Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / “The New Race to the Moon: China, MAGA, SpaceX & Mars” with Jeffrey Kluger

Transcript

“The New Race to the Moon: China, MAGA, SpaceX & Mars” with Jeffrey Kluger · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  Get a humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  Here's an uncomfortable question for you.
• 0:10
  What do you make of this whole quest to go and colonize Mars and the rich boys with their
• 0:15
  toys like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos with their spaceships?
• 0:19
  Is it just a big distraction?
• 0:22
  Or could we be on the brink of a reinvigorated era of space adventure?
• 0:28
  Will NASA ever get itself together?
• 0:31
  It has a new administrator that President Trump has appointed, still needs to be cleared
• 0:36
  by the Senate.
• 0:37
  But this guy is very different from any NASA boss who has come before him.
• 0:42
  And there is now a real plan, an actual plan, to go back to the moon.
• 0:47
  It's partly motivated by the fact that China intends to send human beings to the surface
• 0:51
  of the moon by 2030, and America once again is being spurred into action for geopolitical
• 0:56
  reasons, if not scientific ones.
• 0:58
  I want to speak to the person in the world who probably knows more about space technology,
• 1:03
  the space race, the geopolitics of it, and NASA and all of these guys than anybody else.
• 1:09
  He's the editor at large of Time magazine in the United States.
• 1:12
  He's the author of 13 books, including Lost Moon, the perilous voyage of Apollo 13,
• 1:18
  which is the book on which the movie Apollo 13 was based.
• 1:21
  His new book is Gemini, Stepping Stone to the Moon, the untold story.
• 1:26
  And I wanted to understand not only what is going on in MAGA land between Trump and Elon
• 1:32
  and the new administrator of NASA, what their intentions are, whether anything will happen,
• 1:36
  but also the future of space exploration and how it fits into the history of humankind,
• 1:42
  the tension between our desire to conquer and our desire to make things right here at home.
• 1:49
  The conversation starts a little wonky and scientific, so it tickles my nerd bone,
• 1:54
  but it then expands to the point of exploring space at all.
• 1:58
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did, the one and only Geoffrey Cluecker.
• 2:06
  When I was in university in the 2000s, the first decade, I was a card carrying paid up
• 2:14
  a member of something called the Mars Society, which I think was a non-profit to lobby
• 2:19
  for humans to go to Mars, because I thought I just had a sense that when my parents were
• 2:25
  in college, we went to the moon, now I'm in college, we should go to Mars, when my kids
• 2:31
  are in college, they'll be interplanetary, I don't know, bases on Mars and things,
• 2:37
  and we'll be shuttling back and forth.
• 2:39
  Well, we're 10 years away from my kids going to college.
• 2:43
  What the hell happened, Geoffrey?
• 2:45
  Well, I think what the hell happened was you can trace a lot of it back to Richard Nixon.
• 2:53
  We landed on the moon in 1969, just eight years after we had the first pop-gun suborbital flight,
• 3:00
  we went from a 15-minute flight to the surface of the Sea of Tranquility in eight years.
• 3:05
  It was astonishing, but as soon as that happened, a lot of the air went out of America's
• 3:13
  enthusiasm for space. The big issue, the big question, the big challenge was to get there first
• 3:19
  and beat the Soviets. Well, we got there first and beat the Soviets, and people,
• 3:25
  even something as dramatic as a moon landing, people habituate to familiar things very quickly,
• 3:33
  and Apollo 12 went to the moon. Apollo 13, obviously, that was a different story,
• 3:38
  and everybody paid exceedingly close attention again to the effort to bring the crew back,
• 3:44
  but Apollo's 14, 15, 16, 17, in the popular mind, those ran together.
• 3:50
  Richard Nixon was in the White House from 69 to 74, so he spanned the lunar landing era,
• 3:58
  and he saw that public attention was fading. There was a lot of talk that he still
• 4:08
  was wrangled by his loss to John Kennedy in 1960, and the moon initiative was a Kennedy program.
• 4:16
  So Nixon wanted a Nixon program. So midway through the moon landings, he made it clear that there
• 4:22
  would be no White House support, and if he could help it, no money coming for further lunar
• 4:30
  exploration, and we were instead going to confine ourselves to dog paddling and low earth orbit,
• 4:37
  and this gave rise to the shuttle program. Now, the shuttles were remarkable machines.
• 4:41
  They were deadly machines. Two out of five, 40% of them were destroyed and killed their entire
• 4:48
  complement of crew, and both, and both disasters. But they were still, just to put some flesh on
• 4:55
  the bones of that statistic for me. I think we all remember the Challenger disaster. I mean,
• 4:59
  don't remember where aware of the legacy of the Challenger disaster in the 80s. 40% of all
• 5:06
  space shuttle missions were fatal? Well, 40% of the fleet was destroyed.
• 5:13
  They remember there were 135 space shuttle missions. So no, 40% of them weren't fatal,
• 5:19
  but there were five shuttles, and two of them were destroyed. Yeah, in terms of the devices
• 5:27
  that are being used, rather than the occasions on which they were used. Exactly. Yeah, and the
• 5:32
  occasions on which they were used, you know, 133 out of 135 missions were successes. Unfortunately,
• 5:38
  the engineers claimed their entire crew. So it's like an airline where 40% of the planes
• 5:45
  eventually blow up in the air, but the airline can say, yeah, but we ran thousands of flights
• 5:50
  before they blew up. Exactly. It was perfect. Yeah. Yeah. So, and you wouldn't fly that airline,
• 5:55
  if not. So once the enthusiasm drained out of lunar exploration, and once there was a
• 6:07
  president in the White House who wasn't terribly interested in deep space exploration, it was sort
• 6:13
  of inevitable that we were going to confine ourselves to lower Earth orbit. Now, I remember
• 6:17
  reading, it was either time or newsweek, when Apollo 11 happened, and there was a column about
• 6:25
  what's next in space, and their prediction was we would be on the surface of Mars sometime
• 6:31
  between 1979 and 1984. Well, that was 40, 50 years ago, and we are still not on the surface of Mars.
• 6:40
  You know, we want to get back to the moon. The administration talks about 2027 for
• 6:46
  boot prints on the moon again. Let me just pause, Jeffrey, before we get to today, because
• 6:50
  there was an interesting sort of, I'm curious about this era as well. The earlier era,
• 6:56
  can a case be made just to sort of bend over backwards and be as generous as possible to
• 7:00
  Nixon and his administration, which is something I didn't think I would find myself doing in this.
• 7:06
  Could a case be made that we had to massively overreach from what was practical in the Kennedy
• 7:12
  administration in order to win this symbolic victory in the Cold War, but actually the financial
• 7:18
  and scientific utility of the program once that political win had been achieved was not great enough
• 7:26
  to justify a continued investment. I find it astonishing that in the 2020s, we have made no
• 7:36
  further progress on exploring the moon or Mars, but I don't think that it's necessarily
• 7:44
  the wrong call that in the 1970s, the US was like, we can pause this. We did a lot of us just
• 7:51
  take a breather, wait until the next generation of technology comes along, wait until there's a
• 7:56
  scientific reason or a geopolitical reason, and then maybe in the 80s or something, let's go back.
• 8:03
  Does that make sense? Well, I mean, the space program certainly was expensive. Back in the 60s,
• 8:11
  it represented NASA's budget, represented 4% of the entire federal budget, which is a huge
• 8:17
  number. Today it's 0.4%. So in terms of its share of the national budget, it's one tenth
• 8:25
  of what it was in the 1960s. Now you're talking about 1960s dollars, so you have to correct for
• 8:30
  inflation. But nonetheless, it's just a proportion. If it's just a proportion, that's true.
• 8:35
  So 4%, so 21, 25th, is that of the entire federal budget? Yeah, or something like that. So,
• 8:44
  I mean, some countries spend that on their entire defense. Right. And the US spends about a third
• 8:51
  to a half of its budget on defense, and another quarter is spent on servicing the national debt. So
• 8:58
  the optional, what am I looking for? No, not marginal. The elective, not elected.
• 9:09
  I see what you mean. If I know what you mean, the portion of the budget that is discretionary,
• 9:15
  that's the word we're looking for. The discretionary budget is only about a quarter of the total.
• 9:21
  The rest is mandatory entitlements and interest on the debt and defense. So the share of the
• 9:27
  budget out of which NASA's budget can come was already pretty constricted. So yes, very expensive.
• 9:36
  In terms of the scientific dividends, those dividends are paid in terms of learning about the
• 9:45
  formation of the moon, which tells us something about learning about, tells us something about
• 9:49
  the formation of the earth, which tells us something about the formation of the solar system as a whole.
• 9:54
  That is not without value. That's very important information. But it is academic. It is clinical.
• 10:01
  Once you know that, what can you do with it? Well, you can't buy it.
• 10:05
  Isn't it done by the time you get to Apollo 16? How much more examination of the sea of
• 10:12
  tranquility do you need? Remember, they landed in six different spots and those spots got progressively
• 10:18
  trickier, progressively hillier. The sea of tranquility in the ocean of storms where we landed
• 10:24
  the first two times are as calm and pleasant and flat as they sound. Well, ocean of storms
• 10:30
  doesn't sound very pleasant, I guess. But they were both, they're both pretty level places.
• 10:36
  When Apollo 13 flew, it was targeting the fromaro highlands, which were hillier. Apollo 14 ultimately
• 10:45
  went there. And Apollo's 1516 and 17 investigated mountainous regions. So we were getting different
• 10:52
  kinds of geology. We were exploring different kinds of sites. So it wasn't really done,
• 10:59
  you know, by the time we got out from Apollo 11. And there's still new places to explore.
• 11:05
  We've never been out of the equatorial region of the moon. The US and China are both targeting
• 11:10
  the south lunar pole at this point because it's a different kind of area and because there's
• 11:15
  water ice there that in theory could be harvested by future moon bases to provide potable water,
• 11:23
  oxygen and rocket fuel in terms in the form of the hydrogen liquid oxygen. So you could do a lot
• 11:31
  with the ice deposits in the south lunar pole. This is probably a stupid question, but I guess
• 11:37
  I'd never even thought about it. The moon has cold poles under warm equator like the earth does
• 11:43
  or is that an artifact of the earth's atmosphere? It's partially an artifact of the earth's
• 11:48
  atmosphere. The reason the poles are so cold is that the light comes in laterally. And if
• 11:56
  there's a crater with a lip on it, the light will be blocked and that crater will be in permanent
• 12:03
  shadow. The surface of the moon is blindingly lit half of the month and completely black the
• 12:09
  other half of the month. The lunar day is the same as a lunar month or a lunar year if it's
• 12:16
  orbit around the earth. Because the face is always facing out. The same face is always facing.
• 12:22
  Right. So you get these permanently shadowed regions in the poles which are colder than the surface
• 12:28
  of the moon with the surface of the moon. And yes, if you are directly in sunlight on the moon,
• 12:37
  it will be very hot. The surface of your suit would be very hot.
• 12:43
  So yeah, there are, it is colder in the poles but it's due to the shadowed regions.
• 12:49
  Got it. Okay. So we get to sort of today. I mean, I remember the only other time that I heard
• 12:57
  Mars come up in a formal political context was I think when, correct me if I'm wrong, George W. Bush
• 13:06
  had a brain fart at a state of the union. I vaguely remember and said like he announced that
• 13:11
  America was going to Mars. I think what was it the moon? But no, both Bushes did that. George
• 13:19
  H. W. Bush in, I think it was 1989, you know, in his first full year in the White House, announced
• 13:29
  an initiative to get to Mars and then the Office of Management and Budget crunched the numbers and
• 13:35
  they said it would cost half a trillion dollars to do it. So actually, you know how I said that
• 13:43
  thing? Yeah, let's put a pin in that and come back to it later. So, you know, once they put a
• 13:50
  $500 billion price tag on it, it wasn't going to happen. George H. George W. Bush in 2004 in the
• 13:59
  run up to the 2004 election did announce a new moon initiative with an ultimate goal of getting
• 14:06
  on to Mars. Now, you know, a lot of people said that was just election year candy, give people
• 14:12
  something to get excited about and not really follow through on it. But in fact, you know, it was
• 14:17
  budgeted. It was in the NASA budget and for about five years, six years, there was a very robust
• 14:23
  program at NASA called the Constellation Program to get back to the moon as early as 2015,
• 14:30
  which seemed like a realistic goal when this was first announced in 2004 and ultimately go on to
• 14:35
  Mars. The program was never funded sufficiently so there was a lot of important follow-on work that
• 14:43
  wasn't getting done and when Barack Obama took office rather than supplementing that funding to
• 14:51
  allow the program to be more viable than it was, he simply pulled the plug on it. And, you know,
• 14:56
  so the Constellation Program after six years of work was abandoned. So, yes, both Bush
• 15:01
  Presidencies, you know, had very dreamy views of, you know, where we are going in space, but neither one
• 15:08
  of them came to fruition. Right. So, the first Bush, daddy Bush predates my political awareness,
• 15:15
  but baby Bush, I remember thinking that was probably the first election that I paid attention
• 15:22
  to, except for my brain being pinged by some craziness in 2000 that I didn't quite understand,
• 15:28
  obviously. But that was the first time that I remember there being my realizing that what American
• 15:36
  Presidents said didn't mean that it was actually going to happen. Because I thought that and coming
• 15:43
  from a parliamentary democracy, usually the party in power can pretty much figure out how to get
• 15:49
  what it wants to get done done. And I knew that JFK had talked about, you know, before the end
• 15:55
  of the decade and, you know, then it happened. And so I thought, well, that's great. So, America
• 16:01
  will go to back to the moon and then Mars. So I'll just, well, you know, I can forget about this
• 16:05
  for a few years and then it'll happen at some point. And then I sort of, you know, found myself
• 16:10
  like trying all the door knobs in the room of my brain, where this thing was located and going,
• 16:15
  what, what, what was it about that thing? What happened to that? So did constellation,
• 16:20
  should we blame Obama for pulling the pen on constellation or should we blame NASA for not
• 16:26
  having got its shit together better with constellation in the first five years or should we blame
• 16:31
  Congress under in the Bush administration for not funding it properly in the first place or
• 16:36
  all of those? I hate to say it, but I think the blame goes to Obama. You know, the fact that NASA
• 16:45
  was behind, behind its schedule and missing its deadlines was partly due to the fact that the
• 16:52
  program wasn't funded robustly enough. Now that actually isn't Obama's fault. That's Congress's
• 16:58
  fault. You know, back in the summer, Donald Trump proposed a budget for NASA that would include
• 17:06
  about a 24% cut, which is huge. NASA's, you know, overall budget is only $24 billion, which is
• 17:13
  a rounding error in, you know, in a three and a half trillion dollar economy. And Trump proposed
• 17:21
  to cut it further. That's not going to happen because presidents can only propose budgetary
• 17:28
  expenditures and budgetary cuts. And it's up to Congress actually to write the checks or not to
• 17:33
  write the checks. In this case, it is space heavy states like Florida, California, Texas,
• 17:43
  their lawmakers and Congress are pushing back and making sure the funding continues. So there
• 17:48
  wasn't sufficient funding for constellation. Obama could have lobbied to increase it and let
• 17:54
  the program really thrive since it was already, you know, sort of two thirds of the way to its goal.
• 17:59
  But instead he pulled the plug, which is very typical. One of the things about that distinguishes
• 18:06
  the US space program from, say, the Chinese space program is every four or eight years. We change
• 18:13
  administrations and just like Richard Nixon pulled the plug on Apollo in order to put his
• 18:19
  imprimatur on the space program, Obama did the same thing, Polypon plug installation. China on the
• 18:26
  other hand has five year plans and 10 year plans. And you know, they are quietly working toward
• 18:31
  a moon landing in 2030. And while they have not launched many impressive missions, they certainly
• 18:37
  haven't gone circuit lunar. They haven't even flown in Earth orbit with crews all that often.
• 18:42
  I think they've had four crew flights to lower Earth orbit. You know, they, when they say in 2015,
• 18:51
  we're going to do this by 2030. Well, the same government is going to be in power in 2030 that
• 18:56
  was in power in 2015 as opposed to the US, which could have changed hands four times. Right.
• 19:02
  Look, at the risk of making American listeners believe that the only way to get continuity
• 19:08
  of public service between governments is by having a communist Marxist dictatorship. It is also
• 19:15
  the case in many parliamentary democracies that the public service has a greater independence and
• 19:21
  continuity between governments and that there's more of a standoff hands off, I should say,
• 19:28
  approach from incoming administrations to very expensive projects that were commissioned and
• 19:33
  that are kind of running around running on behind the scenes. But let's not get political because the
• 19:38
  China question brings us to what I really want to talk to you about, which is today. Are we going,
• 19:46
  I guess all of this has been a circuitous way of saying like given my traumatizing experience
• 19:51
  of having believed in Mars in college and then thinking that a US president was actually going to do it
• 19:58
  are we going to the moon again? Yes, I strongly believe we're going to the moon again. As early as
• 20:06
  February, Artemis II is going to fly circumlunar. It will whip around the far side of the moon and come
• 20:13
  home. It will not even orbit the moon. It certainly won't land. It basically will replicate a
• 20:19
  Apollo 13's trajectory, but with a healthy spacecraft. In 1972, the fraternity of men who went to
• 20:29
  the moon, the fraternity of human beings who went to the moon stopped increasing. In 1972, after
• 20:35
  Apollo 17 came back, there were 24 men who had either orbited flown around or walked on the
• 20:41
  surface of the moon. We are now down to three of them, four of them, five of them. I'm sorry,
• 20:48
  four moon walkers plus Fred Hayes. Depends when we release this episode, do you know exactly that?
• 20:54
  There are five out of 24 who are still alive. As early as February, we are going to add four names
• 21:03
  to that list and one of them will be the first woman to visit the lunar neighborhood and one of
• 21:08
  them will be the first person of color to visit the lunar neighborhood and one of them will be the
• 21:12
  first Canadian and a member of the Commonwealth to visit the lunar neighborhood. That is going to
• 21:19
  happen as early as February and as late as maybe April or May, but there is a huge distance to be
• 21:27
  covered between flying circumlunar and landing on the surface of the moon. The US doesn't even have
• 21:33
  a lunar lander yet and SpaceX, which was a site, was given the contract to build the lunar lander,
• 21:41
  lander is badly bungling the job and a couple of other companies are now scrambling to fill in
• 21:47
  the acting administrator of NASA, a man named Sean Duffy who is also the secretary of transportation,
• 21:55
  announced a couple of weeks ago that NASA's contract with SpaceX to build the lunar lander is
• 22:02
  going to be scrapped and he's going to open up the bidding to other companies trying to build a
• 22:08
  lander. The Trump administration says they want to have the lander built and have us on the surface
• 22:13
  of Mars, surface of the moon by 2027. That is absolutely not going to happen. Most realistic people
• 22:21
  say at the absolute drop dead earliest, it'll be 2030. Well, that's when the Chinese plan to go so
• 22:28
  we are in a real-foot race with China and in order to win it, we have to build the machine
• 22:34
  that's going to land on the moon. We haven't even started that yet.
• 22:38
  That is basically the imperative now. What makes now different from the previous
• 22:44
  gestures towards the possibility of going with another space adventure is the fact that we don't
• 22:52
  want China to do it before we do it again. That is it. I mean, the administration talks about China
• 22:58
  a lot. Sean Duffy talks about China a lot, the new administrator of NASA, Jared Isaacman who was
• 23:05
  just re-nominated yesterday. He's very mindful of the competition with China. Trump is very
• 23:12
  mindful of the competition with China. Look, this worked with the US and the Soviet Union in the
• 23:17
  1960s. We had to beat the Russians to the moon because we had to demonstrate to the world that a
• 23:24
  capitalist and open capitalist economy was superior in terms of innovation and invention and
• 23:29
  technology to an autocratic communist system. We won that race and I think people are trying to plug
• 23:40
  into the same formula and get the same kind of competitive energy going. I'm not sure that's going
• 23:48
  to happen because the fear factor isn't there. Back in the 60s, we were afraid of the Soviet Union.
• 23:55
  We were afraid of Soviet missiles. We were afraid of the threat of nuclear annihilation and
• 24:01
  beating the Soviets to the moon was one symbolic way of saying we are the stronger, better,
• 24:06
  fitter country and in a nuclear war we would prevail. We're not nuclear standoff with China the
• 24:13
  way we were with the Soviets in the 60s. That's right. It also strikes me that there's another
• 24:17
  salient difference, Jeffrey, which is just that there was something ridiculously audacious about it
• 24:23
  in the 60s. It was like, you know what? It was a competitive battle for like who has the
• 24:30
  civilizational model that will stand astride the cosmos. You know, it was like this very sort of
• 24:35
  1950s that have optimistic can do like what if we could do something so batshit crazy as to land
• 24:43
  a person on the moon, you know, like that would make us top dog worries. Now it's like, all right,
• 24:49
  the Chinese are going to do it. So we should go back and do the same thing that we did 50 over
• 24:54
  half a century ago. So they don't get a little bit more glory than we do. You know, it's almost like
• 24:58
  the equivalent now is AI or something like who gets to build the super intelligence, you know,
• 25:03
  that's where people's energy is right who gets to build the machine. It's actually going to achieve
• 25:08
  consciousness. Yeah, exactly. And kill us all Jeffrey. Well, so you said the problem is that we
• 25:15
  don't have a machine to deposit people onto the moon and bring them back where only going to slingshot
• 25:22
  them in this upgrowing otomus 2. But you had that machine a half a century ago. What's the problem
• 25:31
  with today's machines that that machine didn't have? First of all, we can't decide what kind of
• 25:38
  machine we want. Musk's Elon Musk SpaceX is planning to use a 150 foot tall upper stage of a
• 25:49
  starship starship rocket, which is five times taller than the lunar module was. You ask a very
• 25:56
  good question because we built it once we could build a 21st century version of a mid 20th century
• 26:03
  spacecraft with all of the hardware and all of the computer power and, you know, contemporary
• 26:13
  materials and contemporary manufacturing techniques. We could build that and Lockheed Martin and
• 26:19
  Blue Origin are both quietly competing with NASA with SpaceX to do just that to build a new lander
• 26:27
  based on the old model of a low slung four four-legged machine with a deeply low center of gravity
• 26:35
  and two stages, you know, landing on the moon and then leaving the bottom stage on the moon and
• 26:39
  using that stage as a launch platform to blast the crew back off. You ask a very good question,
• 26:46
  why can't we just reinvent the wheel for the 21st century and the answer is we can. And there are,
• 26:52
  you know, at least two companies that are trying to do that now. Right. Okay. If I mean, I'm only
• 26:57
  saying if the imperative is just like do it as quickly as we possibly can just to prove that we can
• 27:02
  still do shit and the Chinese can't, you know, obviously there might be other reasons to want to
• 27:06
  do it better than we did it last time. So these designs that are very different, Jeff,
• 27:11
  you mentioned the SpaceX design, this unwieldy sort of almost like, what is it, the Jefferson
• 27:19
  was in Washington, the giant penis in Washington. It's the Washington monument. The Washington
• 27:24
  monument. It's like almost looks like that, doesn't it? I mean, it's sort of lands on lands
• 27:29
  straight on the surface. Yeah. And it has some terrible problem with fuel with how to fuel it.
• 27:38
  Yes. And that is a huge problem in order to get that spacecraft to the moon and get it,
• 27:45
  give it sufficient fuel. It has to park in lower orbit and then tanker spacecrafts,
• 27:52
  spacecraft have to fly up and refuel it. The thinking is Elon Musk, the best he will predict
• 28:00
  is that it will take as few as eight to 10 flights to fill that spacecraft. Other people more
• 28:07
  skeptical, less credulous, say it could be up to 40 different missions to fill that spacecraft
• 28:12
  because the problem is they're using hypergalics. I mean, I'm sorry, they're using cryogenic fuel,
• 28:20
  liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Well, the first thing liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen do when
• 28:26
  they are in a confined space in a spacecraft is they begin to warm up and expand. So you have a
• 28:34
  lot of bleed off. You know, you can't just fill the tank a tenth of the way and then fly another
• 28:41
  ship up and fill it another tenth of the way because in the interval between when you have those
• 28:46
  flights going, some of that fuel is boiling off. So you have a ten percent filled and by the time
• 28:51
  you get another ship up there, it's down to five percent filled. So you're always trying to chase
• 28:57
  the loss and you have to fly a lot of missions very fast to get it fueled properly. The 1960s lunar
• 29:04
  module went up with all of its fuel in place. It had everything it needed on board and, you know,
• 29:11
  the thinking is at least blue origins model will use hypergalic fuels which do not boil off.
• 29:19
  And just to clarify this boiling off phenomenon, the problem is that when you're using liquid oxygen
• 29:25
  and liquid hydrogen, they need to be stored at, I mean, it's not just cold temperatures. It's
• 29:30
  inconceivably cold temperatures that never occur in nature on planet Earth. It's like minus
• 29:35
  280 degrees Celsius as I mean. Yeah, so it's absurd. Right. It's so cold that the environment of
• 29:44
  space, which in the shadowed portion of the Earth, is minus 250 degrees Fahrenheit. I don't know
• 29:50
  the Celsius conversion for that. And that is already too warm at minus 200 degrees Celsius.
• 30:01
  This is like, it's like on a Wyoming in January or it's constant. So as it's boiling up there,
• 30:10
  because it's more than, you know, incredibly, incredibly cold, you're racing up to give it
• 30:15
  enough fuel and you need that much fuel because it's a large unwieldy object. I mean, the
• 30:21
  why can't you just send up a massive rocket that has all the fuel on it? Is it just that you get
• 30:26
  to a point of white at which that becomes? Yeah, you can't control that fuel. So you have to
• 30:31
  fuel it in Earth orbit because you just, there isn't no rocket exists. They can, they can lift
• 30:37
  all that fuel. And the SpaceX Starship rocket that has flown a few times has 33 friggin engines,
• 30:46
  which is amazing. And it is the most powerful rocket that's ever flown. I can't do the kilogram
• 30:53
  conversion, but the Saturn 5 rocket, which for a long time was the most powerful rocket that ever flew,
• 30:59
  produced seven and a half million pounds of thrust at liftoff. The space system rocket that NASA
• 31:06
  is using for the Artemis program and has flown once on an uncrewed voyage produces 8.8 million
• 31:13
  pounds of thrust. So that's a little bit more than the Saturn 5. The Starship rocket produces 16
• 31:20
  million pounds of thrust. So it's more than twice what the Saturn 5 was, but that's still not
• 31:26
  remotely enough to haul up all that fuel. Even if you filled that rocket, even if there was nothing
• 31:32
  on board but fuel, you could still only fill the lunar craft a quarter of the way up or an ace of the
• 31:40
  way up. Okay. And so in helping us to understand why there is this, and we'll get to the political,
• 31:47
  I think the political stuff is interesting as well between Elon and Trump and, you know, this
• 31:51
  billionaire philanthropist who's going to be running NASA and then Jeff Bezos and all the
• 31:57
  egos and everything, but in order to basically understand why we're at something of a stalemate
• 32:02
  as to how to get up there. So we've got this problem with the Elon SpaceX plan, which is it's
• 32:08
  giant and unwieldy and requires a lot of refueling. What's the, what are, there are two alternative
• 32:15
  plans that you mentioned. There's a Lockheed Mountain and a blue origin, which is Jeff Bezos.
• 32:19
  Should we, should we talk about Jeff Bezos' way of doing it? Well, Jeff Bezos, you know, Elon Musk
• 32:26
  is Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos get into, you should pardon the language, a pissy match all the time.
• 32:33
  You know about who has the better spacecraft, who has the bigger, fabric rocket, and by the way,
• 32:39
  there is nothing in the world that looks as much like a penis as the lower suborbital rockets.
• 32:45
  They are, it's almost like they went out of their way. They have a kind of, they almost have
• 32:53
  a circumcised head on the top of the rock. They do have a circumcised head, yes, and you know,
• 32:59
  whoever designed it had no sense of irony. They didn't realize it. Or a huge sense of irony.
• 33:05
  Huge sense of irony, you know, one or the other. But the fact is, he has not yet launched a
• 33:14
  functional payload, even into low-earth orbit. He has never done it. He has launched something
• 33:21
  into orbit just once on the New Glenn rocket. And that was basically just, you know, a dummy,
• 33:26
  dummy payload that really couldn't do anything. He's never launched a satellite that
• 33:31
  now you sound like Elon in being nitpicky about what the kind of payload was because Elon
• 33:36
  originally tweeted that he'd never launched, that Bezos had never launched a payload. And then
• 33:40
  when corrected, Elon went back and amended his tweet to say, all right, functional payload.
• 33:45
  But isn't that a semantic difference? I mean, isn't like either you do the thing or you don't
• 33:49
  do the thing. Do we really care whether he's carrying a whole bunch of Las Vegas pornography fliers
• 33:55
  or, you know, life-saving medicines, either way he got into space, didn't he?
• 33:58
  Yeah. Well, I mean, he did get an object into orbit. But the, you know, that is one flight
• 34:05
  with one object in orbit. And the Falcon 9 rocket has, I forget the latest number, but I think
• 34:11
  it's got 430-something launches, successful launches since 2010. So, you know, there is no comparison
• 34:20
  between the flights that Elon has put on the board and the flights that Bezos has put on the
• 34:25
  board. And, you know, SpaceX is clearly the superior of the two country companies.
• 34:31
  If does Bezos have a plausible moon plan though? He does. And they've been working on that for a while.
• 34:37
  They call it the the blue moon lander. And, you know, it is a two-part ship like the Lockheed
• 34:44
  Martinship. Lockheed Martin in order to get the lander built as quickly as possible
• 34:53
  is using a lot of off-the-shelf parts. Lockheed Martin built the Orion spacecraft, the orbiter,
• 35:00
  the mothership for the Artemis program. And for the upper stage of the lunar lander,
• 35:07
  they're actually repurposing the Orion cockpit. They're just taking the same cockpit that's
• 35:12
  used in the orbiter and building a different skin around it. So, basically, what they need for
• 35:17
  the upper stage is, it's kind of off the shelf at this point. The lower stage, they are reaching
• 35:24
  out to at least 10 other aerospace companies and seeing if they can get a national collaboration
• 35:31
  going to put this spacecraft together quickly. And the thinking is that the leading candidate
• 35:37
  to build the bottom stage, the decent stage of the model of the module is Blue Origin, is Jeff
• 35:45
  Bezos company? Right, I see. And is there a reason why NASA can't do this? I mean, obviously,
• 35:53
  most people are aware that the Space Shuttle program was closed and NASA hasn't been doing,
• 35:59
  you know, NASA has been initially having to pay the Russians to take them up to the
• 36:03
  International Space Station and then paying Elon Musk. What is the point of NASA in all this?
• 36:11
  Get a human, well, if you've listened to this much of the episode, then you must enjoy it,
• 36:16
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• 36:20
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