Cosmic Queries – NASA v. Billionaires with Lori Garver

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide.

StarTalk begins right now.

This is StarTalk, Cosmic Queries edition, always popular with our audience.

And today we’re going to talk about the future of space, public versus private space missions.

Everybody’s thinking and talking about this subject.

Chuck, have you been in any conversation where they heard you were related to StarTalk and this did not come up?

Um, yes.

No, I’m joking.

No, people are very much, I mean, it’s, maybe that’s a good thing, though.

That’s the one good thing about it.

It’s a buzz.

Yeah, no matter where people land in the issues, it’s a topic of conversation, which is something we haven’t really been talking about space lately.

I mean, right?

There was, you know, there’s been these lulls in it.

Well, we’ve got on the show today someone who is perhaps the most pedigreed person in the world to talk on this subject.

Oh, my God, an old friend and coworker, Lori Garver.

Lori, welcome to StarTalk.

Thank you.

It is wonderful to be here.

And you have an arm’s length resume and every item on that resume is space related.

The one we have here, just because we’re being lazy, is that you’re a former deputy administrator to NASA, appointed by Obama.

So the deputy administrator is the second highest ranking person at NASA, if I remember the org chart.

And you’re the recent author of Escaping Gravity, My Quest to Transform NASA and Launch a New Space Agency.

I see what you did there.

Now, disclosure here, I actually blurbed the book.

Oh.

Okay, so if you look somewhere on the cover or inside, I’m going to read you my blurb, so here it is.

Former NASA official, Lori Garver, offers a front row seat to the decades long struggle within and among space bureaucrats and space billionaires.

Bring popcorn as you bear witness to an untold slice of space history.

Neil deGrasse Tyson, American Museum of Natural History.

Because I read that book, it was like, where’s the popcorn?

Oh my gosh.

Wow.

Oh my gosh.

So Lori, Lori, Lori, you’ve done tours of duty in government, in industry, you’ve seen sides of this, more sides of this multi-dimensional space than most people have.

How do you, does this make enemies with everybody or friends with everybody?

Like, do the bureaucrats see you as a industry person?

Do the industry people see you as a bureaucrat?

Do the academics see you as a kiss-up?

Do you have any friends at all?

Yeah, you know, I have a dog and I live in Washington, so that’s probably…

You got one friend, okay.

So goes the other saying.

The dog is proud of you every day, no matter what you did that day.

Exactly.

Be who your dog thinks you are.

That’s my motto.

You nailed it.

I’ve got people who see what from their corner view my perspective as not quite in their corner because I think my view and the point of the book, thank you for your blurb and introduction, is that I brought a different perspective to my two tours at NASA.

I’ve been there over 10 years, twice for about five years each.

Ran the policy office in the Clinton administration in the 90s.

And we have always been going to be on this path, you know, of launching it into space age.

People have been talking about it for decades.

It didn’t just start with Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, but because of them, we are talking about it more and for a lot of reasons that I’m sure we will talk about today.

We have a lot of people questioning why we’re doing it a certain way.

Is this the best way?

Why isn’t it just NASA anymore?

Why aren’t we back on the moon?

And why aren’t we on Mars?

Many questions.

Plus, if you go private, sort of independent space industry, the huge space industrial complex probably feels threatened at some level.

Is that a fair comment?

That’s the real rub, I think, is that aerospace managed to, late 50s, early 60s, transform the equipment and weapons they used into civil space programs.

And it’s those very contractors who have been working for NASA, contracting with the space agency ever since, and doing wonderful things.

But doing it on contract, where you got paid the usual large amount, whether you delivered or not, year after year, and they didn’t want to let that go, obviously.

The glamour of launching astronauts is a wonderful thing for them, especially because they were also getting billions to do it.

If you calculate about $350 billion that we spent on Human Space Bites and Apollo, we’ve launched about 350 people.

So they’ve been getting a lot of money to launch astronauts and to be able to market themselves as that kind of company, and not just a weapons building company.

So they did not want to do this.

Wait, stop.

I’m not an astrophysicist, but that math kind of sounds like a billion dollars a person.

Yeah, don’t just slide by that, Lori.

So we’re talking nearly a billion dollars, if you average that out, a billion dollars per human being launched into space since Apollo.

That NASA has done.

That has nothing to do with these private individuals.

Right, no, but there’s a number just to dangling there in front of us all.

It’s in the book.

It’s hard to…

Just like with a shuttle, we can say, oh, there’s marginal cost, there’s all this.

But the bottom line, NASA, not the whole budget, NASA’s human space flight budget.

Okay, so for those people less economic, one-on-one fluent, the marginal cost is the incremental cost, not including the startup cost and the capital cost that made the thing happen in the first place.

Correct?

Right, and I’m including those in the billion.

We’re just putting it all in there.

So a lot of people will consider that an unfair number.

Because they want to use the marginal cost, which is vastly lower, but you have to set the thing up in the first place.

However, in all fairness to what people might consider bloat, that is the purpose of a government involvement in anything that large is that…

Wait, Chuck, did I just hear you say, in all fairness to bloat?

Was that in that sentence?

I know that people often say…

Let’s give bloat a fairness.

Because people say…

All we’re saying is give bloat a chance.

Give bloat a chance, man.

Like, you know, bloat on, bloat, bloat on.

No, my point is that people think that the government wastes money, right?

And that anything that government is involved in is a waste of money because the government is doing it.

There’s a whole set of people think that way.

There’s a whole set of people that just think that.

And so, but what I’m saying is there are certain things that the government has to do because the money…

There is no money in it.

So it’s all waste.

It’s all waste.

If it were private…

Listen.

So look at me, listen to me right now.

Just follow me here.

If you were in 1960 trying to go to the moon as General Electric, that is a complete waste of money.

100% waste.

There is nothing in it for you as a company.

There’s no profit.

There’s no shareholders.

There’s no benefit at all.

It’s 100% wasted money.

So when you think of like the government wasting money, there are many benefits that we got from going to the moon.

It turned out not to be a waste of money, but if you were a corporate CEO, that’s a total waste of money.

Okay, Chuck, that is the first time I’ve ever heard someone defend bloat.

But second…

It’s 100% an excellent point.

We don’t want people to think what NASA is doing should be done by the private sector.

The real difference here is NASA, the government, should be driving technologies and doing new and exciting things.

Neil talks about this all the time.

It’s like going to the moon.

Since then, perhaps, doing the shuttle program, which was supposed to reduce the cost of taking people and stuff to and from space, it didn’t reduce the cost.

And so that is what we’re talking about.

Post Apollo.

Yeah, very good point.

It’s the bureaucracy.

It’s like the right stuff.

Form 3612B.

So the point is, once we realized that the reusable space shuttle did not actually make things cheaper.

In fact, Lori, correct me if I’m wrong.

Even the Air Force bailed out of the space shuttle as a launch system for secure satellites and other activities because it was too costly.

And they would just launch it themselves for less.

Do I remember that correctly?

Well, NASA had argued successfully that all the defense military satellites should be on the shuttle, yes, in the beginning.

But after Challenger, which was our 25th flight, a new policy said the Defense Department military payloads go elsewhere.

You know, they had to sit around for years because they were waiting on the shuttle.

But the government was trying to amortize.

To the credit.

And they ended up really limiting the shuttle’s payloads after that to only those missions that required the space shuttle itself.

And the volume in the payload section, right?

Well, you couldn’t just launch satellites with the volume of the payload because you were risking astronaut lives at that point.

So it was only those things afterwards that…

There were plenty in the queue that had already made themselves uniquely capable with the shuttle so they didn’t move off.

But for the most part, we built the space station with a space shuttle after that.

And so one last thing before we get to our Patreon questions.

But Lori, what of the point, you know, one of the clarion calls when someone says, you know, the government spent, you know, X billions of dollars on this and what has it gotten us and private enterprise should do it?

One of the rebuttals is the money is not in space, the money is spent on Earth.

And there’s thousands of engineers and scientists who are paid to do this work from that money on Earth that contribute to their economies and the real estate and their schools.

And so what do you view?

How do you view that as a as a legit comeback to that kind of attack?

You know, I think when we are spending the public’s money, we should always be aware of what is the purpose.

And NASA’s purpose helps us to improve the economy, our national security, and it is an inspiration for people to study math and science.

Those were the original, I call them fear, greed, and glory.

You have a different take slightly on that, but that’s why we do it.

So to the extent we are going about exploring space, like we did in Apollo and in the early days with new technologies, the return on that government investment, the return on those jobs is a multiplier.

What is the problem is when the government starts just paying us to do stuff we’ve already done, and A, that competes with the private sector, and B, it isn’t a multiplier because you’re not incentivizing service.

Something that is going to have a bigger market.

The launch industry that we privatized was so obviously ripe for this because we weren’t launching any satellites anymore commercially because we had priced ourselves out with a shuttle, and the US rockets were being run by a monopoly, United Launch Alliance.

So we really have now come back against China, Russia, and the French who were launching all the satellites, and now that’s huge for our economy.

So those investments were job multipliers.

So Lori, here’s an interesting dimension here.

Throughout all of Gemini, Apollo, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, we have contracted with the space industrial complex, but their names are not on any of the vessels.

Okay, you didn’t see Lockheed Martin, Boeing, they’re not on any of the vessels.

So it looked like NASA just did it all themselves, but that wasn’t the case.

Whereas now, with pure private industry, it says SpaceX going up.

No bow to doubt it, right?

So is there any reason for that shift?

Yes, it is fascinating to me that the companies themselves who have been building this stuff for years, they didn’t get their names on them, and I don’t know if they ever asked, but they do advertise with those programs constantly.

And so you’ll see their logo tied in with the programs.

But what the difference is now primarily with SpaceX is they are putting their own skin in the game.

When they’ve got a program, the way NASA is now contracting, SpaceX sort of owns it, and NASA is just buying a service.

So when I was at NASA, in around 2012, they were launching to the space station for the first time.

SpaceX asked if they could put NASA’s name on the rocket.

Oh, wow.

Guess what NASA said?

No.

Not our rocket.

And Ford went shot well.

She is still the president called.

I thought I could break that free, but the head of NASA wasn’t interested in doing that.

The lawyers gave him some, you know, it’s not our rocket.

Well, I was shocked when for commercial crew, they come out.

Not only is the rocket filled with logos of NASA and SpaceX, but they drove out there in Tesla cars.

I mean, the fact that NASA has embraced this program, who initially one of their arguments for not doing it was the public won’t pay attention if it’s not NASA.

I mean, we just couldn’t have gotten it more wrong in some ways.

But they’re doing a good job, I guess.

I mean, it’s a little, it’s more than even I would have probably done.

And I think it’s funny because when you say the public won’t pay attention because it’s not, if it’s not NASA, it’s like there’s one car service that takes people to the theater or the movie or a concert, and everybody thinks that people are actually concerned about the car service.

You know, it’s like, no, the car service only takes you to the main show.

Space is the main show.

Space is the show.

It’s what, you know, what are you doing in space and who you launch it.

Right.

And NASA probably would have never launched 90-year-old Will Shatner.

They would have seen it as a stunt.

And you look at the media attention that got.

Right.

So there’s a certain sort of cultural.

But you know, NASA probably shouldn’t have launched William Shatner.

You know, I mean, would you want your tax dollars going to that?

I don’t know.

I’m thrilled that he got to go.

We owe him something, I think.

I’m thrilled that he got to go.

And the comedians owe him something because you all imitate him all the time.

It’s just like.

But what was fascinating is when…

When he returned, he was more eloquent than anyone I’ve ever heard.

He was clearly moved by the experience.

I will say that you’re right about that.

I will say my favorite memory of all of these launches was seeing him step off of the vessel and talk about the emotional connection that he now had to what just happened.

And just for what it’s worth, astronauts, at least historically, were not selected based on how emotional they were.

Dude, this is amazing!

I can’t believe what I’m seeing!

Oh my God, what is that red light?

What’s that red light?

Hello?

Oh, we’re going to die?

It was the George Costanza rule.

That was the opposite.

They wanted to be cool.

Houston, we have a problem.

Yeah.

So Lori, we’re going to take a quick break.

When we come back, we’re going to hit our Patreon questions.

They’re raring to go here.

And Chuck, you got the list.

All right.

When we come back more with a friend and longtime coworker, when I sort of had a lot of overlap with the space industry and with NASA itself, Lori Garver, we’ll be right back.

I’m Joel Cherico, and I make pottery.

You can see my pottery on my website, cosmicmugs.com.

Cosmic Mugs, art that lets you taste the universe every day.

And I support Star Talk on Patreon.

This is Star Talk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Thanks for.

Listening.

It is all about the transition of NASA and just the world, and its acceptance of commercial space relative to space programs.

So, it’s civil space, I guess, that was called.

And so…

We’re back, StarTalk Cosmic Queries edition.

So it’s civil space, I guess that was called.

What title did you originally propose it as?

Well, I proposed it originally as billionaires and bureaucrats, the race to save NASA.

The publishers changed it to space pirates, which is how I refer to the community of people in the space movement.

We like to think we have a movement, I’m not sure we do, but we like to.

And they eventually changed it to escaping gravity.

Which is also a pleasant title, and I have no problem with that.

It was just not uniquely that book, because any book on space can say escaping gravity.

I had to reformat it a bit, but I liked it too.

They did their research on it, and that’s what they came up with.

I think billionaires and bureaucrats was very early on, although I’ve been involved in a lot of different aspects of NASA, as you said, that has tended to be the flashpoint in my career.

I was a bureaucrat, and I was supporting doing this with the billionaires.

I actually think you need both.

So the answer is very clear.

It’s not a versus.

I think you need one a little bit more than the other.

I’m just going to say, all right?

Well, yeah.

I know I’m somebody who just defended Bloat, and I’m about to defend bureaucrats.

Billionaires.

But yeah, billionaires don’t add to the public good as much as bureaucrats do.

I mean, as much as good bureaucrats, but you need the money at some point.

Right, oh yeah, you’re right.

But you know what’s funny is we say bureaucrats, but what I call them are career government officials.

Yeah, but Chuck, you have never heard bureaucrat in a sentence that was positive.

That’s my point.

But then you look at people like, let’s just say, take for instance, a solicitor general.

That’s a bureaucrat, but that’s somebody who has a very important position in the government.

You know, these non-

Yes, but no one.

Yes, Chuck, but no one will call him a bureaucrat because the bureaucrat is an insult.

Oh, you’re right.

But it shouldn’t be.

I don’t think it should be either.

Right, I agree.

I’m just telling you not, don’t shoot the mess in there here.

My point is I do think Neil and I would agree with Chuck and that this is really good people for the most part.

Yes, yes.

Doing work on behalf of the public and NASA is one of those great agencies doing that.

Now, did I talk about and book some of the individuals and things going on that shouldn’t be?

Yes, and that’s partly because I believe it’s such an important thing that we need to be doing as government.

And when we can’t share with the public that what we’re doing is all about board and efficient, we have problems.

And so I think billionaires were not even part of what we were thinking of in the 1990s when we were looking to more involved private sector and launching rockets.

We didn’t have people worth the amount of billions that we do now, and it was not even a consideration.

Lockheed Martin won the first effort to privatize sort of the post shuttle space transportation.

It didn’t end up working for technical reasons, probably some business reasons as well, because we had at that point the constellations of satellites that were predicted to be launching ended up being hopefully well now delayed rather than canceled by the bursting of the.com bubble.

Right.

Back in the day.

Forgot about that.com bubble.

I know.

See, there were companies trying to do exactly what SpaceX and Blue Origin and Virgin ended up doing in the 90s, but they lost their shirts because they didn’t end up having stuff to launch.

Well, this is Elon Musk’s famous quote.

How do you make a small fortune in the space industry?

Start with a large fortune.

That’s funny.

So, Lori, the book is out now.

People can buy it at your favorite book outlet, whatever that might be.

And Chuck, you got questions for us.

Let’s jump right into it.

Here we go.

This is Lucas Charleston.

He says, Do you think of private companies?

Do you go into space exploration?

Will it prompt competition that will speed up technologies that will cause more companies to go into space exploration?

Yes.

And where would their funding come from?

Now, there’s the rub.

See, that’s the rub.

There’s the rub.

I might disagree with Lori on this, but I want to hear your answer first.

I think it is already happening.

I think the earlier companies that did this drove technologies that have made their way into other, either parts of the satellites to reduce the cost and the mass, because a lot of this is about launching smaller things costs less.

And now that capability is expanding, although a lot of these are protected IP rights, you do end up having more and more companies.

I think there’s over a hundred startup launch companies right now.

They are not all going to make it, but they are all adding their own unique innovation, and the people who are doing it were trained from working for the previous companies.

Yeah, and IP is intellectual property, right?

Yeah.

As you use that abbreviation.

So what you’re saying there, I hadn’t really thought about this.

The total number of startup companies, you only exist as a startup because you’re coming to the table with something nobody else has, some niche that you hope grows to become large.

But the fact that you’re at the table at all, the sum of the startup companies represents a remarkable moving frontier of science and technology.

Is that a fair statement?

Yes, and much of that does make its way into consumer products.

These are things that really, it’s a virtuous cycle.

What used to be, it costs so much because everything was so expensive, that ended up being its own negative feedback cycle.

But now, you’re seeing people, oh, well, it doesn’t cost that much to launch, so I can try this out.

And then things work.

And then they’re going to, oh, well, maybe we could refuel on orbit.

Maybe we could do these other things.

Things that have been on NASA’s plate for a long time, but frankly, NASA became a little calcified and risk, you know, scared of risk, mainly because the political establishment in Congress and some administrations didn’t want to see anything fail.

More of your frenemies scattered around the government.

So, but getting back to that other important point of that question, and this is where we might part ways, Lori, people use the word exploration as though anyone going into space is exploring.

But when I think of exploration, I think advancing a space frontier, going farther onto objects that have never been previously explored, exported, I do not see a business model for that.

And so I see NASA as uniquely capable of posing questions and answering questions that would later on then hand it over to industry once they figure out the sources of risk.

And I have agreed with you on this point for a long time.

The only difference being these billionaires, they are out there, they don’t have to satisfy a shareholder.

They can just do it.

And once they have the real question to what you said is at what price point is there not a market?

And if they can do something that lowers that price point enough, but then it does make sense, there might be more business cases.

But I don’t see many beyond tourism at this point.

Right.

Got it.

Got it.

All right, Chuck, keep going.

What a perfect segue to Avnish Yoshi or Joshi who says this.

Hello, Dr.

Tyson and Deputy Garver.

I’m Avnish.

I’m 11 years old.

I heard about an asteroid in the asteroid belt called 16 Psyche.

I also heard there was a mission being sent out with the objective to mine that asteroid and to make sure that it was a planet core.

First of all, is this true?

Secondly, when will that happen?

And third, what technology will we use?

Also, dovetailing onto what you guys just said, will NASA continue to do this kind of research when commercial organizations take over space exploration?

Wait, Chuck, the child is how old is he?

Did the 11-year-old really say that?

Okay, so now, and he says, I’m Avneesh from Houston, Texas, and then it says, this totally was not written by his father.

But also, I was going to say, what’s he got going in his basement, but in Houston, they don’t have basements, so it had to be in his garage.

See what he’s working on that nobody knows about.

Okay, well, asteroids and the Psyche mission, those are, and the overall question is so important, and I would say…

By the way, it’s named after the Greek mythological character Psyche.

So, you pronounce the E at the end, like Penelope Psyche.

Psyche, Psyche.

Yeah, that’s right.

I was about to say Psyche.

Wait, wait, let me tee this up for Lori a little more.

So, that asteroid, if I remember correctly, represents a planet that had mostly formed, and it was broken apart.

But if you have a mostly formed planet, all the heavy stuff falls to the middle, and the lighter stuff floats to the top.

We have an explainer video on that.

And so, what is heavy that would fall to the middle?

Palladium, gold, silver, platinum, iron.

Cha-ching, baby.

Except for the iron.

Cha-ching.

Except for the iron.

Cha-ching, yeah.

So, you would handpick your asteroids that have been pre-sifted to be rich in these elements that you might care about more than other elements.

Now, Lori, go for it.

Yeah, that is a great background for my points about the value of not just the Psyche mission, but the asteroid search.

Asteroids, for three primary reasons, are areas that we as humanity care about.

One is what Neil just talked about, and this is a particularly, hopefully, rich asteroid.

And for any kind of future space development, people feel we will need to use the resources of asteroids.

Probably never going to mine the gold and send it back.

It’s never going to get cheap enough to do that, that it’s worth it.

But utilizing those for space development, those materials, is really important for a future.

And just to be clear, that’s how the movie Don’t Look Up ended.

Okay, someone came in and said, don’t blow this out of the sky.

Let’s mine it for its resources.

And by the way, that guy was a billionaire in the movie.

God, what a hilariously silly movie.

The second reason there, okay, they can hit us.

Obviously, this is something that we have run this experiment.

People know that dinosaurs didn’t make it because they didn’t have a space program.

NASA has a role.

I won’t say they’re the lead role because there’s a lot of questions about that.

But diverting a potential planet, hurting or killing an asteroid is something that we need to care about.

So we need to understand asteroids better, track them to see when they’re coming, and figure out ways to move them if needed.

And the third…

Just to add to Lori’s point, it’s not to understand an asteroid.

This isn’t a psychological session.

Tell me about yourself, asteroid.

It’s that physically, many asteroids, we do not know what’s holding them together.

And are they piles of rock?

Are they solid?

Are the two pieces stuck together?

And so if you should go up and try to push it, you want to know full well in advance how it’s going to respond to how you touch it.

Otherwise, your whole mission could fail.

So when Lori says casually, yes, we want to understand the asteroid, there’s a lot behind that word.

I like the more understood meaning better.

It’s just, you know…

How do you feel?

Are you cold?

I’m trying my best to hold it together.

What do you have against Earth?

Why are you headed towards Earth?

So the third is, we believe that life very likely transferred here in a commoner asteroid.

So they may have the seeds to life.

So comets and asteroids are incredibly important, and therefore, to the point of the question, we need to be studying them.

And the government, in my view, has an important role in doing that.

Now, to the extent the private sector, this is the perfect way you could transition.

The government does a mission like Psyche.

A first mission, yeah.

A first mission able to characterize the asteroid, able to help determine ways that it could potentially be moved and how, when we see the signature of asteroids coming toward us, what that might mean.

They look like close up.

There’s a lot of science that will go into this.

But when we have that information, you can imagine certain industries having more interest in going to the asteroids in the future that have heavy metals and the things that they’ll want to study.

We’re going to take a quick break.

And Lori, when we come back, once you start off telling us about space resources, is that what they’re called?

There’s a startup company or organization that wants to be the first to mine asteroids.

So when StarTalk Cosmic Queries continues, nice little bit of alliteration there.

We’ve got Lori Garver, old time friend and space professional when we come back.

Lori, we left off with a question from an 11-year-old who lives in Texas, so he doesn’t really have a basement, probably.

So, I wonder if his parents know what he’s making in the garage.

He’s got a cloaking device on the garage.

So, you can’t, they couldn’t know.

So, Lori, this notion that NASA would have a mission to the asteroid Psyche, which would be rich in the kind of materials that would sink to the middle of a planet, and this is an asteroid left over from a shattered planet.

What, I heard that there’s some companies today that have prioritized mining asteroids for just that purpose.

Can you comment on any of them?

Sure.

You know, there have been companies looking at this for decades, and mining the moon is probably a first order issue.

That’s an easy target.

Yeah, yeah, very good.

The government is going to start with the whole reason.

We haven’t talked about Artemis yet, but the whole reason to send people back to the moon this time is to land at the South Pole near where you could mine resources, namely water that might be trapped in the ice in the shaded parts of the South Pole of the moon.

Those companies…

Let me just explain to Chuck, there are places in the South Pole where the rim of the crater permanently prevents sun from reaching the crater because the sun doesn’t get very high in the sky.

So literally, we’re looking for water where the sun don’t shine.

You know, that just does not sound the kind…

It’s certainly not po-dable.

Certainly not po-dable.

That’s all I’m saying.

Well, those astronauts drink their own urine, so I’m pretty sure they’re feeling good about that.

Okay.

And like sweat, right?

And the moisture that they evaporates from their skin.

Well, we’re going to all be there.

These are technologies that we might want to see be perfected.

It’s all doom.

Okay, so go on, Lori, interrupted.

So mining asteroids, mining the moon, is something that companies are starting to look at seriously.

And I think the business plans will be long-term.

I think the technologies will be driven by the government.

Another great example of how this sort of hand-in-glove situation can help us advance space development and potentially exploration.

And if you’re good at getting around asteroids, tell the mining company, oh, by the way, one of those is headed towards us.

Could you deflect it over to the left a little?

They’ll probably have the ability and the resources to do that.

I’m just waiting for the Space Force to step up and say that is their job.

I’ve been up in their face about it ever since they were birthed, so…

Okay, what’s their reaction?

Nods.

I don’t think that was their original intent, right?

They weren’t thinking that way, but I’m saying that’s a security.

This was an issue for us at NASA, is we would have the expertise, but then the military, and in that point mainly the Air Force, will come and say, well, we’re the Guardians of the Galaxy.

The Air Force fully contained everything space in the Pentagon before we had the Space Force, so that’s what you’re saying there, yeah.

Okay, Chuck, give me another one.

All right, here we go.

And authorities keep an eye on that kid?

We don’t want him to develop the next.

What superhero nemesis is he going to be?

I don’t know, Avneesh is his, I’m puberty man, like, you know, that’s where we’re.

Yeah, exactly.

We have to look at what superhero doesn’t have a nemesis yet.

We’ll line him up for that.

Okay.

This is from Alexander Newhouse, who says, Deputy Garver, what is the current state of space law as it relates to public and private missions going to outer space?

In fact, let me tighten that and say, what is the state of space law related to?

Who owns what?

Right.

All right.

Do I own the asteroid that I mine?

Right.

Right.

Right.

If I pitch tent on Mars, do I own the acre of land around it?

So where does all that sit right now?

It is a work in progress.

One of the big challenges, and this is pretty typical throughout history, a technology advances to a point where, oh, we don’t have the governance set up correctly to manage this.

And that’s really where we are in space.

We started in the 60s with the Outer Space Treaty, which said that celestial bodies cannot be privately owned.

And by signing that, the US as a spacefaring nation did not claim the moon, you noticed, when we landed.

In spite of putting the flag there, which is what anyone does when they’re claiming something.

Hey, listen, this is for us all.

It’s like an Oscar.

I’m accepting this on behalf of everyone who was nominated.

I mean, I’m taking it home.

Excuse me, my mantle, not yours.

Yeah, and those moon rocks in the Knot Basement in Houston, Texas and Johnson Space Center are everyone’s.

But just try to get a little piece one.

Find out NASA.

They’re NASA’s.

But we really have a lot of progress made.

Space lawyers have been working on all kinds of activities.

But in my mind, the big issue of rights claims is not settled.

And one of the things the companies who want to go and do the mining of the asteroids want is to be able to claim, if we can get there, it can be ours and we can make money off of it.

That’s a homesteading model, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

And the space pirates really believe this because that’s sort of why I name them the space pirates.

They really believe that it should be people going out and doing this like the frontier and the United States.

We had, you know, the ability to just have the, you could work the land, you could own the land.

The 1800s, 1800s, United States was all about that, right?

And that is the kind of thing they like to model in outer space, but we are a long ways from that.

I’m going to say a problematic historical period to base any model on.

I was going to know we aren’t unaware of any native people out or even organisms out there, but that doesn’t mean they’re not there and our history is replete with, yes, these not so great lessons.

Plus NASA, I think, has all but completely removed the word colonization from their official documents.

I think frontier is even not.

Not even that, yeah.

No more.

Not even frontier, huh?

Right, right, right.

Plus it’s not called manned space, it’s called crewed, C-R-E-W.

Well, and when you said, you know, everyone, we put our flag on the moon, we did it for our own mankind, so that’s why we’ve got Artemis.

That was early enough so that no one knew how to otherwise say it.

I don’t know.

I didn’t feel the warmth.

You didn’t feel it?

Okay.

Nope.

You weren’t feeling it.

Not till Valentina.

You weren’t feeling it.

That’s great.

Tell Chuck who Valentina is because he doesn’t know.

First woman in space.

And it took the US.

20 years after her to have our first, Sally Ride.

Ride Sally Ride was the headline.

Yeah.

First small-text American woman in space.

Rather than the headline, after 20 freaking years, we finally get around to having a female astronaut.

So, Chuck, let’s do a lightning round.

How can we knock it?

Actually, it’s not up to Chuck.

It’s up to Lori.

Okay, Lori, we’ll do a lightning round.

We’ll see how your sound bites work.

Actually, we didn’t do too bad with the ones that we have.

Here we go.

This is Chris Hampton.

He says, Hey, I’m currently 25 years old.

Do you think that by the time I am in my 80s that I will be able to take a sightseeing trip to Jupiter or Saturn, or at least just see those planets as I go around them, even if it’s a one-way trip?

Let me lead off by saying, that’s why we invented telescopes.

Yeah, how far away do you want to be?

That was my question.

So, Lori, humans to beyond the asteroid belt, that’s really what that question is.

What do you think?

Maybe.

It would take leaps.

You know, we always judge our near future.

We think we can do more in it than we can.

But in the far future, we tend to misjudge for the opposite reason.

Correct.

So I wouldn’t roll it out, but we don’t have the technology today.

He’s talking 55 years in the future.

Yeah.

Not today.

We don’t have the technology.

Let me ask you both.

This sounds like a no.

What’s the biggest impediment for doing something like that?

So humans’ ability to survive the radiation because our propulsive methods are slow.

Right.

Yeah.

So it’s a combination.

So if you could go a lot faster, you might be able to survive it.

Right.

You get them back and not get heavily irradiated, but plus you got them ready to invest.

Saturn is twice as far away as Jupiter, so Jupiter is a five-year trip, six years, and Saturn a week.

Are you ready to give up that big a fraction of your life to see what you might be able to see through a telescope or better yet, to see what a space, an orbiting space probe will do?

Those pictures are really great pictures.

Of Saturn?

Yeah, oh my gosh.

So that’s the real question is, so why?

Why would you want to?

And that’s a big question in a lot of…

So NASA should sell picture frame windows with extra 8K video of their space missions and make people think that they’re actually on this crap.

Listen, that would work.

I mean, I see it as a ride at Disney that’s very popular, you know, but you’re right.

Why?

I mean, listen, I think it would be great to lay eyes on, you know, any part of Antarctica.

Okay, but guess what?

I don’t…

I’m not going.

Okay, so now you’re going to get me because I have done it, and it was a little bit of a junket, government blow situation, but I was checking out Antarctica as a government employee, and I don’t know, it’s not the same if you’re not there.

You’ve got to be there.

You’re just making his point now.

I totally am.

You’re totally making his point.

He’s going to just look out a window, and when the plane, the massive cargo plane lands at 12,000 feet on the pole, because it’s mountainous region, flat only because it’s all filled in with glacier.

Okay, wait, just to be clear, Lori, that’s not happening on any planet or any moon in the solar system.

He’s not disembarking from the spaceship.

That’s the difference.

Yeah, that’s kind of an important difference here.

For Chuck, but for Chuck, you get the chance to go to NRIP.

I wouldn’t rule it out.

Okay.

Wait, wait, Lori, have you noticed his skin color?

I was just about to say, Lori, you will not find a frozen black man anywhere on this planet.

As they thaw the caveman out of the glacier, that will not be a black person.

There was not one caveman named Lamar, okay?

You ain’t find no Daryl, no Daryl was in the cave.

Thawed out from the glacier that consumed them.

Exactly, all right.

No, we’re done here, we don’t have time.

Lori, I don’t know why we haven’t had you on before, because you would have been…

Oh Mike, you had such a trove of insight.

It’s so interesting when she asked me, they’re a publisher, I’m like, yeah, I don’t think her…

Yeah, yeah, no, that’s an oversight, and I’m embarrassed by that, because you were totally in the middle of all that as it was going down.

And so now you could be like, as they do on the news, their expert commentator who used to be in it, and now they observe it, and then comment on it.

Like all those sports stars.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So that’s, maybe we’ll have to connect you in that way going forward, but good luck with the book.

Like I said, it’s a front row seat.

And please remind us of the name.

Escaping Gravity, my quest to transform NASA and launch a new space age.

Nice, which is precisely what we are in the middle of, thanks to your help.

In spite of all the enemies you made along the way.

And Chuck, she’s very candid about who became a friend and who became an enemy, simply because of the worldviews that they carried forward.

And that’s a bit of candor you don’t typically see.

So, thanks for that gift.

I’ll call it a gift, Lori, of your life story to the rest of us.

All right, Chuck, always good to have you.

Lori, are you on social media?

Yes, I am.

Well, how do we find you?

Twitter, Lori, underscore Garver.

Lori with an I, yes.

Yes, L-O-R-I, underscore G-A-R-V-E-R, same with Instagram.

Okay, excellent.

And Chuck, always there at chucknice.com.

Yes, sir, thank you.

You got it.

All right, this has been Star Talk Cosmic Queries, space program edition, space program becoming space industry edition.

Neil deGrasse Tyson here, as always, keep looking up.