Science Friday - Moon Art, Space History, And NASA's Megarocket. July 19, 2019, Part 2

Episode Date: July 19, 2019

Our Lunar Muse Most of us remember that iconic photograph of the Apollo 11 moon landing: Buzz Aldrin standing on a footprint-covered moon, one arm bent, and Neil Armstrong in his helmet’s reflection taking the picture.  But there’s a much longer, ancient history of trying to visually capture the moon that came before the 1969 photo—from Bronze Age disks with crescent moons to Galileo’s telescope drawings to 19th-century photos and modern photographs. For millennia, we’ve been obsessed with the moon’s glow, its craters and blemishes, its familiar, but mysterious presence in the sky. The moon has mesmerized experts from all fields of study, from scientists, historians, curators, to artists, including this segment’s guest, Michael Benson. Benson is a filmmaker, artist, and author of Cosmigraphics: Picturing Space Through Time, a history of humanity’s quest to visualize the moon and space. In his own art, he uses raw data from space missions to create lunar and planetary landscapes.  Benson isn’t the only person who’s thinking about how science and art has impacted how we see the moon. Mia Fineman recently curated Apollo’s Muse: The Moon in the Age of Photography at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The exhibit explores how humanity has interpreted the moon through drawings, paintings, and photographs for the last 400 years. Preserving Space History We’ve all heard the iconic stories of the early space program—from   Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech, to The Right Stuff, to Armstrong’s “one small step,” to the dramatic story of Apollo 13.  But how do we find new stories to tell, locate hidden figures of history, or even know they exist? The answer may lie in museum collections, old paper archives, and in the memories of ordinary people. Ed Stewart, the curator of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center, and Reagan Grimsley, head of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Alabama-Huntsville, join Ira to talk about preserving artifacts of the early space program, and the importance of the archival record in telling the tales of historic space flight. NASA's Megarocket Bet The Trump administration says it wants to go back to the moon—but how will we get there? You’ve seen the advances in spaceflight from private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. But a big part of the current U.S. plan for returning to the moon involves something called SLS, the Space Launch System—a megarocket assembled from a combination of parts repurposed from the Shuttle program, and new hardware.  John Blevins, deputy chief engineer for the Space Launch System, and Erika Alvarez, lead systems engineer for the Space Launch System Vehicle, join Ira to talk about the rocket’s design, capabilities, and NASA’s plans to use it to go back to the moon and beyond.  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. You probably know that famous photograph that Neil Armstrong snapped of Buzz Aldrin on the moon just after Apollo 11 landed. Now Buzz is standing, one arm bent, and in the reflection of his helmet, you can see Neil taking the photo. But for centuries, scientists, artists, artists, and filmmakers have been trying to see the moon, capture all of its craters and blemishes, and imagine what could be up there. Well, now a new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York called Apollo's Muse explores those centuries of obsessive moonshots and how they've shaped scientific discovery and the artistic imagination. Science Fridays, Camille Peterson, took a trip with the exhibit's curator, Mayor Feynman. In order to tell this story, we needed to include a lot of different kinds of objects.

This is a book by Galileo Galilei. It is a record of his observations through a telescope in 1609. Galileo's drawings and descriptions completely changed the human conception of what the moon was like. Before this, people thought of the moon as a perfect, unblemished orb. This section of the exhibition deals with the Moon of the Imagination. What we're hearing, it's actually a new soundtrack for an old film. It's Georges' trip to the moon, which he created in 1902. 1902. That's the image of the man in the moon being hit in the eye by the astronomer's rocket ship.

These are some artists' renderings from the 1760s. It shows the moon as a place with people on canoes and giant pumpkins in which the moon people live. Why the pumpkins? Yeah, I guess they thought, well, where would moon people live? It was a new world vegetable, so that was something that was strange and unfamiliar to Europeans. So now we can move into the space race room. Most people know these pictures. Earthrise shows the Earth floating above the horizon line of the moon, and blue marble is a picture of just the planet Earth

with the blackness of space around it. The fact that these were in color was what really created this strong impact. The Earth is this living thing. Why do you think the Moon has been so captivating for centuries. It's a bundle of contradictions. We can see it all the time with the naked eye, and yet it's too far to get to. It's always kind of mysterious. It's constant, and yet it's always changing. It's just a paradox that's hanging out in the sky. That was Mia Feynman from the Metropolitan

Museum of Art in New York, talking to our Camille Peterson. My next guest is here to talk more about the moon's visual past, present, and future. Michael Benson is a filmmaker, artist, and author of cosmographics, picturing space through time. Welcome back to Science Friday. Oh, thanks, Ari. Good to be with you. Yeah, it's nice to have you. And I want to tell our listeners that they can see all of these images we're talking about up on our website at sciencefriiday.com slash moon art. Let's go back, Michael, a few millenniates. It's 1600 BC. give us the depiction of the moon. What did they know about it then? Well, at that time, the moon was key in helping to determine when to plant and when to, you know, when to plant and when to

reap what you sowed. And in fact, the moon's phases are kind of the monthly metronome that temporal backbone of any calendar divided into 12. And the word month, we don't think about this, but the word month is a cognate of the word moon. So at that time, the moon really helped to understand when to plant, you know, when to harvest. But in general, it was also, it stirred fascination and a need to understand. I think more than any other object in the sky, with the possible exception of the sun, the moon influenced the imagination of early humans, and caused this puzzlement and sometimes terror when you had an eclipse, right? So, I have a thesis that all of our contemporary technologies, every cell phone, every laptop, et cetera, derived from this history of technology which originated in European astronomical clocks and then the need to miniaturize those and the watchmaking, you know, finesse and precision, which resulted from miniaturizing astronomical clocks.

And the lead indicator of, of course, of monthly changes is monthly, you know, of the month is the moon. And then also the eclipses were hard to track, and that also was a puzzle. Was the Nebris skydisk back in the 1600 BC? Is that the oldest known graphic? Yes. The Nebrah Skydisk was unearthed in central Germany in 1999 by effectively grave robbers. and then the German police recovered it a few years later, and there was a lot of skepticism. It's about the size of a vinyl record, 12 inches wide.

It's got gold, two representations of the moon in gold. One is a full moon and one is a crescent moon, and you see the pleades on it. And after a lot of testing, it was determined that the thing was actually real. It wasn't some fake or something because nothing like that had been seen before. We're talking about roughly the period of Stonehenge, and it has since been, you know, effectively endorsed as the world's first portable astronomical calculation device. And then the moon made an appearance in the 14th century book Dante's Inferno, right? Oh, yeah. I mean, in Dante's Inferno, you have Dante and Beatrice rising towards the moon. It's actually early spaceflight. There's some beautiful Renaissance depictions of that.

illuminated manuscripts of them rising into the cosmos. And then you have in the 19th century people started making plaster models of craters of all thing. Yeah, that was in part because early film was simply not fast enough to capture the moon. And so beginning with John Herschel, I have an image in my book Cosmographics, which is a photograph, an early photograph, of a crater. made in plaster. And I think that Mia Feynman has some later depictions,

and I also have some of those in my book, of plaster models of craters because then they could be photographed in a controlled studio environment with these slow emulsions of the 19th century. Speaking of slow emotions, wasn't one of the first films ever made a film about getting hit,

the man in the moon getting hit in the eye by a big bullet shot from a giant cannon? I remember seeing that. Right. I just wrote a piece, which should be in the news, New York Times this weekend, and it's about later films. I mean, it's actually about how some of the early geniuses who came up with multi-stage rocketry were provoked by Jules Verne, who depicted a cannon shell taking space travelers to the moon. And, you know, they realized that a cannon would

immediately convert any astronauts inside to, you know, basically tomato juice on launch. And in George Millier's film, you do have a Jules Verne's film. You do have a Jules Verne's. style cannon shell lodging itself in the eye of the moon. But there have been so many films and movies where the moon has an emotional pull or is a stepping stone to further space exploration, like 2001 Space Odyssey, right? Right. Well, what is it about the moon? Why are we so obsessed with it? Well, you know, I think that, you know, we have, we have, there's something symbiotic in the relationship between representation and understanding, right? And understanding doesn't necessarily precede the representation. Sometimes the representation can help with the understanding, right?

So images, you know, Werner Heisenberg warned his fellow scientist, Werner, that's the German physicist, he said, contemporary thought is endangered by the picture of nature drawn by science. The danger lies in the fact that the picture can now be regarded as an account of nature itself rather than our picture of it, you know. But by the same token, how else to develop? You know, you make a model, you study it, you know, perhaps react against it. So Copernicus was reacting against all of those depictions of an earth-centered cosmos. He needed all of those erroneous graphic depictions of an earth. centered cosmos to understand the true design of the solar system.

Do you think that the Apollo 11 landing changed anything about our captivation with the moon's image and how we look at it? That's a really good question. I mean, I think that it showed that we can achieve extraordinary things if we put our mind to it, you know, and I think it, you know, you mentioned 2001 of Space Odyssey. That moon, that moon, that film came out. year before the Apollo landings, the first Apollo landing, you know, which is obviously the anniversary this weekend. And, you know, I think that, I think that that that that plus the actual landings

showed us the next stage, you know. So, for example, 2001 marked the change from the Western, the Hollywood paradigm was the Western, until Kubrick and Arthur Clark made this extraordinary film, which was the highest grossing film of 68. And suddenly, the big budget science fiction spectacular was a going proposition, and it was the, you know, and since then we've had innumerable versions of that, you know, innumerable different types of sci-fi space spectacular. That shows that we kind of reached a next phase. Do we have a next phase now that you see about how we're going to depict and visualize

the moon? Well, I don't know about visualizing it, but certainly we seem to be at a next phase of spaceflight with all the privately funded, you know, Elon Musk and SpaceX and so forth. And then the Chinese seem quite serious about sending people there. So I think we are at our next phase. The depiction of it, you know, we've had a spacecraft orbiting the moon called Lunar reconnaissance orbiter for a few years now, and we have extraordinarily accurate depictions of the moon from that. So our understanding of the moon's surface is quite accurate. Do you think that we have lost our romance with the moon, because we're so scientifically and technically involved with looking at it.

I don't know. I was just driving back to Ottawa, where I live these days, the other night, and the full moon rose over the hills north of Ottawa, and it was so extraordinarily beautiful. I don't think there's really a danger of that. Yeah, I have to agree with you. It is something that does not lose its flavor, and especially now when we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11.

I want to thank you very much for taking time to be with us today, and good luck on your next moon depiction. Oh, thanks, R. It's good to be on WNYC again. It's nice to have you. Michael Benson, he's a filmmaker, artist, and author of Cosmographic's picturing space through time. We're going to take a break, and when we come back, a conversation we taped this spring at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. You know that Huntsville is a very famous place for space exploration. and they also, for preserving space memorabilia in history there,

we're going to talk about preserving space history through archives and museum collections. Stay with us. We'll be right back for that conversation after the break. This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. This summer marks the 50th anniversary of the Apollo Moon Landing. And you know the popular stories, right? Kennedy's speech, the right stuff? The one small step, Apollo 13? But how do we find out those hidden nuggets or even know they exist?

Well, you ask the archivists, the curators of the artifacts stored at museums like this one, or in boxes of old paper, fading photos, dusty records, and two of those archivists are here with us today. Ed Stewart is the curator of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center right here in Huntsville. Welcome to Science Friday. And Reagan Grimsley is head of special collections and archives at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Thanks for being here. Ed, for everybody who's not in the audience here who doesn't know as much as we do about Huntsville,

what is Huntsville's special role in space history? Why are we here? Well, Huntsville's kind of claim to fame for the space program is all things propulsion. If there is a rocket that was built, especially for the early space program and even into the space shuttle program, That engine on the bottom of that rocket was probably designed and may have been built here in Huntsville. Now, you're the curator at the Space and Rocket Center. Give us an idea of some of your favorite artifacts that are here. Well, there's the easy one, which is our Saturn 5 that we have in the hall just outside the theater here.

That's a big exhibit. It is. It is. Getting a Saturn 5 in a building lying down. Yes. About just under 400 feet of length, and the building is built around it, basically. And it's the largest object in the Smithsonian's collection that we have here. And then we also have amazing things that come from the history of the people that develop the program,

childhood notebook of Werner von Browns and technical documentation from the computers that operated the Saturn 5. So it's a phenomenal selection. And Reagan, you're an archivist and head of special collections at the university here. What's so special about these special collections when it comes to C. space. Well, UAH is pretty unique in that we're one of few academic archives in the United States that actually collects space materials. That role usually falls to the Smithsonian or other governmental agencies, NASA. So we have had a very integral relationship with the space program dating back to the 60s. Wernivine Brown secured funding for us, our research institute, and we started

collecting Saturn 5 documents actually in 1968 before the first Apollo missions reached the moon. Ed, what stories can you get? What is an old rocket tell you? Anything from, and especially here, because we focus on propulsion, we get an opportunity to look at the piece parts and then from the piece parts, you see the names on the documents and you can learn about the individuals that contributed to the development of the J2 engine or the F1 rocket engine. And it's through, from my perspective, it's through that hardware that you find the stories about the people that built it that spent their nights and weekends, slaving a way to achieve this really fantastical goal. So you can find, if you look through it, you can find the serial numbers and old parts and stuff like that? Absolutely. Every piece of NASA hardware, especially those used on the Saturn 5, has something called the data plate.

And that data plate gives you a serial number, the date of manufacturer, the company, the contract number, all these. kind of breadcrumbs that you can use to trace back to a lab, a manufacturing facility, any direction you might need to go in order to identify it. And you have a dual role here. You want to put these objects on display for people to look at in your museum. What about preserving and restoring them? Do you work on that? Is it like having in a garage, you're going on a Saturday, and you want to restore your old car?

Let me put it this way. We don't let me near the paintbrushes. No, it's a bit more complicated than that. We do a lot of work, especially since a lot of our display is outdoors, we do a lot of work to make sure we understand what it is that we're dealing with and then taking the best steps to preserve it. And hopefully most of the work is preservation rather than restoration because you want to keep what's there if you at all possibly can. Because I guess a lot of people look at them and they say, hey, this stuff is built out of strong material, but some of it's pretty fragile. That's correct. The one thing that people think of is this is a big metal rocket.

It's so robust it should be able to sit outside forever and ever and ever. And that is just about as far from the truth as you can get. The engineers did not think about putting it on display in a park in 50 years in the future. They were thinking about, I need this thing to not blow up and get its payload to where it's going to go. And so thinking about whether or not a pigeon was going to make its nest in it was not on their list. So we do a lot of trying to keep the animals out, trying to keep it clean, and just everything we can to maintain them. You gave me a tour of the back of the archives in the attic today,

and one of the things you pointed out, the most fragile thing in your archives you said were the space suits. Yes. Tell us why that is. So space suits are incredibly finicky. Of course, they're designed to be airtight, very important feature of a space suit. And they're made up of, depending on the suit,

up to 21 different layers. and a lot of it, because of the time in which they were made, a lot of the polymers or the rubbers are natural rubbers, so they break down quickly. Those layers like to trap air, humidity, and everything in between them. So you have to be super careful with handling them if the rubber has started to become rigid, super careful about the temperature and the humidity and the light levels

to keep those microclimates from forming inside a suit and basically creating a pocket of humidity for mold to grow. So they're super, super finicky to deal with. Reagan, a lot of early NASA archives were focused on preserving the technology, have engineering documents and spec sheets and things like that. But we know from the history that there were great stories about people who did all these things. How do you get the stories about the people preserved? Yeah, and that's a good question because a lot of the early documentation was purely technical.

wanted to make sure that they documented this great achievement of being able to send man to the moon and return him safely. It's only later that we really begin to see the context of humans in that record. And we have to remember that about 400,000 people worked on the Apollo project. And 4%, almost 4% of the U.S. budget in the late 60s was devoted to that program. So you had a large number of people working on a project, and a lot of people, of those people didn't have a lot of background in training you know they were some of them were local people here from huntsville that you know went work for nassas and and worked their way up or or whatnot so they just assumed that everybody knew the story right i mean they it's like us here in huntsville

we draw by the rocket every day sometimes i think we we shouldn't but we take it for granted and so as people begin to age i think they begin to tell their children these stories or to about it and that's when we start to see it come into the archival record and numerous times I've had people who wanted to donate their father's papers or wanted to donate their grandfather's papers and they would give me they would bring technical notebooks and I was saying well do you know do you have a photo do you have some stories do you have some reminiscences do you have something so that we can see the people behind this and so we now whenever we solicit collections we solicit that type of material specifically. Because we want to see how the people fit in the picture. I may ask both of you, let me ask you first, Ed. Do you have a favorite artifact in your whole

museum or collection or in the attic I saw all kinds of stuff? Wow. It's like asking about your children. Yes, which one is your favorite kid? Yes. From a paper documentation standpoint, we have the only copy of

Warner von Brown's doctoral thesis, which is kind of a super, super historically critical thing. It's of course all written in German, typed, except for the formulas, which are handwritten, and then photographs paste it in onto the individual pages. It's a marvelous historic document. From an object standpoint, there's the tiniest part of the Saturn 5. There are these little tiny magnetic donuts that make up a one or a zero inside the launch vehicle digital computer, and they are a fraction of a fraction of an inch in diameter.

Core memory. Yes, magnetic memory. I remember that from my 1960s popular science days. That's exactly right. And they would take these little magnetic donuts and sew them by hand into these planes in between two copper wires. And if it spun one way, it was a one.

If it spun the other way, it was a zero when you ran current through it. So it's one of my handful of top. to your favorites. And Reagan, do you have your favorite? I think one of the favorite things that I have in our collection is something almost not from Apollo, but Warner Van Bruner wrote a book called Das Marsh Project. And we have a signed copy, and ours is special because it was given by Warner Van Brown to Willie Lay. The author who came to America from Germany in the 1930s, unfortunately left all of his book collection behind. it was actually taken from him before he left, but then as he came to America, he began to rebuild it,

and he was really one of the people who popularized rocketry after World War II. So that has to be one of my favorites. That's great. Yes, ma'am. So you've already answered my initial question, which was how do you decide whether or not a document or an object is historically significant enough to include in the archives, but my follow-up to that is,

what do you do if you decide that it's not, significant enough to include in the archives. Does it go back to the family or go to a different collection? Reagan, you want to take that? Yeah, we have a process by when someone gives us a collection, we have a signed donor agreement that tells us exactly what they're giving to us. And part of that is a what to do with materials that we might not want. And many times we try not to take things that we don't think we had a session into our collection,

but it does happen. One thing that happens quite frequently is you get something with personal identification on it, for example, social security numbers or something along those lines, that we just really wouldn't want in public circulation. So we'll usually ask the family to take that back. But we, by law, cannot give away or sell things because we're a state entity. So, you know, we can't offer it up to the highest bidder. Interesting story related to this. we have a very large collection of science fiction books,

many of which are from the 40s, 50s, and 60s. And we're cataloging those, and we're finding duplicates. And I had a gentleman in a couple of weeks ago. He says, I see that you have a duplicate of the Star Trek book. You really don't want to give that one away. It's worth a lot of money. So, you know, these things, they have monetary value. So sometimes we keep them or we give them back to the donor when we can.

But that's usually written into our, donor agreement so that you know they're not kind of floating around out there because there is a there is a large space collector's market out there can you digitize them so we can all read them put them on we're working on that but you know it takes a long time and money out of yeah it takes a lot of money and I think that's the you know the common phrase that we always hear is it's all on the internet and that's just simply not true and we invest a lot of time and money into you know selectively digitizing things that we think people will want to

see that's great I'd like to see a lot of that. Yes, sir. What steps would someone have to go through to be able to view the archives in person? Yeah, who do you have to be, special? Somebody special? No, so because most archives are considered a public trust,

we are available for research and investigation, and for us specifically, we have an application on our web page that you go in, you submit your application, you tell us what it is you're interested in, and then we reach out to you and contact you and try and schedule it, because for us, we're a fairly small team, so we have to manage our time

and with all the projects that we're doing, and then we try and fit you into the schedule. Now, Reagan, I know that you and your archives were involved with the making of a documentary movie about the Apollo. Tell us about that. Yeah, we were involved in the documentary when we were Apollo.

The producer of that came out and talked to me, and I was lucky enough to be able to get him in touch with the right people that, and also served as a scholar on the grant, help them get an Alabama Media grant. Hopefully APTV will run the documentary this summer. But we're also collecting stories as part of that. We're going to serve as the archive

for all of the material that they've collected. So for us, the interest in working with them was to be able to collect all of these stories from people who have memories of Apollo or who worked on the project. And I have to kind of tell this one story. So we had a gentleman who comes in and volunteers for us, John Rankin, and I know John because we're both from Mississippi. John's lost his accent. I haven't. But he wound up working for Boeing because he was working in a paper mill as an engineer, and he was going through and reading a magazine, and they had little forms to fill out.

And he filled out a form and got a job offer from Boeing. went to work in Seattle and wound up being one of the top people in safety protocols. And, you know, he's featured partly in the documentary about the Apollo fire and sneak circuit technology. He was really the top person in that field. But that goes to show you how that average person out there can sometimes wind up being a very important part of history. You take these oral histories and you'll find out these things. You get wonderful stories. Yeah.

I'm Ira Flato. This is Science Friday from WNYC Studios. Right now, last question for both of you because we live in an age of digital things, right? Virtual stuff. You're dealing with an age where there were tangible things, right? What is your advice now to the space program? What should it be doing now to preserve the things for future archivists? What should they be doing?

Print it out. And I say that because from my perspective, if it's a document, so much is being stored digitally, and formats, file formats, we face this as archivists, file formats change, and file formats become obsolete.

And so if you have a document, a hard copy, a piece of paper will last you way, way, way longer than a magnetic disk or a CD. Reagan? I agree to a certain extent. One of our problems is that a lot of the things that we get now are only digital. You know, and it's almost impossible to print them out. In the past when someone brought you a stack of photographs, they were going to be there for a while, as Ed says.

You know, they're bringing you something physical, and now somebody brings you a SIM card. And we have to figure out ways to deal with that. We had a conference about a year ago called to Boldly Preserve, and that a group of our, archivist and museum curators and space collectors got together talking about this very question. You know, we looked back 50 years, we looked forward 50 years. What is the future going to look like? And one of the things that I tell folks is that in 50 years, people are going to be writing histories based on our cell phones. The archival artifact is going to be your cell phone, Ira. And that's what we're going to be writing history from, because that's what we keep our day-to-day lives on.

Some people look at my phone and say, it's already an archive. It's so old. Thank you, gentlemen. Thank you both. It's fascinating conversation. Ed Stewart, curator of the U.S. Space and Rocket Center right here in Huntsville. Reagan Grinsbley, head of special collections and archives at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Thanks for taking time.

This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato coming to you from the U.S. Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The Trump administration says it wants to go. back to the moon, but how will we get there? You've seen the advances in spaceflight from private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, but a big part of the current plan for returning to the moon lies here in Huntsville with something called SLS, the space launch system, and it's big, really big. John Blevins is the Deputy Chief Engineer for the Space Launch System at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center here in Huntsville. Welcome to Science Friday.

Erica Alvarez is lead systems engineer for the space launch system vehicle at NASA Marshal Space Flight Center here. Huntsville, welcome to you. John, for those people have been living in a cave and don't know what the SLS is, give us in a nutshell what that is. It's a very large rocket as the nutshell. But it is taking a lot of the historic components that we had in the shuttle. And we've made them a lot bigger. If you could overlay the two, you'd notice that we're over 100 feet taller. And it's the rocket we plan to go to the moon.

Are there actual parts from the shuttle? There are actual parts from the shuttle. In fact, the engines that will be flying, most of those engines have flight history in the shuttle. And there are other components as well, many other components. And the reason for that is what? Well, because it gave us a jump start. It was a good way to start the program so we'd have flight hardware ready to go, proven hardware ready to go. And Eric, of course, saying that, and there are some people who say, you know, we had been to the moon.

You know how to do that. why not just dust off the old Apollo plans and get that rocket in the lobby filled up and send it to the moon? So there have been times in the past where we've tried to do that. We actually have a hard time sometimes finding the old drawings from Apollo of things that we built way back when. I know one of the things that we were kind of looking at here was the J2 engine. The J2 engine was something that a few years back we tried to go build a new engine. It was called the J2X. And when we found the actual old hardware, you could tell that it was hand-blended, that during that time the manufacturing techniques were different.

You found things that were riveted, things that nowadays we would not be able to pass safety trying to do. And so what we really did at that time was that we took that old heritage hardware and we would scan it. We would do a white light scan. We would pull that into a CAD file, and now we had a mechanical drawing that we can now take to a robotic machine and actually use our new manufacturing techniques to actually build with new materials to be able to pass what we consider now our new standards. So the old stuff would not have passed modern safety standards or design. One of the things that people were pointing out to me in the space of the rocket park here

was that the tooling on some of the engines were done by hand at the last minute. Yes. It was all very custom. In some cases where we were taking apart this hardware, You have to have really small fingers to be able to have the right tooling. You have to have custom tooling, so you have to actually design the tooling just to take the old heritage hardware apart. So nowadays, we try to build things so where they're more standardized, we can use more of a kind of a streamlined flow when we start to put these things together. And at the same time, we're also trying to build a gateway that will actually orbit around the moon.

And so you have to think long term that when people go up there and they actually try to service this station that will be around the moon, the moon, you have to be able to have good tooling to be able to take things apart and fix them if you have to. Right. So you bring a toolbox to the moon, or around the moon with you? Actually, nowadays we bring a printer, a 3D printer, where we can actually send up just a file and we can print it while we're up there. Go ahead and have all the materials, print it out, and then the astronaut will take the new tool, say, yeah, this one works, it's good, or no, send me a new file, I want to make a new one. John, is the new rocket able to go past the moon, have other uses besides just going to the moon?

Well, yeah, the long-term intent certainly is to go beyond the moon. And in fact, for science missions, we've got one booked right now that we plan to send to Europa. So it'll send big payloads further and faster. But we're going to go to a further orbit than we did with Apollo, so 280,000 miles on the first mission next year. And so that'll be further out than we've ever been. Okay, so the time schedule is next year. you will have your first, what, proof of concept sort of mission? People in it?

No people in it next year, yeah. It'll be two years later before we fly the first man mission. November 2020 is our target for launch. You know, there were stories about the Apollo 10 of having, they went all the way down to 40,000 feet above the surface. They didn't actually land on the moon, and someone said, they didn't give them enough fuel to land because they would have if they had. Have you heard that story?

We've heard that story. I've met Gene Cernan, and it's probably true. Erica, you also need to deal with the human side of things. I'm thinking about the, we all saw the movie The Right Stuff and how the astronauts were saying. You didn't ask us about the human side. Why don't you have a window here or a steering thing here for us? Do you talk to the astronauts more now and think of the human side?

Yes, one of the things we do a lot is we take into account when we talk about having a human-rated vehicle is how will humans interact with this vehicle? How will they have contingency plans? If things go wrong, will they want to be able to steer this vehicle? If they want to steer that, how would we be able to enable our flight software to be able to do that? So one of the challenging things about our jobs, really John and I, is we get a lot of requests from our crew office, from our astronauts down in Houston. And we always have to think about how can we meet those requests and at the same time still come up with some of something that we can verify is safe, it will be reliable, we can use it, and it will still

be affordable. So that's our kind of our tight rope that we have to walk every day, because otherwise we'll never be done customizing this rocket. What do you think about the private companies, Elon Musk, other people who say, we're going to get to the moon before you guys. Are they going to? Well, first I'll say it's an exciting time to be in the space business, right? There's a lot of rockets being built all at one time. First time that's ever happened, right? During Apollo, it was just the Saturn,

and it was all NASA rockets. The current architecture includes the commercial rockets, not for the manned piece, leaving the Earth, but for once we get to the moon and going down to the moon. So we plan on part of the NASA architecture, including some of those commercial launch vehicles. That hasn't all been worked out, so that's been in a competition process right now.

Is this mission, the 2020 mission and the one that comes after, is it bought and paid for? Is it, is there the budget for it? Well, that's a good question. I'm not sure they could have answered that question in the 60s on Apollo either. I would suggest that there are discussions that continue. There's some current budget negotiations, and we don't have a long-term budget through Congress.

Every year Congress decides what they want to give, so it's not yet bought and paid for. You know, that's one of the magical parts about this. the decade of the 60 to 70 going that decade of, it went through three presidents and no one killed the program. We got to the moon right on schedule. Do you think something like that can happen today considering the political climate we have?

I mean, I believe so. I believe so. One of the things that I've noticed when we go talk to schools is that a lot of people don't realize out in the public that we don't have a launch system to be able to take us to the moon anymore. It's really a global and a national capability that we want to build.

And at the same time, it's very enabling for some of these science missions that want to go farther, faster. They want to cut their mission time. And they want to be able to do new science to take us even beyond into interstellar mediums. So when we talk to scientists and they tell us about telescopes, or they tell us about missions to Europa,

or they tell us even about getting back to the moon. And when can we do that? And can we start to build a sustainable environment and start to build habitats and expand on that. I think that the space launch system, we're very excited is a big part of that. And so I think once people see that we build this capability that's very flexible, I think right now

we do have a lot of the public support and being able to see what it is that we can do and knowing that it was built here, I think we're up to at least 44 states that all contribute towards the space launch system within the United States. So it's really our nation's rocket. So we get a lot of support,

or at least from the public when we go talk to folks about it. Let's talk to folks about it. We please come on up to the microphone and we'll take questions. Yes, sir. Hi there. A question about the SLS product life cycle. I know there's, as Mr. Flato noted, companies like SpaceX has a fantastic and proven flyback booster capability.

The SLS currently doesn't have that. But I'm wondering, are there plans to make it more cost effective by, increasing the amount of reusability of components and entire assemblies? Well, I'll take part of that question, and then we can bounce it around. And I assume when you talk about reusability, you're talking about like boosters, because that's pretty dramatic, yeah. And so we had a long history in shuttle, as you probably know, of recovering the boosters out in the ocean, and, of course, it took that infrastructure to do that.

I got to work on some of those things during that program and the following program, the Ares program. And so we had, you know, ships to tow the boosters. We had a refurb facility. It's really about the infrastructure cost versus your flight rate. The intent of the SLS rocket is really to have a low flight rate with a lot of capability. It's your 18-wheeler. It's your large barge that you're sending down.

It's not a bass boat. It is carrying larger capability than any of these other rockets we're talking about by really more than two times. And that means a lot in space because having... multiple launches makes it a very complex mission and so we can launch a lot in one mission but it is a big rocket and so we're not planning on reusing the boosters shuttle did that they had a flight rate of up to 13 in one particular year we're looking at just under a year per flight right so maybe one flight per year getting started after a few years and then not a high flight rate

after that so for us it would not be fiscally responsible probably to recover those boosters just the infrastructure to do that and And then, but, you know, the other parts of that, the capsule in this particular case, that is a part that's coming back, the Apollo capsule, the Apollo capsule, the Apollo 16 capsule. Our Orion capsule is set to be used for multiple missions. So there are parts that we've decided to use again, but it's really case-by-case and what makes fiscal sense. Erica, anything to add to that? One thing I will say sort of kind of feeding off what John was saying is that we really get. push to get as much performance squeeze out of this rocket as we can.

And so because of that, there's only really two ways to work that. One, you either get more thrust and you get more powerful engines or you get a lighter vehicle. And so we really try to look at if there's areas that we can optimize the mass of the vehicle, we take that out. We say, do you need to have that bracket? Does it have to be that heavy? Do we have to have this on there? And we do this every single day.

And so when you do reusability, you lose some of that. function and like John said you know the first space launch system is going to carry over 26 metric tons of a capsule but then the future SLS is going to carry a co-manifested payload which is over another 10 metric tons plus all the everything to be able to encompass and kind of do special services for that payload a docking system and a crew capsule nobody can push that much right now and so we we know that our market really is pushing the most pushing farther and just at our flight rate,

just go ahead and get another one the next year. So, again, I think a lot of people don't know it, that one rocket, that the first one is going to be not the same as the subsequent ones. They're going to be bigger the subsequent ones. Yeah, I like to call it a Starfleet, actually. We used to joke around about that. I jokingly call it the Starfleet.

I shouldn't say that on radio. It'll probably be now. Not the Space Force. But we have seven different book configurations right now that carry us about to 2030. Some of that's based on obsolescence, making better boosters and all that. But to add to that question, too, you can imagine if you're going to bring something back,

those design requirements, just like Erica's saying, that mass becomes different. And in fact, when we did the boosters for shuttle, the design requirements were based on reentry more than they were assent for the space shuttle. Do you build in a little, you're an engineer, do you build a little extra for maybe someday? You want to do something a little more, and then you have that capability? Always. But at some point, it has to stop. Eric knows that part of Erica's job is making sure that churn stops.

So just so many options you can put on the vehicle. I'm Ira Plato, this is Science Friday from WNYC Studios here in Huntsville talking about upcoming space missions. Let's go back to the audience. Yes sir. Yeah, if there is some sort of unforeseen problem that develops with SLS, is there a discussion about some fallback positions as far as size or capability, say at the 18th? your 90% level? And you're talking about like getting a lunar mission in case SLS as a program has a problem like...

Any type of mission, are there a fallback position? Well, right now, the only capsule that we have, the only human-rated capsule, really for deep space, something like the moon is our Orion capsule. So we're in a position right now as a nation, as an agency, where really SLS is the only one that can push that. The others don't have that payload capability. There currently is not a fallback if you're asking, like,

Can we create another capsule and launch it on a different rocket? I was really talking about the rocket itself if there's a fallback position on a smaller capability rocket. You know, that's a really good question. I wouldn't, you know, this may not answer your question the way that you think, but I would suggest to you this first vehicle that we're flying in some ways is our fallback. You know, when we started the program, we decided to fly this, we're calling Block 1, and it's a symbol of a lot of heritage parts and it's lesser capability. although, as I mentioned earlier, it's more than twice,

which you can get on any other rocket as far as to the moon, well over twice. And so the long-term rocket has a second stage, and that's really where we're aiming. That is the rocket that we consider SLS at NASA. It's this block one rocket is the backup plan. And, you know, Ira, to one of the things you said earlier about success and all that, one thing that isn't well known is most of the parts are waiting for us. You know, we've got the upper stage that is on this rocket is setting at Kennedy Space Center under purge,

and all the booster segments that we plan to fly are cast. So there's a lot of hardware waiting for the new hardware, which is just about to come out of the factory. And we've got a lot of testing. The reason that it'll be 18 more months is there's a lot of verification testing we want to do to make sure the rocket's ready to fly. Yeah, I mean, I was wondering how you go from nothing to a rocket flying in 18 months, and now you explain that is their parts are there waiting to go. They're already at Kennedy Space Center waiting for the main core of the rocket. And their mobile launcher, too, is brand new,

and that's also sitting out there at Kennedy Space Center, going through all its verification testing. And it's going to be ready to go when we get the rocket there. Yeah, it kind of goes back to the question you asked earlier. You know, this rocket already transcends one presidency to another presidency. Right. We started this in late 2011, and we've been working on it. ever since. Erica Alvarez is lead systems engineer for the space launch systems vehicle at

NASA Marshal Space Flight Center here at Huntsville. Thank you for taking time to be with us today. John Blevins, Deputy Chief Engineer for the Space Launch System at NASA Marshal Space Flight Center here in Huntsville. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for here today. That's about all the time we have. Our heartfelt thanks to WLRH for hosting us and to everyone at the station for making us feel so welcome. Thank you. Special thanks to WLRH's Rebecca Goodwin, Nate Emery, and Brett Tannehill, and to Dr. Deborah Barnhart, Dr. Kate Taylor, and all the staff here at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center for making this wonderful evening possible. Thank you all. In Huntsville, Alabama, I'm Ira Flato.