Let’s Make America Smart Again: The Future of NASA

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. Welcome to StarTalk, I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, and we are right now recording this episode of StarTalk from the Mashable World Headquarters right here in New York City. And in this latest installment of our new sort of sub-series of StarTalk called Let's Make America Smart Again. We have my co-host today, Chuck Nice. Hey. All right, dude. All right, buddy. You also host a spinoff of StarTalk, which I'm still getting into, called Playing With Science. Playing With Science, right? Does your mama know you're playing with science? What are you doing down there? What is happening down there, Chuck? Yeah, no, it's a sports science mashup show where we interview athletes. We've had sports guests all the time. On flagship StarTalk. And it had whole followings unto themselves. That's right. So, we took that and spun it off. Does that mean you're not giving me any sports athletes anymore? No, no, it just means that, it means that when we have athletes, you'll come on the show. That's all. No, that's good. It's good to know that it's StarTalk. So, we're doing that and we also have- So, science and sports. Science and sports. And then for everything, we also have startalkallaccess.com where we have exclusive original content like something that you and I did, which by the way, I'm gonna put a clip of that. You filmed that? Ha ha. That was good. But, and by the way, the thing we did, it's called have you touched my meteorite? You don't remember that? We were in your office? I, I- Okay, I'm gonna send you the clip of this. He's denying it. I deny the allegation. And I deny the alligator. I'm gonna send you the clip, but you gotta put it on Twitter if I send it to you. It's me, it's we're in your office. We're having a conversation. And so, this is so funny. In the middle of the conversation, you go, wait a minute, have you touched my meteorite? I said that? Yes, and I went, no. And then you like, would you like to? And I was like, hell yeah, I thought you never asked. That's true, I do stash a couple of meteorites in my home. Actually, it was very cool, but enough for that. It doesn't everybody? So for this edition of Let's Make America Smart Again, we're gonna talk about the future of NASA. And so we brought in an expert on, I mouth off about NASA, but there are very few experts on this, and we've got one with us, Ellen Stofan. And you're the former chief scientist at NASA. That's correct. That sounds like a badass business card. Yeah, I'm chief. By the way, I would just walk around all the time, to just, hi, yes, double latte, and who is this for? For chief scientist, NASA, right there. So your background is a planetary geologist. That's correct. Very cool, and so thanks for helping us out. Oh, happy to be here. And so, this is a Cosmic Queries version of Let's Make America Smart Again. Absolutely. And so we're gonna just take questions, they've been pre-solicited from our fan base and social media, typically. That's correct. And these are questions about NASA, and where it's coming, where it's going, and just to be clear, you're no longer the chief scientist, you've left that post. That's right, I stepped down in December at the end of the administration, and so now I'm trying to figure out what to do next. The man whose name goes unmentioned. Right. The administration. What was your academic post before NASA? Before that, I worked for a small group of people at a company called Proxmi Research, and I did research on Venus. I'm a member of the Cassini radar team. You did research on Earth about Venus. It's a little hot on Venus. So I study volcanoes on- I winter on Venus. I study volcanoes on Venus, Mars, Earth, and one of the moons of Saturn called Titan. Nice. So you're vulcanologist. That is correct. Vulcanologist. Are you out of your vulcan mind? You're out of your vulcan mind? You're out of your vulcan mind? It's almost as good as chief scientist, but not quite. So presumably you've thought about the past, present, and future of NASA. Would you say NASA is on track in all the ways NASA wants to be on track? NASA's on track. Well, let me say that another way. We all have ideas of what NASA should be doing. Is NASA doing it? I think so, but there's always a caveat there because NASA's part of the executive branch, it gets its direction from the president, but then Congress ultimately decides on NASA's budget. And so there's always this tension between what does the president want, what does Congress want, and does that bear any resemblance towards what's really important to NASA, which is moving humans out beyond Earth, exploring this planet, exploring the solar system, the sun, the universe, and not to mention one other small thing, this planet, which is the most important planet to all of us. So how are those resources being spent? How are they divided up? And that's the tension. Sometimes it's good tension, but it sounds like generally it's not. Well, no, I think it is in general a good tension, because obviously if you look back over the history of NASA, at the time of Apollo, NASA was about 4% of the federal budget. Right now, NASA is about 0.4% of the federal budget. And so that means you have to make choices. NASA still wants to invest in aeronautics. It's one-tenth the commitment of the country from back then. You know, and so to someone like me, I would say let's go wild and make NASA 0.6% of the federal budget. That would be a huge amount of money. It's a 50% increase. Yeah, a huge amount of money for NASA, but really not still that much of the federal budget. And to me, NASA is doing a lot of amazing things, and those things actually benefit us every day. I said let's just go to a penny while we're at it. We're going to raise it from 0.4. Right, just go to 1%, right? Just take it up to a penny, and we're good. Yeah, we're good to go. We'd have humans on Mars very quickly if that were the case. And you'd be doing the backstroke on titans. That's right. Nice. Nice. I like every part of that except the snow. We'd be finding life around the solar system. Solar system, we'd be exploring planets around other stars. We'd be making huge advances. And again, for people who say, oh, that's a waste of money, when you push for technology, you benefit our economy, you have spinoffs that affect our lives in amazing ways. So let me ask you... Just to be clear, since we have so... I think methane is odorless. You know, you're right. They add that odor to it so that you can smell it. Yeah, so the reason why you thought it smelled is because I dealt it. That's why I thought I smelled it. You're contributing to global warming. Absolutely. You smelt it, dealt it. So I think it's hydrogen sulfide has that rotten egg smell mixed in with the methane. Right. Am I right about my chemistry there? You are correct. But I wouldn't expect nothing less from you. I don't presume, but if I think, I'm not letting you get by with saying that you don't want to go doing a backstroke on the methane lakes of Titan because of the smell. No, you're right. It just doesn't work as a joke when I say in the odorless methane lakes with the hydrogen sulfide additives. It doesn't work. Well, it's about 92 degrees Kelvin on Titan, so it would be a cold swim for you. But my real question is, is there anything else swimming in those seas besides you? Right. Well, it will be once I get out of the water if it's that cold. What questions you have? Let's jump into it. And as we always do, we start with our Patreon patrons questions because they support us financially. So it's a whole like pay go to page on our website. Yes. That where you can. And I would say it was a little mysterious to me for a long time, Patreon, because I thought this is just another thing where they're just asking for money. But you actually, there are some kickbacks, the kickbacks at every level. Absolutely. You're actually buying access. You're buying access to the program just like, you know, like for instance, if you were a Russian businessman and you wanted to, I don't know, gain some influence, you know, it's the same type of deal. So, yeah, there's two ways to support the show financially. If you're so inclined, one is Patreon, and the other is startalkallaccess.com, where we have, we'll create all kinds of exclusive original content plus everything that we do, and the money goes back into what we do so that we can... Well, what it does is we use it to do innovative things that can't otherwise be justified by the business model at that time. Absolutely. And so we can grow whole new branches. And that's what it's about. That's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. It's working. And you put it so much better than I got to remember what you just said there, because that's what it is. So anyway, here's our Patreon question from Chris Ryu. Chris wants to know this, hey, let's fast forward a decade or even a few and imagine a permanent Mars colony. Assuming that NASA was responsible, what changes do you think there would be to the role of NASA globally? Would it perhaps take on a more worldwide role? Would it become maybe WASA? And that's Chris from the Atomic Club or the Atom Club in Strumenster, Newton, United Kingdom. Well, first of all, I think before we actually have a colony on Mars, it's going to be a little bit more than a decade or two because those first journeys to Mars with humans, which will probably be in the early 2030s for an orbital mission, hopefully down onto the surface soon after that, to really... Soon after you mean other missions. Yeah. So the mission that first goes into orbit is not going to be the one that lands. I don't think it'll be the one that lands because that entry, descent and landing on Mars with humans is so hard because the Mars atmosphere is so thin. So we're hoping to get humans down on the surface by the mid to late 2030s to really have people there for sustained long periods of time. I think we're maybe three or four decades away from that. But it's already going to be a world wide effort. I don't know if I want to call it WASA. But already NASA is actually working, there are 16 space agencies that are working on this. How do we send humans beyond low earth orbit? Space agencies in different countries. Yeah. So the typical ones people have heard of, maybe European Space Agency, the Russian Space Agency, the Japanese Space Agency. But we've got space agencies from South Korea, emerging space agencies from Africa who are participating. India. So it already is a global effort. Not only that, I don't think it's just going to be a government effort. It's going to be public-private partnerships. And we already see things like SpaceX with Red Dragon sort of moving forward, though it's not clear what the exact timeline on Red Dragon is right now. But I think it's going to take kind of everybody participating to actually make it happen. So are you saying that that first colony will not be NASA and American tax moneys, it will be a collaboration the way this questioner is asking? I think it will be a collaboration, but I think there will be, I hope America continues to lead. We've always led, but that doesn't mean we can't have partners. And so I hope we continue to lead. I hope there is a US base on Mars eventually. And I think a lot of people do envision it sort of like Antarctica where there's a US base, a British base. But I'm actually hoping we all live together internationally like we do up on the International Space Station. That's sort of the dream in partnership. I know, I'm hopelessly, hopelessly optimistic. That's very wishful thinking there. Also I want to differ with something you just said. You said we've always led, but I think we only really led after maybe 1968. Oh, good point. Because we weren't the first in space. They had Sputnik. They had the first satellite. They had the first non-human animal. They had the first- Leica, yeah, Leica. They had the first human. They had the first woman. They had the first black person, a Cuban. They had the first space station. They had so- First landings on Venus. Yeah, first landings. They actually had the first photo of Earthrise on the Moon, which wasn't released till after our photo was- So, we were reactive to so much of what Russia did, leaving me to wonder that if Russia never went there, whether we would have ever had a space program in the first place. I think we may have eventually, but it would have come much slower. And so, there's an interesting parallel going on with that right now, as you see the rise of the Chinese space program. Lot going on in China right now. They're getting ready to put their space station off. You know, if that's what it takes to get us to Mars, which reflects back to your first question about, is NASA on the right track? We're on the right track to get humans to Mars. That whole plan I talked about, but it could easily go off the rails. And so, in my mind, maybe it takes a little incentive by competing with foreign nations to keep us on track. I like that train reference with referencing rockets. It might go off the rails. Which, by the way, if we can get a train to Mars, I'm there. That's a great ride right there. What else you got? All right, here we go. Hey, along the same line, this is Gunnar Cain from Facebook says, do you think NASA will lose significant funding in the near future? Since we're talking about all these grandiose plans, especially with competition, and if so, what will NASA, what research will be halted first? And I would like to add to that, what are we doing in terms of public-private partnerships? Because if we're losing funding, are we supplementing that in some way? Or is it when we pull funding away, that's the end of it? Programs are shut down. Yeah, NASA hasn't been losing funding. Actually, over the last several years, our budget has gone up over the president's request and up. It's barely keeping pace with inflation, but it is going up when lots of other parts of the federal budget are going down. And that's because NASA still continues to have huge bipartisan support in Congress. Because it has 10 centers, half of which are in blue states, the other half are in red states. That's the way to do it. So it continues to have a lot of support. What again, though, the subtleties are, for example, I testified in February before a congressional hearing on the future of NASA. And there was a lot of talk by some members about, do we need to refocus NASA's budget? Do we need to focus NASA on what it should be doing? That's a bit of code for why is NASA doing Earth science? And that's when I start to get worried. So it's not only the absolute number. It's how is that money spread around? And to me, NASA's Earth science budget is an extremely important part. If we don't measure what's going on on this planet, we're not going to understand it. It is a planet. Yes. In case you didn't know that. We have time for one more before we go to break. All right. Let's make this very, let's make this interesting. Chad Thompson would like to know this. Could NASA be the precursor to something like the Star Trek Federation? Which is really kind of cool. I mean, now you spoke to that kind of briefly, but is there a concerted effort to bring these agencies together globally? There is. There's again, there's something called the Global Exploration Roadmap. You can Google it. All these space agencies, the heads of all the international space agencies get together several times a year and meet and say, what are we doing? How can we work together? How can we, you know, everybody's got limited resources, so it's better to work together. And so, you know, if you look at the space station, people have suggested it should be nominated for a Peace Prize. You know, it's literally higher ground where we can get along. And to me, if we can keep space in that realm, the better off we're going to be. In fact, the space station is the greatest collaboration of nations outside of the waging of war. If you look at the budget. God, that is so discouraging. Isn't that an interesting fact? I mean, it's heartening in one respect that we can get together and do things. Well, others, so there's the Olympics, there's the World Cup, and there's a space station. If you look at the budget that drives these, the space station is a greater budget and a greater sort of total investment. And the only other time nations get together like that is to kill one another. Yeah. Oh, we are awful. You know that? Human beings, you suck. This is, this is. This is our great worry in the future of AI. Because when it achieves consciousness, it will be clear to it that we just have no right to be alive at all. There you go. It will be its first task. Let me tell you something. I have no intelligence at all and I still agree with that. We are done with this segment. Will we come back more of our Cosmic Queries edition of Let's Make America Smart Again? StarTalk, we're talking about the future of NASA in this edition of Let's Make America Smart Again. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I've got my co-host, Chuck Nice. Tweeting at ChuckNice Comic. Thank you, sir, yes. All right, and I've got with us, since we're talking about the future of NASA, we've got somebody who has just been working for NASA for the last several years in the capacity of chief scientist. I've got Ellen Stofan here, Ellen. Hey, nice to be here. Thanks for coming. Not your first time on StarTalk. Not my first time, but always happy to be here. Excellent, excellent. We love this. And so, Chuck, you've been soliciting queries. Yes, I have, from all over the internet. About the future of NASA, so let's see. And in this, again, our goal here is to imagine a smarter America going forward. So let's see, what do you have here? All right, so Anna Jesus coming to us from Facebook would like to know this. What is the main difference between NASA and SpaceX in terms of what they would like to achieve in space exploration in the near and far future? And let me add to that, what is the chief purpose of NASA or what is NASA's mission statement? Well, I should be able to quote NASA's mission statement from memory, but I can't. But it's basically to understand our world, our solar system, our universe, and to use technology to move humans beyond Earth. That is really, if you want to sum it up, that's NASA's mission, exploration, knowledge. So SpaceX is a contractor to NASA. NASA has lots of industry partners. SpaceX is one of them. They launch cargo up to the International Space Station. Starting next year, they'll launch crew up to the International Space Station from Florida. So they're one of many contractors. Now, obviously, SpaceX has obviously stated that they want to see humans on Mars. NASA wants to see humans on Mars. So our goals are actually really aligned. And we have a partnership with SpaceX to help them land one of their Dragon capsules on Mars. And I'm excited because they've done a lot of work on entry, descent, and landing that will hopefully make it able for us to land humans sooner. You said earlier that one of the challenges is that Mars has a thin atmosphere. Could you detail why that's more of a challenge to EDL, entry, descent, land than on Earth? Our atmosphere is much denser. So if people haven't seen, there's a great video that JPL put together before the Curiosity rover landed called Seven Minutes of Terror. And it basically takes seven minutes when you're coming in from a trajectory from Earth to get from the top of the atmosphere to the surface. So you have to slow yourself way, way, way, way down. You've got good speed to get there. Now you've got to eat up that speed somehow. Yeah. And to absorb that speed coming, the atmosphere is just not helping you very much, but it's heating you up, which is bad. So you've got to find some way to slow yourself down. So Curiosity weighed one metric ton, and we used a combination of... On Earth. Unless if that's the mass, a wooded mass of a thousand kilograms. Yeah. So we used a heat shield, parachutes, this bizarre thing called a sky crane to land it on the surface. We estimate for humans, you're going to need 20 to 40 metric tons landed on the surface, and the more you can bunch that into single landings, the cheaper it is, so there's issues with that. So how are you going to slow yourself coming down? You're going to have to use something called supersonic retro propulsion, which basically means... It does, because you're firing retro rockets while you're going at supersonic speeds, which causes all kinds of turbulence, everything you're shooting up the back comes back at your spacecraft at supersonic speeds, so it's a crazy thing. SpaceX has actually been working on it. So if you're moving supersonically and you try to put retro exhaust in front of you, you overtake the exhaust. Exactly. That's so wild. Yeah, yeah. That's wild. Yeah. So it's complicated, to say the least. So we just have work to do. You can't roll around the window and stick your hands out just to slow down. No. So it's not that it's an insurmountable, oh my gosh, we can't ever send humans to Mars, it's too hard. And it frustrates me sometimes, I'll see commentary of saying, oh, we just need to stick at the moon. Mars is too hard. Mars is not too hard. We can figure it out. Just any engineer would froth at the mouth to have the opportunity to solve these problems. Exactly. And again, when you solve tough problems like that, you're stretching technology, you're stretching computational skills. You're patenting. You're inventing. Yeah. You're spinning off stuff into our economy right here on earth. Give me another one. Here we go. This is Jeff Sauce Tourette's. And Jeff says, Chuck, you have butchered my name too many times. I'd like to clear the record. It's sauce like spaghetti and Tourette's like the syndrome. Sauce Tourette's. Thank you. Thank you, Jeff, for phonetically clarifying your name. Here's what he wants to know. What is the average age and education of a NASA employee? Is the demographic getting younger or older over the years? So are we attracting people to NASA? By the way, we all saw the video of the launch and return of the first stage in the SpaceX rocket. And you see mission control for SpaceX. There's nobody there over 30, there's one old fart who's 40 in the corner looking around like this. Everybody else who's jumping and hooting and hollering, if they're 35, so that skews young, it looks to me. It does skew young. And if you look at our NASA centers, which again, we have nine NASA centers plus our federally funded research and development center, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, making. If you're in the loop, you still struggle. It's hard to get it to roll off. I need to know more about the FFRDC. The average age is about 52 to 56 depending on the center. Now part of that is because we have people who don't want to leave. They love what they do. They're still productive. We've had scientists who are still writing significant papers in their 80s, so that does tend to hurt your statistics. On the other hand... I know it was in the 60s. Everyone just died at age 60. That was it. Well, kind of. We have people who don't like to retire. They love what they do. A lot of smoking and a lot of ham consumption. A big part of American diet. Every holiday, everything. And then when you didn't have ham, you had spam. But we're healthier now. I told my son that spam was food, and he said, what, Danny? What? Dad, you're eating emails that you don't want? What? I'm sorry. Go on. Where were you? So we've also had periods of time where the federal government has hiring freezes on. And NASA downsized when the shuttle program ended. So all of that's combined to make our federal workforce older. And we need more younger people in there. When you have a hiring freeze, but it applies to NASA, it's a brain freeze. Is that good? Exactly. B plus? You said C? No, no, no. No, it's a brain freeze. It's a brain freeze. If it applies to NASA, it's a brain freeze because you're not bringing in fresh brain blood. Which means that those resources are being allocated someplace else, most likely Wall Street. Right. And the other thing is, though, you really want that mix of ages because we've got people who really know how to land on Mars. We have people who know how to keep humans up in space safe. So you need that kind of wisdom and you need the fresh blood coming in that's going to carry that forward. But you also need a culture where fresh blood, who is not biased by how you always did do it, can be open to a new idea. Exactly. And that need for innovation is something that we worked on a lot over the last couple years at NASA. How do we ensure that we're the most innovative? As a 50-year-plus-old agency, you really do worry about, are you being the most innovative? And NASA worries about that. Interesting. I know the age of NASA because it was founded the same week I was born. 1958. So I feel the pain. Yeah, a lot of people don't know this, but… He feels that lack of innovation. Whenever Neil calls NASA, the message is, I'm your father. All right, here we go. Actually, it doesn't sound like I'm your sibling. Yeah, it doesn't work. Here we are. You know what, here we go. Brad Carrico from Facebook would like to know this. Does NASA have a future solution to the growing space junk problem? So are you guys working on this? NASA's working on it. Where does space junk come from? Well, space junk is because over the last 50 plus years we put a lot of stuff up there. Some of it has broken up. So there are actually even like old stages of rockets, pieces of spacecraft. There was an occasion a couple years ago where two spacecraft ran into each other and it created a whole lot more pieces of debris. So there's just a lot of stuff up there. Now it slowly, slowly de-orbits but we do worry about it. A couple times a year they have to move the International Space Station slightly to avoid space junk, other satellites. We have to watch when we launch things to see if there are anything else on the path. Now space is big so this isn't anything to panic over but space agencies around the world and private companies are looking at how do we literally vacuum that stuff up and people have... I've seen proposals... Back up. Wait. The space station is not a particularly nimble thing. No, it is not. And it's not even sort of structurally... I mean... I like this. My two arms are like the solar panels. Like if you push over here, this will like bend but you're not going to push the whole... I mean, so you're telling me they do avoidance maneuvers with the International Space Station so that they don't run into somebody's shoe or whatever piece of debris was left in space? They do. And they've even had rare occasions where they realized there was debris approaching the space station and they haven't had time because obviously to do a maneuver you have to say... You have to plan this out. This isn't something you want to be like, oh yeah, let's move. You know. It's not the Millennium Falcon who... No. So there have been times where the astronauts have actually retreated into the Soyuz capsule and waited out a potential debris encounter, don't you love the way that's phrased, a potential debris encounter. Something crashing into the space station. NASA for death. But it's avoided. I mean the space station, if you looked at it closely, it's got little pings and pock marks all over it from little tiny pieces of debris hitting it at 17,000 miles an hour. And so that creates little problems. But so far, but to get back to your question, get in, no problem, no problem. 17,000 mile an hour debris. That's all. But that's why it's getting old. And at some point, we will have to deorbit the space station. Right now, it's funded through about 24. By about 28, for example, the solar. 2024. 2024. So by about 2028, a lot of the systems will be degrading, especially the solar panels, which are getting pinged by this micro debris all the time. So when we deorbit that, who puts a new one up there? When do we do that? You know, that's a great question. And so there's this big, what is going to happen to low Earth orbit after the space station? Is it going, you know, if you talk to NASA, they would like it to be the commercial, the private sector that moves in private space stations, a place for, you know, private space companies, Blue Origin, SpaceX, Orbital ATK. Let's find the private sector going to low Earth orbit. But NASA spends about $3 billion a year on the International Space Station. And if we want to send humans to Mars, we want to take that $3 billion and start building what will be the Mars transfer vehicle, what humans will go in on that journey to Mars. If they have to keep spending it on the space station, there's not going to be no money to go beyond low Earth orbit. So now, okay, I'm sorry, I have to ask this, since you were there, and this all sounds highly political to me because you're talking about budgetary issues, but isn't there a way to take the billions of dollars that are going into Lockheed Martin's making a fighter jet that we do not need or tanks that we are building that the government, that the, I'm sorry, the military has said, we do not want them. But yet, because it's a jobs program, we have to make them anyway, couldn't we just find a way to shift this money over to NASA so that, I mean, there's clearly inherent benefits and discovery and technological advances that will be wrought from going to Mars as opposed to a tank that we're never going to use because we're never going to fight conventional warfare again. We now have nuclear wars. Anybody we're going to fight is going to have a nuclear warhead, too, so we're not going to do that. So why can't we just find a way to politically get the senator or the congressman to say, hey, look, we'll give you the money. You just got to build whatever you're going to build over in my district. Chuck Nice 2020. What is the process at NASA to talk to these people? Well, you know, NASA can't lobby Congress. That's not actually allowed. So outside supporters can talk to NASA. I am flabbergasted. NASA can't even advertise. No, that's not allowed. You guys are killing me. Are you kidding me? Just to be clear, what the military does when they have TV commercials during the Super Bowl is not, that's not technically marketing. They're recruiting. No, no. Yeah, they're recruiting. So, what happened was when I was on one of my commissions, we were approached by an ad agency that wanted to create sort of public service spots for NASA to recruit, to recruit scientists and engineers in the spirit of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines recruiting. And that way you can justify commercial time for it. And there's some of the most beautiful commercial I've ever seen and just the tradition to do that is just not there. Get out. And yeah. That is so sad. It's almost as if our government has stacked the debt against what we should be doing. But it sounds good the way it is, but imagine that in a limit where it's out of control. Because all it says is, we taxpayers elect officials who then establish budgets for agencies, the agency can't then market itself. To ask for more budget. To ask for more budget. Okay, that makes sense. Because it's a completely external activity from it. I understand that. So that's why. That makes sense. And while we all feel good that NASA should be able to do it, in the limit, you don't really want that happening. That's all. No, that makes sense. That's all. Because yeah, I don't want the agriculture department doing the same thing. We want just NASA to do it. I only want NASA to be able to do it. So we're going to take a quick break. When we come back, more Cosmic Queries in the Let's Make America Smart Again edition of StarTalk. We'll be back with Ellen Stofan, former chief scientist at NASA. Not that lowly scientist. We're talking about chief. Chief. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson. I serve as the Director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, right here in New York City, if you didn't otherwise know that. In any case, I'm your personal astrophysicist. We've been talking with Ellen Stofan, former Chief Scientist of NASA, very just former. Just former. Like minutes ago, practically. Six months. Six months ago. Six minutes between. Yeah, between, on a cosmic scale, is yesterday. And I got Chuck Nice, of course, doing Cosmic Queries. Yes. So we're thinking about the future of NASA in this Let's Make America Smart Again edition. Yes, we are. Of StarTalk. So what do you have? All right, so this is L. I think. Chuck. L. I think these people are making these names up and just sending them in to screw me, man. All right, L. Not everybody can be named Chuck. Chuck. Yeah, this is true. Monosyllabic and super simple. Chuck. Anyway, very simple. Who will get to Mars first? Who will get a human to Mars first? That's all they want to know is because clearly. Earthlings. Earthlings. That's a great question. Here's the real question. Has it become like a space race? Have we started the space race again? No, I don't think we have. And you know, again, I think people like to have a rhetoric around there being a space race, but I don't think there is. So for Mars, again, Mars is hard. It's not easy. It's not impossible, but it's hard. So I think when we get humans to Mars, you're gonna see it. You're gonna have people from multiple space agencies. You're gonna have public private partnerships involved. Now you could turn that question around for the moon. And that I think is a valid question because there's a lot of talk about human bases on the moon, commercial exploitation of the moon, and whether that happens or not, boy, I'm curious about that. Is it gonna be China putting humans on the moon? Is it gonna be Russia finally putting humans on the moon? Is it going to be a private company? And I'm leaning towards a private company doing it. And so I think that's a debatable question. Mars, it's gonna be an international coalition with hopefully NASA taking the lead. So does it help to, because everybody talks about a moon base, does it help us get to Mars? Is it easier for us to get to Mars from the moon than it is for us to get to Mars from here? So in other words, could the moon be a staging place to launch to go to Mars? It's a great staging place because if you think about it, you're gonna need a multiple module vehicle to get to Mars because you wanna always have multiple modules in case something goes wrong with one of the modules. You can seal it off and still have a safe place to retreat to. So it's gonna be something big that you're gonna have to assemble on orbit. Why not do that out in orbit around the moon where you can use a lunar gravity assist to get you ready to go to Mars? So staging from lunar orbit makes sense from a gravitational assist point of view as well as just you're gonna have to stage somewhere. Why not do it there? Just to be clear, you're not talking about staging from the lunar surface, which requires landing and ascending once again. Staging from the lunar surface really doesn't make any sense because it's different technology to land on the moon. Moon doesn't have an atmosphere. So you'd have to develop all these technologies specifically to land on the moon because frankly all those things we developed for Apollo are basically gone at this point. We'd have to sort of start all over again. So that's a whole lot of money. I did the first part. They closed down the sound stage. So I agree with you, but for different reasons. I think we need to remind ourselves what it is to leave low Earth orbit. And the moon becomes a very easy target that you can get to in a news cycle, right? Just a few days. How you doing? Good. You don't get bored with the trip. They're there. How you doing? You land in four days. You come back for dinner Sunday night. And so this, I think we have to remind ourselves what that's like. And without that, you just say, we haven't been out of low Earth orbit in 40 years. Now let's go to Mars. That doesn't sound wise to me. No, it's not wise. And it also takes us out into what we call a mixed field radiation environment where we really don't have a lot of experience. You're getting solar radiation from the sun and you're getting galactic cosmic radiation. And normally shielded when we stay near to the earth. Exactly. Exactly. So to have a couple years out in that mixed field radiation environment where we can do some experiments with tissues, with cells, with model organisms like fruit flies to make sure let's make sure we really understand the effects before we send humans all the way to Mars eight months exposed to that radiation on the way there, eight months on the way back. That reminds me of a joke by Dick Gregory that he told back in the 60s. Back in the 60s. On the point of what effect does this radiation have on biological tissue? Right. He said when the chimp came back from space and everyone was cheering, and they said, no, I wasn't cheering because I know that that was an actual astronaut. They said, oh, that's what happened. Where do you go in space? You come out looking like a chimp. You know, when we first sent things up into space, we had no idea what the effects would be. After all this experience on the space station, we now know, and we've worked on the ISS. People say, what are those astronauts doing up there? They're actually helping us find ways to keep humans healthy for that journey to Mars, the journey back to Mars. But the one thing we still have a lot of worries about is this radiation issue. And it's not something we can't work with, but we still need to know more about it. Right. And to the people who say, oh, we will never go to Mars because of the radiation, all I'm going to say is Mars is not as big of a challenge to us today as the moon was in 1960. Exactly. Think about that. Yeah. Yeah. That's true, because we went to the moon basically with the computing power of a Texas instrument calculator. No, less than that. Really? I was making a joke. For real? I think it's like a singing greeting card or something. You're kidding. No, someone was saying the other day, this flipped me out, that the Voyager spacecraft has about as much computer smarts as something in your pocket. Your car key. Because everyone instantly thinks your cell phone. Your car key. You're kidding me. The key fob of your car. Oh my God. Oh man. Now that is fascinating. That is mind-blowing right there. Here's John Cates from Facebook. Thank you, John, for having a simple name. He's just helping you out. Exactly. I'm sorry. He changed his name just for me. He changed his name just for me. Okay. That always makes me happy. Give me time for one more question. All right. All right. With all the buzz about Mars, because we've been talking about it, you're an enceologist, does NASA have any interest in looking towards the inner planets like Mercury or Venus? And I know you used to study Venus. Oh man. Dr. Funky Spoon and I are old Venus pals. Funky Spoon, one of our StarTalk all-stars. So Venus is the Earth gone bad. A lot of the times we refer to it as the Earth's evil twin. So made of about the same material. What's wrong with you? I just fell in love with Venus. It's like Venus is the Earth gone bad. You stay away from Venus. You sound like David. So the problem is, here you've got this planet that again started out in about the same way and place in the solar system, made of the same stuff. It's like you put two chocolate cake mixes in the oven and one came out chocolate and one came out lemon in the end. Now this is important because you could say, well, who cares that Venus went down this alternate path where it's 900 degrees Fahrenheit on the surface. There's a runaway greenhouse. Well, we're starting, you know, in the last couple years, we found over 3,000 planets around other stars with our Kepler space telescope. And what we're looking for is Earth 2.0, this habitable planet around another star. So this makes us even more curious about Venus. You had kind of multiple chances in our solar system at habitable planets. Only the Earth was able to maintain long-term habitability. Venus might have had an early ocean, lost it. Although its CO2 is in its atmosphere, it has a runaway greenhouse. Why? How hard is it to make Earth 2.0? Venus can help us figure that out. Amen. That's pretty damn cool, I've got to say. Chuck, we've got like 30 seconds, you've got a 30 second question. Here's a 30 second question. Jason de Guzman wants to know this, what NASA project that is canceled that you wish would be revived? Easy, easy, my Titan boat proposal, I propose to send a floating probe to a sea at the North Pole of one of Saturn's moons to find out is there anything living in that alien sea? Someday it will fly? This is an ocean of liquid methane, methane is the gas that comes out of a household stove. If you say so. It comes out of other places, but we will go with stove. In the suburbs it might be propane, but typically in cities it is methane, the simplest of the hydrocarbons if I remember correctly, CH4, and it has an H in four directions, it is a beautiful molecule actually. This is when I know I am hanging with Neil deGrasse Tyson, now that is a beautiful molecule. He turns the magazine long way and pulls down another panel and it is like, oh look at that CH4. But it's normally gaseous in our lives, but if you drop the temperature, you liquefy it. So it's basically a sea of liquid gasoline and totally exotic, very cold. We don't know if there could be life. It wouldn't probably be life like life here on Earth. Maybe life doesn't require liquid water, maybe it just requires liquid. Liquid. Yeah. And Titan's the place to go to answer that question. Sweet. So it got, wait, but it got canceled. So... It didn't get selected. We were one of the final three missions for a discovery selection, and they instead picked a mission to Mars called the Insight, which will launch next year, which will land a seismometer on the surface of Venus. So it's still... Mars. So it's still out. I mean, the idea is still floating. The idea is still floating. The problem is complicated, but it's basically dark at Titan's poles during Titan winter, and the big seas are all at the North Pole. It'll be dark at the North Pole from about the mid 2020s to the early 2030s, so there's no point in going in the dark. So you lost your window. We lost our window. Oh, well. Don't keep... Oh, well. It's still going to be there. It'll be there. It'll be there. Yeah, I'll be too old, but you know, it'll be there. But we'll know it was your dream when it happens. And if we continue to train the next generation of people to become scientists and engineers, or as a minimum, to embrace what scientists and engineers do, then this is a recipe to assure that America will become smart once again. Yes. Well, let's please hope. No, there's no hope. There is no hope. Hope is what you have when you have abandoned all... Hope is what you have when you've confessed you have no impact on the outcome. Well, there you have it. No, that's very good. Yes, exactly. Okay. Hope and prayer, that's what you do when you're not in control. Exactly. Okay, so I'm saying, let's get in control. Then, no, you don't have to hope. You don't have to pray. There you go. And when you look at all the people who've been shut out of STEM for so long and that if we now can get those kids involved in STEM, we're going to have a much larger, more innovative, more creative STEM workforce than we've ever had before. Science, technology, engineering, and math. There you go. STEM. You've been watching, and possibly only listening, to StarTalk, Let's Make America Smart Again edition with Cosmic Queries, and I've had Ellen Stofan. Thank you, Ellen, multiple times on StarTalk, and always great to have you. Get your insider insights into the past, present, and future of NASA. Chuck. Hey, man. Always good to have you as my co-host. Of course. I've been and will continue to be your personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Until next time, I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson.