(00:00:00) Scientists hailed the data sent back to Earth from the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft is marking the start of a new era in space exploration and the spring or early summer. It is hoped that another step in that exploration will be taken with the launch of the United States space shuttle after a Hiatus of several years space activity is once again gaining public attention and with us today in st. Paul is dr. Bevin French of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Dr. French is NASA's discipline scientist for planetary materials, and he was one of those who analyzed rocks brought back from the Moon. He also helped train Apollo Astronauts in geology. Dr. French is here to talk about the value of the Space Program to the United States the value of continuing that program and what we have learned from recent activities in that field joining us as well in the studio is mpr's Rich diekman were both going to be peppering. Dr. French with some questions here for a few minutes and then in about 10 minutes or so. We'll give out telephone numbers and invite listeners to call. Their questions to dr. French is I understand that you're a geologist. That's right. I have a question that I wanted to ask you I guess based on the fact that space exploration is phenomenally expensive of course, and this may be just the wrong time for anyone to be talking about space exploration when we hear folks talking about cutting Social Security benefits, but nonetheless we have been told from time to time that space exploration is the only way we're going to gain an understanding of how our universe our planet earth was formed and I wonder if you can explain why that is so I'll be glad to The problem basically with trying to understand things like the formation of planets and the nature of the universe even outside. The solar system is that we're very limited in what we can observe from the surface of the Earth. We have access only to one planet. We have to look at the stars and the rest of the universe through this thick murky atmosphere that makes it almost impossible to see many things and it turns out that we've now discovered that our planet is missing most of its early history. It's a very active planet and all the volcanism an earthquake activity that we find has had the effect of taking the older rocks and recycling them into younger rocks so that to find out the early history of the Earth how it Formed How It produced a core produced an atmosphere how it even produced life. We've had to go to other worlds where this evidence is preserved and where we can make comparisons between them and the first effort we've made is to go to the moon and we have indeed found that the moon rocks preserve an early history of intense bombardment of I'm already on melting that seems now to be a prototype for what the earth and the other planets went through. Some of the oldest rocks. We have been told I have heard rather are in Greenland and I've heard to that Minnesota has some examples of some pretty old rock formations. Is it true that we have simply run out of places on Earth to gain much more information about understanding the origin of our planet. We're we're running out the Rocks. You mentioned are three and a half billion years old and even they which are the oldest rocks on Earth leave a gap of about a billion years between the old rocks and the time when we rethink the solar system and the Earth formed and it's just just on the basis of the chances of preserving old rocks. There are probably very few remnants of this age or greater left on the earth. It's interesting to note though that the oldest rocks on Earth are about the same age as the youngest rocks on the Moon the Moon rocks pick up this trend from about three and a half billion years old and take it back. In fact to the beginning of the solar system. We have some moon rocks that are as old as the moon itself. Well as I mentioned Rich deep deep man has joined us in the studio to ask you some questions. I'm going to excuse myself to leave to answer the telephones for the listeners who have questions for you ritual be giving out those phone numbers in just a few minutes Rich. Well, Dan and dr. French. I'd like to pick up where you started or leave off - Internet is in front of me. I have some some of those very striking photographs that were taken by Pioneer and in its flyby past Jupiter and one of them is of one of the moons of Jupiter IO and in the little description underneath it says that Iowa is less than 10 million years old and when I read that I wondered just as you're saying that the moon picks up where the history of the earth leaves off. I guess I don't understand how it can be that here's a moon that's surrounding one of the planets in our solar system. That is only 10 million years old. When As I understood it. Our solar system is much older than that. How how is that? Why is the the confusion comes about because you're talking about two different ages in the case of I/O and even in the case of the earth, there is the age at which we think the all the planets and all the moons formed and that's about four and a half billion years ago. And we think this is because of the evidence we found in meteorites and and Rocks, once the planet forms what happens to it is kind of the result of a battle between external or internal forces a planet of a certain size may have enough internal energy to produce geological activity the way the Earth has vulcanism mountain building and these processes tend to reshape the surface of the planet all through geologic time. And what is meant by IO is that not that Iowa is a very young world but it is a very active world and it is continually resurfacing itself. And in the case of I/O with these astonishing discoveries of active volcanoes erupting huge clouds of sulfur we can actually see this resurfacing going on and that's what you're saying that iOS what they really mean is it the surface of IO is very young about 10 million years old about the same age as the Grand Canyon on Earth and there's a lot you can learn from that even from photographs like this even from photographs like this because we can see Um the general structure of Co or II don't however you want to pronounce it, but we can get a some handle for the kinds of processes that have shaped the world and we can see the volcanoes close up and we can make measurements very crude measurements of the composition of the surface and see what the world is made of see how you develop volcanoes that are fueled by molten sulfur rather than by the molten rock were familiar with on earth and the thing that made eeo. So surprising was that it's a relatively small world. It's only a little smaller than our own moon, but we always thought that a planet had to be a certain size to develop internal activity and volcanism and probably something about the size of mars or the Earth and here is this small world that's producing a volcanic display that puts Mount st. Helens to shame. The reason for this is that we think that EO is caught in kind of a title tug-of-war between mass of Jupiter and the other moons in the system in this title. Will this these Tides just Wrench It And forth and this causes it to heat up you've ever tried to take a paperclip and bend it in your hands until it broke. You notice it gets warm. Well the same things happening to EO and these volcanoes are not fueled by radioactive heat. The way Earth's volcanoes are they're fueled by these tidal forces. And so we've not only found an active world. We found a whole new cause of volcanism on planets and that helps you and other geologists understand better how that system got started and where it might go from here. Yes, it's very important to look at processes on different worlds in the solar system things like vulcanism earthquakes geological Evolution atmospheric Behavior because each planet gives us a laboratory as it were with a different set of a slightly different set of conditions and by studying the behavior of General processes and is many planets as possible. We can find out something about the general rules that shape the Earth because even though these World seem strange they have much Common with the Earth Theo has active volcanoes Jupiter, which is a world of entirely gas with no solid surface has fascinating atmospheric patterns. It has a huge magnetic field Van Allen belts around it. And we just need to study these processes on different planets before will understand entirely how they work on our own. I have several more questions about those missions the the Pioneer and Voyager missions, but I want to ask you about the space shuttle. I know that you don't work directly with that but tell us what you hear about its its future especially in the next six months or so, we expect to hear a good deal more about it. Well at the moment I hear kind of cautious optimism, as you know, the space shuttle was rolled out to the launch pad a few weeks ago and it's now going through a last series of careful checks before a planned launch of about March 15th are talking about either the 14th of the 17th, depending on Minor changes in the schedule. There are a couple of crucial hurdles to pass one of which is an engine firing which will take place early in February. And if these hurdles are passed, I think that mid-march date is going to become very firm. And then we're just going to watch it take off and keep our fingers crossed and unlike the Mercury Mission the first ones or ones that were flown by monkeys, they'll be human beings in the in the shuttle from from the first time or in the first time indeed. Okay, I want to ask you about the training that you gave to to a geologists are not geologists but astronauts who flew the Apollo missions that you may or may not be familiar with Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff I am but in it he talks about at least the early astronauts being more jet jockeys than then scientists of a particular persuasion. What was it like training jet jockeys to know what rocks to pick up and which ones to leave behind on the moon. I think calling the lunar astronauts jet jockeys is an awful sand over simplification. It's a it's a nice phrase but they are tremendous differently different Community. They're all very intelligent capable motivated. But there there's a wide difference between them. They were even the early Apollo Astronauts were given a good geological training. We had to kind of feel our way about the best way to train these people and we finally settled for teaching them to do the kind not the kind of geology that scientists do in Laboratories or even in undergraduate geology classes, but the kind of geology that suitable to someone who's going around making surveys picking up samples in a hurry on a very tight schedule for other people to work on and I think in this way we were extremely successful. I have heard some of the professor's on the team say they wish their graduate students were half as smart and half as motivated as some of those astronauts and of course as you know, one of the one of the astronauts on the Apollo All 17 Mission has a PHD in geology. That's that's Jack Schmitt. So he and I were teaching each other a great deal. The reason we got into terrestrial training goes back to this idea of processes acting on different worlds. The my involvement came because I had studied a large ancient meteorite crater in Canada where there were the kinds of deformed and shattered rocks. That one would expect to pick up on the moon. So that structure was selected as one of the training sites for the Apollo 16 crew and it was a very good selection because they landed in a region of the Moon which was just covered with these impact breccia is down to a layer probably several kilometers deep. So the place that you took them to train them was similar in some respects at least to where they finally ended up on the Moon. Yes, as a matter of fact, they referred to Sudbury a couple of times in the Transmissions from the Moon which kind of gave me a real. Thrill. Okay time is 21 minutes past 12:00 noon and our guest this noon is dr. Bevin French who is with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Illustration and we're going to open up the phone lines right now. If you have a question about the Space Program in this country or in other countries and and its future why give us a call in the Twin Cities, there are two numbers available one is 2211589. And the other one is 2211591. If you're listening to us outside the Twin Cities, but in the state of Minnesota call us toll-free at 1-800-669-9133. That's toll free number 1-800-695-1418. He's again to 21 1589 and 221 1591 while we're waiting for our first caller. Dr. French. I have another question about the space shuttle. What can it do for you as a geologist? It's not going to land on any other planets or any other moons and pick up samples is there much involvement for you in the space shuttle, certainly the a lot of our geology. In studying other planets geologically we're going to have to use automatic space probes. At least for the near future probes like Voyager, perhaps more sophisticated probes that could actually let us say go to Mars land pick up a sample and return it. This is one possibility that certainly feasible is the Russians have shown by doing the same missions on the moon the space shuttle will serve this type of research just as it will serve many other areas simply because it's a an efficient transportation system. It's going to be a platform from which to launch the missions to other worlds. And I think that once the space shuttle is established. It'll be much easier to plan and to justify a continuing program of Planetary Exploration. Do you ever dream about going along on a shuttle mission and be be there to to unload some of those samples that would come back from those probes sometimes sometimes I have a lot of friends who were involved in just that kind of exercise when the lunar samples I'm back from Apollo 15 Apollo 11 for the first time and they still talk about the kind of experience. It was is there much talk at Nasa about mining the moon. I know that in some of the material that that Dave Chittenden said over from the science museum that there were some what appeared to me to be extraordinary examples of deposits of minerals particularly iron on the moon to do you sit around at Nasa and talk about that and developing Technologies for getting out some of those minerals. We're starting to and I hope we can talk about it more in the future. As you know, most of the excitement about lunar mining has been tied. It has been coming from outside NASA from people like Jerry O'Neill at Princeton and people who make arguments that it's more economic to use lunar resources or meteorite resources to build large structures in space than to go to the trouble and expense of Bringing the same things up from Earth. I think we this is something we do want to consider because a bear is very greatly on what the long-term human role in space is going to be the what I'd like to see starting in the near future in NASA. And outside of it is a rather low level program aimed at trying to answer some of the very difficult technical questions that remain just how you get iron and titanium out of lunar rocks or whether you can in fact how cheaply you can develop big structures in Space the main problems. I think to be answered are the the economic and social ones. Is there an economic or some kind of national return for going into space in a big way and I think when we start considering that question, seriously, we will have to at the same time study the technical questions of whether we can use the stuff we find out there to build things. Well, I have lots more questions for you, but there is a phone Bank full of listeners ready. Ask questions of you as well. So I'm gonna step aside. We're going to take our first caller this afternoon. Good afternoon. Dr. French is listening for your question. (00:16:08) Yeah, my name is David Webb and I'm a student at the University of Minnesota and Mathematics and I just have three quick questions to ask him. The first one is The very core of the Sun sorry Dave you cut out there. Can you repeat it? Yes. I was wondering what is physically like at the sun's core. That's the first question and the second question is dealing with safety that they are several years ago to Russian 43 Top Notch during re-entry and they also lost another man out in space has to flown out there somewhere. I was wondering how these accidents have have influenced NASA's concerned for presenting such accidents like Apollo 13 accident and what have you and the last question is presently are four black astronauts on with NASA and I was wondering we will NASA sent up are our first black astronauts out. First women ask Matt and other non US national astronauts. (00:17:03) Okay. There are three questions there for you. Okay. Well, they're up there pretty far apart. Let me take the first one. I have trouble imagining what the inside of the sun is like because from the figures I read the temperature must be about 20 million degrees centigrade and extremely high pressure is it's it's Place I would not care to even come close to visiting. It's as close as anything to the inside of a hydrogen bomb, which is what the sun really is now about the concern for safety. Certainly NASA is concerned with accidents that happened to other astronauts and cosmonauts and space we of course have the memory of the Apollo 1 fire to contend with in our own history and whatever we can learn from any of these Miss chances or even things that go wrong and don't involve loss of life. We certainly make an effort to figure into our planning in the future and we made a tremendous effort after the Apollo 1 fire to almost rebuild the Apollo spacecraft from scratch so that it would work successfully there are both black and women astronauts in the current shuttle Crews waiting for launch. I think they will fly on a routine basis in the next few years depending on how quickly the shuttle comes on board and how fast the missions and payloads are developed. There are at the moment no plans for a non us astronaut. This is certainly something that would be feasible. The Russians have already done this by taking astronauts from seven or eight different countries up to their current the space platform they have in orbit. And as I understand it there are now two French astronauts and in training as well do the Soviets share any information with the this country with regard to accidents or problems. They've had safety problems. I don't know exactly how much because I'm simply not in that that area the work we can there are certain things that become available and certain other things that can be communicated by the Soviets. There is a great deal of cooperation in many other areas in the scientific exploration. We exchange lunar samples with the Russians. There are exchanges of Bio biological information. We have flown American biological experiments on Russian Cosmos satellites, and there are now discussions going on. Or a coordinated exploration of Venus at the next opportunity when we hope to launch a mission to map the radar surface and the Soviets as the Soviets always do will take advantage of the planetary opportunity to send two more spacecraft to Venus. Okay. Let's take another call right now. Good afternoon. We're listening for your (00:19:36) question. Hi, I'm calling from st. Paul and I saw a show on TV about a place in Africa. That's launching rockets. And I was wondering what you could tell me about that and also about some guy heard about in California who was close to try to launch a rocket on his own this year with a human in it, you know anything about (00:19:56) this. I read a little about it in the papers probably just as you have there are a couple of launching sites in Africa, there is one just off the coast of Kenya which was used to launch a very interesting satellite called okuru many years ago, which is as you know Swahili for freedom and who rule was a very small x-ray detector. It did turn up evidence for what we think may be the first real black hole in the solar system an x-ray Source in cygnus cygnus one the person you refer to in California, I think is Bill Truax who is been a rocket engineer at Nasa for a long time and is putting together something he is referring to as the people's rocket a small low-cost rocket to carry a an astronaut into orbit. Those plans are going on. I don't know where they are at the moment or whether the any date for the launch has been said but NASA doesn't have anything to do with that that particular know we're leaving that one strictly to private Enterprise. Okay. Let's take another call. Good afternoon. We're listening for your (00:21:04) question. Yeah, it's not French. I'm calling from down here in Apple Valley and I'd like to know what your thoughts are on. The future of the Space Program now that we have a new Administration in office. Now what you expect in the way of funding like that. (00:21:21) Well, we've had no signals really about what the position of the new Administration is going to be as you know, President Carter submitted a budget for the Space Program which included some increases that we were very glad to see particularly in the area of Planetary Exploration. And in the area of developing a new propulsion system for outer space, but I guess like everybody else in Washington. We're just sort of waiting to see what the new Administration will do and I think it's a little early to have signals yet. Okay. The phone lines are a few lines that are now open if you tried to call us a while ago and got a busy signal line try again. If you will the numbers in the Twin Cities 2211589 and 2211591. If you're listening to us outside the Twin Cities, but in Minnesota call us toll-free at Five to nine 700 Our Guest this afternoon. Dr. Bevin French of NASA and let's take another call right now. Good afternoon. You're on the air. (00:22:19) Hello. Dr. Brennan French. I'm Paul Roth and I'm a graduate of the university and Eyeball history and I'm calling from Minnetonka and I guess I got a two-part question first wouldn't really be fair to advance the alternative hypothesis to this to the other gentleman that declining NASA space funding for exploration is really a result of our emphasis on robot research in terms of sending out biking and Pioneer versus the spectacular man near Earth missions, the relative political saleability is really minimal when we compare them. And I guess my second question is of a different order What alternative to the Space Shuttle is there if it proves catastrophically untenable? And do we have any fall back designs? That would be safer. Say more symmetric concept with a single large solid fuel booster. (00:23:15) Thank you. Okay, let me take the question first. There's always been a continuing debate over both the scientific value and the shall we say the public salability of human versus unmanned missions and I think NASA has done a good job in trying to use both in whichever system is best for the current for the project involved and there are many ways in which the inclusion of an astronaut on the moon really enhance the scientific return we were able to collect large samples. We were able to collect ranges of different kinds of samples. We have much more flexibility than a robot machine. Like the Russians would have had human space exploration is in many ways more expensive as well and you it's there's not a clear cut. Answer, I think I think we can do tremendous things with the robot spacecraft as we've seen from the Viking and Voyager results, but I think for other kinds of exploration it's going to be very desirable and probably necessary to have a human being in the loop. Now the question about the catastrophic failure of a shuttle. I don't even want to think about the shuttle has been designed to be a reusable vehicle and the moment you want to make a maximum recycling vehicle your sort of locked into a certain configuration. You're orbiting stage has to look like a high-speed glider so it can re-enter and your you have to you've made already made certain decisions about the booster so that I think if if there was a major failure, you know, some some major design flaw in the shuttle we would be in the very bad position of having to go very far back to square one. I don't end I'm I not only I think and I also hope that nothing of that kind will occur. You mentioned that in response to an earlier question that there had been the launch sometime ago of a satellite off the coast of Kenya who put the the rocket and the satellite together. It was a NASA project the rocket launch of an orbiting spacecraft. We used that particular launch site because it was I believe closer to the Equator or it was a type of Cooperative project involving several other countries. Yeah, but for certain reasons that launch site was available for a small launch and we went that way and it like many first launches. It came back with a first-order scientific discovery. I guess I was curious to know in part because I'm wondering if if many so-called third world or developing countries Express much of an interest at all in space exploration. I think a great many Express an interest. They express the interest in different ways at one end of the scale. You have simply countries in which the public like in the United States are very interested in space exploration. Very glad to see displays of new pictures very interested to go to displays of moon rocks. And on the other hand. You have some other third world countries that that can contribute resources either in terms of experiments to co or launch platforms to Cooperative projects with the United States. I think there's going to be a continuing proliferation in space as more Nations develop the technical capability and as a result find out about the economic returns. Well, there's some listeners waiting for an opportunity ask you questions. So let's go to another one right now. Good afternoon. You're on the air. (00:26:53) Yeah. I'm calling from Minneapolis and I would like to ask, dr. French a question about meteorites. I have have heard that there that the meteor hits and the meteor showers there that are happening to our solar system. And the meteor belt is a I've caused by a breakup of a planet or planetary body between Mars and Jupiter and I'd like him to comment on this and I'd like to know what the study of meteorite fragments mean as to the evolution of our for the study of the evolution of our own Earth. Okay, the question about the (00:27:37) asteroid belt the idea that it was formed by the breakup of the planet was a theory at the time that we started going into space at some of the discoveries we've made in studying meteorites since then suggest that in fact, this is not a correct Theory we found iron meteorites, which it was suggested came from the core of a very large planetary body. But the evidence in these meteorites shows that they formed at relatively low pressures and Pressure so low that they could not have been in the planetary core. So we've moved into a picture of the asteroid belt probably always having been inhabited by relatively small bodies a few hundred kilometers in diameter. These bodies are run bumped into each other intended to break up with time, but we think the probably the asteroid belt was where a planet would have formed if it hadn't been caught in the title tug-of-war between Jupiter in the sun and the small pieces were never able to so to speak to get their act together meteorites are providing a tremendous amount about the origin of the solar system and the Earth the we've always known that they gave us a clue toward conditions at the time of the formation of the solar system from a nebular dust cloud. We've now discovered that some meteorites have a chemical signature in them where the the the elemental ratios not the elements themselves, but the pattern of the elements is different from solar system material and just to make a long story short. We think that some of this material is actually come out of other stars in the neighborhood of the sun before the solar system formed and has been shot Corked and bottled in these meteorites and preserved for the time where we're looking at them the other thing meteorites and moon rocks can give you as a kind of a space probe record of the history of energy and radiation from the the sun. We're beginning to get establish a record of solar activity from analyzing matter in the sun that's been sprayed out and has been trapped in meteorites. We're getting a picture of solar activity going back millions and perhaps billions of years the exciting thing about this is that the more we can understand about the mechanisms of the sun and the past the better we may be in a position to predict the future activity of the Sun and that's a very high on my list of relevant questions for the space program. I guess that is on mine too. And I want to ask you more about that. But let's take another call First good afternoon. You're on the air. (00:30:00) Yes. I'm calling from st. Paul and I would like to know where the Pioneer spacecraft is going to and what it expects to find. How many years it will be operating? (00:30:13) Okay Pioneer there to Pioneer spacecraft Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 that went past Jupiter in 1973 and 74 and then Pioneer 11 went past Saturn in 1979. Those two spacecraft are going to leave the solar system completely. They're headed out into Interstellar space and we hope that we'll be able to monitor their radio transmissions for at least another 10 or 15 years because we would like to find out as much as we can about this environment at the edge of the solar system and indeed try and find out where the edge of the solar system as determined by the interaction between the sun's magnetic field and the interstellar magnetic field. So it'll be a measurement scuse me, but it'll be a measurement that will come back Telemetry back a little simply indicate that there's a shift here in the in magnetic fields. And this will be like putting up a sign saying you are now entering Interstellar space the The Voyager spacecraft when they complete their planetary encounters will also leave the solar system and we will hope to listen to them again for the same reasons as far as we know. None of these four spacecraft are aimed at any particular nearby star you can make calculations that would show in some number of billions of years. It would come within three light-years of some faint star but as you know, empty space is really very empty in the the chances of pioneer coming close to a star in the foreseeable future are small on the other hand in empty space. The spacecraft will last quite a long time and it may be that they will be found and recognized by other people who will appreciate such a work of primitive technology. Okay. Let's take another call. Good afternoon. We're listening for your question. (00:32:00) I'm calling from Columbia Heights. I wonder if any official study is being made at Nasa on the possibility of disposing of nuclear or chemical waste. Space as in one suggestion, I've heard to perhaps a shoot them into the sun. (00:32:17) There is this is an idea that is being kicked around probably more outside NASA than inside. It's not been the subject of any very formal or detailed study. The problem with disposing nuclear waste into the sun is that we don't have a rocket powerful enough to go that far down into the gravity well and this indeed is something that happened hampers our Planetary Exploration in general the I think it would be possible to develop such a rocket and it would be possible to essentially send these materials into the Sun or maybe an escape orbit out into space. I think it's an idea that bears a lot more careful looking at because the results of a failure on launch for instance might be very hard to live with Let me give out the phone numbers once more. Dr. French. We have a caller waiting, but we have some lines open right now if you'd like to talk to dr. Bevin friendship. Out the space program. He's an official from NASA you can do so by calling us in the Twin Cities at 2211589 and 2211591 outside the Twin Cities 1-800-662-2386 take another call right now. Good afternoon. We're listening for your question. (00:33:29) I'm going to Minneapolis. This may be sort of a departure from the discussion so far, but so far you've been talking about. Very exciting advances in space science and so far and possibilities opened up by something like the space shuttle. But what I've noticed is that in at least one of the major news magazines and other reports about the space shuttle. Is it hitting the news now is that it opens up possibilities for for defense capabilities and Military capabilities from space and and you hearing more and more about that as a justification for spending the money and I wondered how much of that kind of military mentality NASA has to deal with. (00:34:13) There's always from the beginning when the time the space shuttle was planned. It was viewed as a launch vehicle that you would be used for both civilian and military pay loads the dominant booking at the moment is overwhelmingly for civilian payload, scientific experiments or industrial experiments with a relatively small military component. The problem of just how far you go in. The relationships is a very delicate one and it's one that is being worked carefully and needs to be worked carefully in the future. We've had some tremendous advantages with a civilian Space Program in the the openness and the degree to which we can carry out our experiments and in the sight of everyone and I certainly would hope that this could continue in the near future and I think it can by contrast the as you may know the Russian space program is entirely a part of the Russian military and this is made for some difficulties in cooperation and indeed difficulties for carrying on scientific research even within the program, but but it is a problem and it's one that we want to be aware of and continue to consider. Do you have a sense at all? Dr. French for how the Pentagon might approach NASA if they have something they feel is important and that they want as a part of something like the space shuttle. Is it a is it an approach request kind of relationship or is it a this is what we want done kind of relationship. I don't know the exact details, but at the moment it's kind of a you know, we Supply the truck and they load what they want on to it and we load it off when they tell us to but they're obviously the I think the military payloads involving National Security do have a high priority. There will be parallel operations. The military will have their mission control centers for payload data satellite data just the way that we do for the civilian payloads, but excuse me, but I think at the moment from from the little I can see on the fringes of this problem. The relationship seems to be going fairly. Well, we have another caller waiting to ask you a question. Good afternoon. You're on the air. (00:36:32) Yeah. My name is John Donnie on Tripoli. I was just wondering I read in the paper the other day about the possibility of a tenth planet being located outside of Pluto and I was just wondering with the previous column the Pioneer Rockets if there'd be any way the Pioneer Rockets could verify this or anything any more details are available on the subject. (00:36:58) I don't think the Pioneers will be able to tell us much about whether there is a tenth planet in the course of the discovery of Pluto and afterwards there was a very Search made for new planets and anything out there has to be either very small or very far away because we've established a very lower limit for any visible planet and I think the Pioneer cameras or the Pioneer Equipment and even the Voyager TV cameras would be hard put to it unless they came extremely close one way. We might discover an unseen 10th planet is if we suddenly get a perturbation in the trajectory, which something that would pull it out. Yeah, see it moves a little but I don't think that's too likely because actually the spacecraft will be heading out of the solar system above the so-called plane of the ecliptic the plane in which the planets rotate around the Sun. So it's unlikely they'd come close to a tenth planet. Okay, we have another caller on the line waiting to ask you a question. Let's go to that person right now. Good afternoon. (00:37:59) I'm from Bloomington. I've got a question on why they used tiles instead of heat for protection of the re-entry of the And also I was wondering about propulsion systems whether anything has been done for ION or magnetic type propulsion systems for our spaceships. (00:38:18) Okay, I can't tell you too much about the decision to use small ceramic tiles on the rather than large sheets on the shuttle. I suspect the material is being used on the shuttle incidentally as a kind of frothy silica glass. It's an extremely good insulator and it's a matter of fact. It's such a good insulator that I saw an experiment where a guy heated 1/2 mm Fahrenheit with a torch and then calmly picked up the other side of it. This was about an inch thick I suspect that one thing that may have dictated. It is the difficulty of fabricating larger sheets of this material because the material has to fit very closely not only to the Contours of the shuttle underneath but also to the boundaries of the adjacent sheet I think in In retrospect, we we might have looked at that look at the alternative of larger pieces a little more carefully, but I really think that probably this was about the only way we could go with that material. Let me see you right you asked a second question. I think he's off the liner already and I didn't write it down either. Oh, so I'm sorry, we won't be able to answer that one. Have you seen the shuttle? Have you seen the Enterprise only in pictures as we have we saw the rollout of the Enterprise the first shuttle at Palmdale and then we've I've seen pictures showing the Columbia the flight Shuttle that's right as it was rolled out to the pad. Yeah. Yeah, we have another caller on the line. Let's go to that person right now. Good afternoon. You're on the air. (00:39:49) Hello. Yes. Go ahead. We're listening for your question. Yeah, I haven't heard the entire program. But I was wondering if NASA has an opinion on building giant solar collectors in space to be used in microwave energy back to the Earth's surface. (00:40:04) Okay. NASA doesn't have any opinion on that at the moment, but the people who are concerned about future uses of space are giving it their attention. It's an idea as you know, that originated outside of NASA, whereby you would put a large solar panel on the order of several kilometers Square in space turn the electricity in the microwave radiation or in another variety into lasers and beam it down to the Earth where it could be collected and used we just we did discuss earlier on the program the problem of what we do in space on a large scale whether we go for large structures or large large habitats in the connection of whether we can use extraterrestrial resources for it. And this idea of solar power satellites is one that's Very prominently in plans of this kind because it's at least something that presents a possible economic return. So it is considered it's being considered. I would like to see more intense consideration of it. Excuse me from two points first, whether and how you can use lunar resources to build some of this and secondly a more detailed analysis as to what the possible economic benefits might be a lot of the pros that's been written about these things is very exciting, but it tends to sort of leap lightly over the numerous intervening technical problems. And I think we really need to take a hard look at those. They may not be as forbidding as we think they are that prompts this question for me and that is where does NASA get its ideas? I I'm particularly interested in knowing whether a person who doesn't necessarily have a great deal of training and Engineering or is is a kind of engineer that we read. You're about every once in a while, but doesn't have any formal degrees or during our training if they have any if there's any chance at all of them getting information to NASA and sparking some some interest certainly we get lots of ideas from people sending in that way. I think the I don't know of any case where as you a penny has dropped and started the pinball machine going in that way, but it's certainly possible and I think a good letter or good idea would get attention. Mostly NASA gets its ideas from outside advisors in things like Advanced planning or scientific programs. We put together a set of committees that are intended to sit down and give us give us advice give us suggestions on what kinds of space missions we should be undertaking or in more detailed terms give us information on what group of instruments we should send on an approved Mission, but we're we can't have too many good ideas. Is okay. I think we have one more caller left and let's go to that person right now. Good afternoon. You're on the air (00:42:55) Bloomington. Okay, my other question was on magnetic or ion beam type propulsion systems as wondering whether any type of research has been done in these types of approaches. (00:43:08) Okay. Thank you for calling back. The answer to your question is yes, because some of these systems would be very suitable for planetary missions because they provide a low thrust for long periods of time and they allow you to build up a velocity that would permit you to Rendezvous with a comet or get into the very outer solar system or even get down into the sun in the NASA budget is some money to begin development work on something called solar electric propulsion. This is a system. Whereby you spread solar panels to the sun use the electricity to ionize something like Mercury and use the Mercury jet to drive it drive the spacecraft forward. This is one option that was Decided on after looking at a number of other things like a small nuclear propulsion systems or solar sailing even but there's a real appreciation. I think particularly in our program where in the planetary area that the existing spacecraft don't let us do certain things in regions of the solar system that we can't reach and we're hoping that the development of these will stay in the budget and will be continued. I have two very quick questions. I want to send your way before we turn it back to Danielson here and one is how does a person get information about the u.s. Space Program person who is interested in perhaps working for NASA or or in some capacity or another? Okay. I think the quickest way is to if if you've got gone through some of the books that the magazines that cover NASA activities like Starry Sky and Telescope or Aviation week is to contact the public affairs office either at NASA headquarters or at the various NASA centers. Are elsewhere in the country the one of Houston California Louis at Cleveland Huntsville, Alabama and Goddard space flight center in Maryland. If you live close enough to make a visit to these centers, that's even better because you can see the people personally and if you're interested in a scientific specialty that that Center is doing you can talk firsthand with the people that are doing it. I think one of our problems and NASA has been that we haven't perhaps done as good a job as we could of getting general information out to people on a continuing basis and particularly after the encounter or whatever has occurred in answering the questions six months later. Like here we flew the spacecraft past Saturn. What did we find? So I think the the contact is the the public affairs office at the at Nasa and my last question is in is you look into your crystal ball in the evening in the laboratory or wherever how do you see space exploration? Acting Us in the next three to five years in this country on that shorter-term. You got to remember when you talk about three to five years. You're really talking about what's going to happen tomorrow. It takes about 10 years to plan develop and fabricate a major space mission and the thing that's I think should be a concern to everyone is that we're right now at a peak of Planetary Exploration and indeed of space exploration in general and in the next three to five years, there's going to be a great drop off because five to ten years ago, we did we weren't able to get the missions that we would have liked to put into this period of time now, it won't be a complete vacuum. I hope but and about the mid-80s will see a number of exciting things that have already been approved by Congress are being funded. There will be the Galileo mission to Jupiter a spacecraft to orbit the planet for a long time and to study it in detail and send a probe through the atmosphere. They'll be the launch of the Space Telescope which will be put give astronomers their dream of getting a big telescope up above the atmosphere where they can see more than you can with the largest telescope on Earth. And in the in this year's budget from The Carter Administration is a what we call a new start beginning for a mission called Venus Orbiter with in imaging radar voi are which would essentially put a big radar set in orbit around Venus and enable us to make the first detailed map of the structure of this planet that we used to think was Earth twin. So there are some exciting things that will will happen if we can keep the momentum going. Okay, Doctor Bevin French of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Thanks very much for being with us this afternoon. Thank you. Also thanks to the Science Museum of Minnesota for bringing you to Minnesota Dan. Thanks Rich. Thanks Professor French just before we excuse the two of you from midday for today. You're speaking this afternoon at the science museum. It'll be this evening this evening. What time well this evening. It is sold-out dance. Oh forget it. Everyone is sold out. Maybe maybe someone will make a tape of it. And and how long are you in the Twin Cities just until the weekend. I've got to go back and see if I can find my desk under the papers that have built up. We did Welcome to mrs. French and Native of st. Paul. I have learned so pleased to have her here in her home City.