Science Friday - Apollo Anniversary And Bird Book Club. July 19, 2019, Part 1

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Celebrating Apollo's 'Giant Leap' July 20, 1969 was a day that changed us forever—the first time humans left footprints on another world. In this segment, Ira Flatow and space historian Andy Chaikin celebrate that history and examine the legacy of the Apollo program. Apollo ushered in a new age of scientific discovery, with lunar samples that unlocked the history of how the moon and the solar system formed. It accelerated the development of new technologies, like the integrated circuit. And most of all, says Chaikin, it taught us how to work together, to achieve seemingly impossible goals.  We also take a look at what comes next for NASA’s historic launchpads. Science Friday producers Alexa Lim and Daniel Peterschmidt went to NASA Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida a few months ago. They got to see how the space agency is upgrading some of its storied launchpads—and leaving others behind to rising sea levels. Take Flight With Science Friday's Book Club Called anyone a “bird brain” recently? There was a time when we thought this meant “stupid,” deceived by the small size and smooth surface of birds’ brains into thinking they were mere mindless bundles of feathers. But researchers are finding out what birds themselves have always known: Our feathered friends come with mental skills that might stump even humans. Be it tool-making, social smarts, navigation across vast distances, or even the infinitely adaptable house sparrow, Jennifer Ackerman writes of dozens of examples in this summer’s SciFri Book Club pick, The Genius of Birds. Take homing pigeons, which can be released hundreds of miles from the roof and still eventually wing their way home. Or mockingbirds, who can memorize and mimic, with astonishing accuracy, the songs and calls of as many as 200 different other birds. And birds have other kinds of genius: Bowerbirds craft intricate displays to lure their mates, each species with its own particular aesthetic preferences, like the satin bowerbird’s penchant for blue. Ira, Book Club captain Christie Taylor, and bird brain researchers Aaron Blaisdell and Lauren Riters convene for the summer Book Club kickoff, and a celebration of avian minds everywhere. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, we're kicking off our summer book club with a celebration of bird brains. So stay tuned for the book announcement and how to play along. But first, we're commemorating the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 and that moment in July 1969 that brought people all over the world together to witness one small step for a man and the end of one giant political race to the moon's surface. If you have a memory to share about Apollo 11 or thoughts on the legacy of the moon program, what was the Apollo program's biggest achievement?

Or maybe its biggest shortcoming. Give us a call. 844-724-8255. 844-724-8255. Or, of course, you can tweet us at SciFRI. And, you know, we've been collecting your thoughts on the new SciFriVRIV. app all week. You can find the sci-fi vox pop wherever you get your apps to join in. And here's what you had to say about the legacy of Apollo kicking off with Bill in Portland, Oregon.

I believe that the Apollo program inspired a nation and showed what we could accomplish. With all the things that were happening back in 1969 with the Vietnam War, that was a great positive thing for the world and for people to look forward to. who helped at least spur the commercial development of computers. I am recording this on a device whose existence is a direct result from NASA's need for tiny electronics. Heightened curiosity about science. Freeze, dried foods. I think the Apollo program's single biggest contribution to society was the photograph of Earth.

That single picture let us know how fragile our planet is, how thin that little atmosphere that envelops the planet is. and what a huge universe we are existing in. Along with Bill, that was Linda in Wisconsin, rich in Tennessee, David in North Carolina, Edna and Ronnie in Pennsylvania, Tom in Arkansas, and Tom in California, sharing their thoughts on Science Friday Voxpop app. And you can go ahead and download it

and share your thoughts, Science SciFRI Vox Pop, the V, SciFri Vox Pop. Let me introduce my guest for the hour, our guide to all things Apollo, Andy Chakin, he's a space historian who's written extensively about the Apollo program, including the book A Man on the Moon. He's also a visiting instructor at NASA, teaching the human behavior elements of success in spaceflight. He joins us from Northeast Public Radio in Albany. Good to talk to you again, Andy.

It's been a while. Yes, Ira, nice to be back. Nice to have you back. What did you think of all those listener's suggestions? Pretty good summary, huh? That was super. I really have been enjoying hearing people's memories of that event. You know, there was so many of us.

I was 13 at the time. I was glued to the TV, as you can imagine. But I had even at age 13 the sense that this was something that was really stopping the world in its tracks to kind of, you know, come together for a moment, at least, and witness something that was absolutely spellbinding, just amazing. Yeah. And I like the fact that people. mention the view of the earth because that to me is one of the great legacies of Apollo. You know, it's not the reason we went to the moon, and it's not even something that the

people who got to go necessarily anticipated. But that view, looking back at the home planet from a quarter of a million miles away, was a leap in awareness for the human race. And I think even after all this time, it's something that still can inspire us to recognize that we live on a very precious and beautiful planet, an oasis in space, as Jim Lovell called it, on Apollo 8. And to really hammer home the fact that, hey, you know, we're all really one tribe living on this spaceship Earth, and we should really try to get along

and do better at living and working together. Well, you know, I know the astronauts were always exquisitely planned. Everything was planned. Was that shot of the Earth rise? Was that a planned photo? Well, you know, that's a personal question, because I was very invested in figuring out who took the picture. Frank Borman, the commander of Apollo 8, had claimed for years that he was the one who took it,

and not only had he taken it, but that he had to grab the camera away from his rookie crewmate, Bill Anders, who apparently was so invested in the photo plan that he didn't want to take it. And nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that Bill Anders was the one who was looking out the window, and by surprise, you're absolutely right, saw the earth coming up. He was the one that took the picture. It was not something that he anticipated. And as he told me, when I interviewed him in 1987,

even while he was still circling the moon, it began to dawn on him. You know, we came all this way to study the moon, but it's really the earth that's the most fascinating part of this flight. And Apollo was a great technology accelerator, too. someone, one of our listeners in the Vox Pop mentioned the computer chips we wouldn't be having these little phones and things if it were not for the space race.

Yeah, absolutely. It's really amazing to go back and look at the effect of the space program on microelectronics, even the testing of microelectronics, right? Because you had to make sure that these little transistors and resistors and things didn't fail during the mission. A tiny little component failing could derail the whole thing. So NASA and its industrial contractors actually advance the state of the art in the testing of electronic components. Another comment that I recall very vividly and a listener mentioned is how Apollo united us.

I think that 1968 was probably the worst year in the world. after World War II. We had two assassinations. We had riots. We had all kinds of stuff going on. And then we took time out, both for that famous Christmas, right, of 68 and then the landing in 69. Absolutely. You know, it would be a mistake to think that the entire American public was solidly behind Apollo throughout the 1960s.

That was not the case. Public opinion polls show that public opinion was, in fact, divided. But I think when it happened, you know, there's a famous story even about the day before the Apollo 11 launch. Ralph Abernathy, the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, led a group of protesters to the Space Center in Florida. And the NASA administrator, Tom Payne, came out to meet with them and said, you know, I'm very sympathetic to your concerns about poor people in this country. and if I knew that I could help poor people in this country by saying, let's not push the button tomorrow, I would do that. But that's not the way it is. And Ralph Abernathy in return said a word of thanks and that he was humbled to be there and he actually got to see the launch.

And I think no matter what your politics was, that was a moment that just really got through the differences. and the other thing I want to mention, and Mike Collins, the Apollo 11 astronaut, has been talking about this, that when they went on their world tour after the mission, you know, instead of hearing from people that they encountered in all these different countries, instead of hearing something like you Americans,

you pulled it off, people that they encountered said, we did it. They all felt that they had somehow been part of this great adventure. Interesting. You know, the space race, as we used to call, It was really a political race between the Soviet Union and the U.S., but, of course, there were some legitimate science issues going on there, were there not? Well, when you say science issues, you mean the experiments and things that were tried and left on the moon.

Oh, absolutely. Science was not the driver for Apollo. The Cold War was. However, the scientists certainly realized that this was an incredible opportunity to study the moon. in situ for the very first time. And not only the experiments that we left behind, the seismometers and so forth, on the several different missions, it wasn't just Apollo 11, it was six different landings, but the photography of the moon from orbit, from the surface, and the samples.

The lunar samples are another of the great legacies of Apollo because they unlocked the door to deciphering the earliest history of the solar system. And aren't they waiting to open up another sample that has not been open? They are. There's a core sample from one of the later missions that is going to be opened, I think, maybe this year, if I'm not mistaken. But, you know, NASA has done a very smart thing. They've kept a lot of the samples in protected in vaults stored in nitrogen to prevent any alteration

because they understood that the technology to study those samples was going to improve with time. So, yes, there have been pieces of the moon that have gone out to scientists for the past 50 years, but there's a lot more that is waiting for better technology to be developed. There's some stuff in the news about the moon actually being seismically active. And they left those seismic sensors there, correct? They left them there, but now you may remember this, Ira. They actually turned off the lunar science stations in 1977 to save money. I can believe that.

Don't get me started. I know. I know. So the data set is limited, but I'll tell you one of the coolest things is that recently, in the last few years, scientists have used modern technology to go back and look at things like the seismology data, the data from the rather small network of seismometers. And they've actually figured out more details about the interior structure of the moment. moon and the fact that there appear to be features called lobate scarps, which are seismically active. We actually are seeing clusters of shallow moon quakes in these features, which basically represent

two pieces of the lunar crust moving past one another, a little bit like what we think of with plate tectonics on the Earth, but of course the moon has no plate tectonics. It has no crustal plates, so it's nothing anywhere near that. But it's still fascinating to think that with these modern techniques, we can go back to old data and we can pull out new information. And for students and teachers out there, we actually put together a collection of the data collected by the Apollo Mission seismometer, so you can use real data to decide for yourself

if future lunar explorers need to worry about moonquakes. And you can check all that activity out in our Apollo special on our website at ScienceFriiday.com. slash Apollo. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato talking with Andy Chacon about the Apollo program and the Cape Canaveral launch pads for Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the space shuttle. You know that they sit on the east coast of Florida because it's near the equator.

And when you launch a rocket eastward from there, it gets a little boost from the rotation of the Earth. It's great for getting into space, getting to the moon. And, of course, if a rocket goes awry, it will crash into it. to the ocean and away from populated areas. But now, almost 60 years later, the ocean is the problem. Corrosive sea air rusting the beachfront rocketry. You have rising sea levels threatening to submerge historic sites and any possible future launch pads. Our producer Alexa Lim went down to the original Apollo launch sites in Cape Canaveral to have a look around.

Complex 34 was one of the sites where Apollo history was. made. The tragic fire of Apollo 1 happened here, where the astronauts burned on the launch pad during a test run. Just one year later, Apollo 7 launched from this site. We still are going at this time. Sending the first crew into space for the mission. Three, two, we have ignition. Commit lift off. We have lift off. This is launch control. We have cleared the town. Today, the complex is quiet. And the only sense of the I can hear are a few scrub jays calling out and ocean waves in the distance. And standing in the middle of it, it's hard to tell where I am.

Brazilian pepper trees have taken over the area. And tree trunks poke out of tunnels that used to carry communication cables. There's a rusting launch table which once held the Saturn 1B rocket and crumbling buildings with doors pride open dot the perimeter. I always think of Plenty Apes when I come out here. You know, it's like, what's happening here? I'm with Lori Collins, who is an archaeologist with the University of South Florida and Tampa. She's trekked through tropical jungles in Central America,

uncovering 2,000-year-old stone sculptures, and she's surveyed medieval monasteries in Armenia. Lori's now focusing on sites that are a little more modern, the decommissioned NASA launch complexes on Cape Canaveral. They're the ones used in the early days of spaceflight, during the Gemini and Apollo missions. On Complex 34, most of the original structures are gone. These things weren't necessarily meant to last.

They weren't thinking about that when they were designing these. Lori's goal is to salvage what's left, to build an archive of how the engineers originally built this place, and to create a resource that modern-day engineers can use as they prepare for future missions. I like to say that it's like an endangered species, right? That these are treasures that once they're gone, they're gone. She starts by giving GPS points to the structures that are still here and makes estimates

to the missing features. After her team lays out the pieces like a giant giant. jigsaw puzzle. They start scanning. I did like a position map from the last scan date. They use lasers and 3D cameras to record the details of the launch pad, down to the millimeter scale. And one of the elements she's working on looks like two rusted steel skateboard ramps. The Saturn 1B created 1.6 million pounds of thrust at launch. That's six times more than a 747 airplane. So they needed these steel ramps to deflect the huge flame

and prevent it from incinerating everything and every one nearby. It would have moved one of them in, and it would have come right up underneath the pedestal there to be able to deflect the blast, basically, from the launch vehicle. Laurie's creating a type of virtual museum of these artifacts. Just across the bay is the epicenter of modern spaceflight, Complex 39B. It's home of the active launch pad for NASA's Kennedy Space Center.

Regina Spellman is NASA's senior project manager for the pad. She's in charge of construction on 39B, where future spacecraft will roll in and get hooked up for launch. We're kind of like the RV park when the RV shows off and all the connections. Regina's prepping the pad for NASA's next moon mission called the Space Launch System, or SLS. She's retrofitting the remnants of Apollo. If Lori Collins is like the archivist preserving the layouts of the historic launch pads, then Regina is the architect building on top of those blueprints. It's because of the history.

It's like building a brand new house versus remodeling an old Victorian home. Sometimes you don't know what's behind the wallpaper. I follow Regina to the big renovation project she's working on now. We'll go over here and you guys can see the flame trench. That's right, the flame trench. It's a 50-foot deep fire moat. How hot is it going to get? 4,000 degrees.

The SLS rocket will produce 8.4 million pounds of thrust, five times more than the Saturn 1B. So, a wheeled and flame deflector won't do the job here. The upgrade involves pulling out the Apollo-era bricks and lining the trench with 100,000 new fire-resistant ones. Every past mission from Apollo to the shuttle program is still here, and you can see it in the pipes, wires, and towers built into the complex. That's our new elevator. That's brand new.

Some of these platforms over here, the electrical platform, that was built under the shuttle program. The one closest to us, the facility connections, that was Apollo. You can see the three different generations, all working seamlessly together. We've just continued to build on our historical past. Back at Historic Complex 34, I take a walk along the beach with Lori Collins. There are huge bleached out shells, and what I think are pumice stone and driftwood. But when I take a closer look, I realize they're chunks of concrete and rusted piping.

They're pieces of Complex 34 breaking apart and slowly making their way out to see. See where the fence line is kind of right there. That area's got a lot of features that you'll see eroding. The rest of the space coast could look like this in the future, because sea levels in this area are predicted to rise five to eight inches in the next three decades. Pair that with the hurricanes that hit and beaches that are washing away. This hub of activity for NASA, SpaceX, and Jeff Bezos' Blue Orgent sits at a vulnerable spot.

And it's something that Regina Spellman thinks about back on Complex 39B. One of the projects on the complex is a three-mile sand dune around the the area. Don Dankert heads up that project for NASA. Our number one concern is shoreline erosion. You know, when we have a storm, we want to protect the inland infrastructure from the storm surges and from the potential for inland flooding. In this modern-day space race, the players are different, but they all have to contend with the same existential question. How will the space coast battle a future with rising sea levels and climate change? For Science Friday, I'm Alexa Lim.

Also with Alexa, digital producer Daniel Petersmith, toward the the launch sites, and you can see magnificent photos of their trip to these abandoned launch pads. And as a bonus, we have an interactive tour via Google Earth that will take you on a tour of these sites. It's all up

on our website at sciencefriiday.com slash Apollo. Still with us is Andy Chacon Space historian, author of a man on the moon. Andy, is it sort of nostalgic to go down and see everything that's just rusting away? Yeah, down there.

Yeah, yeah. It's always mixed feelings. It's a sense of sadness that, you know, these things are not going to last forever. They weren't capable of it. But on the other hand, so inspiring, so amazing. I mean, go to one of the centers where you can see an actual moon rocket. There's one in Houston. There's one in Huntsville, Alabama.

There's one in Florida at the Space Center in Florida. to go stand next to that thing and remember that it was all done with 1960s engineering. And, you know, that to me is the other great legacy here, is that human beings in all those years ago figured out how to do this stuff. And it took 400,000 people working for the better part of a decade. And what I actually do now is I go into NASA and other places like the Missile Defense Agency. I talk about what, how did they do it from a human behavior standpoint? It was almost like the country-funded experiment in how to do hard things with huge numbers of people.

That's a lesson of Apollo that will live on and is still valuable. Let's go to the phones. Lots of people would like to talk. Let's go to Reno. Catherine, I welcome to Science Friday. Catherine, are you there? Catherine, no. Oh, that's too bad.

She was telling us on the screen here, she visited her brother of the fire station. and the day before a Basque Shepherd had come to the fire station camp. This was during Apollo 11, because the shepherd had a radio of some kind and told the brother that we had landed on the moon. Brother speaking, Castilian, Spanish. Amazing. A lot of people that really, I was watching photos the other day of Times Square. I had forgotten, you know, I was a teenager.

We all were watching together, and here's another memory. Let's see if I could get a listener on the phone. Let's go to Lee and Santa Cruz. Hi, Lee. Welcome to Science Friday. Oh, we're having more trouble with the phones today. We can land a man on the moon, but. And, you know, that's funny.

You say that because there are a lot of little, you know, sayings that came out of the right, if we go, land a man on the moon, can't get the phones to work. Also, what, the term moon shot? Yes. Well, again, this boils down to the, the lessons that Apollo gave us, one of the things that you have to have is a goal that is clear and compelling. And my God, we had that with President Kennedy's challenge.

But you also have to have sufficient resources to accomplish the goal. And that's something that we don't usually see. Here's a tweet. Let's go to the tweets because they're working. Alex tweets, I remember my third grade weekly reader. I remember weekly reader. In Education Magazine, publishing an addition devoted to the future of the space corrupt program. It detailed a one comparatively vast permanent space station on the moon by

1999 and two, a moon base by 2010. We're way behind that. Can we get back on track if we choose to? You know, well, it's a different reality, of course. Apollo was funded like a war because it was, in fact, a proxy for a shooting war. It was a way of fighting a battle in the Cold War. It was a way of fighting a battle in the Cold War without actually dropping any bombs or launching any missiles. Today, the challenge is a bit different. We have to figure out how to do human spaceflight in a way that's sustainable and doesn't break the bank. And that's one of the reasons why I think the work by folks like Elon Musk with his SpaceX rockets and Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin, those things are very exciting because they are trying to figure out how to do it differently in a way that is sustainable.

And I think that when we can remove the economic barrier to just getting into space and then going beyond Earth orbit, then I think we're going to start to see a little closer to what we all watched on Stanley Kubrick's 2001 way back in 1968. You know, I remember a quote. I thought it was by Arthur C. Clark, but I can't really find it. But I remember it very distinctly. I think it was on the 25th anniversary of Apollo. And he was still alive. he was asked, I think, what it was the most amazing thing about the Apollo's launch system? And he said, the most amazing thing is that we could go to the moon and never go back. Yeah, that's exactly right. Did he say that? But it's an amazing thing. I actually have not heard that.

That's a great quote, which I have not heard before, but I agree with him. Nobody at the time thought, least of all, Arthur C. Clark, but certainly nobody at NASA thought that we would be, you and I would be talking about this 50 years later and have it be so long since not only the first landing on the moon, but the last landing, which was in 1972. It just goes, but I'll tell you a story just to hammer that home. NASA's chief spacecraft designer was a brilliant engineer named Max Faget, and he told me a story one day in the 1970s. He and his former boss, Bob Gilruth, were walking along the beach at Galvest. And there was a big bright moon in the sky overhead, and they stood there looking at it, and Bob Gilrith turned to him and said, Max, someday people are going to try and go back to the moon,

and they're going to find out how hard it really is. And I think that means all the stuff that you can't put down on paper, that you can't put in a NASA experience report about how they solved these daunting problems and how you make a team like that work. we have to go back and revisit Apollo to remember those lessons and take them forward. I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios, talking with Andy Chacon, author of A Man on the Moon. And that lesson that you say about working together is one of the points made by people who say, you know, if you let the space industry languish, we're going to lose the talent that knows how to do these sorts of things. That's absolutely right. The amount of corporate knowledge that we have lost is really regrettable. And so, you know, we've got to kind of pull ourselves up by our bootstraps.

But some of this is not about technical expertise. The technical stuff, as hard as it is, is not the stuff that really can trip you up. You know, your report on those launch pads mentioned the tragic fire that killed three astros. in 1967 on the launch pad, the fire that swept through their capsule. And it's amazing to think that NASA was not able to perceive the danger they were putting those three astronauts into with wires that were exposed and vulnerable to damage, flammable materials like Velcro and nylon netting, but most of all, a cabin atmosphere of pure oxygen at 16.7 pounds per square inch. And that danger, just somehow, as Mike Collins said to me many years ago, we were blind to them.

And I think we have to recognize the limitations of ourselves as human beings. We've got to be what one of my buddies at JPL calls properly paranoid. We've got to be a little bit running scared that recognizes that we'll never know everything we need to know and we've got to be on guard. You know, one thing we keep getting asked all the time about, are the flags? from the various Apollo missions still standing at them. Can we see them with a telescope? Well, of course, you can't see them with a telescope because no telescope, not even Hubble, is that powerful. But we can see the landing sites in amazing detail, thanks to NASA's lunar reconnaissance orbiter, which has been circling the moon now for almost 10 years, or actually, excuse me, a little more than 10 years.

that arrived in the summer of 2009. The cameras on LRO are so good that if you look, for example, at the Apollo 11 landing site, you can see Neil Armstrong's tracks as he ran back from the lunar module late in the moonwalk to take pictures of an 80-foot diameter crater that was about 200 feet behind the limb. But, you know, even on that image, the flag is just a dot. But we know from Buzz Aldrin's description as he was walking out the window when they blasted off from the moon that the blast of the set rocket knocked the flag over. So at least that one is not still standing. Probably the other ones are, but they've been seriously degraded by the intense solar radiation and other forms of radiation.

Yeah, we know how sun bleaches the colors out of things. If you leave them outside. And plastics and things like that are just degraded by things like that. Yeah, so those flags are, if they're still up, you know, they're not those kinds of flags anymore. We're going to take a break and come back and take lots more questions for Andy Chakin, author of a man on the moon. He's a visiting instructor at NASA and teaches human behavior elements of success in spaceflight. We'll be right back after this break. Stay with us. You're listening to Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato. We're talking with Andy Chakin. He's author of A Man on the Moon and Taking Your Questions. A bit of Apollo trivia for you, Andy. Was Neil Armstrong supposed to be the first person to step off that lander? I mean, he's the captain, doesn't he supposed to go second? You know, it's the last? I know there's an interesting story behind that.

There is an interesting story behind that. When I was writing my book, I was very interested in that question. And what I found out at that time was that the early versions of the checklist, which had been in the works, even before the... Neil was assigned to that mission showed that the co-pilot, or in this case the lunar module pilot, would be the first guy out. And the precedent for that was during the two-man Gemini missions, the co-pilot had been the one to do the spacewalks. Now, Pete Conrad, another Apollo commander, pointed out to me that that was no longer a valid precedent because once you landed on the moon, you were no longer in flight. And he, he, he, he, being a Navy guy, likened it to when you have a Navy ship that arrives in port, the captain is the first person down the gangplank. Uh-huh.

Now, mixed in with all of that was the story that everybody had heard again and again, which said that, oh, well, the hatch opened the wrong way, and the cabin was so small that it really didn't make sense to have Buzz get out first. And that was even something that Neil seemed to agree with when I talked to him. But, you know, in more recent years, a new story has come out from James Hansen, who wrote Neal's biography, his official biography. And according to the interviews that he did, some of the leaders of NASA, Bob Gilrith, who we just mentioned, Chris Kraft, who was the head of mission control and all the flight controllers, Deke Slayton, the chief astronaut, and George Lowe, who was the spacecraft program manager, got together. in the months before Apollo 11, and they said, look, you know, the guy who is the first on the moon is going to be a historical figure right up there with Charles Lindberg, and he's going to have to have the temperament to handle that. And it was their feeling that Neil, by his temperament, was much better suited to that position.

And so apparently that's how the call got made. That's interesting. And in a few minutes we have left to speak with you, how about another bit of trivia about Neil? Armstrong and that famous line. One small step, there's controversy that he said, this is not just one small stuff, but the word A was in there, right? Right. So the quote that he had intended to say was one small, that's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. And when I interviewed him, he explained to me that, you know, in his mind it was a small step, but a significant step. And that's how he came up

with the quote. I personally don't hear the uh when I listen to the recording. It's just too small an increment of time. It's a tiny fraction of a second between the word four and the word man. In more recent years, someone did some sophisticated analysis of the audio waveform and said, no, no, it's in there. It's just that Neil was speaking in the pattern that a, you know, Ohio boy would do, you know, for a man. I'm sorry. I still don't. hear it. I think my own feeling. Did he write it himself? He did. He did. And apparently he had, he had sort of zeroed in on that and maybe one other possibility before the flight, but didn't make the final decision until they were on the moon. I think in the heat of the moment, it just, it just came

out without the word, but it's a great quote anyway. It's a wonderful thing. And it's a great, to have you on to remember all of this with us, Andy. Thank you, Ira. It's always good to be with you. That's great to have you back. Andy Chakin, space historian, author of A Man on the Moon, terrific book. He's also visiting instructor at NASA teaching the human behavior elements of success in spaceflight. And you can check out all our Apollo coverage, including a behind-the-scenes tour of the Apollo launchpads, all up there at Science Friday.com slash Apollo. A hot and steamy weekend is in store for a lot of folks. Perhaps a time to escape the sweltering city.

head to the beach or seek refuge in, oh, a shady hammock. That sounds so good. If that's on your agenda and if you were looking for something to read while on the road or in that hammock, we have one particular recommendation for you that might seem for the birds. It's this summer's Sci-Fi Book Club selection, Jennifer Ackermans, the genius of birds, tackling the myths about bird brains, celebrating some of the incredibly clever things our feathered friends can do. and we want you to join us. Sci-Fry producer and bookworm.

Christy Taylor is here to tell you how to play along. Hi, Christy. Hey, Ira. How's it going? It's summer vacation season. I am about to scram myself for a weekend. So excited to have time to read for fun. So tell us more about the genius of birds.

Right. So the genius of birds by Jennifer Ackerman, as you said. It is nonfiction, as we do every summer. But it is this delightfully poetic, super engrossing, look at this old stereotype. about birds not being very smart. Okay, now that's a term bird brain, for example, describes a stupid or foolish person. I take it that phrase is gone goose these days.

Yeah, right. There was this time, I don't actually, I love birds, I think they're smart, I don't see it myself, but there was a time about 100 years ago when people thought bird brains were too tiny to harbor intelligence. They had sacrificed everything, including smarts, in order to be light enough to fly. But researchers in more recent decades have been subjecting birds to all the other people, kinds of IQ tests. And the verdict is that many species are doing things you or I could never in a million years wrap our heads around. I know. I can't migrate thousands of miles along the same route every year, even with my GPS. And I love hummingbirds. And I'm so impressed how hummingbirds

keep coming back to the same spots year after year. Yeah. And I'm a huge pigeon fan, and I still can't really believe how like homing pigeons, you can put them in a truck, drive them 100 miles from home, and they will find their way back to the roost. You've seen those videos of crows solving puzzles on the internet or even making little tools to get food. If you look at mockingbirds, they can memorize and mimic as many as 200 calls

and songs from other birds, not just even their own language. So in this book, Jennifer Ackerman is taking us around the world. She goes to Australia, South America, even back to sort of common house sparrows in cities to introduce us to these birds and the different ways scientists are studying their brains. I would maybe call this book not quite a big,

beach reef for summer, but for people who are spending time in the woods, you can look for for shorebirds or even just in your own backyard, right? All right. You sold it to me. How do we get involved? All right. So I have a laundry list for you. Go for it.

First of all, as we do every year, we're giving away 20 free copies of the book this weekend, thanks to our friends at Powell's books. You can go to Science Friday.com slash book club for that and information about everything else I'm about to talk about. We will also be sending weekly newsletters with discussion questions and having conversations with our listeners in our Facebook group. And we're asking you to share your thoughts in our new app, SciFri Vox Pop. You can join the conversation by searching for SciFRIVox Pop.

That's a V as in Victory, OXP-O-P-P, to send basically your voice comment, just like you're calling us on the phone, wherever you get your apps. And then for NYC listeners, we have a live event in August to look forward to. We're already selling tickets. And Ira, as you know, the early bird gets the bookworm. Oh, that's something I would have said. And all of this is up on our webpage at ScienceFriady.com. slash book club. Right. And all month we'll be celebrating bird genius in different ways on the air and online,

and we'll wrap up with a big conversation with two bird brain researchers at the end of August. Okay, so how do you test the bird's IQ anyway if they can't talk? Right. They can't tell us what they think the answer to a question is, right? I want to bring on those two experts actually right now to talk about that a bit, since they're both deep in the work of trying to see what's going on inside a bird's head. So welcome to Dr. Lauren Readers. She's a professor of integrative biology and neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin. Hey, Lauren. Hey, and Dr. Aaron Blaisdell, professor of psychology and head of the Comparative Cognition Lab at UCLA. Welcome, Aaron. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, welcome both of you. So, Lauren, like I said before, I don't really think of birds as dumb, but that bird brain stereotype

came from somewhere, right? That's right. Yeah, so there are a few reasons that birds were considered to be bird brain, and I think Jennifer Ackerman does a really great job of introducing this, and you already mentioned that there's this early idea that having feathers is not compatible with intelligence. So there was this idea that there's a trade-off between flight and brain power, and that birds had to give up big complex brains so that they could fly. And when scientists looked at bird brains, they saw that they were different from mammals. They're really smooth, and in mammals, it wrinkles and convoluted, and in mammals you see neurons in areas of the brain that are important for higher-level thinking, but they're organized in distinct layers. And you just don't

see that in birds. And so these differences were taken to suggest that the bird brain is just not set up to produce exceptional complex behaviors. And then it didn't help that when scientists were naming the brain areas in birds, they called them things like one example is paleostriatum, primitivum, which reflected the idea at the time anyway that the bird brain is ancient and primitive and not highly evolved. But Aaron, on the other hand, we have all of these examples of birds actually being quite smart or at least remarkable in their thinking.

That's right. A lot of the examples that Jennifer Ackerman covers in her book actually come from all the cutting-edge research that's been going on over the past couple of decades, with some examples being Professor Irene Pepperberg's famous parrot, Lalit Alex, who she taught human language. And we know that parrots have for a long time been known to learn languages, but she was able to teach it a lot of English words, and then using those words was able to interrogate the intelligence of Alex and really uncovered a profound intelligence with lots of human-like

qualities. And other things, oh, just another example is finding out that not just like, so back in the 60s, when people thought only humans use tools, it was Jane Goodall who discovered that chimpanzees also used tools. Now it was a groundbreaking discovery. Well, flash forward to just the past few decades, and we've discovered that many birds, especially the New Caledonian crows, are so amazingly proficient at tool use. Yeah, and Aaron, you're studying pigeons more specifically. Are they using tools, or what are they up to? Pigeons are not known for being tool users, although we are really good at getting them to peck at buttons

and keys and things like that. But the kind of work I study about pigeon is more about what kind of psychological processes do they have that are similar to what's found in mammals, in particular, like, humans. So what kind of memory processes, what kind of learning processes do they have? And also, what kind of higher level cognition do they show in terms of reasoning processes and abstract levels of cognition? I'm I reflater with Christy Taylor and Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Yeah, and Lauren, you're working with Starlings, but you're asking a different set of questions, right? Yeah, that's right. So I actually began studying birds by also studying pigeons.

I was studying homing pigeons and how they return from different locations. That's right. But then I discovered songbirds, and so for about 20 years, I've been studying birds' song, and a lot of my research is focused on what I refer to as why birds sing. So I'm interested in what motivates birds to sing, what rewards singing behavior. And in some cases, this is clear. So males will commonly sing to attract mates, and this can result in mate attraction, and then male will mate, and that will reward his singing behavior immediately.

But sometimes we don't know why birds are singing. So, for example, often outside the breeding season, birds will form flocks. For example, when they're preparing to migrate or they'll form these large overwintering flocks, and they'll sing. at really high rates, and we don't know why. It's important for them to sing because they have to learn their songs, song words, learn songs from adult tutors, so they need to practice. And forming flocks and singing in the flocks is probably, you know,

the song keeps the flock together. But at this time, you know, they're not attracting a mate, they're not repelling rivals, they're just singing. So Darwin actually proposed that in this context, in these large affiliates of flocks, birds are singing for their own amusement. And so research from my lab is now supported. this idea. We're finding that birds in some contexts do appear to sing because it's intrinsically rewarding. So they're having fun. Yeah, they sing for fun. That's amazing. So how do we know

any of the things that we know though? These animals can't talk to us, as Ira just asked earlier. We can't just ask them what they're thinking or feeling. So what are your experiments like? How do you tap into what's going on in that head of theirs? Okay. So it is difficult to probe the internal cognitive. or emotional state of birds. And, you know, there are many methods, and some of them are described really well in Jennifer Ackerman's book. But with respect to my own research, for years we've been trying to figure out how to ask a bird

if it feels good to sing. And so what we've come up with is something that we borrowed from studies that are often run in psychology departments to look at reward associated with drugs of abuse. So these are rat studies, and they use what's called a condition, place, preference, test of reward. And so I'm going to skip details here, but basically if you give a rat heroin, which is an opioid, and we think that actually when birds are singing and it's rewarding, this has to do with endogenous opioid release. So I picked heroin as an example here.

But if you give rat heroin in a particular place, like a chamber that's decorated with polka dots, then later if you give the rat a choice between a chamber decorated in polka dots or one that's decorated with stripes, the rat's going to spend most of its time in the polka dot chamber. So it develops a preference for a place associated with that positive heroin experience. So this means that heroin's rewarding, right? People accept that. And so what we've been doing in our studies is instead of pairing heroin with a distinct place, we pair singing behavior.

So the act of singing birds are producing song, and we pair that with a distinct place. And then what we find is that songbirds will develop strong preferences for places that were associated with singing behavior. So specifically. I have to thank Chrissy. and our guests. Yeah, so thank you both for joining us. We're going to talk a lot more with both of you when we wrap up at the end of August. But again, thanks to Lauren Readers,

a professor of integrative biology at the University of Wisconsin, and Aaron Blaisdell, a professor of psychology at UCLA. And, of course, Christy is our librarian of the book club and everything you need to know to play along and join the drawings for a free book. Free book on our website at ScienceFriety.com slash book club. Thank you, Christy. Thank you. For shepherding our club today.

Charles Berkwis is our director, a senior producer, Christopher Taliatta. Our producers are Alexa Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Feather. Our intern is Camille Peterson, BJ Lehman, composed our theme music. And we had technical and engineering help today from Rich Kim, Kevin Wolfe, and Sarah Fishman, who was working the boards for us here for the last time. Sarah, we love having you all these years with us. And we wish you very well in your new adventure. Hope you'll check in.

Every once in a while I'd like to know what's going on. And, of course, we're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all social media. If you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So sort of every day now is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato in New York.