 years to build something else that we can analyze this with or, you know, learn something else from a, another body that really contributes to this. It's a crazy amount of time with the, you know, the pace that we're flying at right now to develop between now and when these things come back to Earth.

Yeah. Well, I mean, and so now you're provoking more thought from me, but the, we're going to get the Osiris Rex sample back next decade. And then we're going to learn, think of all the stuff we're going to learn from processing that. That knowledge will be applied to processing the, 67P sample, right? And we've got a couple more missions out to Psyche and Lucy's going out to some Trojans.

So there's a lot of, you know, and, you know, any random asteroid mining company who may or may not get their shit together. There's a lot of momentum in this direction of these kind of bodies. Yeah. Well, that's what at LPSC last year, Jim Green had talked about at the NASA night, right? It's the age of sample return. so we're going to see some pretty cool stuff coming from this. One interesting note that I do want to call out, so I was again reading about the Decatal survey

to refresh my memory as to why we were doing this. And one of the big reasons behind prioritizing comet sample return is that we need this mission as a precursor to another sample return mission. So one of the kind of horizon goals for sample return is to get a cryogenic comet sample. I saw that word and kind of glossed over it because I see cryogenic a lot in different space things. But then I went back and I said, wait a minute, what is a cryogenic sample?

So the goal really is to get like a really well preserved sample from a comet. And what I mean by that is you want to preserve the stratigraphy. So if you think about like an ice core, you want to get an ice core from a sample from a comet. So you can dig in. You can see the layers underneath the surface. And because that sample is going to have rock and it's going to have ice, you need to preserve it at a certain temperature. So the horizon goal for a comet sample return is to get this kind of ice core, put it into some sort of chamber that can preserve it and get that back to Earth. And that's like basically the, you know, the holy grail of comet sample return.

So they've, they said straight out the Decatur server that we are not there yet. And we need this mission to really kind of refine some of that technology, refine probably some of the operations and the sample processing abilities and all that kind of thing to get us there. so that's pretty exciting. I just wonder how tall of an order that is compared to can we get, can humans beat the cryogenic sample return? Like, can getting humans to the comet happen faster than figuring out and successfully carrying out a cryogenic sample return? Yeah, but even if they can.

You're not going to fly a whole science lab there. no but even if they can you're going to want to at some point get a larger sample size so if you can lock in the technology at some point you're going to want to get

a core sample from 10 different comets and asteroids you don't want to have to send people to all of them right if you can automate if you can have people go to one to like figure out what we're looking for and then robotically

or bring it to us right like the whole Asteroid redirect thing that was, I think, premature. I'm glad it's dead, Anthony. I'm glad it's dead, personally, because I didn't like what it turned into. But the idea being like, okay, let's send a couple things to Comets, pick the one that we want and just bring that baby right on home. Yeah. Well, actually, and one of the things that I didn't talk about is that

besides all of science objectives, planetary defense is also one of the objectives for Takeda surveys. So this will assist in that and that we can figure out how to play around with comments. Scary. Yeah, super cool. Hey, Jake, if you were in charge of a mission and you could fund it at flagship levels, and you could launch it within our lifetime,

what would you launch? Well, thankfully, I've had some time to think about this because even though you made that sound like it was a very ad-lib comment, We are more prepared than we think we are sometimes. Jake, more so than I. You should see our notes. Yeah. I'm a, you know what?

Sometimes I'm a good note taker and sometimes I'm an awful note taker. So you're only seeing facets of me just so you know. I'm like an onion. Yeah. Okay, so yeah, Anthony and I decided what would be like if we could make up our own mission, what will we pick? If we had our own, you know, large strategic mission, if you will, something bigger than a new frontiers, what will we do? And I chose for mine a Neptune mission, specifically a Triton mission, which is a moon of Neptune.

And I don't know why I picked it so much other than I think Triton is one of the coolest, weirdest places in the solar system. So if you like Pluto, you'll like Triton. It's very, very similar. And that's actually one of the reasons we want to explore it is that it's got similar geography, it's postulated to be a captured Kuiper belt object. So, you know, if it was orbiting similar to Pluto and then Neptune swallowed it up, that could be one of the reasons it's there, probably one of the reasons it's there. And, you know, we haven't been to Neptune since the Voyager

flyby, and a lot of stuff's changed since then. So, yeah, I really am interested in Triton a lot. So I started to think about what kind of mission could we do to go and explore Triton in a more thorough process. So this is a really interesting mission to study. So the weird thing about Triton is that it orbits retrograde. So most moons orbit the same direction of planet spins, you know, from west to east. But Triton goes the opposite. So it's orbital inclination, if you will, is 157 degrees.

So it's backwards. And that's one of the reasons they think it's been captured. right? And so I was kind of thinking a little bit about that and how do you, how do you explore that? And, you know, Neptune is a nice giant and it's worthy of its own exploration as well. So you, you probably don't want to orbit Triton. You probably want to do the same sort of Cassini style thing where you orbit the main body and then just do flybys of the moon so you can map them. So I think, I don't know, maybe I'd love to hear what you think about this, but I don't think you don't need to, you don't need to really change your mission style depending on which way it's spinning.

you can still do this kind of flyby technique and do the mapping. That's kind of where I went with it. You get quicker encounters, though, right? Yeah. Your fly-by time would be, it's like driving by somebody on the same side of the highway or driving by somebody that's going the other way on the highway. Relative velocity.

You know what I mean? Well, unless, didn't Cassini do basically like polar orbits? Most of the time? Yeah. Yeah, I don't, I mean, I don't think the relative size of this. stuff. Like, it's not like you're going to be like, we'll see it going to fly by you and like, shit, I don't even get a picture.

That's not going to happen. If we were successful blasting by Pluto at God knows what speed, I think we can handle this one. So I also thought about like how do you get to Neptune and it's not an easy thing to solve. So if you think about like a regulator home in transfer, which is the least energetic, most efficient way to get from one planet to the other,

it's just one elliptical orbit up and then back down again, right? That is a 30-year transfer time. So if you think about Mars-Haw-N-Roh-E-Squired would be 107. He would be old AF. So like a Mars-home-in orbit, a home-in transfer orbit is like, what, seven, eight months or so. Neptune is 30 years. So that doesn't really work with the technology.

we have today. So I thought, okay, well, we got to use some sort of flyby gravity assist thing. Trying to find some sort of tool to calculate a one-body gravity assist, never mind multi-body. It was like basically impossible. I did not have those skills. Yeah, if you did, we wouldn't be doing this podcast. No, if I had those skills, I would be in a different place of employment.

So what I did is it turns out that a couple months ago, a couple months ago in the summer, NASA actually published two. two kind of early, early studies for both Uranus and Neptune orbiters. And they outlined some basic, basic kind of trajectories there. So I'm going to use that. I'm just going to piggyback off that like a good, good scientist would. I'm going to iterate on what they did there. So the utter constraint is a 30 year transfer orbit.

And that requires 12.5 kilometers a second of delta V. And then what NASA's thing said is they can get it down to kind of about 15 years using a Jupiter, um, uh, gravity assist, which is pretty cool. And then throw in some ion propulsion as well to kind of make the efficiency a little bit better. So that's a 13 year transit and a two year mission. That's the 15 years. So if I use that as sort of, the thing about a flyby though is that you get there faster, but you need more delta V to slow down. Right. So, um, what I said in my head is I'll just double the delta V budget. Use 15 years. And that's what I'll use for my, my constraint. So if I require 25 kilometers per second of Delta V, I can basically put a Cassini class mission around Neptune with an SLS Block 1B.

And I think if you strip off a few of the instruments and some of the extra mass, you can probably get it onto Falcon Heavy or if Delta 4 Heavy is still flying in 2030 or whatever. New Armstrong. New Armstrong, maybe. Vulcan heavy. Vulcan heavy. Is that a real rock? That's the tough part about this thing that we did. We found some tools to pick like proposed launch systems,

but there's also a bunch of proposed launch systems that we have no idea what it will be yet, but we'll definitely be here in the 2030s. Yeah. So wait, this was, so. Block one. How much did you say you can get Cassini there? In what year?

So that would launch in 2030, 2029-ish, around that time. And then it would take 15 years. So yeah, in the hypothetical world that SLS still exists, I don't think it would be Block 2 yet. So you're probably right in saying Block 1B is a sensible decision. That's like, you know, 10, 12 SLS flights from now, right? Yeah, it really is.

That's a pretty sweet mission. It's kind of cool. So, I mean, I went through kind of the instruments that I'd want. on it and it's it's not far off from what you'd want from Cassini because it's a very similar style mission you want you want your basic cameras spectrometers magnetometer would be a must because uranus and Neptune both have this weird dipole magnetosphere so the the north and south pole don't align to the spin axis they're like tilted 40 degrees or so so when it spins it makes this weird like corkscrew style magnetosphere so you'd really want to map that out which is super cool

thermal mappers to study the the weather underneath there and then i think radar is super important because you want to be able to look on triton underneath the the icy surface right um probably throw an atmospheric probe on there so we can drop just like uh because you need dropped hygons onto tit on a yeah titan and then this way we'd probably drop it in neptune so we can study the atmosphere so i figure if we model it after like the galileo probe at jupiter it'd probably be a pretty similar thing and then yeah we can start studying it so i was looking at the orbits and this really interesting yeah so i think i think that kind of polar orbit would be really good because then you'll be able to get kind of a good Neptune mapping you'd be able to see all the

different weather patterns moving across the planet and then if you put it in i did the math so uh triton has kind of like a six-ish day orbit around uh around Neptune and if you do a half half of that going like a two-one residence residence so a three-one residence so a three-year three-day orbit for your orbiter, polar, your, what's the, your apo-apsis for Neptune, apo-oh.

I don't even know. Apoposcian, whatever it is. That would be at like around Triton's orbit, and then your periapsis would be down kind of around 90,000 kilometers or so, which would you put you in a really good spot to observe Neptune's rings and all the inner moons. So the moon's like Despina and Larissa and those kind of wonky ones in the middle there,

the orbit among the rings. So that way you kind of have two in one. So every two orbits, so your orbiter went around, you'd be able to check out Triton on a pass and then also around the rings and stuff. So I think that's a soundish orbit to put it in. And then, of course, you'd move it around with different observations you'd want to do and stuff. But I think it'd be kind of fun. I think, I don't know.

Triton is so weird. It's just like Pluto, like I said, it's got like these nitrogen mountains. And that's a super young surface. There's no crater impacts. There's like this weird like cantaloupe terrain and geysers and cryovulcanism. It's like a mental place way out there in the middle of nowhere. So I'm fascinated by it. And I think this has a really cool mission.

Man, that was like a legit proposal. Like you know what I mean? You got like all sorts of stuff. When we were getting ready for this, I saw, I always get these email notifications at Jake's dropping stuff into the notes. I was like, what the hell is he putting in these notes? And I see like two to one resonance of Triton and this 90,000 kilometer.

I was like, oh my God, I really need to put some more effort into my proposal here. So I had a bunch of ideas. I had some ideas for Europa and things like that. But the more I was reading about dragonfly, I couldn't stop thinking about Titan. and there has been all these ideas in the past, in other rounds of New Frontiers like we're talking about.

I think one was in a discovery class mission as well. There had been all these ideas for sending something to Titan to either just float in the lakes or NASA in 2015. There was like a study for a submarine that would go into one of these lakes. So there's a lot of ideas out there for things going into the lakes of Titan, which I think is an absolute must. Like, we've found lakes. I don't understand how that can't be the next flagship mission. There are lakes.

I feel like that alone should warrant the billions to go to a lake and hang out in one of these lakes. So I found out that it's kind of a tough time for Saturn transfers. at this point. Basically, Dragonfly would be the last one for 10 years. Just the last sensible one. You can get there every once in a while, but it takes a lot of energy in certain cases because you don't have a good setup for flybys and all that kind of stuff. Because you use Jupiter.

You use Jupiter or just like Earth a couple times. Right, okay. So the trajectory browser that NASA has out there, the next, like, after Dragonfly were to go in the 2025 range, the next good one is in 2039, which is a very interesting timeline because Dragonfly will have been there for a decade at that point. Or, you know, it might not be operating anymore,

but it has done all of its mission kind of stuff. We can figure out where we want to go. Because as I was mentioning with Dragonfly, there's a couple of different types of lakes. There's the one that's fed from aquifers. There's the very complex ones in the North Polar regions. So we may have learned a lot about it to figure out where we want to go.

So I'm proposing Sea Dragon. This would be the follow on to Dragonfly. And this thing, so we've got a 2039 window for this. So November 28th, 2039 Earth departure, only 4.45 kilometers a second of Delta V needed to do this trajectory. Like, I'm telling you, the C3 value on this thing is 28.5.

That's like the departure energy you need. all of the other trajectories in the 2030s are like 80 or 90 it's crazy like can't you could put like a one metric ton out there but in 2039 with the current architectures we have falcon heavy as of right now could throw six or seven metric tons on this trajectory which should be enough to get something that could float in a lake out there if we can't we got problems because remember we've got a very dense atmosphere so we can use that atmosphere to get a lot of mass down to the lake. Right. So, you know, like we were saying, 2039 is very far away. Zero chance this flies in a falcon heavy, but stick this on whatever exists then, and you can get a lot of mass out there. On New John Young or whatever it's called.

New John Young. Oh, man, we'll get into that in a second. So, yeah, this is a launch from Earth. About a year after launch, you're doing one deep space maneuver to set you up for an Earth flyby that would happen three years after launch and that would send you on a six and a half year transfer out to Saturn and you arrive in 2048 when Steve Squires is 92 in the calendar of the year of our Lord Steve Squires. So that gets you out there and the things that I'm thinking about again like I said I would I would want this kind of mission to be informed as much as possible from

dragonfly in terms of like knowing what kind of lake you're going to go to. So there's a couple of different options. So one is you could do something that was like the Titan Maray explorer, which was a mission that was a proposed in discovery class, which just splashes down in a lake and does some research on the surface of the lake, maybe the shores. But I think we can probably get a little bit more fancy with that than in flagship missions and either do some sort of a boat type thing that sails around the lake, maybe goes over to some of the canyons and gets a look at the geography of the canyons because you might be able to see some intricate layering on the canyon walls. But then you might go the route where

like you've got a boat with a small submarine that detaches, maybe tethered so you have communications up to the surface the whole time and can send data back or maybe just some deep, some deep sea probes that you kind of shoot out there to get down to the depths that you want. In general, these lakes are 50 to 200 meters deep. So you've got a lot of depth there to explore. So there's a lot of different options that I think, you know, given how big these lakes are and how varied the terrain is, I think you'd want to tailor it some sort of way based on what we find out from Dragonfly, whether you want to go investigate canyons more or, you know, there's a lot of river mouths in some of these North polar lakes. So maybe you try to land this near one of the river mouths where a river is coming in. There's one that comes into one of the biggest lakes in the north. That's about 400 kilometers long.

So this thing's flowing almost like the Nile all the way into this lake. So you could have some interesting flows coming out of there from higher altitudes and, you know, silt that's coming down the river. So much different, you know, dynamism there that you'd want to investigate. So I feel like it could be a pretty amazing flagship mission for the sole fact that like there are lakes. And we need to go to these lakes. You know, you wouldn't even need a submarine If you just had like some sort of like You know, a little probe with like

Like super simple like a thermometer And like a barometer and then just some sort of like Depth navigation where it just like would drop down on us on a tether And just drop it to the bottom and pull it back up And then drop it to the bottom and pull it back up and just yeah go around it You forgot though you got to have a camera just in case Yes, just in case there's just in case there's just Crazy Titan whales or whatever under that.

Just in case. A picture from the bottom of a lake on Titan would be the cover of Time magazine for like 48 months in a row. Like, listen, we know we showed you this picture last month, but I don't think you've properly appreciated it. Yeah, you shouldn't be. This is the bottom of a lake on Titan. So Sea Dragon.

That's all I got. It's pretty cool. I don't have orbital resonances and. Apple Appsies, I don't have all that. Yeah, but you did a way better trajectory job than I did. I was like, ah, NASA did it. I'm going to talk about it. Literally, NASA's trajectory browser only goes up to 2040, so it's the last one in that window.

I was like, it's probably going to work like with Jupiter, probably. Anyway, let's talk about the payload. This is why we're a good team, you and I, see? Pretty good. Yeah, okay, cool. Yeah, we wanted to do some mail, huh? Yeah, we should do some mail because we got, we got, so listeners, you were. a really good at sending mail for this. I want to say I really appreciate it because

this is a lot of mail. Almost every episode we get a good flurry of people telling us some cool stuff. So I'm super stoked about it. So you want to talk about the I don't know if we're supposed to say names, but we had a really good name. From Fred. We'll say it's Fred. Fred, we just want to tell you. Fred and we can still say it's Fred, but you could figure out the rest. You can figure out the rest, but I'm not sure that's your real name, Fred, because I just don't know who names their child, Fred, when your last name is that. Please send me a letter to tell me it's your real name.

Also, I'll need a picture of your driver's license and or passport. But Fred wanted to tell us, well, first of all, he wanted to tell us he's from San Diego, which apparently is like a mecca of craft beer, and I did not know that. I'm from the Pacific Northwest, and we are obsessed with ourselves when it comes to pre. craft beer so we don't think about other places in the world that have good crap beer and i guess

san diego's got good craft beer so if you listeners if you're in san diego uh i would love to hear some beer recommendations um first of all and then fred says that uh he'd like to do an episode on asteroid mining uh is caesar enough is caesar enough no no because it's not an asteroid i have an idea for this i think we can make it happen i'll leave that as ominous as possible do do do Yeah No that's a very good topic For a feature show

And one that I know Literally nothing about So it'll be the op nominal Whatever episode Where Anthony tells me About asteroid mining Okay All right good

Business self We got an email from George We love George Hello George George George George George is a fan of all of our podcast I think

I can't imagine someone who's nicer to us about the stuff we put out and so he sent us an email telling us he likes off nominal. So George, thanks a lot, man. He also wants us to make a Twitter account for this. Yeah, what do you think about that? I'm still undecided. I know you were like we should do it, but. We have no presence other than our website.

I sort of like that. All right, well, George, that one's on the, Yeah, that's on the thinking block. It's going to require one to two more ground control and then Cassie space beers. We're almost there. And that's saying something because these are strong. Yeah, I'm at the bottom of line.

Matt sent us one that's pretty long. Yeah, Matt sent us an email talking about our last episode about China. And he had some thoughts about China. I don't know what to say about it other than China is a, It's a different place. He's a space agency's different. He's pro-my theory that they're going to get stuck on a space station like we did. Yeah, but he was also a pro-my theory that maybe that won't happen.

That's true. Yeah, you kind of went right down the middle on that. He flip-flopped. And we got one from Jesse. Yes. So Jesse is from, what do you call that region of the United States? I don't know the regional geography very well. Do you want the nice one or the good one?

Yeah, that's the Midwest. It's a flyover state, right? It's the flyover states, yeah. Yeah. So he's from Kansas. Jesse's from Kansas. And he says that Kansas is a different kind of place if you're a space fan. There's not a lot going on there except one cool thing.

You have the Cosmodrome, right? Is that what it's called the Cosmodrome? Yeah, I always want to go there because I'm always reading Wikipedia and I'm like, all this good stuff's out there. Yeah. The amount of times I've gone on like Google Maps and being like, can I make a trip that starts in Hutchinson, Kansas, and goes down to Houston, and I can do like a space trip?

Like, how long of a drive is that? And it's like, it's a little long. I mean, I grew up in the prairies as well. I was going to say, I know you're used to driving around quite a ways to get anywhere. It is pretty long. I don't know how much of my vacation I want to spend driving across some flyover states. But Hutchison, Kansas, if you can get there, listeners, they have an Apollo capsule there, don't they?

They have I don't remember which one it is Oh dear They have an Apollo capsule I want to say it's 13 I think it's 13 Yeah it's uh yeah it's uh I even said it in the email to Jesse

And then I can't remember it What's the name? Is it Aquarius? No that's Is that the lander Odyssey? Odyssey That sounds right Yeah I think you're right though It's the Apollo 13 command module

That Jim Lovell came back in So you should go see it Yeah there were some other astronauts You should look it up if you're interested Yep Cosmphere Is it Cosmosphere? Cosmosphere was I calling it the Cosmodrome the entire time

Yeah you were they're not that Russian Cool That's great Okay so Cosmosphere and Hutchinson Kansas At least I got the city right You did you nailed it it. You know this. Yes. Okay, cool. So thanks for the email, everybody. We love getting email. So please send us email. Tell us your favorite beer and tell us your favorite space thing from where you are because it's

awesome to hear about that. You got a pick? I do have a pick. And I'm going to give a shout out to another one of our listeners. I think it was Pat that told me about this. So Pat, if you're out there, And if it's not Pat and it's a different person, Pat, please pass this praise on to the other person because our Discord chat is very fast and furious sometimes. But I think it was Pat that let me let me know about this. So Planet Money did a space podcast series. And I finally listened to it last week. And it's really, really cool. So it's a four-part series, Planet Money being not a space podcast.

But they basically explored what does it take to put a satellite into space? and they got really down into the kind of nuts and bolts of, for someone who's not into space, it was a very, very good thing to listen to. And sometimes that's important for me. Like sometimes they get so deep into like the NASA spaceflight articles where it's like, what is the material that the crew access arm is made out of? Right.

And like, you know, and like you forget about. What's the serial number? Yeah, yeah. Please step back a little bit and be like, where do you get rockets? Oh, that's a great question. You know, I don't really know where you get rockets. And so they kind of went on this journey,

of the two hosts and they picked out a satellite that they're going to like sponsor it was through the company planet which does cubesats that that take pictures of the earth and it's a really cool company and yeah so they sponsored a satellite kind of and then they they launched it on an orbital at k rocket out of california and did this whole series about cubesats and the you know the miniaturization and the um reducing the cost of access to space and it was it was very entertaining there's four and they're like 20, 30 minutes each, they're pretty short. Something that I would encourage everyone to listen to. I haven't yet, but I've had a lot of people tell me that I need to.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like, it's really, they do a great job of breaking down, like, everything into really simple ideas. And so it was really easy to relate to and, like, kind of latch on to. And it was almost refreshing based on some of the details that we have to get into sometimes. So it was a nice kind of like, ah, cool. cool. Space is really cool and like I can take a moment to reflect on that and remember that it's awesome. I'm into it. I've got that in my cue now. I was just doing it while you're talking. Nice. I really hope that was Pat. I think it was Pat. It might have been Kurt.

Maybe. One of them. Everyone was talking about it other than me. Let's just let's just credit the Discord. The Discord chat's awesome. If you're not in it, get in it. If you don't know how, listen to our other podcasts first. I don't know, whichever one of us you like better. Um, I got a pick. It's a sad pick. John Young died. It breaks my heart. I love John Young. John Young is my favorite astronaut, but I, so far. He died last night.

Yeah. So he's got a book called Forever Young. It's on Amazon. It's a book about him doing his space stuff, but like, this guy flew a lot of spaceships. He did. Gemini 3, Gemini 10, Apollo 10, Apollo 16, walked on the moon. STS 1 STS 9 STS 9 STS 1 has to be

the scariest mission ever to fly STS 1 that is something that not a lot of people would do And he wouldn't do it It sounds like

No he would not I don't think anybody would After they figured out What happened right Like that's my favorite John Young story Of all the cool moon stuff he did

was like him telling the story about STS 1 and the body flap on the back kind of like stuck and he's just like if I had known that that was like that I would not have reentered the atmosphere like who scary stuff man so I got two John Young stories that I love we were talking about this in the discord earlier too is that the famous story of him landing on the moon with Charlie Duke on Apollo 16 and the flight surgeon said that

Charlie Duke's heart rate during landing is 144 which is like a workout and John Young was 70, which is like lower than I am standing here right now. And that's just, I don't think anything describes John Young better than that. Is he just like, so, whenever you see interviews with him, he's just like this calmest little, he's always wearing his little cute turtleneck, and he's just very calm and like, he's, you can't not love him. Ice in his veins, man. Wow.

Yeah. The other thing I find really cool is that he was walking on the moon when they radioed up him that Congress voted and approved the space shuttle. And he was like, oh, the nation needs that shuttle mighty bad. And then he flew it, like, not too long later. I find that just such a, that's such a cool little roundabout way to get there, you know, and that's, I don't know, it's pretty neat to like, he was the first person that was on another world to hear about a new spaceship.

Yep. That's pretty rad. He's the glue between Apollo and shuttle. Yeah. So cool. Yeah. So John Young, Forever Young. It's a great book.

Would read it. Add after John Young. He's great. This one's for you. Space Beer. Yeah, right? So good. That's it.

The next time we do this, we may be in Florida. We might be. We might be in Florida. It really depends on when SpaceX will pick a day, finally. It seems like it might time itself pretty well with our production schedule. I think it might. I think it's going to be first week of February for Falcon Heavy. I don't know.

That's what it seems like right now. Yeah. It feels like that right now. And that would be great. That would be outstanding. So I wanted to plug that because if you're going to be down for that launch, we probably will at least hang out at somewhere fun at night. I don't want to promise anything else other than that.

Somewhere where they serve these drinks. Yes. So if you're going to be down there, let us know, email our non-existent Twitter. Some way, let Jake or I know if you're going to be there because we would or just follow us on Twitter somewhere because we'll be talking about, I'm sure. Here, we could probably do them a favor and tell them the places that they could email us and contact us. Where is that? So if you want to talk to Anthony, his main Twitter feed, is at we have miko that's his his real podcast his his day job podcast real one um and then if you

want to email us both of us you can just email hello at off nominal dot space jakes is we martians as well we underscore martians on twitter yes we you thought i was going to forget i knew you were trolling me i knew it you can file a thing for that I didn't show you how since last month. All right, that's all I got. I have not done that since the last episode where you told me I could do that. Goodbye, everybody.

Anyway, I'll see you in Florida. Anyway, thanks for listening. Yes, maybe we'll see you in Florida. I'll see you on the John Young Parkway. Is that a thing? Everybody hates that road. Don't drive on the road. Nobody really likes the road.

Good tip. Great astronaut, bad road.