StarTalk Radio - NASA’s Vision for Space with Charles Bolden

Episode Date: June 21, 2015

How important is space exploration? What’s next? Mars? Europa? Find out when Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews NASA Administrator Maj. Gen. Charles Bolden. Neil is joined in studio by astrophysicist Dr. Michael Shara and Bill Nye. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Tonight I have a very special guest host. The one, the only, the inimitable Bill Nye the Science Guy. I'm here to help. Yeah, thank you. Well, tonight we're featuring my interview with Charlie Bolden, General Charles Bolden.

Call me Charlie. The head, the administrator, which in government speak means you're the highest ranking person, of NASA, Charlie Bolden. I went to Washington. I got the interview in NASA headquarters. And we talked about everything. Past, present, future, NASA. He was an astronaut himself.

And one of his missions, he repaired the Hubble Space Telescope. He drove the ship, the shuttle. Yeah, yeah. It's a fighter pilot from Vietnam. And I know you're a space guy, but I wanted more. So I combed the landscape. And it happens to be in my department, the Department of Astrophysics, here in the Rose Center for Earth and Space, we find Mike Schara.

Mike Schara, Curator of Astrophysics at the American Museum of Natural History. Thanks for joining StarTalk. Absolutely my pleasure. Excellent. Glad to be here. Now, why would we have two astrophysicists in the same place at the same time? I was going to ask that. Is there some disruption in the space-time continuum? Skeptical.

So Mike Schar actually worked for 17 years at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute. You were eyewitness to the telescope going up and its trials and tribulations. So the first day Hubble was put in orbit, April 1990. That's right. That first day was not a good day for Hubble. And so here I am sitting with the head of NASA, who deployed the telescope himself. And so I had to get the bottom line of how all that went down on that first day. Let's check it out.

Nothing went right that day. Why? Well, after we finally got it out of the payload bay, we deployed the high-gain antenna, two of them on either side, boom, boom, boom. They went down, no sweat. Because we've got antennas. Antennas. You can't deploy an antenna. Go home.

Well, everything worked. Okay. But we thought, if you can't deploy a solar array, go home. And we almost had to do that. So we deployed the first solar array. Second solar array started out, I don't know, maybe 16 inches and stopped. And we went, that's not supposed to happen. So these solar panels unfurl?

We had to do two things. We had to unfold the drums and then when we activated them, they had this, it was incredible. They had a ribbon that pushed out and as it pushed out it formed itself into a rod. And so that was the two of them on either side of the solar array. This is a clever engineering design. Incredible clever engineering design, except the second one got about 16 inches out and went, and stopped. And we went, oh, my goodness, what's going on? Long story short, when we could not get the solar array to work,

before they determined that it was a tension monitoring module, they made the decision that, okay, we've got to get this. We're running out of power because, remember, Hubble was on batteries right now. It didn't have any solar arrays to get power from the sun. And so batteries were running low. The team down in Houston and Goddard said, we've got to get it off the arm. We've got to get it out of here. And so they said, take Bruce and Kathy, put them in the airlock, suit them up,

and they'll go out. They both were veteran spacewalkers. And so they were anxious to go out anyway and bask in the sun and save Hubble. So I got them in the airlock. And the only person not excited about them going out was me. Because as the Ivy crew member, your job is to make sure they stay alive. And so once again, my heart started beating. You didn't want that on your conscience. I did not want that on my conscience. Because that's one of the most cinematic things to show, is a spacewalking person drifting away. You don't want that. With the cape. Every sci-fi movie shows that. So I got them all suited up. We got the airlock depressed. And we got down to vacuum. And we were probably five minutes from them opening the hatch and going out on the airlock depressed, and we got down to vacuum, and we were probably five

minutes from them opening the hatch and going out on the ground and said, stop. We got a young engineer down here that thinks he knows what the solution is, and we're going to try it, last chance. And so Lauren got the vehicle in position, and they said, you know, let it go, and we went three, two, one, go. And Bruce and Kathy were locked up in the airlock at vacuum, trying to look through a little hole, and they couldn't see anything except the payload bay. So they hate me to this day. It's funny, to be that, I put them in the vacuum.

You know, that's just really cool if you're in control of what the ship is doing. So was everyone at the Hubble Space Telescope Institute at the time aware of these little problems of deploying the telescope? We were terrifyingly aware. Terrifying because... We knew exactly what was going on. It was a career-ending.

This was, for all of us, life and death. Many of us had been working on the telescope for 7, 10, 12 years. This was our careers. This was our passion. If it didn't work... The telescope was not off the shelf. It was a one-of-a-kind object.

Nobody had ever done anything like this. Except for the military ones that look like that, but that's a different show. That's right. They were looking down, not up. We were going to look out. So everyone is pins and needles. And because you not only care for the telescope,

you care for your job security, I guess. Is that part of it? There's a little bit of that. You're working at an entire institute designed to serve the data that comes from that telescope. There are 500 people who have decided that they are going to devote their professional lives to advancing astronomy a century in the space of 10 years. Every one of us had put our hearts and soul into this,

and we cured, I think, more than anyone except maybe the astronauts and the other builders, how this thing went. It had to go well. Hey, what did the young engineer do to shake loose the spring-loaded rods? I would like to say that all he wanted to do was just baff it with a hammer. A nice hammer. No, no, as the story goes, the engineer said, don't believe the sensor. Occasionally the sensor, because you don't want major things to fail, but if your sensor fails that tells you that something did fail and didn't, then you've got to ignore the sensor, and somebody's got to make that call. And sure enough, the panels unfurled, and electricity started to flow,

and instead of that graph going... Electricity derived from sunlight. From the solar panels, and instead of that, instead of, oh my God, we're going down the toilet, suddenly it started coming back up again. And he was saying that we were running on battery power at the time, and so you had to get the solar panels deployed. That's right.

And if you didn't, and they were semi-deployed or partially deployed, you were going to ditch the telescope because you weren't going to risk the lives of the astronauts. Well, not just that. You can't just, I know it seems intuitive if you pick something up on Earth, but you can't just go out in space and shake something because you'll be the shake-ee. That is correct. And the thing has a tremendous amount of inertia, and it has to be oriented with extraordinary So the point you make is, I can sit here and shake this microphone, and I'm not moving anywhere.

Yeah. In space. With a thing that has a mass of several tons. 15 tons. Yeah, 15 tons. You're going to sit here and shake this microphone, and I'm not moving anywhere. In space. With a thing that has a mass of several tons. 15 tons. Yeah, 15 tons. You're going to shake right back. Yeah, you're going to be the shakey. So it's not that simple.

Plus, the thing is extraordinary aiming or pointing capability, right? We hadn't turned that on yet. We've got little telescopes looking out the side, little interferometers. How big is a cute little telescope in this case? This one is one and a half times the size of a city bus. Weighs 15 and a half tons. Human beings could fit right down it. It's a very respectable telescope, even on Earth.

The first time I saw it, because I wasn't the astronaut, right? So I visited the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, and they've got a mock-up of the Hubble telescope there. And I said, that can't be it. This is too big. Beautiful one-to-one mock-up. Oh, my gosh. It's the biggest.

You can't even. Don't even. Don't even. So the bigger it is, the more light it gathers, right? It's the diameter of the primary mirror. Give us like astronomy 101 with Hubble. Tell us why we all would like Hubble. The size of the mirror is great.

It's important. It's 2.2 and a half meters across. That's wonderful, but that doesn't make it... It's the diameter of the main collecting surface, okay? That's correct. And at the time, that was, oh, about 10% of the collecting surface of the biggest telescopes on Earth. Oh, but it was in space.

But that's the point. Because I would have said so. So is right. Yeah. But once you're above the atmosphere, all of that blurriness goes away, and all of that ultraviolet-absorbing oxygen and ozone goes away. So what you're saying is the strong twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are, is the boon to all modern astronomy.

It is. Because the twinkling is atmospherically derived. Twinkling is horrible. You get above that, you get the sharpest images there ever was. Suddenly you can see in the ultraviolet

and you can see details 20, 30, 40 times finer than anything you can see from the ground. So 30 times the resolution means 30 times more detail for any given spot on the sky.

Think of it as going from an optical microscope to an electron microscope. And we've all seen pictures from electron microscopes. So suddenly you're not just seeing the bacteria, the viruses pop into view. All new sorts of things you can see. All sorts of ability to resolve what's going on in the centers of galaxies. So what you're saying is Hubble, arguably the most productive scientific instrument there ever was.

Not arguably. You cannot argue it. It is true. I can argue. What about microscope? But go on. More so. No, you can't point to any one microscope that is as productive as that one telescope. Am I right? Do I get amen? You get double amen, sir. Double amen. Amen, amen. Amen, amen. Amen, amen.

But one tiny flaw nearly doomed the entire project. That story is next on StarTalk. We're back on StarTalk. That's Bill Nye, in case you don't otherwise recognize him. Bill Nye, thanks for being my co-host. It is I who must thank you. And we've got my friend and colleague, Mike Shara, fellow astrophysicist, astrophysicist extraordinaire.

Totally a pleasure to be here. Prolific. And we got you on here because you have firsthand information about the deployment and success of Hubble. And how much of your research, would you say, has pivoted on Hubble? Since the Hubble telescope was launched in 1990, probably two-thirds of the papers that I've written of the research, peer-reviewed papers, have been Hubble.

Okay, so you Hubble. It's been the core of my career. It's the core of your career. Compare that to other astrophysicists, other people. Has everybody's research been affected that much? I would say the average astrophysicist is a third to a half. Oh, only a third. Only a half of everything you do all day from this one instrument.

That's why there's no argument. It is the telescope. It is the thing that has transformed astrophysics. And when it was deployed, deployed by the head of NASA back when he was only a shuttle astronaut. And a general. Only a shuttle pilot. Commander. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When he was only that. Mirror guy. We're learning that things didn't go smoothly. We have this multi-billion dollar instrument. And things are not going smoothly. That is really the understatement of the last two decades. It was a complete mess up. A complete mess up.

A mess up? Watch your mouth. So we'll get your point of view on this in a minute. You were on Earth. Let's find out what it looked like from space. Charlie Bolden. We were all apprehensive about doing something that might damage Hubble. Hubble was huge, and you know that. 25,000 pounds. Yeah, it's the size of a school bus. It's the size of a school bus and a half in length. And it was almost 15 feet in diameter in a 15-foot diameter payload bay. And I remember the day before we were supposed to launch the first time going out to the pad and sticking my fist in.

And my fist could just fit in between the side of Hubble and the longer arm of the shuttle. So that's the clearance. That's the clearance between the circumference, the outer diameter of Hubble, and the shuttle itself. And so Steve Hawley— That'd be the payload of the shuttle. That's it.

And Steve Hawley was the prime arm operator. And it had been through all kinds of analysis. We had carried classified things before, and everything said, this is going to work. All you got to do is lift it out. And so Steve and I had trained for that for about a year. But when we started lifting it out, when Steve started for his motion, I was reading off the attitude and position numbers, and I said, Steve, stop. All of a sudden, the telescope was starting to twist and tilt, which was not good because there's not a lot of room to twist and

tilt. You don't want to break it pulling it out of the box. That would be bad. That's really bad. And so we began what turned into what was supposed to take about 10 to 15 minutes, we began what became about an hour-long arduous task of constantly tweaking the joints on the arm. Steve did an incredible job, I mean, moving joint by joint to lift Hubble out. But after the flight, weeks later, when we heard that there was a problem, he and I just, we kind of pondered because we didn't know whether we had bumped or had caused something. A little period of time.

Yeah, so there was great relief when someone used this term that I had never heard before, spherical aberration. Spherical aberration. And so it was a design flaw. Not a design flaw, a production flaw. And so we went, whew. Okay, so he's off the hook.

There's something wrong with the mirror, but they deployed the telescope correctly. They did 100% fabulous, wonderful job. The problem is that a couple of years before, a little washer, literally a little washer, just a half a millimeter thick, had been put upside down inside a measuring device, a little interferometer, and the washer wasn't the same this way as that way.

That spaced two mirrors wrong, and so the Hubble mirror got polished perfectly, smoothly, but to the wrong shape, which meant that we could never focus Hubble perfectly. And when they went through the first focusing test, what happened? How did you feel? I'll be like, Oprah, how did that feel? They went from the most negative focus position to the most positive focus position.

As anyone would do when you're trying to focus something, because you don't know if you can get a better focus, keep going, so you keep going. And then you go through the exact focus and you come back. Whoa, there it goes, back up. Whoa, too far, wait. It's like trying to get to the temperature in the shower. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you were always being scalded. There was not a damn thing you could do. You were always going to be out of focus. It was horrible. This, we didn't, we tested on Earth. Says the engineer. Bill Nye's a professional engineer here. We tested many aspects of Hubble.

We did not do a complete end-to-end test because there wasn't enough budget. But you can't test everything. You can never test everything, but you sure as hell can test it from end to end. So what features of your telescope do you have? Well, we have some electronics and we have some little maneuvering. Is there a mirror?

Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. So it's an Apollo 13 moment. Fix this. Two of my colleagues at Space Telescope get up, the chief engineer, Jim Crocker, Holland Ford, colleague astrophysicist, and they propose the most elegant thing I had ever heard. How long did it take them to do this? They worked on this for a couple of months. A couple months. And what they did was? What they said was, listen, the beam is converging and it's supposed to converge to a little spot, perfect focus, but it doesn't quite get there.

perfect focus, but it doesn't quite get there. But if we could make the beam length a little bit longer, then in that extra path that the beam would follow, it would converge. This is two microns or something. Well, what we're going to do is we're going to take a little mirror and put it into the path. The cutest little mirror. Only the size of a U.S. quarter. And we're going to stick it in the path of that converging light, and we're going to make that light bounce. That's going to redirect the light onto the camera. Okay, so these are corrective lenses.

Corrective mirrors. Mirrors, sorry. So now you fix it. So did it work after you fixed it? Well, we take it up there. The next shuttle mission at that time goes up there. The astronauts dock with the telescope, grab the telescope, and they deploy these little mirrors.

And we take that first picture, and nobody's breathing. Everyone in the room is turning blue as that picture comes down, and it's perfect. Perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Beautiful. And suddenly you saw tiny little points that picture comes down, and it's perfect. Perfect. It's absolutely perfect. Suddenly you saw tiny little points,

and hundreds of new stars that had been blurred out by all the other bright stars popped into view. The universe came into focus. It was as if you were... That was good, right? That was good. That was really good. As if you'd never been able to see, and you put on your glasses, and bang, you could see as sharp as day.

Is it going to wear out? It'll wear out in the sense that if we don't send astronauts to it and there are no plans and no hardware and no technology that currently exists because the shuttle program is over, it's actually going to either fail. it's actually going to either fail, one of the key components is going to fail, or it's going to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere four, five, six years from now and burn up. It'll re-enter the atmosphere no matter what at some point. Unless we do something to boost it and there are no plans to do that. And you want to plunk it into the big toilet bowl of space, which is the Pacific Ocean. That's what's going to happen. Yeah.

A reminder that we are featuring my interview with the head of NASA, which is the Pacific Ocean. That's what's going to happen. A reminder that we are featuring my interview with the head of NASA, General Charles Bolden, and we'll find out what's next for NASA when StarTalk returns. We're back. StarTalk. Bill Nye. Who else could this We're back. Start off.

Bill Nye, who else could this man be but Bill Nye? I call him Sir W. Sir William. Thank you, Brother Neil. Don't let anybody else call you that but me. So what am I supposed to, like, mess him up if somebody calls me Sir W? You're supposed to push him down. He's been in New York too long. I'll mess you up.

And I went with mess. There's other verbs. We're featuring my interview with the head of NASA, General Charles Bolden. And as head of NASA, he's overseeing NASA's plans to go to Mars. Yep. Let's check it out. People have always dreamed of going to Mars. Always.

You know, as long as I can remember. Even before we had airplanes. Given the budget we have today, we are on a path that will get us to Mars in the 2030s. So if I write you another check for another 18 and a half billion, you can speed that up, perhaps? Tighten it up? Maybe. I can guarantee you with more certainty that 2030, we're going to have humans on Mars. You're trying to get me to presuppose.

No, no. I'm writing the checks for you. I know you're writing the checks. I mean, write them. Please do, by all means. And your friends in Congress, please write those checks. And I am going to be able, or whoever's sitting in this chair as a NASA administrator is going to be able to say, with greater and greater and greater certainty, you know, we're going to be on Mars with humans in the 2030s.

They will be able to say with great certainty, greater certainty as you buy down more risk. There's risk in everything we do. Risk is never, ever going away. Risk is never going away. So in the exhibit, when did you predict we'd be on Mars? We didn't predict a date because we didn't know what the budget was or will be. Frankly, I think that we are not as brave as we should be.

As you well know. Wait, wait, wait, Mike. Exactly. Wait, wait, stop. Stop. Mike, you're going to tell me you curated an exhibit that could have said we could be on Mars by a certain date, but since you didn't know if there was money available, you withheld such predictions?

No, we certainly... If we felt that way in the 1960s, we wouldn't have built the world's fair. We didn't have a cold... We had a cold war. We said that we could be there in the 2030s, just like Charlie Bolden said, but if you doubled spending,

which this country sure as hell should do, because we're spending half of 1% of our national budget, $18 billion out of $3.5 trillion, frankly, is an embarrassment. We should be spending $36 billion a year on the space program. Yeah, Neil, you should be spending, write the check. You said to the guy. Planetary Society, what's the posture there? Well, Planetary Society, we advance space exploration and space science, and we think the sooner the better on all this stuff. Is that the deepest answer you can give me? No, hang on.

So people say, why send humans? Because the robots are so successful. Spirit and Opportunity Rover, the Curiosity Rover are fantastic. Opportunity Rover, the Curiosity Rover are fantastic. By the way, you guys, Curiosity Rover now is sort of going on two billion Spirit and Opportunity. They're about a billion. You're doing like three and a half billion dollars for these three rovers, and they're not even locked. Anybody could just, on Mars, could just walk up to them, drive them away. But the thing is, nobody does because they're isolated. So people say, why send humans? Humans, you have to feed them.

Wait, wait, just to be clear, the price you cited for them is over their entire mission. Yeah, yeah. Not just in any given budget year. The whole thing. You divide it into a budget year. So yeah, the Opportunity Rover is still driving. It'd be like, it's been going on 11 years.

It would be like buying a car with a three-year warranty, not changing the tires, not rotating the tires, not changing the oil, not doing it, and having it running 120 years later. That's pretty good, man. That's a bargain. But putting humans there is extraordinarily difficult. But the reason to do it is humans would make discoveries,

its estimates vary about 10,000 times faster than what a typical very good robot does in a week, a human geologist or astrobiologist could do in about a minute. The key to going to Mars, the single thing that we're going to be able to do is answer that question with certainty. Is there life on our nearest planet? Because we're going to drill down.

It's not our nearest planet. Oh, you want to get into the thing about Venus? Yeah, about Venus. He's right. So, by the way, you're at Venus. Venus is really high. I'm sorry. Sorry to interrupt.

I just got to... The man's right. We're going to get to Mars. We're going to drill down, and we're going to hit water. There's water on Mars. We know that for sure. There's no sterile water on Earth except in a pharmacy. You drill down on Earth, you hit water.

There's always viruses, bacteria, protists. Everywhere you go. Everywhere you go. The first time you hit water. Everywhere on Earth. Everywhere on Earth. The first time you drill down on Mars and you hit water, you're either going to find bacteria or viruses or critters of some sort,

or you're not. If the water is utterly sterile the first time you drill down on Mars, then Mars' data is a doorknob. It may not always have been, and your drill will be micro-sampling, looking for fossils all the way down. But if you get down there and there's nothing, then Mars is completely sterile. I don't think it's going to happen. And then we can move there.

And terraform Mars with a clear conscience. But if there is life there, what kind of DNA or what kind of memory? Is it a whole other, is it like something totally, is it ACGT? What is it? I always wondered about it. Is it a whole other, is it like something totally, is it ACGT? What is it? What is it? I always wondered about it. All right, so we got to even the position of having this conversation because of what was known as the space race. Soviet Union, United States, who's ahead of whom?

Now we're in a different world where other countries are rising in their presence on the space frontier. We should be curious what NASA's plans are in a world where we are not the only player in town. More on that when StarTalk continues. We're talking about space from the whole of the universe of the Rose Center for Earth and Space. It's cool. This is where you got inspired as a kid, yeah? That's where I was, age nine.

So what we have, we have entered a new era. Other countries are putting things into space. Even countries like India. India. What do you mean even India? India, because when we think of India, do we think frontier space? Look at the American hubris that we carry coming out of the 20th century. We have our deep understanding of what we think the rest of the world is,

and then what it actually is is different. Such as India, where they launched an uncrewed vehicle into orbit, which is the first step before you put people into orbit. Absolutely. So I went to Charlie. I said, Charlie. Charlie, I said. I said, Charlie.

The whole world is now kind of doing what NASA's been doing. There's some competition out there. Isn't that a great thing? And I asked him, does this feel like competition to you? Let's find out what he told me. We teach people. We act as a model for how people of different cultures, different races, different nationalities can, in fact, work together. There are now five other nations, at least five, who are sitting on the surface of Mars roaming around for the first time ever.

Because there's only been one nation, one nation in the history of humankind that has ever successfully landed a vehicle on the surface of Mars that has functioned. And that's the United States. You know that. America. However. America, if you want to put it that way. America. But right now, there are other nations.

I'd lost count. Thanks for reminding me of that. Is that the model going forward? The chance, international co-op? Yes. Without question. Okay. If you look at the space launch system, or international space station, no doubt. That's my championship model.

That is the largest collaboration of nations outside of warfare that there is. So, Bill, is this state of the moving frontier, is that going to take us to the world of Star Trek? That's it, where there's a Russian guy sitting next to a Japanese guy and they're all in it together? Yeah, exactly that. With an optimistic view of the future? And then when we get to Mars, it's just... No, more broadly, it may be that science is what people turn to to lead the way

for international cooperation on a level far more potent and effective than anything the UN itself could possibly accomplish. It would be a wonderful thing if we all got this thing in our heads

that we're going to find out whether or not we're alone in the universe and we're all going to work together. It would's fantastic. By the way, right over Captain Kirk's shoulder is the science officer,

not the military firing officer. It was a cool, optimistic, it is a cool, optimistic view of the future. But they can still fire torpedoes. Those photon torpedoes will ruin your day. Yeah, well, if you're on the wrong side of them. And the Shield 4, man, is always trouble.

Is that right? Shield 4? Oh, man, it's always buckling. I didn't know that. Yeah, yeah. I've got to go back and check that out. It's a design issue. We're working on it.

But you still have to get to that point. Yes, and I want. You have engineering challenges. Yes. You want me to solve them? Perhaps the highest challenges of them all. Is money. Are political. Yeah, absolutely Perhaps the highest challenges of them all is money. Are political.

Yeah, absolutely. The technical challenges are solvable, everybody. Let us find out what General Charles Bolden, head of NASA, has to say about NASA and politics. All right, it's a worldwide thing. Everybody looks for, what do we call it, the return on investment. Dollars.

ROI. Everybody looking at this show knows what ROI is. You know, what am I going to get back ROI is. What am I going to get back from this? What we are going to get back as a nation, what we are going to get back as a people is the incredible satisfaction of knowing that we have finally accomplished something that humanity has been trying to seek for millennia. We have left this planet, we have gone to another planet, And we're on our way, you know, farther out into the solar system. And maybe one of these days. But it is a long,

long, long, long way off. You know, we're going to turn even more science fiction into science fact. But maybe following Voyager and leaving this solar system. So the unstated fact here is you need a vision statement that is bipartisan supported. Got to have it. Because time scales for NASA to plan and execute are longer than reelection cycles. Oh, oh. So something has to...

So you need a substrate. Way so much longer. Right? And Neil, you know, and you're a big person on NASA needs more money. NASA needs more public will, more national will. So, Mike, how do we do that? I mean, NASA wants to plan something.

If you want to go to the stars, that takes decades. But you reelect people every two years, four years. How do we get around that? Well, the political system in the U.S. for funding NASA is in many ways broken. That's why you joined the Planetary Society. And the way to fix the system is to get so many people yelling, not yelling, but speaking loudly to Congress through the Planetary Society, through the American Astronomical Society, to your congressmen, to the White House, saying, this is damned important. The return on investment, every dollar you spend in space, you get 100 bucks back, maybe a generation later, in new technology, in planetary defenses, and in discoveries, you can't even begin to imagine what they are. begin to imagine what they are.

And plus, there's another twist here. Because now, if you just come up with a couple million dollars, you start a private space company. Oh, yeah. There's more than a couple million. More than a couple million. Yeah. It's less than NASA's budget.

Considerably. So these might be game changers, perhaps. Now, you know, I ask that of the head of NASA. I just wanted to know, what did he feel about private companies sort of getting in the game? We will find out when StarTalk returns. We're talking about space, featuring my interview with General Charles Bolden, the head of NASA. The NASA administrator, as they're called.

Bill Nye, Mike Schara, friend and colleague. You guys are helping me through this, thank you. We're now talking about private space exploration. I know, they're popping up like corn. Like mushrooms, yeah. Mushrooms. Yeah, yeah. So, does corn pop up? With the rockets on the back. I don't know. I don't know corn they're popping up like corn. Like mushrooms, yeah. Mushrooms. Yeah, yeah. So does corn pop up?

With big rockets on the back. I don't know. I don't know corn, but mushrooms I've seen. Corn pops, Neil. Oh, corn pop in a popper. Yes. Oh, okay. And they're going to grab the whole market.

They're going to grab the market? They're going to grab the market. Who's the buyer? Everybody who wants to launch any kind of commercial vehicle, like a weather satellite, like a communication satellite. So we've got SpaceX, we've got orbital sciences, we've got, give me some more. What's the difference?

When Columbus left Spain, he was government funded. Yes, he was. Magellan was government funded. Lewis and Clark were government funded. You're not going to go to Mars and look for life for kicks. You're not going to go to Mars and look for life for kicks. You're not going to initially, but you may go look to capture an asteroid, not for kicks, but for profit. As soon as people start making money in space, in near-Earth space, then you're going to see lots of people jump on the bandwagon. People sell weather data, to be sure.

And imaging data and spy data. Imaging data, exactly. So let's find out what Charlie Bolden has to say about this infusion of private enterprise into this new game. Private space ventures are absolutely essential for us to be successful with exploration. We took a gamble. We took a gamble. We said we believe, and the president said, we believe that we should allow NASA to free itself of requirements to get people and things to low Earth orbit. So Orbital Sciences and SpaceX have been carrying cargo back and forth to the International Space Station for two years.

It's not that NASA has never partnered with industry before. We always have. Always have. Always have, yeah. The reason I tell our employees and our family, the NASA family, which to me includes the contractors, that anytime anybody asks them what they do, they should stick their chest out proudly and say, I work, you know, for or with NASA. I work with the space program.

Because we have always had this unbreakable partnership with American industry in every spacecraft we've done. This time, we are not controlling. We are not owning. We are not operating. So the ownership, the operation, everything, right up until they get to the International Space Station. When they get in the box, then it's mine. We will take over and maneuver it into the box, let it dock. It'll belong to us. The difference is the LEM descending on the moon didn't say Grumman on the side. It said NASA. It said U.S. It didn't say NASA. It didn't even say NASA. It said U.S.A. Thanks for correcting that.

Today, it's their spaceship going up. So it's going to say SpaceX. And it's going to have a US flag on the side, and it's going to say US. But it'll also say SpaceX. Yeah. Maybe. I don't know whether they'll put it on the side or not. But hopefully there'll be a big US flag there.

But that's going to be the mode of transportation of US and partner astronauts to the International Space Station because a nation like the United States... It's a new business model. It's a brand new business model. New business model. Let's do it. But we are reminded every now and then how dangerous this activity is. Yeah, but I just want to remind you, we send people in space,

we're talking about an adventure. We're going to make discoveries, but it's going to be an adventure. So we need two motivations. One, yes, we want to do some science, and maybe that's best done with robots. But if you send people, it doesn't have to be about science. It's about adventure. And discovery. We're going to just find stuff.

I guarantee you we'll find things we didn't ever think of. And those humans are adaptable. They get there. They get to the surface of Mars. Something doesn't go quite right. Not all of them. They see it right away. Not all the humans are adaptable.

Some of them are pretty stupid. Not the ones we're going to send to Mars. Right. Okay. So, all right, so you're ready to do this. Are you going to sign up to go to Mars? I would go to Mars probably in a heartbeat, but not. That would be in a 70th of a second.

Not just for the adventure. I'd really want to go if if I was carrying the equipment, to go do that drilling. To look for life. To hit the water, and I'd want the microscopes and the DNA analyzers coming along with me because I want to make that discovery. That's the point.

By the way, that's why these guys are all hot for bringing a sample back from Mars because they can't get all those instruments up there. Well, if you could get all the instruments there, you don't have to bring the sample back. Study it in situ. Yes. Forget all this landing on Mars stuff and terraforming.

At the end of my interview with the administrator of NASA, I had to ask him the burning question that's on all of our mind. Where are the flying cars? When is that going to happen? That's what I asked him coming up on StarTalk. StarTalk is back. We're talking about space. And this is the part of the show where I normally, like,

throw to Bill, lost somewhere in New York, but I've got Bill Nye, like, right here. Give us that gesture that will bring your clip up. Let's... let's roll that tape. For decades, we've explored the near reaches of outer space. We've flown vehicles like this up into the icy blackness just to see what's out there. But missions like this are just a first step. It's early in the 21st century.

I hope in the next hundred years, we will have explored under the icy crust of Jupiter's moon Europa, looking for signs of life. In the next hundred years, we'll probably know whether there was or even is life on Mars. If we were to discover life on another world, it would change everybody's perception of life on this one. Everybody's perception of what it means to be a living thing on a planet in space would change. I hope in the coming decades we commit to explore farther and deeper into space

so that people everywhere will know the cosmos and our place within it. So that people everywhere on Earth share a vision of our place in space. You look kind of manic there. I was kind of worried about you. The guy is wound up. So, Mike, what is your, what do you want the future of space exploration to hold? Yeah, man, what do you want?

What do I really want? Yes. What do guys really the future of space exploration to hold? Yeah, man, what do you want? What do I really want? What do guys really want? I want to know, A, if there's life on Mars. I think that's the single most important question in all of science right now, not just biology, not just astrophysics. And allow me to broaden that to say we want to know if there's life anywhere other than Earth. Of course. Yes. But the place to go to answer the question utterly definitively is Mars.

At least we can get a confirmed sure, yes or no, in much less than 20 years. And we don't need to send astronauts. This can be done 100% robotically. I want to know what the dark energy is. And I want to know what the dark matter is. That's the future of science, but I'm talking about going places in space. If we're going to explore the solar system, Europa, Ganymede,

and Callisto are obvious places. Europa is twice the seawater of the Earth. Moon. Maybe more than that. And what's the fishing like there? I know. Are there Europanians swimming around under the ice? I asked the head of NASA. Charlie, you said.

Charlie. I said, Charlie, what are NASA's greatest accomplishments, and what do you see for the future of this all? Let's find out. Why I feel so good about this agency today is because I honestly believe— You kind of have to because you're running it. No, no. Why this agency sucks. Well, we do suck in some terms.

There are some things we don't do as well as we should do. Even under your watch. Even under my watch. But in terms of technological achievement, nobody can match us. In terms of achievement and exploration, we are on Mars. We are on the moon. When Voyager left the solar system, for the first time in the history of humanity, not only had we visited every single planet in the solar system with some NASA instrument, but for the first time in the history of humanity,

we had a man-made vehicle that had left our solar system. That's a big deal. Charlie, I don't care what else your agency is doing. When are you going to give us the flying cars? Come on. We've been wanting those for decades. We are trying to enable industry to do that. We're already collaborating with companies.

I won't give them any advertisement or stuff on autonomous automobiles. Whether they're going to fly or not, I don't know. But we're learning. We're collaborating with them because what they're learning about autonomous vehicles, we're trying to apply to autonomous flight of unmanned aerial systems. How do we make airplanes more efficient? So there's a lot of collaboration going on. So it won't be NASA that brings us flying cars, but industry, hopefully one of these days, may develop it as a result of the collaboration with us. Okay, so I'll stop writing you letters about that. No, no, don't stop writing me letters.

I mean, it's important. That's the way we determine what the public wants. We'll start with the hoverboard, maybe the hoverboard. I'll accept that first, and then we'll move on. So I think there's an important little bit of information there. We think of NASA as planting flags, and in there we get a taste of the infusion of NASA's energy, money, and intellectual capital in creating technologies.

Oh, this is a big deal. See, this is the difference between your good old days and what's going on now. NASA's involved. No, seriously. What? No, the good old days, NASA led the world. And I'm not busting your chops. I mean, it was a different era.

Sure sounds like it. But what it means is perhaps we need to think of NASA more as an engineering, as an agency that inspires engineering solutions to our greatest problems. Sure. And the greatest problem is going to be climate change. And that's going to require some space assets, things flying around in space. But even in those good old days in the 1960s

when, yep, there was this huge singular focus on going to the moon, there was lots of planning going on for the Hubble Space Telescope. People were already working on it. For the International Ultraviolet Explorer. For astronomical missions. For lots of other kinds of science. So NASA has always had this multifaceted approach. Yep, there's always this one huge thing that they're working on.

Do we need the one thing to get to rally? You can't rally around 100 things. Or to not, that's the trouble. Where do you spend money? Let me ask you this. Didn't we find out the age of the Earth with rocks on the moon? We determined where the Earth and the moon came from. More important, where the moon came from, because we found that the oxygen... It wasn't like Arkansas or something. No, no, no.

The oxygen isotope ratios in the lunar and the Earth rocks are basically the same, which meant common origin. Once you knew that, the giant impactor theory was just an idea ready to be born. I get that, but you and I are astrophysicists, so we care deeply about things like the origin of the moon and what the rocks are made of and all of this. But at the end of the day, somebody's got to write a check. It's going to come out of Congress, out of a community of people elected by the country. Right. I'm not confident that just telling them to spend money on an agency that employs us

in our activities is sufficient enough for them to write that check. But we have to tell them at the same time that we are their life insurance policy. Because if they ignore us, and if we ignore those space rocks out there, for example, then one of them is... Wait, at the beginning of the sentence sounds like, if you don't...

I'm getting attached to you, man. This is the diabolical scientist. I'm a pragmatist. Guys, you want to ignore those big rocks out there? Ignore them at your peril, just like the dinosaurs ignored them, and you're going to go the same way. But there's a hundred other reasons, because we do all this other cool stuff for you. I cannot top that comment. We will end StarTalk on that comment. You've been watching StarTalk, and I've been your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist.

From the whole of the universe, I bid you to keep looking up.