The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Alan Stern

Episode Date: July 7, 2019

In this episode, Lawrence sits down with planetary scientist Alan Stern to discuss his new book Chasing New Horizons, which chronicles his work as head of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond.  Stern describes the trials and tribulations of a decades-long space mission, and he and Lawrence debate the future of manned space exploration, and much more. See the exclusive, full HD videos of all episodes at www.patreon.com/originspodcast immediately upon their release. Twitter: @TheOriginsPod Instagram: @TheOriginsPod Facebook: @TheOriginsPod Website: https://theoriginspodcast.com Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hello and welcome to the Origins podcast. I'm Lawrence Krause. Alan Stern is one of the most experienced explorers of deep space we have in the United States today. He's been involved in 24 missions on the space shuttle and the Hubble Space Telescope, as well as being PI of the New Horizons mission to Pluto and beyond. He's chief scientist on the Moon Explorer mission. Andy was associate administrator of NASA. I've known Alan for some time, and he's excited and energetic. and he has what it takes to generate and maintain the enthusiasm and organization necessary for decades of exhausting work involved in space exploration.

I wanted to talk to him about the challenges of doing deep space missions and also the promises and opportunities they provide for learning about ourselves. Patreon subscribers can find the full video of this program immediately at patreon.com slash origins podcast. I hope you enjoy this show. Alan, it's great to have you here. Thanks so much for coming. Oh, I'm looking forward to it, Lawrence. Great to be here. And before we do anything, I want to show your book because I'm a big fan of it and the story that it tells. And we'll be talking about this. So you just gave it to me, too. So it's great to have my own sign copy. Thanks, Lott. I'm sure you'll appreciate this. I call that my 100 Lost Weekends because it was two years of weekends.

It's a good read, and people should read it before. And the story that it tells us is one we're going to talk about, which is this boldly where no one has gone before, literally. So let me start. In fact, there's a picture on here. Pluto, planet or not? Planet. Me too. Now, why do you think it's a planet?

Because my daughter did her grade four project on Pluto, and I thought, there's no way I'm going to make her go back to grade four and redo that. But why is it a planet to you? No, you know, there's a bit of a story here, but, you know, we have undergone this revolution in both planetary science and astrophysics. Sure, sure. that you go back a generation, you go back to say 1990. And all we knew of were the nine planets of our solar system.

And then the Kuiper Belt was discovered, the third zone of our solar system. And not only did we find lots of small primordial, what we call planetesimals out of what planets were made from, but we started finding the cohort population for Pluto, other dwarf planets. And it freaked some people out, because when the world was quaint

and our knowledge was limited and we only knew of nine planets, you could know all their names. Yeah, exactly. And then as the numbers grew, believe it or not, scientists, people who you think would respect data, started to say,

oh, this will tarnish our reputation. You know, school children won't be able to remember it. And the International Astronomical Union freaked out in 2006 and said, nope, we're going to keep the number at eight. That's it. you know what I said in response, we're going to go back to eight states now?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, are we going to limit the periodic table to stop at Borrelium? Yeah, well, I mean, the point is, and this is the point, one of the reasons I asked you, is that people say, what defines a planet?

And of course, it's a really vague... So actually, there's a really good physical definition. It's called the geophysical planet definition. Yeah. And it's very simple. It says, a planet is an object in space that's large enough to be rounded by its own self-gravity. I did an experiment once at the Rose Planetarium.

Neil Tyson had me there, and we're talking about the same subject. We set this up in advance. Oh, good, because I've hit Neil about Pluto many times whenever I'm there. Well, Neil's selling a book. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But this was in 1999, and we got to talking about this,

and then we had set it up. I had his ushers pass out, a blank sheet of paper to every person in this 1,100 seat theater. And we said, draw a picture of a planet. And then we collected them, and we counted the number that were round and the number that were squares, triangles, or other shapes. 1100 is zero. Yeah, I was going to say that.

Well, you know, it's interesting because I've heard people say, well, it's not just that they're round, but they also must control, gravitationing sort of sweep out the region around them be the dominant gravitational object. And the bottom line is, and one of the reason I wanted to bring it up is it reminded me of when I've worried about this silly debate about whether Pluto was a planet or not, and as I say, for those of us as old as me and you, it's going to be a planet because we grew up with it that way, was Richard Feynman, actually.

There's a story when Feynman was young. His father used to take him for walks in the woods and, you know, talk about nature. And they'd be looking at these birds and he'd say, well, you know, What's the name of that bird? And as father said to them, the name doesn't matter. We don't learn anything by the label of a bird. What you learn about, what's important to know is how the bird behaves, how it goes for food and all of the aspects of its behavior.

That tells you something, but the name is unimportant. Right. But, you know, science is ultimately reductionist. Yeah. Right? We try to take a large number of disparate facts and make sense out of them. And categorization is important. Now, about this gravitational criteria,

we don't require that stars control their zones in galaxies, for example. Nowhere else in astronomy, is there any definition that was specifically engineered to limit the number of objects to something that you can memorize? It's very anti-scientific if you think about it. But it is important that we as planetary scientists, and I know you're an astrophysicist and physicists, and physicists, But in planetary science, we need to understand which objects are and are not the central topic of our field. Sure, sure. And we want a definition that works. Now, the interesting thing is after the 2006 IAU vote, the press completely bought it.

And then the textbooks changed. And teachers started teaching eight planets. Pluto's not a planet kind of thing. neither the other dwarf planets. Planetary scientists more or less ignored that. If you go to planetary science meetings where people are giving talks, they'll use the word planet,

not just to describe Pluto as a matter of course and the other dwarf planets, but even large satellites that orbit other planets. So from a planetary science standpoint, the objects that are planets, doesn't matter what they orbit, what they're near. Your zip code, your location, has nothing to do with it. It's the intrinsics of the object.

The same way that a biologist doesn't care if, to categorize a given being in its species, whether it's in a herd or a flock or owned by itself. And Phil Metzker, who's a professor at the University of Central Florida, Phil did a paper yesterday, last year. Fascinating paper. He did, he used some machine learning techniques to look at all the planetary science literature since 2006

and determine how many. papers written by planetary scientists are using the IAU definition. Do you know what he found? None. None. He looked at some, I may have the number wrong, he looked at tens of thousands of research papers. Holy Mac. He found the only papers that use the definition were papers about the definition. Oh, okay. And that every research paper in every journal uses the geophysical planet definition, maybe without saying it, because it's useful. Because it's physical. That's the point.

And the IAU definition is just not useful. Well, in fact, I mean, that's the point I think FIMA was getting at too. The idea is that you want to define these things in a way that describes something that's useful. Just a name itself doesn't mean anything. But the geophysical definition defines a physical aspect that's relevant for understanding later on the dynamics of that object and the objects around. And I think we should be teaching in schools. It's wonderful. We've discovered thousands of star systems.

with other planets. We've discovered that our solar system is teeming with small planets that outnumber the giant planets and the terrestrial planets combined. This is how discovery works. Paradigms change.

Exactly. And, you know, where I live in Boulder, Colorado, if you look to the west, you see precisely four beautiful mountains. And they have names. There's Flagstaff Mountain, Bear Mountain, Green Mountain, and Sanitas. And the Arapo-Indian,

used to live there. And if you were in Arapaho, living in that valley, you might think these four big, tall things, there are four of them in the universe. Yeah, yeah. Unless one day you scaled one of them and you saw this sea of mountains that are the Rockies, it would change your point of view. A lot of people think it's, is, are afraid of that change in particular. That's the whole point of science, is that terms we use and ideas we have change. And that's not bad. That's called learning. That's what it's all about. Precisely. And that's why I say, that the IAU's reaction to it was anti-scientific.

Yeah, I think that, I can see that. I honestly think it was the worst pedagogical moment in decades in science, because I've actually had people say to me in the public that, you know, because the definition of a planet can change and because it's arbitrary, it's based upon a vote,

that, you know, I'm not buying this story about climate change because that can be arbitrary. People just vote. I've often said the purpose of education and science is to make us uncomfortable. And the idea that we define things to be comfortable, this is a planet's comfortable because we can name them. It's the fact that the fact that the planets we named in all of human history up to a few years ago,

we're just a drop in a cosmic iceberg of planets is wonderful. It shouldn't be something we're upset about. It should be something we're amazed about. And when I was a little boy, you know, I remember being taught about rivers. I very specifically remember that we had to remember, memorize the names of the eight great rivers like the Ganges and the Nile and so forth, the Mississippi. And all you had to know is the rest you could look up in a book, right? And that's how we ought to treat planets. You're going to know the important ones, the famous ones, the original ones,

and the rest you can look up in a book. Yeah, when once you have a few numbers, reminds me of a, of a, when I was in New Zealand, speaking of large numbers, this fellow had to bore these these sheep from the sheep, the people use sheep to cut their lawns there. And, and, and so he, he'd, he'd, he got this new property and he got 10 sheep and he realized it had to be sheared. So he called, this is a true story. He called up to find out about shearing him. The guy said, sure, we can share your sheep. And the guy goes, okay, how many do you have? And he goes, 10. And he goes, 10,000. And he goes, no, 10. He goes, do they all have names? Because that's the difference. 10 versus 10,000. Well, I'm glad we, I thought that might be just a chance to kick off,

but the talk about the planets is pretty important, I think. And in fact, you have helped lead an exploration of one of the most interesting objects in the solar system. And in fact, when you mentioned 2006 as the IU, 2006 was another important year, right? Take us through the New Horizon History a little bit. Yeah, 2006 was the year that we launched this expedition from Earth to cross the solar system. When did, when, you know, I want people to realize what kind of dedication this. I couldn't do what you've done. I could not sort of say I'm going to, as a theoretical physicist, I write a paper and I hit and I can go to another area and I can go to another area. The idea that I'm going to start something that the fruits of which may not be, could be decades away literally, takes a kind of bravery and intellectual bravery. That's amazing. But when did you start? Take me back even further. When did the whole notion of New Horizons start? Well, it didn't start as New Horizons. It started just as the Voyager mission,

this epic exploration of what we now call the middle zone of our solar system, the exploration of the giant planets by Voyagers 1 and 2, was wrapping up in 1989, and Voyager 2 was approaching Neptune, and everybody knew this was the end of the line for exploring worlds with Voyager, that it would go on out into the nothingness to explore the heliosphere and interstellar space if it lived that long. But no more planets, no more flybys.

and I was just finishing my PhD that year. And along with some young professors and postdocs and a couple of graduate students, we thought there's a little unfinished business. At that time, the Kuiper Belt was not known. It had been conjectured since mid-century. Sure. But no one had discovered any objects in the Kuiper Belt

except Pluto, so there was no realization. Pluto really looked like unfinished business, a third type of object, not a terrestrial planet, not a giant planet. We thought of as a forensic clue, if you will, to how our solar system formed. And it turned out to be quite a clue

because it was a hint that everything else was out there. Yeah, it was the tip. But we didn't know that. But with this mix of unfinished exploration business, why would we explore eight of the nine planets and not the ninth? And the scientific potential, we started to drum up the case

for this. And we went to scientific colloquia, we went to meetings, American Geophysical Union, that kind of thing. Because science, especially big science projects, there's a lot of sociology as well as science. And to get something to happen, it's kind of like lobbying for an Academy Award or anything else. It's not just, I mean, you have to convince the community, you have to get into some funding agencies. And I assume this, well, for you as a young person, it was a learning process. But if you want to talk about that as well. Yeah, it was for all of us. And we dubbed ourselves the Pluto underground. Oh, okay. There had been a decade before a group of similar age then in the early 80s called the Mars underground. They were very successful. Yeah. So we said, we'll be the Pluto underground.

And you were successful as it turned out. And we were just learning as we went. And we were very young and challenged by much more senior people who said, you know, it's an afterthought in the solar system and it's not going to be very important. And it's a long way to go. And why don't we do some missions closer to home, things like that. But we were persistent. And the case was good. And as it rose through the advisory committee structure, it really stuck. Unfortunately, though, because of the vagaries of what was happening in NASA in the 90s, it took us 12 years to go from people around a table with, why don't we try and do this, to NASA releasing a call for proposals to actually do the mission. In between, there was study after study after study and

lots of money spent. Nothing ever got off the drawing board. Nothing ever got out of the gate. How did those young scientists, though, keep, I mean, again, in my field of, in the field I came from, which is particle physics, you know, the experimentalists have big accelerators. And some of the young people are working 10 years on their PhD and longer before the experiment even gets started. But how do people keep their jobs? During that, time when you have to publish and you have to produce and yet and it's going through advisory committees. Well, it's actually very analogous. You know, all of us work on a lot of things at once. Yeah. Well, that's important. I guess that's important for you. During the period of the 90s,

I think I published 150 papers. I was probably involved in a dozen space missions on teams. I don't mean proposals, actually missions that were being built and flown. I was principal investigator on a whole series of suborbital sounding rockets, principal investigator and shuttle experiments, PI on ultraviolet spectroscopy, instruments that flew on comet missions and lunar missions and others. And so all of us, you know, are wearing a bunch of different hats. And just part of what we're doing is the advocacy at that time. That's the point. You have to keep your focus on it, but you can't, you can't, it can't be your sole focus because you couldn't survive. Right. It's an interesting So, you know, I do realize that having done, having been the leader of the farthest exploration

of world and the exploration of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt, that I'm typecast a little bit like, you know, the cast on Gilligan's Island. It's the only thing people remember you for. I've been on 29 space missions now. I've led 15, on 15. And yet this is the only one people think I ever worked on. But it's not bad to be remembered for something. I'll tell you that. I mean, it's better than the alternative. It's certainly more interesting to the kind of people that are listening to this than ultraviolet spectroscopy. Yeah, well, that's true. But in this case, it's a successful leader, which, so I interrupted you.

So you've got 12 years of pushing through these committees, and then what? Well, so then NASA agreed after much strife, and we tell this story. It's a very much a people story and story of persistence, as you said. ultimately NASA issued an announcement of opportunity and essentially a call for proposals that had to meet certain criteria. You must arrive at Pluto for a certain cost, within a certain time frame. You can only use this or that technologies you can't have to invent fusion drive or something. And five teams formed and competed. And our team was very much the David and a David and Goliath battle. Oh, really? Yeah, very much so, very much. And the book tells the story in

chasing new horizons of why we were the David and how we knew we were that. We were the underdogs and we were going to have to work harder and have a better proposal in every respect. And we won. And, you know, I've done many missions with our main competitor back then, the Jet Propulsion Lab. They are legendary. They invented how to explore the solar system. But the way that this competition turned out, I was competing with their arch rival, with them as an arch rival, and they were competing with us as an arch rival, because they didn't want to lose their franchise, that they were this sole entity doing the exploration of the outer solar system, what was then called the outer solar system. And we beat them at that.

Now, the way it works there, there's never any, as it sometimes happened in, again, in different fields, there's no, NASA doesn't say, well, we like you both, can you work together or anything like that? Sometimes there are forced marriages like that, but they don't work. that well, I guess. Well, I shouldn't say. I have some friends who have forced marriages, and they were fine. Scientifically. Yeah.

Okay. Well, you know, I've actually been on a couple of those, and one worked and one didn't. But anyway, in this case, it didn't. They didn't propose that. They said, the New Horizons team wins. This team doesn't win. Do you think it was one of the reasons you might have been successful is because you guys have been thinking for so long about this, or no?

I'm convinced that that's part of it. Also, we were running scared. We knew that we were the underdogs. We had less experience at the exploration of the planets, even though we had, I think, the stronger scientific team, the stronger concept. And we had the drive to really make it happen. But the interesting thing is this is just like business.

We won it, and our competitors were so shaken up at losing their franchise that they went to Congress and had it canceled. Oh, wow. And all of a sudden we're back to square zero. Yeah, yeah. We won, but we lost. Yeah, wow. And so it became a bare-knuckles fight.

You know, it's unfortunate, well, it's, I mean, but science is, you know, science, there's a difference between science and scientists. I keep trying to always try and remind people that. Science works in spite of scientists, often. Scientists are people. They have passions, they're in reasons, a slave of passion. And, as Hume said, and there's all sorts of issues. But the wonderful thing is the science.

ultimately overcomes that kind of parochialism. But, you know, so we realize that science is a human enterprise, and there's no reason we should pretend it isn't. Right. But the ultimate goals, and what comes out of it, is independent of the rivalries or whatever. I mean, Pluto is what Pluto is. And the fact, if the mission works,

we discover things that change our picture of our place in the universe. Exactly. And fortunately, it did all work out. We did ultimately get it funded. So did you have to do an end run or anything like that? that. Again, I'm thinking my friends at LIGO at the gravitational wave, there's a great history of all the different efforts when that was died and was reborn several times. So I've skipped over most of the tales. But, you know, I like to say if Pluto had been a cat, it would have been dead long ago because cats only get nine lives.

We got, it took so many tries and so many attempts and there was so much intrigue. And then finally when the dust settled and there was no more doubt. We were going to be funded to do it. Then we, very reminiscent of the day that John Kennedy announced the Apollo program in 1961, the guy that was running NASA, Jim Webb called his senior staff together, and this is documented history. And he said, well, boys, this is very 1960s. Well, boys, we got what we wanted? Now what do we do? We were saddled with the following challenge. We had four years and two months to get this launched,

or it would wait a decade, because we had to launch in a single three-week launch window where Jupiter was in position to slingshot. Yeah, to give you an orbital boost. And on top of that, NASA funded us with a budget that was one-fifth Voyager. And here we were going farther.

Yeah, sure. Right? And I had many colleagues that wrote me and said, again, you won, but you lost, because you guys, no one can pull this off in this small amount of time, it's never been done for an outer planet's mission. And then on top of it, you have to somehow do it five times less expensively.

How are you going to figure that out? You know, so you guys are going to work on this for a couple of years and get canceled because you're going to fail on one front or another. And we just have an amazing team of people who signed up for 52 weeks a year, round the clock, forget weekends, and we made it.

So 52 weeks, year, four years, 2006. By the way, just out of interest, I don't know. Was Pluto demoted before or after you launched? About eight months after we launched. Okay, so when you launched Pluto was... So we were flying to the asteroid bill. It would have been pretty demoralizing.

If the week you launched it had been demoted. But okay, so the launch, of course, all of that depends on, you know, all of that work, all of that effort if the launch fails. And it must have been a very... There have probably a few moments in your last 20 years

that have really been tense. That was probably... Well, you know, every space mission, launch day is make or break. You know you're going to have a big day, regardless of the outcome. It's going to be memorable the rest of your life. And as I said, I've been on 29 of these.

And I was actually on one where it exploded in front of my very eyes at the launch light. It was the launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Yeah, oh, okay. Which I had my very first PI shuttle experiment aboard. Oh, wow. And I was project scientist on one of the satellites that it was carrying.

And all that work, gone. But worse. There were people there. There were people who I knew. Yeah. Who I considered friends on the crew. It was tragic. And so anyway, so when it came to the day to launch New Horizons, you know, you know everything's on the line.

And this is not like Voyager or most of the other first missions to planets where we sent two. Yeah. You know, you have Mariner 3 and 4 to Mars and only Mariner 4 made it. And, you know, and the Vikings, the Voyagers, the pioneers, they're all twins. we didn't, that's part of how we saved the money to keep it. I was wondering, was it originally planned to be twins or? Originally in the 90s, we wanted two for scientific reasons. Yeah.

We just couldn't afford that. And I've always been a big believer in 80% of something is worth way more than 100% of nothing. Yeah, absolutely. So everything depended on that launch. And of course it was successful. I mean, the book, look at the cover. It's a spoiler alert right there. There's a picture of Pluto.

Yeah. And the 10-year journey was successful. And all of us recognized you from late night. news knows that it's successful as well. I guess, I guess. You know, New Horizons, it's big science like particle physics. 2,500 men and women work to build new horizons, the launch. 5,500, okay. And the nuclear power supply.

This is a big project. Was there, I don't want to dwell too much. With Cassini and, I mean, was there any, the nuclear power supply, was there any, people get all worried about nuclear power supplies, even if the small nuclear power supply. Was there any issues there that you had to do with? Well, NASA has a very thorough. process to get launch approval and to prove that it will be safe, even if the rocket explodes that the power supply will be self-contained. Ultimately, we had to achieve approval by 42 different

state and federal agencies. You know, the Coast Guard, the Navy, the FAA, NASA, the Department of Energy, the state of Florida, Brevard County, the 42 of those. Yeah, see, this is why I'm happy I'm a theoretical physicist. It's a lot of paperwork. Yeah, it's paperwork, but at least I get to do it, you know, the paperwork involves calculations. But it turned out, you know,

after Three Mile Island in the 70s, and so for missions that were launching in the 80s and 90s, there was a lot of baggage left over about flying nuclear. And they got approval, but they had protesters and real concerns. Sure, I remember. By the 2000s,

and part of it, I think, is due to just, you know, the increase of carbon in the atmosphere, and its effects on climate. Nuclear is actually looking greener. Of course it is. We have very little in the way of protests. Oh, that's good.

Very interesting. But people just are afraid of the word radioactivity when they don't realize it, and I'll probably do another program with this. Not only is radioactivity a lot easier to detect than, say, pollution from carbon, but it's, you know, in terms of the number of people have been impacted on Earth compared to coal burning,

it's far less. But the word, but somehow radioactivity because of nuclear weapons, is a scary word, but it's a lot easier to detect a small radioactive source than it is a carcinogen in the atmosphere in many ways. But anyway, that's an aside. Okay, so 2006, and then it took how many years to get to Pluto? Nine and a half. Nine and a half. Nine and a half. But the interesting, I mean, and again, chasing new horizons tells the story, but when Voyager flew across the solar system, they had this lavish budget and 450 people. Think of that as like the star-shy-

Enterprise was their flight crew. Yeah, sure. Right? It's about the same crew size as Shatner had. Yeah, yeah. Okay? Or at least as Kirk had, because it's just fictional. New Horizons, because, in part, because we had so much less budget, but also because the advance of computing technology, so we could automate a lot of processes. We did the whole flight with 50 people. Wow.

That's the flight control team. That's the engineering team, the science team, management, everybody, 50 belly buttons. And so that entire nine and a half years, we were furiously busy. Sure, yeah. I mean, there was never a year off. So, okay, I was going to say, it's not as if it's 50 the whole time. It's not as if we just say, okay, let's go home for a year. It's out there and we just will come back in a year and see where it is.

Well, people famously knew that this spacecraft, one of the things we did to reduce the size of the flight control team, was we more or less invented the real application of spacecraft hibernation techniques. So spacecraft takes care of itself most of the time. And people thought we were hibernating. They would say, look, what do you do? Do you work on something else? I mean, are you bored? And we're like behind the scenes doing the work of 450 people

to plan this flyby, which is a one shot, and all the backup plans and all the training plans and all the public engagement. And on top of it, fly the spacecraft navigated to Pluto, keep the instruments scientifically calibrated. Okay, so one of the problems, of course, is dynamics, just planetary dynamics. Newtonian dynamics to some extent, but making sure that you got, you know, when you're aiming to

Pluto and you've got to adjust things and were there concerns or surprises on the way about whether you were, as presumably as you learned more about the gravitational dynamics in the outer solar system, you had to adjust the trajectory to make sure you got to where you wanted to go. Were the concerns about that or any issues? Well, there was a lot of work to make sure that we got to the right place at the right time. And, you know, I remember asking our navigation team, our prime navigation team one time, how do I know that you're going to the same Pluto I'm going, you know? Because there are lots of reference frames.

And most mistakes in spaceflight boil down to some miscommunication between human beings. Sure, like metric versus... Exactly. Right? And it could be something very subtle. Yeah. So I actually hired an independent navigation team to have a double check on all the work, not in an adversarial way.

But in a way, look, we got one shot at this. Yeah, absolutely. Right? And the position of Pluto was not as well known as the other planets, primarily because they'd already been first missions to them that nailed that down. Yeah. And we had to arrive to make, it's amazing. We have a very sophisticated spacecraft in some ways,

this is AI aboard, for example, because the light travel time is so long, for most malfunctions, it has to be able to take care of itself. Absolutely. It can't just radio for home like an Earth orbiter. The light travel time to Pluto. Nine hours round trip. So, you know, all the fuel could leak away,

the fuel leak before you could respond from the earth. And lots of other problems could be catastrophic unless you had the intelligence on board to detect faults and then run down a checklist, even branching based upon conditions, to solve the problem. So in some ways, New Horizons is extremely sophisticated. Was there a surprise, though?

I mean, were there, were, did it just, was it textbook, or did you discover you had to do something dramatic in order to make, to be where you wanted to be it? Was there any moment? Not dramatic, but Herculian. We had to do a lot of homework to pin down Pluto's orbit. We had to go back and take glass plates for the 1930s, astronomical plates, and reanalyze them with modern techniques to increase the arc length and drop the error bars on the known position of Pluto. We had to track our spacecraft with a technique that involves quasars as distant, reference frames to make sure that we knew where it was and where it was going.

We had to take images on approach of Pluto against the Starfield and ship them home and analyze them quickly to determine the difference. Down to the pixel, where is Pluto compared to where it should be if we're in the right place and from the difference compute homing burns that would correct and not only correct our position to arrive at the right place. we had to arrive after nine and a half years within 450 seconds because the spacecraft doesn't actually see the data from its instruments. It can't tell I'm off.

I'm not looking at the target. Right? After all that. Entie space. Exactly. Or even, you know, half. Yeah, yeah, right? And so the timing, because everything's moving,

the spacecraft's going 32,000 miles an hour, Pluto's going, you know, in its heliocentric orbit at many thousands of miles per hour. All the satellites are rotating in their orbits at speeds of like a kilometer per second. And the spacecraft knows its position and it has an ephemorous, it can compute for where all the targets are. And based on knowing the time and the time of arrival

and where it is and where those things ought to be, it does the trigonometry and points and points again and points again as it flies through. But it's doing it what we call open loop. It's not seeing if those images are actually centered. And so we had to very accurately navigate. Yeah, you had to be... 450 seconds error maximum after nine and a half years.

It's amazing. You know, several hundred million seconds. And it must have been very... Again, must have been a very tense moment. We'll get... You know, I want to talk about the science and I want to talk about the greater context. But I think it's important for people to realize

the efforts that are required to actually get to the results. We just see the results. But it's just an amazing, amazing task of, as you point out, so many people. So the first image of Pluto, well, of course, you're looking at it from, you know, far away, but when you're close enough and you're worried that you may be pointing in the wrong direction, just walk me through that. Because, of course, you get the data, but it takes a long time down. So the data takes four and a half hours to come from the spacecraft to you.

And then how long before you know you've actually got a picture of the planet? Tens of seconds. Tens of seconds. Typically. Typically. You know, the secure internet that routes it from the tracking station to our mission control at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab. They then reroute it to Boulder where our Science Operations Center servers are. And then we are looking at files being placed on certain directories.

And that whole process is typically minutes. We have a high- cadence pipeline that runs all the time. Okay. But of course, I mean, that's just, no, you have something. And then you have to analyze it. Then you have to reduce the data and get an image. But it doesn't take a rocket scientist to tell if it's the entire planet or half the planet or none. Exactly.

All those are really interesting star fields. You see it's round and you say, oh, it's a planet because I know for all those 1,100 people told me it wasn't a triangle. That's right. Exactly. Well, look, for the listeners, you won't be able to see this, but of course you probably see the internet. I just, at the end of all of this, you've got these beautiful images. And it's not just images. And that's the point I want to get to.

I remember when I first saw this, I was just shocked. as you were. I mean, I tended to assume that Pluto was this ball of ice out there and may not be very interesting. And of course, that's, forgive me, but that's as a cosmologist or a vertical physicist or astrophysicist. But I was prepared to see an interesting object. But what surprises me is what always surprises me, that every day I'm surprised if I'm not surprised. Every time we open a new window on the universe, we find out right even in our own backyard. I mean, I worry about things that are the other end of the universe or the earliest moments of the Big Bang. But in our own backyard, there are incredible discoveries waiting to be made. And so these images,

which I just want to go through because they're so pretty. If I may tell a story, sure, you know, we had the advantage of exploring Pluto, a generation after the whole exploration of all the planets from Mercury to Neptune. And I told my team over and over again, they got tired of it. I'm sure I would say, look, every single first mission to a planet got it wrong. You know, what we thought of Mars was completely wrong. We thought of Venus completely wrong. Absolutely. Every time we've been wrong.

Who expected volcanoes on Iowa, the first mission of Jupiter? Yeah. And going down the list, you know, oceans inside of satellites, you know. And so I said, look, our challenge is to take all that perspective gain from all those different kinds of planets we've been to. And let's try to get the ninth one right beforehand. Right? And I like to say we got an A for exploration. Everything worked.

Yeah. We got an F for scientific predictive ability. But that's the best thing. Pluto, Florida's. But being, that's another thing I often tell people that people don't understand is that scientists love to be wrong because it means there's so much more to learn. I mean, if you would predict it right, it would be a much, in my opinion, far less interesting. But here's an example.

We learn how the solar system works in a different way. Just one of the many aspects that makes Pluto the planet fascinating is the discovery of this vast million square kilometer nitrogen glacier that was, born yesterday on a world that should have cooled off and died billions of years ago, I didn't have a single glaciologist on my team. Who thought there would be glaciers on Pluto? Right? I mean, as soon as the date is coming in, I'm like on the phone hiring some of the world's best planetary glaciologists. Well, that's what I, when I looked, when I'm the image that I'm looking at now, and you know, it's one of the classic images of Pluto. But the first thing

that amazed me is, hey, there's areas without craters. There's, there's dynamics. This is, this is not a frozen statogic. This is a living dynamic place. Yeah, and you look and you see these incredible vistas. I don't know. I mean, you know, you can walk us through a few of these. I don't want to spend, I mean, we don't have time to go through all of the aspects. But this incredible glacier, this plane that looks untouched in cosmic time. Just shocked me, I know that.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We can't find a single crater on a million square kilometers of terrain, whereas look just below it in the image. You see terrains as old as the... birth of the solar system, we age date those from the number of craters to be four billion years old, four billion plus. And if you look at that image further, this is not anything like our highest resolution, but you can see vast mountain ranges, the size scale of the rockies. Yeah, sure. You can see false tectonics in effect. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. So one of the things that, you know, I hadn't anticipated that I don't think any of you had either necessarily. But so this

means it's dynamical. But do we now know what the dynamics is? What, what, I mean, what's driving it? What's driving it? We don't. Yeah. We don't. You know, um, if you reduce planetary geophysics to a very simple everyday analogy, you know, if you have a cup of coffee and next to it, a vat of coffee, the cup of coffee is going to cool off a lot quicker because the little guy's got a higher surface area to mass ratio. So it can radiate more per unit mass than, than the vat. So by the same analogy, big planets can hold their heat.

Yeah, sure. And little planets should cool off. We see that. Look at the Earth's moon. The Earth's moon is quite a bit larger than Pluto. Yeah. And to planetary science, it's something we call a planet, by the way,

the fifth terrestrial planet. But the moon is, for most intense and purposes, a dead world. Sure. That its geologic engine, not completely, because it's an interesting place. There are some things going on now, but on a large scale,

it died within about a billion years or so after its formation because it lost that heat. Pluto being much smaller should have had an interesting early life. That's exact. I thought you'd be looking at a fossil of the early solar system,

which is one of the interesting aspects of it, of course. But that's what I think all of us thought. So here we find a world that's alive on its atmosphere is dynamic. It's got climate cycles. It's got global change. It's got an ocean in the interior. It's got glaciers that must be renewing themselves. We see direct evidence.

It has an ocean in the interior? I guess I didn't realize that. Wow. And there's evidence for that. I mean, physical evidence for that. How do you know? And it has to do, well, there were models predicting. You know, because Pluto's about 30% made of water ice, and as you go down in depth and the pressure increases, the temperature is connected through the ideal gas law, it's going to increase.

And you're going to reach a point where that water ice should liquefy under temperature and pressure. This is actually common in icy satellites and small planets. And we started to discover this in the 80s and 90s, and now oceans inside of these kinds of worlds are very common. Yeah, and the moons, yeah, lots of moons have oceans. But you actually, but that's a prediction. Yeah, so I'm getting to the evidence. So then we get to Pluto and we find this giant nitrogen glacier,

which strangely just happens to be diametrically opposed to the synchronous satellite Sharon, the size of the state of Texas. This isn't a stable equilibrium point. This mass concentration is that the only place it could be to create a stable situation. Now, the interesting thing about that,

and there's only one more step involved in the logic, is that it could have been born anywhere else on the planet, and it had to migrate there. And the only way it can migrate is if there's a nearly frictionless surface down below so that you can get the slippage. Okay.

So that's a title. And I say the only way. There are papers that... It suggests other ways. But the idea is that there's a title for us from Sharon that's moving that. Right. And it ends up at this... It's like something, you know, from a detective show, right?

You get this forensic clue. It's exactly opposite Sharon. Yeah. That's not just an accident. Yeah, it's highly unlikely to be just an accident. Exactly. In fact, that's the way we do things in science. It's likely, not likely, highly and likely, highly likely.

People don't realize that everything has an uncertainty. And of course, if you're doing observations as opposed to sort of experiments, you have to recognize that there are intrinsic uncertainties. When you make claims, you have to be able to label the uncertainty to us. So we would like to go back with an orbiter for a lot of reasons, but one of them would be with being able to do the gravimetics and to have ground penetrating radars to actually find this ocean with direct evidence. not indirect circumstantial evidence.

Okay, well, it'd be nice, yeah, take a while to go back. It took a while to get there the first time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I want to go through, I want to get to other things as well, but some of these images are just amazing. And, you know, if there's anything I'm zipping by that you want to mention for the audience you can, but I just like looking at.

Well, I should mention that everything that those who can see this are looking at, and any time you look at a picture of Pluto, remember, everything is nearly at absolute zero. Yeah. 40 Kelvin, 400 degrees Fahrenheit. And then it's a sci-fi world. None of this is made of common stuff we're used to. I mean, it's true.

The atmosphere is made of mostly nitrogen like the Earth's atmosphere. But the surface is made of nitrogen ice, methane ice. That's a fuel here on Earth. And carbon monoxide ice. And then the darker areas are made of organic, organic gunk that Carl Sagan, first dubbed the thule. These are not living organics, but these are carbon-hydrogen-based molecules from organic chemistry. And it's, by the way, that was another, I remember back when, when it was a surprise that there was organics.

And I mean, we realize now that in many ways the basic building blocks of organic molecules that later on became life are abundant everywhere. Particularly in the outer solar system. Yeah, in the outer solosium. And there's chemistry going on. There's ultraviolet radiation. There's lots of chemistry. And that's what causes the red color, actually. is the interaction of the radiation field

with the surface constituents that you can reproduce in a laboratory. You can start with nitrogen, carbon monoxide, methane on a coal finger in a vacuum chamber, and we've done this, and you shine a solar simulator on it, so a lamp that produces the same spectrum. And you will find that the resulting residue

has the same color and spectrum as this material. And those are important experiments. I know on a later program we're talking about origins of life issues, but the key question is just how rich what eventually became the Earth was in terms of preparation in the outer solar system and beyond is really an interesting question. And you know, the organics on the Earth were not originally there. When the Earth formed, it was molten from the heat of appreciation and destroyed all those molecules.

And so then after it cooled, there had to be a process of late veneering. Of course. And a lot of that came probably from the outside. asteroid belt, but a lot of it also came from the Kuiper belt. Yeah, in fact, I mean, that's what we'll talk about one of the things we can learn. But I mean, when I wrote a book a few years ago, maybe a decade ago, it was still the question of where water on Earth even came from, was highly debated. Yes. And still we've learned a lot more from looking at, from being able to measure objects in the outer solar system. But these are key questions that are relevant,

not just to learning about the universe, but to why we're here. So let's ask it now. Why are we interested in this stuff. Well, you know, it's fascinating of all the uncountable number of species that have arisen on this wonderful planet Earth. We're the weirdos that are actually the universe looking back on itself and asking who are we and why are we here and what is this place all about. And, you know, even my very highly intelligent Labrador, you know, which can do many, many things that require real intelligence. Yeah. Has no clue that there's a universe. Yeah. Much less, you know, is, He's interested in why.

You are his universe. Pretty much my wife. She feeds it. Okay, exactly. No, and so, I mean, obviously this is expiration, questioning, but there's a real connection. If we want to understand ultimately how life arose on Earth and how, and whether we're unique, whether we're alone in the universe, we have to, we have to ask these questions. In fact, what I think a lot of people don't realize, when we look, we're looking for exoplanets, which we'll get to, when we're looking for life elsewhere in the universe, When people talk about habitable planets and a lot of other things, I'm often quite skeptical,

because what we really need to know, we don't even understand the origin of life here on Earth. We know lots of factors. But if we want to learn what's possible out there, a large part of it is learning what actually happened here, which means exploring our own solar system. Yeah, to an extent, but I'm also going to disagree with you just a little bit. Good. Because we have learned, you know, in the 50s and 60s, when before we really had spaceflight, and we use telescopes to look out across the solar system.

And the scientists of the day looked and they couldn't find any oceans anywhere. And the Earth is unique. It turns out the Earth is unique, but it's a weirdo. It wears its oceans on the outside. Oceans are common, but they're on the inside. And the interesting thing about those oceans, and I've written a couple of scientific papers on this,

is that the concept of a habitable zone is very geocentric. Of course. Right? A warm, liquid water inside of worlds that can, in principle, seed the development of biology can take place anywhere in the solar system, even at Pluto with a surface temperature of 400 Fahrenheit, minus 400 Fahrenheit. If that ocean is really there, as we strongly suspect, it could be an abode for life.

So it actually changes our perception again that we should not be so geocentric. It's not being so myopic or so solipsistic in the sense that we assume we are, that we are necessarily typical. Precisely. The Copernican Revolution continues. Yeah, exactly. It continues in every way outside and inside. And, you know, in fact, what you just said is true not just for Pluto and not just to the planets.

What we're learning on Earth is that it could be that there's a lot more life underneath the surface of the Earth than above. Absolutely. And again, it's weird to think. And it's so amazing. We live in a time when we're just discovering that, when people kind of feel. like, oh, well, we know everything about the Earth. We don't. We don't. The nature of life, even on our home planet, is still ripe for discovery. And if you just put a little more thought into it, you think about these ocean morals that have their oceans on the interior. In many ways,

they're actually better suited to the development of life. They don't require a magnetosphere for protection. Yeah. They don't care if they're catastrophic planetary impacts because they're up hundreds of kilometers on the surface. They're not going to damage the ocean. And as people have said in the origin of life and earth, it's, it's, it's, many, many people think it originated deep in the ocean. One of the reasons would be that is at least protected from some impacts. But this is much more protection. Yeah, yeah.

And in fact, those worlds don't even care if there's a star around. You could have interstellar planets that have been ejected, but interior is still warm and having an ocean. You don't care about stellar flares. You don't care about nearby supernovae. They're actually pretty hospitable for the development of life. whether, I mean, be horrible for astronomy because there's a roof over your head.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. I was just going to say, the astronomers there would say, wow, look at the universe, it's full of water. There is no universe. It's just all of us. Well, their universe would be their water. Yeah, yeah.

And where we can get to that. I often, often, when people talk about anthropics about what's likely and what's not likely, you know, it depends on what you're in. If, you know, an intelligent fish down in one of those things would say, why is the universe made of water? the answer is if it wasn't full of water,

you wouldn't be there to ask the question. So there's a lot of selection effects. And when we're looking at the universe and trying to understand things, we don't understand like the nature of life or whether we're unique, or whether in my own area, the fundamental parameters of cosmology are selected,

or as some people would like to think, design, which they're not. Tune. Yeah, tune. They're not. You have to ask these questions. Well, you know, it's weird that the universe seems to be tuned for life, but they don't, but the much more sensible thing is that life needs to be tuned for the universe, is that, is that we only evolve in a, in a situation in which we can evolve. And it's

not too surprising to discover that it's quite conducive, because if it wasn't quite conducive for living, you wouldn't be there to ask the question. And it's probably true on each of these planets. Well, you know, it was upsetting to find out that the, the planets move. Yeah. And then it was, upsetting to find out for some people. For some people. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, it was upsetting to find out that there are planets that are very different from us in some ways. And, you know, it was upsetting. you know, the Earth is not typical at all. And the same thing is true and it's upsetting that there are countless numbers of planets.

For some people, but for others, it's just a new chance to learn how strange and wonderful the universe is. Every time we learn that our perceptions of the universe are different than we thought, we should celebrate because it means we're living in a wonderful time of exploration and discovery. I believe it's our responsibility as scientists

to adapt to new data and not to be dogmatic about it. Yeah, exactly. We can be skeptical and we can require a high standard of proof, right? But I think that's what being a science. We all have our own pet theories and things that are hard to get let go of. And Max Planck once said that physics precedes one funeral at a time as the old rise or, you know, die. But I think the point is that we get, physicists and scientists of all types get dragged, kicking and screaming by the data.

Ultimately, they have to give up their cherished notions. and that's the great thing about being a scientist because you get trained to say, you know, this is what I really thought would be really neat, but you know what it's wrong. And I tell students that I kind of hope everyone has that experience sometime in their career of educational career afterwards.

Discovering that some cherished notion of yours is wrong is liberating because it opens your mind to a new world universe of possibilities. I couldn't agree more. Well, speaking of possibility, I want to just zip over there. What was your biggest surprise of this whole mission, of Pluto?

Well, because I want to talk about later the quick, well, I'll give you the same answer I've given before because I really say. There is not a single thing. There really is a trifecta. Okay. Okay. And the first was how complex Pluto is.

Generally smaller worlds are less diverse. And yet we found a degree of complexity on Pluto itself that rivals Earth and Mars, despite their much larger size. At the same time, this whole discovery, that Pluto is alive and dynamic and still evolving on vast scales when geophysical paradigm

would tell you that can't be is just as big a discovery. And the third discovery is not scientific. I was really overwhelmed by the public's fascination with this exploration on a scale that NASA had not seen before and it was really heartwarming

to see how much people like science and love exploration and want to see good news in our time. You know, human beings succeeding at something tough and doing something a little larger than life, that connection and all the public talks I've given since then, it's been almost four years, the way people come up and tell me what it meant to them, how it changed their life, how, you know, young people who say, nothing, we get told all the big things happened before we were born, this is the big thing in my life. Yeah. To hear that from a co-ed, or to hear, as I literally did when we were on this book tour,

a man stand up at a book reading and literally start choking up and saying, I was on the verge of suicide until this happened. And I decided life was worth living. Look at the universe. To have things like that happen to you? It's just an amazing thing. Or a mother tell you her son was a slacker and failing until he saw this and said, I want to grow up and be an engineer.

I want to do that. And now he's straight-a-kid. Yeah, it's wonderful to have. You don't know your impact. and it must be incredibly heartwarming thing. It is. So let's leave Pluto and Sharon for the moment. I want to get to,

we're showing a picture of this snowman. Talk about it. Yeah, well, this is our first Kuiper Belt object exploration, a billion miles past Pluto on January 1st this year, 2019. I remember watching you January 1st celebrating. And this, I think, you see, as hard it was as it was for me to imagine taking pictures of Pluto appropriately, I remember at this time thinking, my gosh, it's just a little object you're zipping by it.

How long did, what was the window of time in order to be able to get a picture of that and to know you? I mean, see, Pluto had been studied for a long time before. This object hadn't been. We discovered it in 2014. Yeah. And then we hunted it down in the dark in the deep outer solar system. It flew by it much closer than Pluto at the same speed and had to motion compensate and arrive even more accurately than at Pluto. what this team pulled off is...

I was shocked you're able to do that. Truly amazing. That it took the picture and it didn't miss it. I mean, it didn't... It's in the middle of the frame, my goodness. There you go, again. And again, for people... Obviously, people listening won't see this picture,

but you've seen it on the New York Times and every other newspaper in the world and when it came out. It's amazing to me. In a way, I almost find this more... Almost more poetic than Pluto in a sense that I'll talk to you about a second. But one of the things I've wondered,

or people may wonder, it looks very bright. Why does it look very bright? That's because the way the image is processed. It actually has a reflectivity of about 7%. 93% of all the light that falls on it is absorbed by the surface. It's darker than garden variety dirt. But there isn't a lot of light falling on that surface. Either the sun is way over there.

It's really kind of amazing. The sun is 4 billion miles away. Yeah. But we have very sensitive cameras and telescopes that were built to operate at these light levels. And apparently the engineers did it right. Yeah, I know. But people should realize what an engineering feat is.

It isn't as bright as it looks here. So, you know, Pluto's the size of the United States, approximately, and this is the size of greater Washington, D.C. And like I said, we had to hunt it down in the dark. Yeah. Again, only one shot. And this is a wild and willy, this is the first thing we've ever sent a spacecraft to

that is completely primordial. Yeah. That is so small that it can't have a strong geologic engine to cause it to evolve. And at the same time, has never been close to the sun and warmed. So even Pluto that's out far where the sunlight can't cause it to evolve

the way that it interacts with comets and asteroids and planets. But it's large enough to have this geologic engine we see with everything from oceans to mountains to tectonics. This is the first thing we've ever been to, which is a relic, a well-preserved relic of the formation days. And it is amazing this place. It's bizarre.

It is alien. Well, that's why, to be it. me, when I look at that picture, and I remember thinking about it and as I'm looking at here now, and it inspires me in a way that pluded in the sense that I think of, of I look at that, I see a few craters,

but I think this thing has been there alone in the dark since the beginning of the solar system, four and a half billion years ago, and it will be there, it'll still be there long after any record of you and I is now, is gone, and it's out there in the dark alone. And for

some reason, I just find that unbelievable. When I think about it, I find unbelievably poetic, I guess. Yeah. Everything about this is, there's an emotional connection to something, this alien. This alien and this primordial. And that's, I want to get why, people may ask, why do you want to go to the Kuiper Belt? We want to be able to find fossils of the beginning, because there's still so many questions we don't have answers to

about how the solar system formed, what the conditions were that eventually led to the water that led to the earth. And to do that, you have to go out and, and see these primordial objects. You do, just the same way that archaeologists have to make a dig to find out, you know, what things were like in past centuries and millennia. What's the biggest surprise about the solar system itself? Is that it's typical or not typical, that it's unique or not unique,

based on what you, you know, that and what we've seen now from exoplanets. Well, I would give you two responses. One is that from the exploration of the solar system, this amazing enterprise, you know, stretches back 50 years now, even 55, going on 60 years since the earliest missions to the planets. Just how rich nature is. That every place we've gone, it just blows our doors off. Every time I've learned about discovery of a new planetary system,

almost every time we've discovered that we thought our conventional wisdom told us what couldn't happen happens. Giant planets in the inner part of the solar system, and all these things we didn't think could happen. The other thing I was going to say is then from what we've learned about exoplanet systems, we've learned that our solar system is very atypical. Yeah. Right?

Everyone always, and that's, again, not what we thought. We had a great little tidy logical story of why you should have rocky planets on the inside and gas giants on the outside. Sounded so good. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And nature, you know, is just so amazing. The imagination of nature is so much greater

than the imagination of humans, which is why we have to keep exploring. Why we can't just have theoretical physicists like me in rooms because we come up, if we figured out what's happening, the picture we have would not be the picture of the universe, We have to look outward because it keeps surprising us. We need the exploration. We need the explorers like you and the missions that you develop.

We need the data. Yeah, the data. And that's the basis of science. I know for theorists, data is a four-letter word. No, no, no, no. For me, I mean, that's what guides theorists. At least I'm an old-fashioned kind of theoretical physicists. If the data, it doesn't matter whether it's elegant or beautiful or pretty.

What matters is to correspond to reality. And the only way to know is to look out and find it. Right. It's what really guides us. And what's amazing is in space exploration. It's why I love this field is that we get such big surprises all the time. They're not little surprises at all. And they're close to home.

As I say, as someone who spends this time thinking about the beginning of the universe or the fundamental structure matter or the end of the universe, you think there are these great cosmic mysteries about our universe, and that's true. But it's so hardening to find out that close to home, and they're not that close at Pluto or Altmutule, but that there are still so many mysteries waiting to be solved. Now, you pointed out that you did this mission on a shoestring.

And as I've often said, you can send a rover to Mars for the price of making a movie about sending Matt Damon to Mars. And it's this human versus robotic exploration. For me, I know the people are fascinated by putting astronauts out in space, but the science we can do with robotics, with autonomous missions is there's no question that. That's the way we need to explore the universe, in my opinion. I wanted to hear your, you can be, you don't have to become as unpopular as I am by having said that just now. You know, here we have to disagree, Lawrence. Oh, good, good.

Really, honestly. First, the robots are fantastic, but it's a false dichotomy to choose between them. We need the robots and we need the humans. And if we're going to become a multi-planet species, if we're going to become spacefaring, I like to think that here, the beginning of the 21st century, this is where Star Trek is beginning. And we need all of that. And we want to send humans into space in vast numbers.

We want to have an insurance policy against what could happen to the Earth. Yeah, that's fine, but that's science fiction in a way. That's true, but I think the point, I think what I worry about is giving people false hope in the near term. Sending humans into space is expensive and dangerous. Even, I mean, even, and I know that you're involved in near earth, and the last thing I want to talk about, as a commercialization of near-Earth orbits, where we now know what we're doing enough that industry can take care of things.

But sending, I, maybe disagree with me about this. I don't think the first mission to Mars of humans is going to, the economics of that is going to allow it a company to do it. It's got to be a government. Well, if you listen to Elon Musk. I know if you're listening to Elon Musk, but I don't agree with it.

The case closes. Yeah, I know, but I think he's wrong. So you know we need visionaries like that. Oh, I think we do need visionaries. And the exploration of North America and South America, the Americas, was very dangerous. And countless people lost their lives. Yeah, but there weren't so many lawyers then. That's a different story.

No, I think the point is that when we have space tourism and the first space tourist dies, it's going to be, what we have to realize is, is a challenge. And part of the problem that I have, and maybe I don't want to end on a negative note, but is that when we have to realize that when we send humans into space,

most of the money and design goes to make sure that they come back alive, or they stay alive if it's one-way missions. When you send a rover, if it crashes, it's a disaster. Or when, I mean, let's go back to that mission of yours where your satellite exploded. Well, you were sad your satellite exploded, but you're much sadder that the humans died

in the Challenger explosion. You know, if I can say, I think you're coming at this a little bit from the wrong perspective. Okay, good. Educate me. Every form of transportation kills people. People get killed in boating. People get killed in airplanes.

People get killed in trucking. People get killed skiing. Of course. Space flight is no different. And we just have to get used to the fact that it's dangerous. But it's worth it too. Oh yeah. No, I think, look, I think in the long run, if humans survive, and that's a big if, that we need to be as, we will explore the universe.

And I think that human space travel is mostly for exploration, literally an adventure, adventure, the human adventure. the human adventure. But for the moment, if I asked you as a scientist, you have a certain amount of money and you want to explore the outer solar system, obviously you're going to,

because, you know, humans don't... Ask somebody like Steve Squires, B.I. and Mars Rovers missions that just finished after 15 spectacular years. Steve would tell you that what they did over years was about equivalent to what an Apollo crew could do in a weekend. I know, my geologist friends

in my department say that. But then I also say you could send a thousand of them for the price of one geologist. So I like the idea that we don't agree on this. I do think ultimately, I mean, if you ask me, would I like to go? Yeah. Would I like to see it?

Would I like to experience it? But I'll tell you one other thing. Let me just come back to this. When I look at the picture of ultimate delay, when I think of your spacecraft, when I think of the rovers, I have an attachment to the New Horizons. mission that I might not to an astronaut because I think of that as an entity, the New Horizons

spacecraft, as an object that's out there alone doing its work autonomously, not needing food, not needing love, not needing companionship, even if it tweets every now and then. And I find that so remarkable that I almost feel more attached to those spacecraft than I would to an astronaut. I would think of it a little differently. I'm talking about myself. You can choose how you want to think about it. Think of it when you sit down at the table for a meal.

You have a knife, a fork, and a spoon. They're different tools. They're used for different purposes. It's really hard to do the soup with the fork. It's really hard to cut the meat with the spoon. You need these different tools, and we need both human spaceflight and we need robotic spaceflight,

and there's a very great synergy between them. And I'm convinced the future is the future with both advancing rapidly. Well, look, that's an optimistic view of the future, which is great, and I hope you're right. and I certainly am convinced that however it advances, we will be amazed. And this time we spent together, I hope, demonstrates how amazing it is and how necessary it is to keep that window on the universe open and to keep being willing to be bold enough to propose

things and spend 20 or 30 years thinking about it, doing it, exploring it, and making new discoveries. And I know that you like to speak to people, and I think people have been listening to this will realize how much you enjoy doing it and will want to go hear you wherever you are and read the book as well, chasing New Horizons. But where can they go to find more about you and the mission, any Twitter or webpages or anything like that?

Sure, where you can Google New Horizons and find lots of resources from websites to social media feeds. For myself, it's very simple. At Twitter, I'm just Alan Stern, AL-A-N, S-T-E-R-N. And I have a website. It's allanstern.space. And you can learn more about the books I write and some of the other adventures I'm involved in there. It's been a fascinating discussion and I really appreciate you coming. Thanks, thanks again for having me. I've really enjoyed it. Thanks, Lawrence. Take care. The Origins podcast is produced by Lawrence Krause, Nancy Dahl,

Amelia Huggins, John and Don Edwards, and Rob Zeps, directed and Gus and Luke Holwerta. audio by Thomas Amoson, web design by Redmond Media Lab, animation by Tomahawk Visual Effects, and music by Ricolus. To see the full video of this podcast, as well as other bonus content, visit us at patreon.com slash origins podcast.