Science Friday - Chip Fraud, Space Station Future, Neutron Star. Mar 2, 2018, Part 1

Episode Date: March 2, 2018

Currently, the International Space Station is the only destination for astronauts traveling into lower-earth orbit. It’s also the only way for scientists to conduct experiments in microgravity. After two decades, it’s still proving to be incredibly useful to researchers. But time is running out. President Trump has indicated he wants to defund the station as scheduled by 2025, it’s nearing the end of its expected lifetime, and private companies have indicated that they, too, want to invest in the space station market. What does the future hold for science’s single biggest asset in lower earth orbit? Plus, researchers investigating mysterious X-ray sources in other galaxies are finding something strange: neutron stars that burn hundreds of times brighter than they should be able to. And new research published in Nature Astronomy suggests that the answer has to do with a magnetic field 10 billion times stronger than the strongest one ever generated on Earth by human physics experiments. It’s been about two years since U.S. retailers and lenders began converting to chip-based credit card technology—all in an effort to fend off the kind of fraud and hacks that stole millions of credit card numbers from big retailers like Target, Home Depot, and Michael’s a few years ago. Has it made a difference? And Gizmodo's Ryan Mandelbaum tells Ira about the biggest science stories this week in the News Round-up.   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 Iroflato. Scan your radio on the FM dial, and you might come across a familiar sound. No, not waves. Sounds like it's static. Yeah, to you and I, there's nothing there to listen to. But astronomers report this week that a radio telescope in Australia has found something in the FM static that could be a signal from some of the earliest stars formed in our universe. Here to tell us about that story as well as other short subjects in. Science is Ryan Mandelbaum Science writer for Gizmodo.

Good to have you back, Ryan. Hey, Ira, great to be here. So we're learning about the secrets of the universe over the radio waves, and I mean that's true every week on Science Friday, of course. But tell us what you mean. What did scientists discover here? Right, so using that small radio telescope, it's essentially a shadow from the hydrogen gas that used to diffuse across the universe about 100 million years after the Big Bang

that's being cast across over the cosmic microwave background, the earliest light. that we can detect in the universe. So this shadow, you know, signifies the beginnings of the first stars being formed. But it also, what was crazy was it was twice as cold as expected, which when you have these unexpected things in physics, that means we don't know something. And in this case, it might be dark matter. So the shadow should be warmer because it's sort of heat left over from the Big Bang theory, but it's colder than you expected?

Well, since it's a shadow, it's absorbing light, and then it's absorbing twice as much light than you expect. And so they're hypothesizing that might be the dark matter in the universe. It could be a hint of dark matter interacting with the earliest hydrogen atoms in the universe. But what's really, I mean, this is a first observation. There's a lot more work that really needs to be done here, but it's really tantalizing, and a lot of astronomers are excited about this one. Wow, wow. And I understand that astronomers are also a say, well,

Well, physicists are also excited about a discovery about bald lightning, that they're sort of making it in their laboratory, something like it? Right. I don't know if you've seen ball lightning, but it's this bright flash. It's very rare. It happens in the evenings. It sticks around a long time. It looks like a ball. Yeah.

So physicists created what is essentially a quantum simulation of what they think looks like ball lightning in the lab. And it's this arrangement of particles called a skirmion. A skirmion. Scurmia. Scurmia. I'm writing that down to add to my bar talk tonight over a beer. Scermia. That's right.

And so what is it? How do you get lightning out of a skirmia? Right. So what I mean, it's made from a Bose-Einstein condensate, which is one of my favorite things in physics, which is these almost macroscopic systems of atoms like rubidium, expressing quantum mechanical effects that can be observed. And in this case, it's this knotted structure in the magnetic field lines of and electric field lines, of these rubidium atoms. And you've got to see the pictures because they're really cool,

and your mind will leak out of your ears when you actually see what these look like. I can see you're a little excited about this. You love this kind of stuff. I love those Einstein condensates. They're my very favorite. And those are really a cool, cold state, right? They're the coolest, actually.

I do coolest. Where's my rim shots, sound effects? Okay, let's move on to next public health experts are saying that the measles virus has come to New York for a visit. Just one visit. A tourist from Australia was confirmed

to have had it and visited a bunch of places in New York from February 16th to 21st. Lucky for us, nearly 95% of people in New York have gotten the measles' mumps Rubella vaccine, which is 97% effective against the measles.

But any time you see something like this, you worry about sort of the folks who haven't been vaccinated, you know, the anti-vaxer movement is going on. And this is just a reminder that like, while measles has been pretty much eradicated from the U.S., it pops up, and if you're not vaccinated, you'll have a problem. Yeah, and that's what's different about the world we live in now, is that people come in from all over the world, they travel by plane or whatever, where they weren't traveling as much as they used to. So you can bring anything in from a country.

Right. I mean, just because it's been – just because the U.S. isn't seeing very many new cases of measles, doesn't mean that measles is completely gone in the world. All right. Let's move on to this really interesting story. in the news that elephants blurred the lines a little bit in terms of the species they would mate with? Tell me about that one. That's right. Scientists did a super complex look at the history of elephants and found interbreeding between a couple of species

like between the American woolly mammoth and the Columbia mammoth. But they also found places where the elephants wouldn't interbreed where you'd expect, which like the African forest and African bush elephants, which look pretty similar but weren't mating for quite a long time. So it basically is just saying, like, we're the kind of the ones who've decided what a species is, and the elephant will mate with whoever it wants no matter what. No one told the elephants. Right, no one told the elephant.

But it's interesting that they actually thought they were interpreting with Willie Mammoths. These are two different species of, yeah. Interbreeding in the elephants, who knew. Wow, who knew. Finally, I know this is a favorite of yours, Ryan. I know you're a birder. We were talking about this before. I love birds, yep.

So there's this rare yellow cardinal. I mean, cardinals are red, right? Right, but this is a yellow, same species of the red cardinal, but it is yellow, and it could have maybe a condition that's causing it to express it, or maybe it's a mutation. But in Alabama, there's a woman who's got a yellow cardinal in her lawn, and she hasn't given out the location, so we shouldn't go swarming there, but it's there, and it's awesome looking. You should look it up. Yeah, you can look at you. So the cardinal is hanging around, and we don't want it to give it out because she thinks all these. These birders will show up, won't they?

You're a bird, you would go see that, would you? I mean, Ira, there was once a bird in Pennsylvania where so many people came to visit it that they were able to calculate the economic impact of the bird's visit, and it was $220,000 based on the log that the people who had the bird in their backyard kept. Oh, that's a lot of bird seed. It's a lot of hotel visits. Not to mention trampling on the grass. All right. All right, thank you very much. Yeah, thanks so much for having me.

Ryan Mandabal and Science Writer for Gizmodo, and he's here in our New York studios. Now it's time to play. Good thing, bad thing. Okay, remember, life before you had that fancy chip credit card, you never had to guess when to insert your card into the machine or when it was safe to remove it or get beeped at for not removing your card fast. I never know when to pull that thing out of the machine. All you had to do is swipe it and be done. You also had more to worry about fraud one. It's much harder for someone to make a copy of your credit card with that chip now.

And according to new numbers from Visa, retailers have made the switch to chip card readers, and they're seeing much less fraud. But according to my next guest, it's not quite time to celebrate the end of credit card fraud in the U.S. My guest is Megan Geyes, staff editor at Aris Technica. Welcome, Megan. Hi, Ira. Thank you very much. So good news for us, those fancy card chips,

The chip readers are really doing their job? Yeah, so Visa released some numbers last week saying that merchants who upgraded their terminals to accept chip embedded cards saw fraud drop by 70% between in September 2017 compared to December 2015. I mean, that's a lot, and it indicates something we already knew that chip embedded cards are less prone to fraud than the magnetic stripe swipeable cards we have used for so long. Wow. What makes the chip so safe? Well, it's basically it's a chip that's embedded in a credit card that effectively acts as sort of a mini computer.

The EMV card creates a unique code for each transaction, and ideally it requires the customer to enter a pin associated with the card. In the U.S. right now, we're still relying on chip and signature. Signature is a lot less, I guess, less secure, because if somebody mugs you and steals your credit card, they can still go use that credit card. card somewhere and sign your name and it won't, you know, the cards, card companies won't catch that for a long time unless you catch it. So in other, in Europe and other countries in the world, having, there's, you would enter a pin essentially to sort of authenticate that code. That's a lot more secure. But we're still using the chip embedded card and that chip creates a unique code, which does make it harder for fraudsters to sort of steal credit card numbers.

and then reuse them. Yeah, I've been there. Of course, the bad news is that that doesn't help in stores that haven't switched to the chip card reader, does it? Right. Yeah, the less than great news is that it seems that only 59% of U.S. storefronts can accept chip cards right now. And that's more than half, which is good.

But two years ago, another separate survey had said that 37% of storefronts were able to process chip cards. So in two years, that seems like a slow transition compared to Europe. where 95% of stores are able to accept chip cards, according to a 2015 survey. Canada, Latin America, and the Caribbean also have a rate of like 80% of storefronts that can accept chip cards.

So, yeah, so we're lagging behind. Yeah, and also with all the stuff being bought online, there's no place to stick your chip card on your laptop. Maybe not yet. I've just thought about it, you know? Yeah, yeah, a chip-embedded card doesn't prevent card not present fraud, which is basically when you buy something online or maybe you buy something over the phone or, you know, something like that, buy order a pizza, give your credit

card number to somebody. Anybody could steal your credit card number and use it for some other over-the-phone payment. But it does go sort of a long way to preventing in-store fraud, which is good. There are other ways to sort of prevent a card not present fraud that companies are working on right now, especially with the increase in e-commerce, which has been in increasing and increasing. Yeah. Don't forget, you heard that idea about the chip card on USB port thing from me first. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, right now companies are card networks like Beeson MasterCard are working on something called 3D Secure 2.0, which makes online payments sort of more secure by allowing there's like many, many parties behind a credit card transaction. And all those parties sort of help to authenticate that transaction based on the perceived riskiness. of a person's purchase. So if you're making a small purchase in a zip code that's close to your own and, you know, it's from a known device, that's easy, you know, and if it's, you know, maybe from a dodgy IP address and it's a huge purchase, they're maybe going to ask for a secondary method of authentication.

Now, I know my cell phone and other cell phones, they sort of make a token first, right? Yeah. Is that the future? Yeah, well, yeah. So 3D Secure 2.0 is definitely sort of a future thing. And it can also work with tokenization. A lot of mobile payment systems are using tokenization, which hides the user's actual credit card details,

including your number and your verification. I'm sorry, your... That little code on your car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it replaces that with a token, which can be passed around and used for specific purposes or in specific instances. Thank you very much for taking time to view this today.

Megan Geistave editor at Ars Technica We'll have her back to talk about some more stuff When we come back What does the future look like for the international space station And a private company wants to put up its own space stations Or a series of space stations We'll talk about it after the break, so stay with us This is Science Friday, I'm Ira Plato

A bit later We're going to be talking with former NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus About the future of the International Space Station and if you have a question about what could happen to the NASA space lab as it enters its golden years. Don't forget the space station is like, what, 20 years old, something like that. Give us a call. Our number 844-8255, or you can tweet us at SciFRI. But first, imagine you're an astronaut peeking out a window on the International Space Station,

and far from being the only spacecraft in sight, you see several small space stations dotting the landscape, or actually the spacescape, if you might put it that way. That could one day be the scene in low Earth orbit as private companies like Bigelow Aerospace decide to try their hand at building space stations. The company announced plans to launch two standalone space stations into low Earth orbit by 2021. But first they'll have to figure out

who their customers are going to be. That is, if they build it, who will come? That's the question for my next guest. Blair Bigelow, Vice President of Corporate St. strategy for Bigelow Aerospace and now Bigelow Space Operations. Welcome to Science Friday, is Bigelow. Thank you for having me, Ira. Now, I understand you already have an inflatable module attached to the space station now, right? Yes, we absolutely do. We have the beam, the Bigelow expandable activity module that launched to the International Space Station in April of 2016 and was

recently granted a mission extension from NASA, and Beam is the only privately owned and human-rated expandable habitat in space. So you're actually going to sort of expand on that idea, so to speak, instead of having an attached one, you'll have a series of smaller independent ones? Yes, and I wouldn't quite characterize them as small. What we call this space station is the B-330, and you can envision it like a Boeing 747. We will be producing B-330s on somewhat of a production line, and these spacecraft will be the platforms for supporting commercialization in low Earth orbit and beyond. So 330 stands for the space inside 330 cubic meters? Correct, yes, and this spacecraft represents an entire human space program and an entire space

station in a single launch. So are you designing this to sort of coincide with the end life of the International Space Station? You know, we've been working on this program for over a decade, so I wouldn't quite say that, but we feel that the time is now, and the administration has brought urgency to this matter with starting to drive the conversation towards defunding the ISS at 2025, and we feel very strongly that in order for there to be continuity of human presence in space, and for there to be a seamless transition from government-owned and operated platforms to commercial-owned and operated platforms, we need to have a commercial space station in parallel with the international space station. So does Bigelow look at itself as sort of the SpaceX of satellite companies?

Or of Habitat companies, yeah, I think that might be an accurate characterization. So who would use your space station, and what would you be using it for? Well, we have the ability to support an array of activities. If you think of a metallic module, all of the systems are on the walls of the spacecraft, and once it's launched, it really is a final product. If you think about an expandable system, we're able to expand the spacecraft from the inside out. So the flexibility and the option for accommodating different activities is almost limitless. And we are looking towards other governments, corporations,

individuals, universities, we're looking at price points that are so affordable and even some cases where Ira, even you could fly to space for free. So give me a price point. If I wanted, because I noticed on your website that these would be called yachts. You can all have your own space yacht. What would it cost me for you to build me a space yacht? So those are just some options to really get your imagination going. But I can't really talk about pricing today, but I'll leave you with a confidence.

that we are, we're going to be opening up access to space for many countries and many corporations at prices that have never been offered before in history. As I used to say here in New York, they're insane. No, I mean, you know, you remember that crazy Eddie commercial. So who's going to launch them? Do you launch, you build your own rockets too to launch your space stations or someone else does that? We don't. We don't.

We don't build the rockets. And we actually act as a general contractor and have, in-house fabricators. So we build about half of the space station in-house, and we contract out for the rest. And we are exploring the launch industry right now. And how do you envision Bigelow possibly working with NASA moving forward? We would really like NASA to be a customer. And, you know, governments have only ever done this before. So we will rely on them to work hand in hand with us for things like operations, safety protocols, and they've been there, done that.

So we aren't trying to reinvent the wheel. We want to do things efficiently and smart, but we also understand the enormous responsibility of keeping humans alive in space. Well, you know, NASA's not the only player in town or in the world. We have the Japanese, the Chinese, India, Japan. Are you ready to work with all of those people? Aren't the Chinese going to put up their own space station?

Yes, they have already begun to, And we recognize that we need to establish urgency in our nation's space ambitions because we want to ensure that we remain the leader in that area. All right. Well, we wish your luck, and we'll be waiting to see. You'll come back on when you have your first one up there, won't you, Blair? Absolutely, absolutely. All right.

Blair Bigelow, Vice President of Corporate Strategy for Bigelow Aerospace and now Bigelow Space Operations. Right now, the International Space Station is the only destination for astronauts in orbit and the only way for scientists to conduct experiments in microgravity. And after two decades, the space lab is still proving to be productive and useful to researchers. Last week, the station logged the record 110, almost 10.10.109.3 hours for science. But it's getting old. Time's running out. President Trump has indicated he wants to let funding run out for the station as scheduled by 2020. And, of course, Congress could extend that deadline.

On the other hand, parts of the International Space Station were built in the 80s and 90s. So like any spacecraft, or like your car, it's nearing the end of its expected lifetime. So what does the future hold for a science's single biggest orbiting asset and will stations being built by private enterprises like Bigelow impact the future? Joining me to talk about this is Sandra Magnus, former NASA astronaut who spent four and a half months aboard the space station. She's also Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Dr. Magnus, welcome to Science Friday. Thank you, Ira. Thanks for having me. Were you listening to my conversation with Blair Bigelow there? I was, actually.

I was enjoying it very much. Is that something that excite you that idea? Yeah, you know, when I think about what's going on in the space industry right now, especially in the U.S. It's really we're at the point where we're benefiting from 50 years of government investment because the foundational knowledge of how to operate in space, the technology development that's occurred, the understanding on the business side, at least what the risk-reward might kind of look like, and then the government's willingness to enable all of those factors to come together is we're at that point, and that really started probably in the late 2010s, like 27, 28, 29, when NASA decided to go to a commercial cargo model, followed by a commercial crew model,

which, of course, we're still in the process of making a transition to. And now people are starting to look at what else can we do in low Earth orbit to encourage economic development. So do you think then that it's a wise decision by President Trump to let the funding run out in 2025? Yeah, I'm sorry. I think Blair made a really good comment on that. It's forcing function to start the conversation about what should a transition. look like. I think what will actually happen

has a lot to do with what the plans that are evolved look like. I think a couple of baseline imperatives are that as we do a transition from a government owning the building to a government renting the building along with

other renters, that we make sure it's really critical that we don't have the loss of a capability to do research in low earth orbit. And sort of like We had a good plan on how to transition the shuttle, but we executed it really, really poorly because we have a gap in our operational capability.

So we don't want to have a similar gap in the capability in lowerth orbit. So I think that's going to be a real key. And whether 2025 is the magic date and whether it's zero or whether that's a square function or a ramp function, it remains to be seen with how these plans evolve. But the stake is in the sand to start the conversations,

which I think is good. Let me start our conversations here with our listeners. 844-724-824. 55 is our number. You can also tweet us at SciFRI. You've spent so many months up in the Space Station. Tell us what life is like that and what makes it a valuable place to be in. You know, I think, well, first of all, life up there is really magical. We're very busy, but just living in the microgravity environment the way we do gives you a whole different appreciation for it. And I think that's really the key. Having a platform that's constantly

in that environment allows us to test. and develop technology and explore the boundaries of science that we can't do on Earth because gravity is so, quite frankly, gravity is horrible. And what's really interesting about being up there and what I'm really excited about where we're going in general with what's happening in the space industry that more and more people are going to get access. You know, Ira, there's a difference between intellectual knowledge and experiential knowledge. And so we can sit here and we can have a conversation about what microgravity means and what

you might be able to do in microgravity. and you're approaching it from your intellectual knowledge about how the equations work and the effect of the force of gravity in those equations and in those phenomena. When you live in microgravity, you understand it in a different way. So I think getting people up there who have technical training and creative sparks to actually internalize what that microgravity environment is all about will really expand the possibilities of what we may be doing in space from a not government base but more of an economic development side.

And I'm actually excited about those possibilities. Do you think there's public interest in visiting low Earth orbit is sort of like the tourist industry? Oh, my goodness, yes. You know, anytime I give a public talk and I ask the group in the room, who wants to go to space? It's usually 95% of the people raise their hands. I think the more people we get up there, the better off we all are, frankly. Yeah, let's open the phones. Ken in San Francisco, first up today.

Welcome to Science Friday. topic, but it seems to me in the interest of your tourist comments just now, it ought to be possible to find and find a way to moth bulb station when it's deactivated and park it in a stable orbit someplace to wait to turn it into a museum. You know, it's interesting, Ken, I've heard that concept before about, you know, could we pull it up to a higher orbit and let it hang out up there and then eventually not even maybe use it as a museum or maybe just mothball the hardware. And I think people have looked at that,

and I'm not entirely sure the energy balance of the, and the capabilities of the systems allow that. But that idea has been floated before, so people have taken a look at it. It's an intriguing idea. Yeah, because we have a tweet coming from Randy says, could the space station be pushed or nudged in the direction of the moon as a habitat?

Yeah, I think if there was some decisions, To do that, I think what you would end up seeing would be piece parts of the station being deconstructed and used and repurposed as opposed to the host station. You know, one thing you have to keep in mind with the space station, it was designed to be serviced regularly. And it was designed to be controlled from the ground. So any exploration architecture that we come up with has to be from fundamentally a different design paradigm. And so the station wasn't really designed to, you know, wonder off too far out of low Earth orbit, just in the house. the engineering and operations were built in from the beginning. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International.

Ira Flato talking with a former astronaut who has been in space in a station a few months, Andrew Magnus. You know, you bring an interesting point up, because I know as someone who used to work on cars, that really good cars are made. They know the parts wear out and they're made to be replaced if you want to keep it around a while. Is the space station built like that? could we just keep bringing up spare parts that wear out and keep it going for much longer?

Yeah, we could actually. When you talk about the certification of the space station and how long it can remain on orbit, the real limiting factor is the structure and the structural integrity, because there's a lot of piece parts that were designed to be replaced, and NASA has indeed done that over the years. When boxes break or wear out, there's a lot of repair and replacement that goes on and it was designed in. It was one of the issues when the shuttle program ended

before we had another vehicle to start operations with was basically we had to sort of rethink how we were gonna do that regular replacement and how many boxes and what's sort of logistics stream you needed to built in before the shuttle replace. So for example, I was on the last shuttle crew and we took up 10,000 pounds of stuff, a lot of which were replacement boxes and spares

and things like that because we were gonna lose that capability to take so much up and down and back and forth. but it was definitely designed with that in mind. And when you talk about people certifying the station to 2024 or 2028, it's really all about the structure, and is the structural integrity going to be maintained. Yeah, you mean from the steel being embrittled or things like that? Yeah, and you think about the number of dockings that happens,

you have a low cycle and high cycle fatigue problems and micrometeeroids and all these kinds of types of environmental issues. I get it. Let's see if I can get a column before the break to Christopher and Durango. Colorado. Hi, Christopher. Hi, how's it going? Hi there, quickly. Yeah, my question is, I wonder if the guest sees any specific areas that private industry will not be able to cover in the next 20 years, and that governments will have to cover. Good question. Yeah, I think we will never have a time when there's not a need for government to do research and development in low Earth orbit and beyond,

because companies, of course, are interested in developing products and systems and capabilities that earn them a profit. And so it's hard for them to invest in cutting edge technologies or do fundamental science. That's just not what they do anymore because there's no profit margin there. I mean, even looking at, you know, we just heard from Blair Bigelow and the technology they're using for their beam module, that was NASA developed technology that Bigelow came along and licensed to then turn into a commercial enterprise. And so NASA, the government, across the board, not just NASA, that will continue to need the ability to do research in space, both in low Earth orbit and beyond.

And that's never going to go away. It's just a matter of what type and intelligently designing a research program that benefits everybody. You think about what's going on in space. It's 50 years of government investment and research and development that's where we are today. And so we have to continue to push that envelope.

So 50 years from now, the next wave continues to have access to that expanding knowledge base that research and development provides. We're going to take a break and come back and talk lots more about this. Our number, 844-8255. Lots of tweets are coming in at SciFry, talking with Sandra Magnus, former NASA astronaut who spent four and a half months aboard the International Space Station. And then she's also Executive Director Emeritus of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. And I understand that's your last day today?

Is that right? Yeah, yeah. My replacement, Dan Dunbocker, started in January. We've had a lengthy handover to make sure everything went well, and I'm getting ready to walk out the door. Not quite yet. Stay with us for another segment, okay? And we'll be right back after the break.

Don't go away. You too, Sandra. Stay with us. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. We're talking with Sandra Magnus, former NASA astronaut, and resident on the International Space Station about the future of that station and possible others.

Dr. Magnus, you mentioned before, and we're talking a bit about China putting up their own space station. Is there any real need then for the U.S. to have a major role? I mean, the U.S. is losing a lot of its leadership positions, a lot of technology areas, and education. I mean, go through a lot of these things. I'm not going to go through them now. To other international countries, I mean, would it just seem logical? We could lose our lead to China, or whomever wants to take that lead. and take the chances in space.

Well, of course we could. I mean, we need to make sure that we maintain a very integrated, strong, enduring, long-term commitment to what we're trying to accomplish as a nation in space. And I would argue in any other area as well, but we're talking about space today. And I think it's really important that we do that. You know, China notwithstanding, the world does look to us to establish sort of the vision in that sense. and we bring a lot of energy and a lot of passion and a lot of technology and know-how to it. And people do look to us to say, hey, you know, we think it's important that we're going to go to the moon.

We think it's important that Mars is a horizon goal and how can we all go do this together? And that is something that our international partners look to us for. And if we cease to fill that role, they will look elsewhere. And what does it cost to maintain the space station about, what, $3, $4 billion a year? Oh, gosh, I don't have that number off the top of my head. I think it might be a little bit less than that. Yeah, it's in the couple billion dollar ballpark. Yeah, and if it's an international venture, you would think we could all, you know, scrape together a few, that's a few bucks in a larger budget to keep it going?

Yeah, so the way the way, the way the big portion of the budget, by the way, is just transportation. It's not just the operations of the station, but it's getting stuff up and down and getting the people up and down. So that's part of the station operational budget if you look at NASA's line item. But the way the international program works is each, it's an in-kind, it's sort of a big barter, system, if you will. And so when the memorandums of understanding created the Space Station project so many years ago, it was basically, you know, each country came to the table and said, we're going to put in this and we're going to put in this, and out of that we'll each get certain percent of crew time, a certain percent of power, a certain percent of the resources. And so it really was an international barter treaty. And so each country puts resources in and gets resources out. And every year, the partners sit down at a table and they examine how the allocation of all of those resources went in the previous year and continue to barter back and forth based on the baseline memorandums of understanding that were agreed to decades ago. Let's go to the phones to James in Connecticut.

Hi, welcome to Science Friday. Hey, how are you? Hi there. So I just want to say, you know, it's kind of nice seeing that we're shifting from government-owned, government-operated stuff, and we're slowly moving towards the private sector, especially with Elon Musk and SpaceX, you know, they've, it's Elon Musk is actually coming up with less expensive ways to get stuff in the space. And honestly in the long run, it's reducing the government's risk for reward, you know, especially with the launch costs from NASA. And on top of that, you know, the governments, you know, their spacex and such are able to take more risks and put a little bit more ingenuity out there, you know, than the government funding, you know, the space station or rocket launches that may or may not yield results they're looking for.

Yeah, and you know, what I like to think about here is think about, and I have an expanding bubble. I'm going to, I use when I talk to public, you think about, you know, human beings being on Earth, and then our expansion of experience as a bubble goes off of the Earth, and now it's expanding to moon and Mars. And as that bubble expands, you know, the leading edge of that bubble is the government investment. Because, again, you look at things of what SpaceX is doing, what Blue Origin is doing, what Virgin Galactic is doing, what college students are doing, what the CubeSac community is doing. all of that knowledge that they're using to create these capabilities at these different price points and all that has been leveraged off of government investment.

And so that's the leading edge of the bubble. And now after all those years, again, these companies are coming in and they're looking at innovative ways of using that technology and that know-how to create these other products and services, but there will always be a need for the government investment

at the leading edge of that bubble, right? And so what you're seeing now is that, okay, hey, private industry is thinking, hey, we kind of got lower orbit. We kind of got some of these capabilities and services, but there's other technologies that government will continue to investigate and invest in. Solar electric power is one of them right now.

NASA has a very vigorous solar electric power research and development program, and once that's developed, that will be a capability that everybody else will benefit from it, too. So it's not an or, it's an and, and if each part of the ecosystem is investing in the things that make sense for what their strengths are, then the overall ecosystem is health. Speaking of ecosystem, where do you see yourself? Are you going to be still in the space industry, do you think? Yeah. Yeah, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I promised myself a little bit of a break after I was finished with AIAA, so I'm going to take some me time, but I'm really passionate about the space program, so I imagine I'll get engaged in a few months, but in the meantime, I'm just going to kind of hide for a little while. I get it. I get it. Because you're certainly a very good spokesperson and speak very well and how to get the point. and how to get the point across. That would be, you know, would be ashamed if you still were not involved in space somehow. Oh, well, thank you, Ira. That's very nice of you to say.

Yeah. Hope to see you again. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. And good luck. And congratulations, I guess, on your retirement from... Oh, thank you. It's been a lot of fun. And I would encourage people to pay attention to what's going on in the space program.

There's a lot of great things happening these days. Sandra Magnus, former NASA Astronautics, Executive Director Emeritus at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Decades, astronomers have been puzzling over the mystery of ULXs. Those are ultra-luminous X-ray sources. Of course you knew that. Often perched in the edges of galaxies. Not quite strong enough to be supermassive black holes,

but too bright to be other kinds of known objects. Well, four years ago, the mystery seemed solved. The fledgling new star telescope detected pulsations that proved, at least a few of them, were neutron stars. Neutron stars, tiny dense stars that pack the mass of several suns into the space of just a few kilometers. But that just created a new problem because these neutron stars were far brighter than they should be, given what we know about the limitations of mass and luminosity in stars, hundreds of times too bright. Kind of a problem that astronomers love to have.

Well, now new research might have an answer. These neutron stars might have an intensely powerful magnetic, field, 10 billion times the strongest magnetic field we've ever generated on Earth. The research is published in Nature Astronomy this week, and my guest, Dr. Matt Middleton, a lecture in physics and astronomy at the University of Southampton in UK, is one of the co-authors. Welcome, Dr. Middleton, to Science Friday. So what made these x-ray sources so mysterious? Started looking out into the universe with x-ray telescopes, because remember you can't actually see x-ray

on the earth because thankfully our atmosphere protects us from such harmful radiation. And when people looked out, they found these things that were really, really bright. They were far too bright than they had any right to be. ... with the centres of galaxies where we know material falls onto these supermassive black holes, where the masses are millions to billion times the mass of the sun. But there was still way too bright to be what we normally see in x-ray binaries, where we have like a black hole, which is, say, 10 times the mass of the sun or a neutron star, which is around 1 to 1.4 times the mass of the sun, or even white dwarfs, which can be even more tiny,

where that really gravitationally compact objects and material falls onto them and they get very bright. But these uralexes, they seem to be too bright for that. So for a long time, astronomers were sort of scratching their heads and going, well, what could this be? And people first thought, okay, well, maybe these are a new type of gravitationally compact objects, and maybe these are what we're called intermediate mass black holes, which is a great idea, right? because we know that supermassive black holes in the centers of basically all galaxies had to form somehow. So they had to build themselves up from very, very small, possibly primordial black holes. And somewhere along that line, there may have been intermediate mass black holes around like 100, 10,000, 10,000 times the mass of the sun.

So maybe that's what they were. But we can't just go and weigh these things. It's very, very difficult. So we needed indirect unity rage and what are they? Do we think they're like normal, intermediate mass black holes? So that was really the root of all these arguments. So voila, you look at your data and you say they're not black holes. They are a different kind of neutron star that we've not seen before?

Well, I'm located on that. So we looked at them and they break your light into various different channels, and you look at the shape of that. And you can compare that to objects that we know and study really well. And for a long time, we looked to them with them. They could be neutron stars. We don't really know. We all had to come up with indirect lines of lines.

Things got much simpler because a colleague of our Mateo Vecetti discovered with the New Star Telescope, which is led by Fiona Harrison, who I know you've had on the show before, they discovered these pulsations. And these pulsations indicated that this thing had to have a surface, and it was spinning really quickly. So all of a sudden it's like, well, it can't be a black hole because black holes don't have surfaces. Although, you know, hyperservices are different topical together. So it had to be a neutral star.

and then the question is, how can these neutron stars be so bright? And then your answer was, well, we give them this giant magnetic field. Rapid rates, cake, and in the middle of that pancake, you've got a neutron star. At some radius, so some distance from the neutron star, then it tapers down to the neutron star, so it'll be a cone, right? Right. And then all that radiation is produced within that disk or from that neutron star, gets trapped within that cone, and it gets what we call geometrically beam towards us.

Right. So it's like having a flashlight behind it so that it reflects that. that illumination that's coming from the bulb back out towards you. That's why it looks so much brighter than it would do if you just had the bulb on its own. So that's one way you can do it. The other way you can do it is by having, as you said, a really, really strong magnetic field. And it's possible to choose lies somewhere in between. The importance of the magnetic field in this picture is that it reduces what we call the cross-section

or the scattering cross-section to electrons, and that's horribly complicated. So let me just say what I mean there. radiation. This is Science Friday from PRI, Public Radio International. Talking with Matt Middleton, lecturer in physics and astronomy at the University of Southampton in the U.K. You know, black holes get so much attention, don't they? They do.

Do you neutron star guys get a little jealous of not giving enough neutron star love out there to these stars? Oh, no, as far as Newtron star, old enough, you might remember at Disney life a lot easier. You know, of course, last year's big gravitational wave news was that LIGO and Virgo had detected these colliding neutron stars. Yeah. Something we'd never observed before. Is there something else like that we might soon have a chance to observe? Yeah, sure. Well, I mean, for the very fit be finding neutron stars going around black holes or white dwarfs going on neutron stars or all sorts of things.

So it's going to be an extreme thing. So, you know, you find I talk to astronomers, physicists, all the time, and what really excites them is that they don't know some. something. Yeah, absolutely. It's the hunt that they like. But, you know, I get to work on these amazing objects and do that. Well, I'm glad you engage in your work. Thank you very much. That's a terrible fun. Yeah, I know. That's me. Matt Middleton, lecturers in physics and astronomy University of Southampton, and co-author of the new Neutron Star Research, glad to see you have so much fun with this.

Thank you for taking time to be with us today. My pleasure. Anytime. You're welcome. And for our New York City listeners, we've created a monster, I mean a monster party, that is. We're celebrating the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's classic with Frankenfest, a Frankenstein variety show. That's absolutely truth. We're going to have a comedy and music, storytelling from Story Collider, and lots of freaky science. And the date is March 5th, 7 p.m. at Caviatt in New York.

Tickets and info are at ScienceFriety.com slash Frankenfest. March 5th, 7 p.m. Caviath, ScienceFriday.com slash Frankenfest. Charles Berk was our director, senior producer, Christopher Taliatta. Producers are Alex Lim, Christy Taylor, Katie Heiler. We have technical and engineering help from Rich Kim, Sarah Fisherman, and Jack Horowitz. And, of course, we're active all week on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, all social media. And if you have a smart speaker, you can ask it to play Science Friday whenever you want. So every day now is Science Friday.

I'm Ira Flato in New York.