The Dispatch Podcast - James Webb Takes Us Back in Time

Episode Date: July 21, 2022

Images from the James Webb Space Telescope have taken the internet by storm, and Declan is here with two guests who worked on it for a fascinating conversation about its long journey into reality. Dr. John Mather, a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and the senior project scientist for the JWST, and Dr. Scott Acton, a physicist at Ball Aerospace and JWST’s Wavefront Sensing and Controls scientist, relay their exploits in achieving the most incredible and ambitious space images ever taken of thousands of galaxies, black holes, and dust clouds. And we have to ask: Are we alone in the universe, really?   Show Notes: -First Images from the James Webb Space Telescope -Dr. John Mather -TMD: This Is Something That’s Going to ‘Change Our Understanding of the Universe’ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. This is Declan Garvey, editor of the Morning Dispatch. And today, we're going to talk about the cosmos. Last week, NASA released the first images captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, and they are spectacular. From the gravitational interactions between a grouping of galaxies to a star-forming region in the Karena Nebula, the space telescope, the most powerful of its kind and nearly three decades in the making, is giving researchers a glimpse into depths of the universe previously considered unthinkable, and it's only just getting started. The JWST is a remarkable scientific achievement and one that belongs to hundreds upon hundreds of astronomers,

physicists, and engineers at NASA and both the European and Canadian space agencies. On today's episode, I had the privilege of speaking with two people who've been working on the project from the beginning. Dr. John Mather is a Nobel Prize-winning astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center studying infrared astronomy and cosmology, and has served as the senior project scientist for the James Webb Space Telescope since 1995. Dr. Scott Acton is a physicist at Ball Aerospace and has spent the last 20 years as the JWST's wavefront sensing and controls scientist. Dr. Mather and Dr. Acton brought unique perspectives to the discussion, addressing questions, about the telescope, both theoretical and mechanical, and I really enjoyed talking to them about

the history of the project, how the JWST operates, and what the future of space exploration holds. Dr. Mather, Dr. Ackton, welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. Good to be here. The only person who might be more excited than I am for this conversation is five-year-old me who spent his summer attending a space camp at Northwestern University for kids. But I'm hoping that we can have a much more higher-level in-depth conversation here today that doesn't involve coat hangers and styrofoam balls and a little bit more in-depth science. So before we jump in, I first want to just congratulate you both on the remarkable success of this telescope, what we've seen the past couple days. I can only imagine the emotions that you've been experiencing these past six months since

the launch and then these past few days as the first pictures from the telescope have been published. Just for listeners who don't know, you've both devoted decades of your life to this project. something that, you know, obviously means a tremendous amount to you both on a professional level and I'm sure on a personal level. So I'll start with you, Dr. Mather. Can you try and explain what you felt when you first saw those images earlier this month? Well, I was thrilled to see how beautiful they are because although you know what you're going to look at, you just don't know what they're really going to look like. So they are so gorgeous. And not only that, they

show us the telescope is working perfectly, even better than we ever hoped. And the universe is cooperating by having things to tell us that we had never been able to see or measure before. So all at once, suddenly we went from we hardly know to now we don't know everything. And I am so thrilled with that. It's amazing. It really is. And Dr. Acton, I know your role in the mission and kind of wrapped up a few weeks before the images went public. Can you talk a little bit about what it was you were doing these past couple months? And do you have any particularly fond memories of realizing things were finally squared away with the telescope and you could relax a little bit?

Yes, that was a lot of fun. So my role is or was, I'm very quickly becoming was, because we're pretty much done, was the wayfront sensing and control scientists for the project. So over the course of two decades, me and obviously a team that people who worked with put together a system that would allow us to basically focus the telescope after launch. Now, I say focus and everybody is familiar with the idea. You have a knob and you turn it and it changes how the image looks. But imagine focusing, but you've got about 100 knobs you'd be to turn. So that's what we're doing.

We're aligning and phasing the telescope or focus, if you prefer. after launch. And we finished that just basically right at the end of April and in the middle of May, roughly. And it was pretty excited. Yeah. And where were you when you first saw these images? Did you react the way that you expected you would? Yeah, that was a really magical moment because Marshall Perrin, who's with the Space Telescope Science Institute, had this idea says, let's set up the data pipeline so that no human being gets to see these images until they appear on this computer in the conference room where everybody on the project that could cram into there was there watching the screen. And so I got to see them, Dr. Mather

got to see them all, the very first people to saw them all saw them at the same time. And it was fantastic. It was fabulous. You know, we had, in the intentionally sort of saturated the prime star in that image so that we can see all the background things and just the galaxies that came out of that. One of our team members has taken that very first image and carefully extracted all the galaxies in there and made a poster. And it's, I can send you a copy of that if you'd like. But there were 250 galaxies in that first image. Incredible. And one of them even has a, what looks like a supernova going on in it. I'm not sure about that, but that's the story I'm sticking with. And, uh,

It was just an amazing time to have all the management there, all the people that worked on this forever, and to be able to say, we know how to do this. There are galaxies. There's no dark sky. I think I remember saying someone hearing saying that. Yeah, from what I've read the past few days, it basically seems like this telescope can pull out this infrared light through space dust and capture it in a way that with some tweaking is percept. to the human eye and what might look like a dark sky where we're learning is actually not so dark at all. I want to take a quick step back before we dive into the nuts and bolts of the telescope itself and talk a little bit about the history of the project. Either one of you could answer these questions. I'm sure you've both been involved for some time now.

But how was the JWST conceived? And what was the impetus for it? you know, in the 1990s, and why did we need something more powerful than the Hubble Space Telescope? Okay, well, I started by not working on this project back in 1989. We were about to launch the Kobe satellite to measure the Big Bang and measure the cosmic microwave radiation that's left over from those earliest moments. And so the Hubble was getting ready to be launched at the same time. So my eyes and thoughts were completely on the cosmic background radiation. So other people, however, at that same time,

we're already looking ahead to what would we need after the Hubble was up there. And they said we're going to need a big telescope more powerful than Hubble that can pick up infrared light. So they knew way, way back that that's what we needed to do because that was going to be the next opportunity for science. The things that Hubble could never see because Hubble is warm. And that we could never see from the ground either

because the air is warm and also kind of opaque at many wavelengths. So they knew what we needed to do, and I wasn't paying any attention at all. But by 1995, we had fixed the Hubble telescope after it was not in focus, learned how to focus a telescope in space, and we got some pictures that said, oh, man, this is exactly what we have to do next. We got a picture of the most distant universe. It was called the Hubble Deep Field, and it had thousands and thousands of galaxies in it, and it was gorgeous, and there were little red dots on there that said,

this is as far as we can see back in time and far out in space as we can see. And, you know, it's not quite far enough because we want to know what happened before that. How did the first galaxies grow from the Big Bang? And now we had a picture of the Big Bang. We knew what to do, and now it's time to do it. So people wrote a book, and then as soon as I was done with the Kobe project, then I got a phone call. Would you like to work on this new telescope?

And of course, I said, yes, that's the coolest. that's the most important thing I could possibly imagine to work on. So that's what I've been doing ever since. You know, like pretty much any project of this size and scope, it ended up taking longer and costing more money than initially estimated. I think the final price tag came in at around $10 billion or so. Obviously, I think we can all say now that that was time and money well spent. But what were some of the biggest challenges that cropped up over the course of the project

that added those years and additional expenses, and how were you able to overcome them? Well, in a sense, they weren't really additional expenses. They were just, we did not understand at the beginning how hard this project really was going to be. And you just couldn't possibly figure it out by thought alone. You have to start and try to build something and see what you don't know.

And then when you don't know it, you have to solve that problem. So we made out a plan, and then we got a long, to 2002, we had a contract with a big company, which was TRW and then bought by Northrop Grumman. So all of a sudden, now we have a contract, and we can put serious effort into this and say, okay, now what did you mean when you wrote that? And so now work out a better plan, a more detailed plan. And there were quite a few things that we didn't include properly in those first days, especially how to test the telescope.

we learned that the plan that we all had was not good enough and so we better change it so scott were you involved in that part in changing the test plan oh no it was not um i was around when that happened uh but fortunately i was able to defer to people like lee feinberg and uh to work out all those details yeah anyway we a complete change of plan and we had to find a different vacuum tank to put it in and change the way that we were going to do the job. And, oh, well, that was hard. So as it ended up, by the way, we did that test during Hurricane Harvey in Texas. So we got four feet of rain on the outside of the building while our telescope was perfectly

happy inside the vacuum tank. But everybody else got wet. So we survived it. We learned what we needed to do. The telescope worked fine. And we send it on to the next step in California to be attached to the spacecraft and bus, which is the box that has all the rocket engines and transmitters and receivers and antennas and solar arrays and the gigantic sun jade, we call it, which is a huge umbrella that protects the telescope

from the heat of the sun and the earth. So it was quite dramatic. But anyway, that's just a hint to tell you why it took a little bit longer and crossed a little bit more. I wrought more than what people first imagined. Well, I like to say that, you know, I suppose on any project you can always in hindsight go back and see what you might have done differently to save money. Probably a little bit of that. But for the most part, I just think that's what this telescope takes.

That's what it takes to build a telescope like this. Yeah, especially when you're on the cutting edge and frontier like this, you don't necessarily know what exactly it is you're trying to build until you build it. And on that building process, Dr. Acton, I know a lot of your most important work happened after the telescope was launched. But what was your day-to-day like during the construction process and getting things ready for the launch late last year? Well, you know, prior to the launch, I think my life and my role looked like just about anyone's. I went through a lot of meetings. I talked a lot of the telephone and I sat in front of a computer and I typed.

And that's what we did for two decades. A lot of traveling, too, because, you know, you'd have to get people in the same room if you're ever going to get anybody to agree on anything. But I suppose the product, you know, what we came up with could be summarized in the form of documentation, you know, procedures, steps that we're going to follow, and computer software that contains all of these, you know, very complicated algorithms and, you know, approaches to start with a randomly deployed telescope and end up with what we have today.

And so since the launch, I guess it was December 2021, the telescope had to travel to orbit the sun at the second Lagrange point, if I have that right. And once it was there, that's when your role kind of came to the fore. you had to set up the sensors and tweak them so the telescope could take the images that we've seen the past few days? Yes, that's right. I mean, of course, there's a whole team of us that were working on this. But we had to start by deploying everything.

And, of course, those tense moments that I'm sure you're quite familiar with in the animations and just everybody was thrilled to death. You know, like I said, I like to worry. And the program manager, Bill Oakes, did an interview, I think it was on 60 Minutes where he said he was 100% certain that everything was going to work. And, you know, he was right. He really was right. I was very concerned. I was giving it maybe in the high 50s percent, but I was wrong.

And everything did work. But then the next thing we had to do was deploy the mirror segments. So all those segments in the secondary mirror are sitting on top of actuators. And they have to be moved about a half of an inch out of their stod. position for launch to where they need to sit and operate for the life of the observatory. And that was a very slow process. We would move just one little motor step at a time and then maybe one motor revolution at a time and then maybe a millimeter at a time.

And somebody commented that the mirrors were moving slower than grass grows. And Jane Rigby, one of her program scientists, made us a Kia web. you know, like a chia pet, but it was shaped like the Webb Telescope that we watered it. And sure enough, it grew faster than the nearest point. They were, she was right. And so that's when we began, as the telescope reached a temperature that would allow the detectors to operate on the science cameras, we went to the various steps, starting off with things quite a bit warmer than they were supposed to be, but good enough to do the initial steps.

And it's just literally just like following a procedure. or it's a, you know, baking something in the oven. And, you know, you have your ingredients, you have the steps. And if you follow it right, you think it's good, carefully, it's going to work. And bone cold it did. So once the sun shield is deployed, the mirrors are aligned. Dr. Mather, what does the telescope actually do to capture the images that were published last week? I know infrared light isn't visible to the human eye, so the pictures have to be altered somewhat to let us comprehend them.

But what is the actual process of capturing that infrared light? How does it go from existing, you know, somewhere in the universe to becoming a JPEG that I can download on the Internet and make my laptop background? There are a whole lot of steps. The first one is you have to decide where to point the telescope. So we did that by soliciting proposals from the entire planet. Anyone could send us an idea with a description of what they wanted to see and why it was important. And then we had committees that read all these proposals, and there were well over

a thousand of them. Okay, these are the most interesting for today, and we'll try these first. And so we made a big plan for that. And of course, you know when each one will be visible during the year. They're not all visible at the same time. So make a general plan. And then you get ready. And so we knew from advance, well, how to focus, sorry, how to set up all of the the cameras and the equipment. We've got filters to choose. We've got a spectrometer to set up, which spreads out the light of the star or a galaxy into a rainbow. Lots of choices to make. And so we did all of those. And then we put it in the catalog of what we want to do. And now we are able to upload, that is to say, send a command list up to the telescope every day. This is what we

want you to do. So that's sort of how it's done. Then after it's up there, the commands are up there, then the telescope has a command processor. It says, okay, I took this picture, now what do I do next? And it goes on to the next one. And it's got a stored list of commands and it does them all and captures the data in an onboard memory. And then once a day or maybe more, depending on how while it works, we send all the data back down to the Earth by radio. And it bounces around several times on the Earth before it gets back to our institute in Baltimore, where we transform it in all those computer bits go into numbers that mean something to astronomers.

So that's called calibration. And then we produce images that mean something even more. So an astronomer can say, I see what I meant to see and begin to interpret it. So when it's in that form, then we put it in the archive and astronomers from around the world can download it onto their own computers by the internet. And they say, now I see my picture and I'll get it ready for public release because we can already see people are releasing their data every day because they got something so pretty. They can't hold onto it any longer. So that's sort of the process. You could ask maybe you did already, how do you make it?

the colors. So, of course, web telescope sees colors you can't see. So what we usually do is we say, well, okay, the shorter wavelengths look blue to human eyes, and the longer wavelengths look red. So we'll make similar colors when we make our artificial colors. So even the infrared light will have the shorter wavelength will show you as blue, and the longer wavelength will show you as red. And once in a while, we have something special to say, well, this particular color means a particular compound or chemical way out there. Some particular ion or molecule is out there. So then we make artificial colors and we give you the picture. And then astronomers have a good time saying this is what it needs. Not long ago, I saw someone go

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with options up to $3 million in coverage. With a 4.8 out of five-star rating on trust pilot and thousands of families already applying through ethos, it builds trust. Protect your family with life insurance from ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s-com slash dispatch. Application times may vary, rates may vary. I imagine that each of you have a favorite picture that's come in thus far. I think mine is the Karina Nebula. That's what I see every time I open up my laptop or iPad now. But do either of you have a particular image that you find yourself coming back to time and again? Mine actually, I have to confess, is the more of an engineering image. Recently, one of the last things we did before officially turning the observatory over

and saying it was fully commissioned was something called a thermal slew test. And part of this process was to ensure that the observatory wasn't rolling. So they took images on one of the guider instruments. It's not really a science instrument. It's more of an engineering tool. It's there to help stabilize a telescope. 20-minute integrations on this guideer image. But they did it about 90 times and even just one of those images as you can imagine a six and a half meter telescope cryogenic sensitive from one to five microns and no filters is going to reveal a lot of anything you're looking at but when you add 90 of those together you get the deepest image ever taken and that was just amazing to be able to see that and just to stretch the image

and see all those just countless galaxies in the background I sent this to a a galactic astronomer at UCLA, and he estimated that single image contained 15,000 galaxies. And that's my favorite. If I could append to that, the reason I knew to look there was, if I could just say, to understand the ways the memory works on the spacecraft, you take an image and it goes into a buffer, and then it stays there until the next image is taken and it pushes it out, kind of a first in, first out thing.

and sometimes the last image of your observing sequence will stay in that buffer. Well, the ground software won't process the images until it has all of them. So you don't want to wait. I mean, you'd get it eventually, but you don't want to wait. So what you do is in your observing program, the very last image you take is a complete throwaway image. So this is even before we were done phasing the telescope, but we snuck in a 40-second integration on one of these guiders, just that we could flush the buffer. And eventually that image came down. And I stretched the contrast on that.

And that image, that single image had 500 galaxies in it. That experience actually moved me to tears. I'm not ashamed to say. And because I knew in that moment that every image taken by web was going to be a double-heap, a Hubble deep field, just loaded with information. Yeah, it was quite an emotional experience to see those first images. Yeah, I've seen someone describe it in my world. recent days as though even if you're just taking a picture of a planet in our solar system with

the web telescope, all these other galaxies are going to basically end up like photo bombing Mars or wherever because of the depth that it's able to capture. Dr. Mather, do you have a favorite image from the telescope so far? I do. The one that got my attention is the one that turned into people's t-shirts and the like, because it's the image we took of Stefan's Quintet, which has five galaxies in it, four of them interacting with each other. One of them has a black hole in the middle with stuff falling in and so it's shining very brightly. One of the galaxies is very nearby, and you can even see the individual stars in it. And this one's made it away into a merged image with Van Gogh Starry Night.

And so you can get it on a t-shirt. People have sent me this picture. It is so beautiful. And it's connecting us with the artistic beauty and imagination that people have had for so long. So we are a cultural phenomenon now. Yeah, it's the amount of attention. and a kind of admiration that NASA and this entire field has gotten the past couple weeks. I'm sure it's been fun to kind of see your work recognized in that way.

But, you know, this telescope is also, it's producing beautiful images, but they're also so much more than that. You know, they have immense meaning and present incredible opportunities for scientific discovery. Dr. Mather, could you talk a little bit about, you know, at a fifth grade level, when we're looking at these pictures from, you know, thousands of light years away, what is it that we're actually seeing? Okay. When we look at things, even with just our own eyes, we look at things as they were when light was sent to us, not as they are at this very moment. So even looking at the sun, you see it as it was about 500 seconds ago. So we've got a time machine in our eyes always. just don't think about it. So when you look at things that are really, really, really far away, you're looking way back towards the beginnings of time, if there is such a thing. And so we see the universe as it was very young. So we had altogether four major themes of things we wanted to

look at with the telescope. What are the first things that grew from the Big Bang? The first stars, the first galaxies, the first black holes. There's something astronomers call the cosmic dark ages, which is the time between the image we have of the Big Bang with the Kobe satellite and others and the first objects that grew that turned on to send out their own light. So then how do the galaxies grow? So it seems that our Milky Way galaxy

and all the others are made out of thousands of little bits that came together by the force of gravity. So how did that go? And in particular, since we can't really look at the history of our own galaxy, how can you look at others to determine what our history might have been. Close up, when you see the Karina Nebula, that beautiful cloud with glowing things in it and bright stars,

you can begin to understand how the stars are being formed today. So right now, new stars are being born right there and with planets, probably. So we want to look inside and see everything we can learn about the formation of new stars and planets. And really close up, we want to see the planets around other stars and the ones in our own solar system. to begin to understand how did that happen. So how is it possible that Earth occurs here? We seem to be a very rare phenomenon in the universe. We've looked at lots of other planetary systems

and none of them are like home, which is a bit interesting and disappointing because it would be easy to imagine that other stars with their planetary systems would be like ours, but they're not. You know, here in the solar system, we have four little rocky planets in the middle, and then a gap for the asteroid,

the asteroids, and then for gigantic gaseous planets that are way out there and a lot colder, we do not see anything like that around other stars yet. So we're special, but nevertheless, we'd really like to know whether we are really, really, really alone or only that the neighbors are very far away. So are those little planets out there capable of hosting life? Well, we probably can't tell if they do have life with the web, but we could tell if they have atmospheres and maybe oceans. So we're going to be looking for that. And that would be something to answer that cosmic itch. Well, where did we come from? And are we alone? Yeah. I mean, it's it's almost impossible for me to imagine looking at these images and what they

represent, how many galaxies there are pictured that we can truly be the only life out there. But it's exciting to think about what discoveries could be coming next. What questions will the web telescope be able to answer that the Hubble telescope could not? Okay. We designed it to do everything you could never do with Hubble or with telescopes on the ground. So infrared lets you see farther back in time, farther out in space, because that's what the expanding universe does to the wavelengths of light. We can look inside those dust clouds because infrared can go around. to dust grains and not just bounce off them.

And infrared can pick up heat radiation, that is to say, from things that are not warm enough to emit visible light like the sun. So things that are too cool. So those three big categories let us examine a whole new universe. And that's why it looks so different from the Hubble pictures. Got it, got it. And by the way, I wanted to say it also turns out to work even better than we ever hoped at short wavelengths, where we do overlap with Hubble, thanks to Scott and his buddies that

made it better than it had to be. Just a little bit, but it's so much better that we are thrilled. It's so much better. We promised a certain degree of performance where the number to get was two, and we got down to about 1.2, and that's much better, extremely much better. So we get much sharper pictures at all wavelengths than Hubble could do. Dr. Acton, when we spoke a couple months ago right after the launch of the telescope, you told me about a process where the JWST could essentially take, I think it was multiple pictures capturing multiple angles of a planet, and if scientists stitch those together in a particular way, they'd be able to gather a little bit more information about the atmosphere

of that planet and what could potentially be there. Do I have that right? Yes, absolutely. Although I'm faking it here, and Dr. Maddick could probably embellish it, but you're referring to differential spectroscopy, where you can't see the planet, but you know there's one there. So if you know the ephemorous or how the planet is orbiting the star, and the planet goes in front of the star, you can take several different, there are a couple different spectra. You could take one where the planet is behind the star, you could take one where the planet's off the side, and one where the planet is in front of the star. And one where the planet is in front of the star. star and by combining those together and subtracting you very very careful and very clever you can determine what that planet the spectrum of light is off reflecting off of that planet or maybe even possibly going through its atmosphere and I think you saw an example of that in the early release observations based on your spectrum got it got it well just to to zoom out on the conversation a little bit before we wrap up here I I want to talk a little bit about the international aspect of this. NASA obviously played a key

role in the telescope, but it was a collaboration with the European and Canadian space agencies. What was it like working with scientists from across the world? And do you think that the future of space exploration is more globalized like this? Sure. Well, we started off with the instructions from NASA headquarters to please build an international team to do this because we make the telescope available to everyone in the world and we'd like the people to use it to be able to contribute to it. So eventually we negotiated a partnership where Europe would contribute the rocket to launch the vehicle and they would contribute one of the instruments and half of another. The partnership with Canada included the fine guidance sensor,

which is the thing that locks onto a guide star and makes sure we get sharp pictures and also another scientific instrument. So then we did this and we got to do things that were probably too hard for any one country to do alone. So that's one of the things that collaboration enables. When you get into trouble, it's good to have friends. And when you've already made a plan, you're not going to disappoint your partners and say, well, we give up now. We're going to say, we're going to finish this because we said we would. And so it's much more powerful than it would have been, and we got to finish it, too, and not to be scared off by difficulty. Definitely. And Dr. Acton, you said something when we spoke a few months ago that's stuck with me

since, that the interest in the JWST and SpaceX Blue Origin to a certain extent have, quote, reopened the window for space exploration, you know, making things possible now that we maybe not, wouldn't have been able to dream of in the 1990s. Obviously, We haven't had someone on the moon in decades. But do you think that the enthusiasm generated by these pictures and these other projects will have broader ramifications for the future of space exploration? Oh, absolutely. Absolutely.

I mean, you can just do a mental exercise. Ask yourself where we'd be if the telescope had not worked. We'd be having a very different conversation right now. But the reality is we do know how to do this. all those things that we've envisioned to do in the late you know they're the mid 90s and stuff we've now figured out we know it and I think the sky is the limit and we're looking forward to the next telescope I've seen personally just in the minds and the attitudes of people over the past 20 years a dramatic change in terms of their attitudes about

space and the accessibility to humans you know and I'm personally kind of encouraged I really think the interest in this, my own granddaughter, you know, she's quite a feminine little girl. She's seven years old. She's here with us in Montreal. But, you know, she has pictures of astronauts on her wall, you know, female astronauts. And she tells you she's going to Mars. She's going to be the first woman to set foot on Mars. And I find that very encouraging. That's, no, that's, that's fantastic. And do you see SpaceX? kind of the public-private collaboration with SpaceX and the government as being our best shot at achieving that goal of sending someone to Mars?

Well, so far, I haven't seen SpaceX do anything wrong. They've been making just tremendous progress. I think if he is successful in developing the super heavy lift vehicle, that the sky is the limit. You're going to find, you know, low Earth orbit being accessible, maybe $10. a kilogram, and of course, would be going to Mars now as to whether or not a private company on its own without government interest and assistance is the quickest way to get to Mars, I'm not certain. I think I should mention that basically everything NASA does is a public-private partnership

because most of the money that we get, we spend on companies to help us do the things that we ask for. So the Web Telescope is public-private partnership. We spent our money on contracts. The rockets that NASA has been launching all these years, we buy them from companies. So it's just differences of exactly how we go at it. And I'm thrilled also to see the progress that SpaceX has been making because that super heavy lifter, well, it is enormous.

And it's thrilling to imagine what it could do when we have it working. It sure is. Well, thank you both for your time today. I think I'll close with one last question for each of you. What potential discovery are you most excited about in the next 10 years now that we have the Web Telescope up and running? What questions do you think we'll be able to answer that we weren't able to before? Okay. Well, I think number one, we've got big mysteries all along the way. The very first objects from after the Big Bang have never been seen. So we're just beginning to find them in the pictures, but they're not really the very first one.

So we've got a big mystery there. We've got cosmic dark matter, cosmic dark energy. Nobody knows why they're there. We just know that they are there. Where did the first gigantic black holes come from? And you know, every galaxy has a big one in the middle of hundreds of millions to billions, of masses of the sun all squeezed into a black hole. So nobody has figured out how that could have happened.

Then close to home, everything we know about planets has been a surprise. So I'm expecting surprises about planets. I don't know what they're going to be, but that's where I'm placing my bets for a surprise. That's why there's surprises, yeah. Yeah, I'd have to say planets for me too. The next big telescope could answer the question. there life on another planet, you know, life of some kind. Now, it doesn't mean you're going to do that, but yes, is certainly one of the possibilities

of the way we'll answer that question. And if any luck, I'll be alive to see that telescope built and commissioned. And, you know, we, who knows, we may have a very different perspective on our place in the universe. Can't wait to have that conversation. And one more thing to add, by the way, we are exploring Mars with the intent of bringing back some rocks to Earth, and that's not so far off now. It's quite a hard project, but it's definitely easier than sending people to Mars,

so we are doing it. So in some time, I don't know what the time is, we will have samples. And if you can look in there with your microscope and seaside, that looks like it was alive. That would be really exciting. Yeah, there could be conceivably, could be life on Mars now in, you know, subterranean water or something or certainly maybe even fossilized life. So that might be the quickest avenue to potentially answer that question. Well, thank you again, both of you for joining us on the Dispatch podcast.

I know I was incredibly excited for this conversation. I know our listeners will be as well. So thank you both for being here. You're welcome. Well, thank you. Declan, it was fun. And good to see you, Scott. Good to see you, too, John.

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