Dr. DeGraaff: Welcome to Spark Science, where we share stories of human curiosity. I’m Regina Barber DeGraaff, astrophysicist, pop-culture enthusiast, and we are here with show favorite Casey Dreier. He’s been on shows previously, and his title is chief advocate at the Planetary Society, and today we’re gonna talk about space and how it’s much harder to travel through space than people think.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, we’re gonna be real bummers.

Dr. DeGraaff: Yes. But we’re gonna talk about pop-culture too, so that’s gonna be fun.

Casey Dreier: Okay.

Dr. DeGraaff: Okay! We’re also gonna answer questions, I think there’s been in the news kind of how industry has taken the lead in space flight. I think people may be confused, or may be excited about how that’s different from what it’s been in the past, so I want to talk about that too.

My main first question is: what do our listeners and our watchers need to know to kind of understand how crewed missions– human flight– has changed in the last few years. What do we need to know to understand what’s happening right now?

Casey Dreier: Well I think the most important thing with human space flight to remember is that space is constantly trying to kill you. It is very dangerous, it is very unpleasant, it’s full of radiation, it’s lacking in air, so you will die like six times if you ever get depressurized into space. It’s a very nasty place. This is why space flight has classically been expensive.

Think of it this way. You have to bring– if you’re sending a human into space, you bring a little bubble of earth environment with you. To maintain that against all the problems of being in space– that just takes a lot of work, it take a lot of reliability, it takes a lot of engineering and assurance, and a lot of safety issues. So, that drives space flight. Really, whenever you put a human a rocket, whatever the goal of that mission is, whatever it wants to do, there’s only one real mission success criteria, and that’s to bring the astronaut home alive. Everything else is secondary.

Dr. DeGraaff: How has that changed over the last– let’s say 50 years?

Casey Dreier: Well, I think we’ve realized how dangerous it is. So, you know when– first human in space?

Dr. DeGraaff: Oh, Yuri!

Casey Dreier: Yes, Yuri Gagarin. April 12th, we just had that anniversary in 1961. It kind of kicked off what we consider the space race in the 1960s. The first accidents

they started to have was the Apollo 1 crew in 1967. You also had issues then of course with the Columbia and Challenger space shuttles, Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Over time, they realized that if you fly in space long enough, eventually statistically something will go wrong.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right, like sky diving.

Casey Dreier: Yeah. Or walking down the street.

Dr. DeGraaff: Or driving a car.

Casey Dreier: Literally doing anything. So, trying to understand– and the big lessons that they learned from those failures, particularly on the US side, is what they thought was safe wasn’t. They didn’t understand ways in which things could fail. They didn’t understand in Apollo 1 that a fire could break out on the launch pad, and they hadn’t planned for that. That’s why they died.

They didn’t understand that the O-ring that protected and joined the side boosters going up would be brittle when it was cold, and so it would crack and leak out and blow up the whole thing in the Challenger situation. They didn’t understand that foam could fall off the big center fuel tank of the space shuttle and crack a wing, destroying the Columbia space craft. So, there’s always in which something can go wrong, and the more you do it, the more of those you’re gonna find, but that doesn’t mean you’ve found them all. That’s why space flight for humans is always going to be inherently risky.

>> Well you’re up there traveling around at 5 miles a second, the heat of reentry and all the complexities and the things that have to work right– you may come to a time when something happens, and we have a tragedy that goes along with our triumphs, and I guess that’s the story of all mankind.

Casey Dreier: So I went into this professionally because I saw a rocket launch for the very first time. I’d always been a space fan, and got my background in physics by was working as a software engineer. Seeing a rocket actually launch for the first time, sitting with thousands of people who helped build the thing on top of that rocket– it was the Curiosity rover– is a completely different experience in person than watching it on TV. In person, you feel the tension in the air. You feel the hopes and dreams and the future careers of the people you’re sitting with.

Watching a tiny little rocket in the distance that is basically a giant bomb– a rocket is just controlling the explosion of a bomb and pushing it downwards– the most dangerous period of that rocket’s life. You’re sitting with all those people, so as it’s counting down it’s getting quieter, and quieter, and quieter. The tension is getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger. And when it launches, you realize you’re watching something like a 30-40 story tall structure lift off into space, never to come back again. And then everyone just flips out and goes crazy and cheer and cries and screams and the tension is released because of the danger inherent in it. And that didn’t even have humans on it.

Dr. DeGraaff: So, I kind of want to get into– your position in the Planetary Society is also related to advocacy– well it is, you’re the chief advocate– related to policy and actually going to talk to elected officials, and kind of encouraging them to spend more money on government sponsored missions and endeavors. And we can get into industry in a second, but how have you seen that change, just in your own career, of like money being given to space?

Casey Dreier: Well, thankfully in the last few years NASA has been getting bigger and bigger budgets. They’ve actually been on a good run in the last 5 years. The numbers have been going up, a couple percentages a year, nothing crazy, just slightly above inflation, basically. Overall, politics have changed in the last few years. After initial attempts to cut spending, everyone has agreed it’s actually more fun to spend money, and so overall the pie has been getting bigger, and so NASA can grab a slightly larger slice as well, at the same time. So that’s been great. And then also, we’ve been specifically focusing on the science side of NASA. There’s no private scientific exploration company.

The action of answering a question (what do we want to know about something we don’t) has no guaranteed economic payoff. This is why the public invests in it. So there’s no private company that’ll explore Mars for us scientifically. So, the role of government is absolutely essential, and it actually maintains tens of thousands of scientists in this country. It keeps them employed, functionally, because of the work that NASA does. It’s kind of a fascinating endeavor. It’s actually one of the best things I think our nation does, or any nation can do, ’cause it really represents a part of our self, the better angel of our nature, to say what’s out there? Well, let’s go look. And to do it peacefully, and systemically, and cooperatively? Like, it’s just, everything about it, the act of seeking answers to fundamental questions, is one of the best things humankind has ever invented.

Dr. DeGraaff: What is the mission of the Planetary Society? Is it linked to what you just said?

Casey Dreier: Yeah. It’s literally to enable the world’s citizens to advance space science and exploration. We want everyone to find a way to contribute to support the advancement of fundamental knowledge about our universe, about our history, where we’re going, and what’s out there. We really encourage people to not only appreciate the incredible things that NASA, or international space agencies like ESA or JAXA, things that they’re doing, but also to know that as citizens of those nations or countries that support those programs you have a role as an advocate to, to support these things.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right. So we’re gonna take a quick break, and when we come back I want to talk about some examples of what those scientific endeavors are, and then maybe talk about some representations of those examples, or that science, in pop culture.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. DeGraaff: So, in your mind, why do you think space is so dangerous?

>> Umm, I don’t know a lot about space. I think because we don’t have a lot of history or time or experience going to space, or like a lot of people going there, that there’s just like a lot of uncertainties and unknowns still.

>> Uhhh, I don’t know. Pressure, lack of oxygen, the unknown. Who knows? You could just be crushed in an instant or lost forever.

Dr. DeGraaff: Why do you think space is so dangerous?

>> Umm, I think space is dangerous because the like, lack of things– like it’s like void of oxygen and things we need to survive.

>> Well, it’s an environment that we weren’t evolved to occupy, so like vacuum and various temperature changes and stuff like that, that we need equipment to survive in.

>> Why it’s dangerous is because we evolved on this planet, and we are used to its protections like the atmosphere. We’ve got this great big magnetic bubble around us protecting us from all the radiation of space, and out in space we have none of that.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. DeGraaff: Welcome back to Spark Science where we’re talking with Casey Dreier, the chief advocate at the Planetary Society. So, we were talking about science endeavors and space, and I wanted you to give us some examples of what those are.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, so collaboration– and usually what I mean by this is international collaboration between not just nations, but the scientific communities in those nations. Great example of this: during the Cold War, it was the scientific communities between the Soviet Union and the United States that always got together and had backchannel ways to communicate for political issues, for international issues. They found ways to work together– actually the United States and Soviet Union met in space in 1975 on the Apollo-Soyuz project.

Even today, the International Space Station is one of the greatest international success stories. 15 member nations run that with massive contribution from Russia and the United States. In the ashes of the Cold War the United States and Russia joined on this 30-year partnership to maintain astronauts and cosmonauts in space together in a joint project, along with the member nations of the European Space Agency and Japan. It’s a spectacular example of international collaboration, and they have multilateral treaties between nations that guarantee support for the space station.

Dr. DeGraaff: Wow.

Casey Dreier: So even as tensions have gotten worse between United States and Russia over the years, no matter what we have a shared goal, a shared enterprise, that we work together every single day in, which is maintaining the International Space Station. Literally taking a global view of things, you realize how petty things like nations are.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right.

Casey Dreier: You don’t see these divisions from space, and you also see the earth projected against this backdrop of the harshness of space. Every other planet you look at: is it grey, or is it greenish grey, or is it brownish grey? Earth is like this blue, bright, green, white clouds– it doesn’t even look like any other planet. It just emphasizes the rarity and the fragility of where we live. And so a lot of astronauts will come back from space with that changed attitude about their role and how humans should work together.

Dr. DeGraaff: So that collaboration that we’re talking about when it comes to different countries, is that at all mirrored, or even an element of that, when we’re talking about industry? When we’re talking about SpaceX, ’cause you’re kind of in the world, do you know anything about any collaborations?

Casey Dreier: Well, in some ways, but it’s very different motivation.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right, ’cause of capitalism.

Casey Dreier: Well, yeah. They’re businesses, right? So you can buy a SpaceX rocket, like the Arabsat company did, and they just launched a Falcon Heavy into space with an Arabsat payload. So SpaceX will work with others, but they’re a business, so they need to have revenue. So you’re incentive structure is completely different, which is why a company like SpaceX is not a replacement for NASA, ’cause the incentives are utterly and completely different.

Dr. DeGraaff: But I think what you just said– so give me some scientific, you know, mission and programs and studies that are going on right now.

Casey Dreier: Something I’m excited about that’s happening now, we have a mission at Jupiter– and I love Jupiter, so maybe that’s why– Jupiter has a mission called Juno, which is looking at the Aurora borealis equivalent on Jupiter, which is just as you might imagine, spectacular– very big. But it has this camera on it that was actually put on the mission only to take pretty pictures of Jupiter. That’s literally why it’s there. All the scientific goals of the mission could have been accomplished without a camera. But because it was paid for by NASA it had a public role, it had a role to serve the public, like “we have to put this camera on it.” So there’s some spectacular, beautiful pictures. It has these big, looping orbits around Jupiter, and so if you take all these pictures and put them together you’ll see this planet of Jupiter being spun over and you’re flying right

over the cloud tops. Some of the most spectacular pictures of that planet I’ve ever seen. That’s happening now.

Dr. DeGraaff: Yeah.

Casey Dreier: Something that’s about to happen, also at Jupiter, is a mission called Europa clipper, and it’s going to start characterizing this moon of Jupiter that has more liquid water than all of the earth does.

Dr. DeGraaff: Yep.

Casey Dreier: Like two to four times as much liquid water. That liquid water is in contact with the rock, so it has minerals and nutrients. It has energy being added to the system through lava– they think there’s underground lava flows and hot vents.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right, ’cause they think there’s gravitational pulls.

Casey Dreier: Yeah, from the presence of Jupiter so close it kind of squashes the interior.

Dr. DeGraaff: And the other moons as well.

Casey Dreier: Yep. And so it has an active core. So Io, the other moon of Jupiter, has a bunch of volcanism. I think that’s similar to what’s happening under the oceans. And then it has time. It’s been very stable. So you have liquid water, basic chemical nutrients known for life, you have interface with rock and ongoing energy, and you have time. That’s literally everything that the scientific community thinks was required to start life on earth, and it’s sitting there on Europa. So we’re gonna send a mission there starting in sometime in the mid-2020s. But it’s being built right now and it’s gonna be a very exciting mission. We worked– at the Planetary Society we worked for a long time to support that mission.

Dr. DeGraaff: Tell us more about that asteroid mission that you were talking about.

Casey Dreier: So asteroids, little just rocks floating around, right? So we have the asteroid belt, but there’s also all sorts of asteroids that can– their orbits will take us really close to, or cross the orbit of earth. We call those near earth asteroids, or near earth objects more generally, NEOs. NEOs are notably very likely responsible for the end of the dinosaurs, right? We had a giant asteroid impact about 60 million years ago. These are still out there. On average, earth has been hit by a destructive global life ending asteroid every 100 million years. Smaller asteroids that can still cause a lot of damage hit us every couple million years. And so they’re out there.

So, we take this stance that we don’t want be hit by those, the Planetary Society. So we need to do two things. One, we need to find them and understand their orbits. We frankly only have recently started to do that. They’re trying to find– they found over

20,000 near earth asteroids. None of them are likely to hit us yet, but we still are looking. There’s another mission– the other thing that we need to do besides finding them is being able to, should one be on a collision course with Earth– can we stop it?

The easiest way to do that would be, as far out as you can, with as much advance notice as you can, to slam something into it and divert its orbit a little bit so it misses Earth instead of hitting it. There’s a mission now– being built now– that’s gonna launch in 2022 called DART, the Double Asteroid Redirect Test. It’s launching on a SpaceX Falcon 9, and it’s a mission that’s basically a chunk of metal with a camera on it. It’s going to this moon– this asteroid in the main belt a little beyond Mars called Didymos, is the name of the asteroid. Didymos actually has a little moon, a little asteroidal moon around the asteroid. We call it Didymoon.

Dr. DeGraaff: And we’re gonna practice on that?

Casey Dreier: We’re gonna smack into the tiny little moon and we’re gonna measure exactly how it changes the orbit. It gives engineers and scientists a lot of information in the practical sense. If you really do slam something into something else, you don’t necessarily know the composition of the asteroid. You don’t know its exact surface features. This will give us a hint of how to do that. So it’s our first time practicing deflecting an asteroid that’s not gonna hit us, but it’s the practice part of that.

Dr. DeGraaff: It’s like our student lab that we’re doing, on a huge scale.

Casey Dreier: Yep.

Dr. DeGraaff: So with that, we’re gonna take a break and when I come back I wanna talk about– why was it 15 years ago? It makes me think of The Core and all those movies that came out around then, but I also wanna talk about the show that you are featured on. Yeah, we’ll talk about that as well.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. DeGraaff: Where would you wanna go, if you could go on a spaceship, you could go anywhere, where would you want to go?

>> I would want to go to Mars ’cause it’s like, I don’t know we’re like starting to know stuff about it with like the water being there and stuff. Like, it seems like it’d be interesting.

>> If there was another planet with life, I would go there and explore that.

Dr. DeGraaff: What about anything you know actually does exist?

>> Know actually does exist? Probably Mars.

>> I don’t know, there’s so many cool places. Titan would be a good first choice. NASA landed something there and they said it landed in pudding. It’s like, what kind of pudding? I would have believed tapioca. But then, you’re kind of thinking just in the solar system, but if it’s anywhere, like what about exo-solar planets? Let’s go check those out. What does the universe look like? I don’t think you can answer that question. But if you need an answer, let’s go with Titan.

>> What’s the one that like rains diamonds? Is that Venus?

Dr. DeGraaff: Ohhh, I don’t actually know and I’m an astronomer. I think it’s Saturn? I’m not sure. Somewhere that rains diamonds.

>> Maybe that, or I’d go really, really far because I feel like people are always wondering, “Where’s the edge of it?” I know it’s like infinite and whatever, but I think it’d be really cool to go just as far as possible.

Dr. DeGraaff: You’re an explorer!

>> Yeah, I guess!

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. DeGraaff: Welcome back to Spark Science. We’re talking with Casey Dreier, who’s the chief advocate at the Planetary Society, and we’re talking about not letting asteroids kill us, which has been in pop culture for the last, I don’t know, many years.

Casey Dreier: 20?

Dr. DeGraaff: Yeah, Deep Impact.

Casey Dreier: Deep Impact, and then there’s also the movie Armageddon.

Dr. DeGraaff: Armageddon, that’s the one I kept on forgetting. That actually came out like 20 years ago, right? So five years later we started looking for them.

Casey Dreier: It wasn’t until the late-80s, early-90s that the first searches from NASA began. And the first congressional directives telling NASA that they had to find asteroids that could threaten earth came in the mid-90s, and likely that has something to do with the fact that they had two movies within a year of each other about asteroid impacts. It was also a time of Hollywood disaster movies, too.

Dr. DeGraaff: Yes. That’s true. You actually are featured in a show called MARS– all caps. That show talks about this idea that you kind of alluded to, where you want to do– science for science’s sake does actually build cooperation, builds collaborations, helps humanity, but there’s also this kind of need– why should we do this? Why are we gonna give money to this, you know.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

>> We had set out into the unknown. Explorers of a new world. I was part of the first mission.

>> Mission control, we’re looking at a red planet.

>> A new hope for humanity.

Dr. DeGraaff: What are your takes on that? What have you contributed to that show? What have your experiences been?

Casey Dreier: I was one of the many experts featured on the show.

Dr. DeGraaff: You’re not like an actor.

Casey Dreier: No. There’s a fictionalized part of the show, and then there’s a bunch of people talking about the reality with kind of the same theme. They did two seasons of this. It was fun. It’s a cool show, and I really recommend people check it out. They did a lot of work in it. The theme is interesting because what it does is it looks back into history, particularly for human exploration and settlement, and it looks at those motivating factors. When did that really start to take off? The advocates of this certain type of space exploration would say, “Well, only when people were motivated by greed did we actually have true, you know, expansion of human presence.” The metaphor– or whatever– breaks down in space, because the problem is space doesn’t really have anything that we couldn’t just do a lot easier on earth. Mars is mainly like basaltic rocks and volcanic rocks and iron, which we have plenty of here. The problem is that there’s no real economic incentive to drive the individual, private investment into space.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right.

Casey Dreier: What we’re starting to see instead is some individuals in the world are so vastly wealthy now that they can pursue idiosyncratic interests of how to play with their wealth. You have basically patrons of space. Actually this goes back to an earlier era, in particularly US history, where you had the equivalent being done. Very wealthy captains of industry were, instead of making rockets, they were making telescopes– big observatories around the country. There’s all these sorts of grand observatories made in the 19th to early-20th century where primarily benefactors from wealthy individuals who put in the equivalent of hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars of their fortune for space exploration: looking into the skies. So we had a brief period in the 20th century where it was dominated by government, and now we’re almost reverting back to an old historical situation where it’s a mix of some government investment, but also patronage from very wealthy individuals to enable space exploration.

So you have companies now who talk about making money in space. There are ways to do that, but it’s not by going to the Moon or Mars, or further out. It’s usually going up to space and then pointing right back down to us.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right. I really like that phrase, this idea of space patrons versus space explorers. I think that you really touch on something that’s really– I think people don’t think about– that the first scientists were people, at least in Western civilization, were people that had the money to do it.

Casey Dreier: And just to clarify for these observatories, rarely would the patrons themselves use it. It was to buy their good name, basically. To put a legacy, in the same way that you had the Rockefellers and the Carnegie creating libraries. You have these Carnegie libraries all over the country. They used their immense wealth that they had gathered, usually through inequitable distribution of wealth, but they used that to try to make a legacy that was more positive to society– some of them did.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right.

Casey Dreier: And so that’s where you have a patron. In a similar way now, we have people like Jeff Bezos, people like Richard Branson, who are using their own personal wealth and acting as a patron and enabling a large number of people to build this infrastructure with their name, hoping to leave some sort of lasting legacy.

Dr. DeGraaff: I think that’s still good for us, right?

Casey Dreier: Sure! I’m so glad they’re doing it, absolutely.

Dr. DeGraaff: And I think that people are very excited. So in our last like minute, what would you say is like the next– what are you most excited about when we’re dealing with the people actually travelling into space?

Casey Dreier: Well, absolutely– so Commercial Crew is what it’s called, a program that NASA has been funding. It’s actually contracted with two companies, Boeing and SpaceX, both of which are building their own separate commercially operated and owned spacecraft to service NASA’s needs. So basically, NASA is saying, “We wanna basically buy the equivalent of a ticket on United Airlines and send an astronaut to the space station.” But they’re giving them a leg up to build that capability. So SpaceX looks like it might be ready as soon as later this year to test sending humans from the US back up to the space station. This will be the first time since the shuttle retired in 2011.

Dr. DeGraaff: Right.

Casey Dreier: Boeing is close behind it, so I’m very excited about that. And of course the big recent announcement is that NASA has been directed to land humans on the Moon in five years, using a mix of commercial entities and other ways to try to do this,

and to see if they can do it. It’s a very, very aggressive timeline, but I would love to be alive– you know, you and I were not alive when the moon landings happened. I would love to see humans walk on another celestial body again. And to do it in a way that we don’t leave this time. That we maintain that and build this foothold into the universe somewhere else, and learn how to do that, maintain that knowledge, and start building out our capabilities there. It’s really exciting.

Dr. DeGraaff: I love talking to about all these things ’cause you’re so in the world, and you know all this stuff, and I want to thank you for coming on our show!

Casey Dreier: Yeah! We weren’t even a bummer today!

Dr. DeGraaff: No, we weren’t! It was all up.

Casey Dreier: Yeah!

Dr. DeGraaff: Thank you so much.

Casey Dreier: Yep, happy to be here.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. DeGraaff: We want to thank Casey Dreier for taking the time to share his knowledge of space travel, space policy, and also the industry of space exploration. Thank you to National Geographic for the audio clips of United States senator John Glenn, and the television show MARS.

[♪ Music playing ♪]

Dr. DeGraaff: Spark Science is recorded on location in Bellingham, Washington, at Western Washington University. The producers are Suzanne Blaise, Regina Barber DeGraaff, and Robert Clark. Student editors are Julia Thorpe, Zerach Coakley, and Aaron Howard. Spark Science is sponsored by WWU, and created in partnership with KMRE. Thank you for joining us. If wanna listen to past episodes, visit sparksciencenow.com. If there’s a science idea you’re curious about, post a message on our Facebook page: sparksciencenow, or tweet us @sparksciencenow.

[♪ Music playing ♪]