documentary for "the history channel" and discovery communications including the widely praised modern marvels, apollo 11. has been a professor at a university and lecturer with johnson space center. he presents amazing stories of the space age which features 20 of his favorite films from the golden age of space exploration. join me in welcoming rod pyle. [applause] >> thank you very much. normally i kind of dance around a bit while i'm performing these things but because they're taping tonight and we have kind of a weird microphone setup, i will sort of stay with the podium. i will go back to my professorring days at university of laverne. i know it is rough getting here on week night. i used to drive to ucla when i was 18 years old in 30 minutes to pasadena. last time i did that drive it was 2 1/2 hours. i appreciate y'all going through what you went through. let me go back -- amazing stories of the space age has kind of a long story behind it. i won't bore you with the whole thing but i've been writing about different parts of the space age and space science and history in general for 13 years. before that i spent about a decade working in television, mostly in documentaries. i worked on "star trek" a while as an effects guy. mostly on documentaries. i would constantly come across these cool stories from the '40s, the '50s, the '60s, that i only heard little bits about. sometimes just because they weren't very commonly written about. this is before the internet. are. part of those long file cards we pull out in the library. something we pulled out in a magazine. something classified and only little bits of you could you find but would i see these, say, i want to make a tv show about that. i wrote up the show proposal, called, secrets of space, you need a reverb to do properly. that got close a couple times. we didn't quite get it done. after working on that for a while, i thought this would be more fun to do as a book really because there is so much you stuff to tell and i like to talk a lot as you will soon find out. so i did it as a book proposal. promethus was kind enough to pick it up. it was our third book together. it came out two months ago, selling briskly, thank bod. because i know you're here i know it will continue selling tonight. i want to frame this, setting up the space age for us. i see a few faces out here, thank god, who remember the space age like i do. that is not always the case. sometimes i do these talks, i realize talking to people in 20s or 30s, what is this guy talking about? when men landed on mars? we remember most of us that the united states had a space program that started in the early 1960s. we landed on the moon in 1969, coming up on 50 years ago. in between we had the mercury program, gemini program, apollo program, space shuttle, space station and the privateers. that is the space program we had. most of this book isn't about that. there are a few chapters about the space program we grew up and remember. little-known incidents like almost having an engine, explosion on-line nor module on poll low 11 after it landed which i didn't know about until six years ago. the most of this were about space programs designed in the 1950s, 1960s, primarily by the militaries of the world who had a slightly different vision what they thought we ought to do. i will start a context allizing piece to reorient into the space age and what might have been. ♪ ♪ ♪ >> there it is. a small atoll of coral islands in the pacific where man is dedicated to just one cause, the conquest of space. our spaceship moves ponderously toward the firing site. ♪ >> 10, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. [explosion] ♪ >> to xr-1. your cutoff altitude 63.9 miles. >> so that was a little clip from the other space program they were talking to us about in the 1950s. i thought floating pencil was a nice touch. that was from a disney show in 1954 i think, called, tomorrowland. so our ideas about space were very different than they turned out to be. and there were a lot of good reasons for that. principle among them, was the fact that at this time, just shortly after the end of world war ii, we were riding the top of this technological and soon economic age of the united states but we had an enemy across the ocean, and that was the ussr, the soviet russia, and there was a lot of concern about, about this standoff we had since the end of world war ii when we ceased being allies quote, unquote. it was never that comfortable but we tried. so there are a number of alternatives to what nasa's plans would become, starting in 1958 when they were formed. mostly partly military in nature. the whole idea was general terms, space is the high ground, we have to get it first before the russians do. depending which branch of the military you talked to they had different plans. in the army's case, this is the high ground. we go for the high ground. you have to go on top of the mountain to shoot down the bad guys. we should be ones to take space. federal government give us the money, we'll charge the hill. the air force said, no, no we fly things. we know how to use joysticks and navigation and guidance systems wings, all that, propulsion. we should be the ones to go. the navy came along with their proposals, slightly weaker case, no, we do submarines, that involves life-support for months at a time, high pressure. we know pressure moving wrong way. you get the general idea. we should be ones go to space. comes from the early day of v 2 rockets. the robert performed perfectly, it landed on wrong planet. he was a great engineer. incredible leader. he was going to get where he wanted no matter what. just to finish setting up this era. the end of world war ii we're still name at least, allies with the soviet union. we've had nuclear weapons since 1945. we used them in anger twice at japan. ussr had nuclear weapons since 1940s. they have hydrogen bomb by 1953. western governments are not happy about this. one bright point in the standoff you still have to deliver nuclear weapons by bomber. you don't have weapons yet. you have to load them in the payload bay of big lumbering propeller lore jet or fighter bomber. they are slow, ponderous. they can be shot down. all kinds of interventions could take place. what if you drop nuclear weapons from space on unsuspecting nation below? that was a very scary thing. this is the era i grew up. i was born in 1956. and if you remember this, this was work place brochure how to survive a nuclear attack. interestingly revived in the 1980s in the reagan years, by cap weinberger who reminded us all if we dig a whole four feet deep and get underneath a kitchen door and 18 inches of dirt on top of it you could survive nuclear blast for four hours. who knew. it was not practical. this was kind of thinking going on when i was a kid. the turtle doing duck an cover. only problem i had with, burt had a shell. all i have got a shirt. that is not the same. burt with cord of stick of dynamite how to survive a nuclear attack. some of you may remember duck drills. quarter inch of formica protect us from 5,000-degree nuclear powerball. the part they didn't sell, all classes rooms had floor to ceiling windows. under half i've of for mica, looking at this sheet glass window, isn't that bomb going to, shut up. get under the desk. that was a little frightening. that was the, the setting if you will of the kind of stories we're talking about. the first, one of my favorites is the u.s. army's plan to put a base on the moon. this is is project horizon. this was turned into the eisenhower administration into 1958. very short study. four to six is months. von brown was part of this. i don't think he was as intimately involved as he would have liked to have been because if you read this, i have read it a couple times, it doesn't show the attention to detail but the general idea was we needed to build a base on the moon before the russians got there because you could do science. you could hold that piece of real estate against invasion. oh, by the way, we'll not talk about it too much, but you could put nuclear weapons there and aim them at earth. take them 2 1/2, three days to get here. that was certainly consideration. here is the moon base. this proposal is graphically challenged. bear with me. that is not as good as illustrations get. that is not me, thank goodness. you could see here, the general idea was to dig these trenches,fy in the cargo containers and assemble a lunar base on the surface, using a number of large rockets. largest they had at the time anyway. this is the u.s. army. the first flight would be in 1965. they were going to send three men up in a rocket. when i say rocket, they didn't have the saturn v yet. this is 1958, '59. we're talking about von braun's smaller rockets. fly into orbit. leave fuel up there. fly other one up, cross feed the fuel, take off for the moon. land directly. no rhonda -- rendezvousing. just like bugs bunny cartoons, go right up there. we had never seen the surface through anything better than a telescope. they would select the landing site, assembly site of the base. we would fly upwards 100 to 130 cargo runs with rockets, 130, not the 16 we flew in apollo, 130, launching out of a little island in the central pacific, they could launch from cape canaveral. this was the army. cape canaveral belonged to air force. no, we'll ship everything down to christmas islands and launch from there. that is how these things work. big plans, big ideas. they will do the cargo runs. once they decide where to put this send modules up, nine people of course, 1950s, the army. they had 15 days to dig the trenches, put together, block and tackle, build moon tractor, move everything over, in the trenches shove them together, seal them up, build the wires, kitchens, bathrooms, build the office, battle center in there, get their weapons situated and ready to go. then they would start flying crews in rotation. needless to say a little ambitious. the crew by 1966 would have been between 12 and 20 soldiers and they were soldiers. if there is anything good about this besides just blind ambition, that it would have been an open-ended program. we might still be there. which is something we didn't get from the apollo program. the best part i'm saving for last. is the moon soldiers. you can't have an army moon base without soldiers, right? these are not just astronauts. these are moon soldiers. this is moon soldier in the entire get up for being on the surface. my favorite part, these are not ice skates. these are large foot bad, because we didn't know how much dust was on the moon. we're afraid he might step into a crater and disappear up to his antenna. that wouldn't be good. they had ways to deal with bodily functions, heat radiator. that is all they marked up on there. i'm not sure why that is incomplete. that is the well-dressed moon soldier is wearing in 1958, 59. needless to say that is not how they did it. you have to have weapons up there and concerned about using sidearms and rifles for a couple reasons. one concern if you were shooting .45 pistol what the army used then in a vacuum the metals might seize up or temperature and like metals rubbing against each other. they were concerned there was no air, smoke might collect in front of the gun. my favorite concern, using rifle at right angle, right caliber of bullet you might fire and miss the bad guy and goes around the room and hits you in the back of the helmet. that is very bad. they decided rather than have something silly like that, let's have nuclear bazooka instead. surely that is good weapon to use against invading red soldiers coming over the crater this is the davie crock the m-9 mortar. 51-pound warhead. just under a kiloton. it moves 10 or 15 kilotons. it is a big explosion. range of two or three miles. it wasn't accurate. when you talk nuclear explosions be, you don't have to be accurate. two guys set this up, pull the trigger and get down behind the rocks and hope not set up in a nuclear blast. they sent these things to europe in the 1960s. never used them. this is a large backpack device. if you're going to have these, you have to test them. here is test on sunny day in nevada. bang. of course the physicists in dark sunglasses getting irradiated eight million equivalents of yearly x-rays. we knew that it worked. that was good. the other weapon they wanted on the moon, was lunar claymore which they repurposed for lunar use. this was widely used in the u.s. up through, at least through vietnam. and you got to love that, anybody ever in the military? okay. it is good to have instructions on things. front towards enemy is my favorite. just so you don't get it backwards which is important when you think about it. filled with plastic explosives. has 700 soft metal balls in it. bad enough to get hit on earth with one of these things. you see it has quite a blast radius. on the moon you don't have to kill everybody, just puncture their suit. that will tie up two or three other guys dragging them off the surface. this was ideal moon weapon if you're into that kind of thing. tested in a vacuum with it. it worked very well. unfortunately they didn't have anywhere to take it. but if that wasn't enough, a few years later after this project was shelved it was turned into the eisenhower administration in '59. my understanding it is not quite written down and took off his glass, gave him one of those, you got to be kidding me kind of look. he was fan of space program, despite the background in world war ii, he didn't want to see war extend into space. wisely he said we'll not do that. we'll have a civilian space program. that didn't stop our rock island arsenal. i get them mixed up. put out this study in 1955. never did find name of person who wrote it. meanders of weapons oriented mind applied into the vacuum of at moon. i assume he is not applying his brain to the vacuum. this was study complete with well-dressed lunar soldiers here and flying tank or something over there, about what kind of sidearms you might want to use on the moon because recoil could be problem as we discussed. this is very buck rogers examples. there were six of them. i took my favorite two. this fires either pellets or little darts down here. it is roughly the power of .22 pistol or one of those or a powerful pellet gun. i don't know why the sensors but it is looking cool, so if you're designing weapons in 1962. this is micro gun powered by compressed air or spring. my personal favorite is the sausage gun which has 19 little holes and can be used interchangeably with rocket propelled pellets or rocket propelled bullets or stablized. there is pen clip to put it in the pocket of your flight suit if you're going over to talk piece terms with the russian commander, you can whip out the sausage gun and end negotiations very quickly. this was, as i said, these are two of six. the other ones got progressive weirder. the idea if you have a moon base you have to have your special moon weapons. thankfully these were never done. just to close on project horizon, these thingsals come with a price tag, right? if you're going to propose something like this. you have to have some generally, maybe kind of realistic idea what it will cost. we know project apollo because a matter of history, 11 flights, plus tests cost between 20 and $24 billion depending how you slice it in the money of that time. project horizon will have 155 plus with development and base down in the carolina islands and fully-running permanent moon base and so forth for $6 billion. after all, how hard it can be? i think they underbid a little bit. it is government contract so those things tend to inflate a little bit. 150 billion was a challenge to anybody's budget. that was nonstarter. apollo was much better decision. number two, only doing two of my chapters tonight, 22 of them, is is the atomic rocket. up until now including elon musk and jeff bezos and all the buccaneers doing the new space projects all rockets leave by chemical reactions. they are big, powerful, weigh a lot with kind of power and can only get so much up in orbit at one time, unless you ask elon musk thinking he will make them bigger and bigger which he may very well do but there is a limit. how could you bypass that? what is a good way to do that? we're talking 1950s. nuclear power is all the rage. we were looking at it from everything from power plant to airplanes to military ships and submarines. ford even designed ad car called the nucleon would have figures reactor in the trunk. fission reactor. only fuel once every 10 years. would be a shame if something went wrong in the neighborhood. in '40s and '50s, sold us on rockets like this. some are chemical powered, some are nuclear. they're very cool looking. what they have in common, big, cabin space for the crew and cargo and little tiny engines and not a lot of fuel left over for chemical fuel. which is really how we want to do it if we want to fly to space a lot but nobody's figured that out yet. somebody may recognize this. this is from destination moon, one of our favorite movies. this is what rockets were supposed to look like. they promised us this, right? a nice big bridge where everybody walks around and chat and do their thing and young maidens in the velcro minute sy skirts and nod to the captain. it was supposed to be like "star trek." don't forehe get about the gravity. we didn't get this spaceship. what we got apollo capsule. imagine sitting there two weeks. they never did it that long. gemini had two guys, much smaller. two astronauts in the gemini capsule, shoulders touching, this much clearance between the hatch. you can't open it because of the vacuum out there, thank you. what we want bigger, more robust environment that can go places faster to carry more stuff. that is the point of having big rockets. we could have had this. that is leslie nielsen by the way, if we had done this, which is project horizon. i mean project orion. general dynamics said, hey, you know, we have a lot of nuclear bombs sitting around this country. we could use those for propulsion. one of the other engineers said surely you mean nuclear reactor? he said no, bomb. think about it. each time they go off they give a little bit of a push. by gosh they do. they design ad number of versions of spacecraft. this is one of the larger ones. this is interplanetary version, they came from small, medium large, interstellar. i like this one, looks like a a.50-caliber bullet. that is proportion to statue of liberty. it is 170 feet tall. weighs 22 million pounds. saturn v weighs 6.5 million. it had four thousand times the thrust of a saturn v. could carry people as far as you want to go until you run out of atomic bombs. tons and tons of cargo. this is the one shot going anywhere in the solar system where you want to go. it was still studied up to couple weeks ago. as of yet no engineers found a reason that it couldn't work. it would be challenging but, all the numbers and everything seem to add up to say it would be possible. so the crew quarters is here. these are all atomic bombs. these are shock absorbers because you don't want atomic bomb going off down here and that banging directly into you. you have the shock absorbers here. pressure plate. that little tube where the bombs go off, bang a couple hundred feet away. this is to scale. that is apollo astronaut. gives you idea of this thing. it would have been sensational. dyson was a part of this study. my favorite quote of his, 1965, saturn by 1970. he wasn't kidding. he was dead serious about this. it would have probably been about the same cost or cheaper than the apollo program. what do you suppose the problem was? well, lifting off from earth with atomic bomb is non-start are now, isn't it? it was a great program with a really sound engineering logic behind it but taking off from the ground using nuclear weapons is not necessarily the best way to go. dyson calculated it would have only added about 1% to the fallout in the atmosphere given how much nuclear testing was going on at that time. most of them some time or another if we're at certain age. he said there would only be one or two deaths per launch in the public which, sounds kind of bad until you realize that 36,400 people were dying every year in corvairs and buicks and other large american monstrosities they were driving at the time. so, you know, in terms of raw numbers price isn't too high. morally a little shifty. so, this was also a nonstarter, which is a shame because it could have been really neat. preferably launched with chemical rockets than gone nuclear. they tested with conventional explosives to make sure the idea would work. i would show a little bit of that. this is the putt-putt, about three feet across. setting off tnt as it goes up, it shows it works. if you have them spaced at right time with solid plate at bottom to prevent astronauts getting cooked this thing can function. what stopped it? the nuclear test ban treaty signed in 1963. that kind of rained on their parade. outer space treaty was signed in 1967. you can't weaponize space. nobody can own anything and so forth. the not weaponizing part was downer for project horizon. it was nuclear. earth day came along. we got environmental awareness, people said, do you really think it's a good why, even if you get the stuff up there with regular rockets without polluting atmosphere, do you think it is good idea to launch great wads of plutonium in space when rockets blow up and sometimes and may come down? truth of the matter we launched plutonium on at least three mars missions, couple deep space missions. all ap poll -- apollos. three apollos have it. russians have done a multipletimes. one or two came back. they're sitting down on the ocean, not a good thing. not as dangerous as we thought. not anything on scale of oy ryan. if anything had gone bad it would have been a very bad day. some of the scenarios i cover in the book, using gemini spacecraft to land on the moon. air force thought they could do that to pete apollo there. to try to keep the apollo assembly lines open after that program shut down 1972, there were ideas considered, flying loops with crews three or more around venus or mars or both in the same flight. that would have taken two years. but again, do the math, it all works out. the question is, who would want to? radiation is kind of a concern too. von braun designed an inflatable space station in 1953. that big ring-shaped one i had in the beginning. it looks like steel. it is actually a big bicycle tire in space t would have worked. there were concerns contractors on project voiced about, if some astronaut get as little overexuberant and bounces off the side and punctures a whole, this thing will fly around like a balloon let go in a room. probably wouldn't have, but valid concern i suppose. armed space stations and a lot more. what is coming up? i will end quickly what we're heading into. nasa retired the space shuttle in 2011. we still have a wonderful space station that goes overhead in every 90 minutes. since 2011 we haven't had a way to get our people up there even though we paid for most of it. which is kind of a problem. we've been buying rides for the russians on soyuz spacecraft, which iconically designed to beat us to the moon when we were flying apollo. it didn't succeed in that. but has been successful spacecraft since then of the when we retired the shuttle, fees on the soyuz is 38 million. now it is 85. it is not like the fuel has gotten more expensive. it is just what the market will bear. a lot of people are not very happy about this. nasa, among other things are building a space launch system. known as sls. some circles the senate launch system they like to call it. this is a saturn v class rocket that would do probably many things that the saturn v would do. we can go back to the moon with it. if we launch number of them we can assemble a spacecraft to go to mars. there is a lot of uses for it. the problem so far, very slow to build and really expensive. it is billions of dollars a year. if you're nasa, that is something you're used to. that is how you've been doing business a long time with aerospace contracts and so forth this is an example how it might look in one of the lunar configurations. things are going along swimmingly until this guy comes along, elon musk, hey, 2002 i'm starting a rocket company. nasa, air force i want to fly your cargo. you hire me i will do it a 10th of the cost. they said basically nice kid, get out of the tent. let us know when you're ready. much to the surprise after the love us that follow this trade he did that now he is flying rockets regularly. large payloads. getting ready to fly astronauts later this year, early next year, tests of a new space cast. this is his dragon 2 capsule. going back one step, nasa with their sls, they have flown one test flight not with that rocket, but flown a test flight with the capsule 2014. worked out fine. heat shield had issues. worked out fine. next flight until 2018. that is another unmanned test flight. they fly with a crew in 2021. 15 minutes of time and space landing on the moon in eight 1/2 years. taken us this long to test the rocket. a lot less money at stake. nasa has one 10th of the budget they had in the '60s. it takes too long. here comes the trump administration. there are suggestions that things could be set up. they have stud he did id, haven't committed to putting astronauts on maiden flight and sending it around a loop around the moon which is cool idea unless you're people that have to go which sounds scary. they announced it six weeks ago. elon musk says, nasa, that is great. i will fly my falcon heavy rocket next year. once i test that, i will let a couple paying passengers go in my spacecraft. i will loop around the moon six months before yours does. that was interesting moment. surprised a lot of us. this is the falcon 9. what is revolutionary about musk's rockets and jeff bezos and amazon does this as well, they come back. first stage is multiple orbit. second stage continues. first stage comes back. if you watch this, there is one launching in a couple of hours. flies back to either the launch site or to a barge out in the leaving pacific or atlantic ocean depending the launch site. completely autonomous. nobody joysticking this. talking to barge or spacex, talking to the rocket, comes down usually landing perfectly. he is refurbishing them and getting ready to fly soon. this is major change. you're talking about a huge reduction in costs. this is the falcon heavy. this is his big one going up in probably about a year, six months to a year. basically three falcon 9s put together. all three will separate and fly back as i was describing. finally he pitched in september in mexico at a conference, his interplanetary transport system this is his idea of a huge solar system class rocket that can carry crews saturnish, he says, kind of like orion. that is next to a saturn v. you get idea of the scope. that is the passenger vehicle which he thinks can carry0 to 80 people. this basically for his plan to colonize mars. the whole reason he got into the space business was because he wants to send you humanity to mars and have this carbonnite earth 2.0 environment up there so when we completely wreck this planet we can live on that one. it has a long way to go. mars is not very nice place. it is interesting idea. jeff bezos is same basic ilk. he runs amazon. he has a rocket company. he wants to colonize deep space. he is not sure about mars. for scale, here is a astronaut sitting up on tail end of the rocket. it is big. if you every want to go into space, and like my, you break into cold sweat when elevator doors take too long to reach the floor, this is the rocket, not like no windows like the other guy. before we end i have a space age quiz. i have three copies of the book to give away. i know there is couple of ringers in here, you probably shouldn't weigh in, but for you civilians, you know who i am talking about david. for you civilians, who was the third man to step on the moon? >> pete conrad. >> wow. give the man a hand. most people don't get that one. probably made these two easy. i will be completely embarrassed. who was the first woman to fly in space? >> did it with the accent. [inaudible] >> most people say sally ride. she was female cosmonaut in 1963 was it? val tina. [inaudible] what's that? was he wearing a shirt? okay. question number three, last one. what media hero is elon musk most often compared to? you know. yep. "iron man." captain crunch did you say? very good, sir. [applause] boy, that was quick. so, that concludes, if you would like a copy of the book. they're here. happy to sign, write anything you want in there, as long as it is savory. welcome to the new space age. we're here. thank you very much. [applause] before i turn it back to you, we'll do a q and a before i turn it back to you, gentleman in the red shirt here, david, stand up. this is david. let's give him a little round of applause here. he goes through all my books because he is nice guy. i don't pay him anything for it. i probably shouldn't pay that you should be able to bill for this. keep me from making embarrassing mistakes. frances and martin do same thing. wherever you are, stand up take a bow. i will take questions. >> what is our government's plan for landing on mars? >> what is our government's plan for landing on mars. the plan as been put forth is the journey to mars i guess since we canceled the constellation program in 2009 is an overarching pan to incrementally work our way to mars with humans. sometime by 2036 and what i have given you is about much detail that is out there to be nailed down. there is a larger plan. it is interesting you ask this now actually because i interviewed senior national official in charge of that program, human spaceflight a couple months ago, said, what is our plan to get to mars? he said, well, gave me a very long answer. it's a good answer. incremental, rebuild capability on earth. build the rocket. got crews in it. retire the space station because it is very expensive to operate. get stations in lunar space around the area around the moon. get experience there. make that big step off to mars in 2030. he have did say something i thought was very profound. we design life-support systems, experimental hardware and test it on earth for a year all the time. we get it up to the space stations, two weeks it goes kerplunk. you have to figure out what is wrong to get it fixed. that is why we have a space station probably. that is good point. on other hand guys like elon musk says, that is not way to do it. build a very large rocket with a lot of chemicals and get in it and go. he has a point. there are problems. we're trying to figure out to deal with radiation which is much worse more than we thought. eve effects of it are worse than we thought. effects of weightlessness are worse than we thought. interview for a new book at johnson space center, 50 years ago we're finding stuff that it does to people that isn't good. flattens eyeballs. may cook neurons in your brain and dementia-like symptoms, may bring cardiovascular issues into the system. it will take time to figure out. if you take robots or brains in a led sphere or a machine, if you send people there is a lot to do. that is non-answer. musk intends to do it by 2025 if he can. chinese say 2040. we'll see you there. anybody else? >> take cooperation from the, no thanks. cooperation of the international space station and continue that and cooperate on the way? >> right. the question is, can we have more cooperation in this ongoing human space exploration? that is another one of those answers that tends to get stretched out. the simple answer is yes. we proved we can do it with the space station. it wasn't easy. initial batch much cooperation with japan and some european powers, european space administration. russia was brought in as sort of a political move, when the soviet union fell apart. they had a bunch of hardware for their next mir-2 space station. we said bring it to the party. we'll include it on ours. that is essentially what happened. it did provide a good model for international cooperation. it hasn't been easy, has not been a smooth road but it works. the problem we're having right now, major partners are european space agency, which are great, wonderful smart people, wonderful engineers, don't have very much money. the russians space agency, again lots of experience and in orbit,. lots of experience with life-support on large rockets but really struggling financially. most of their problems are shelved at the moment. we need to pay them to do it. of course partner of choice would be china. they have flown in orbit. they have launched two small space station. they will launch a third that will be bigger. they have gone great guns. they are landing probes on moon. sending them to mars. they will send astronauts to the moon we think in the 2020s. we have this thing called itar, a set of laws designed to prevent intellectual property being transferred to what could be hostile powers, depending on how you read itar almost everybody but hawaii. it is really frustrating. there is a lot of limitations what you can do internationally because of those regulations. so there is a lot of people in nasa that are trying to figure out how to work past this. it will probably be some form of trilateral agreement instead of bilateral ones. that way you can work with other partners to make it all come together a little better. the answer is yeah, probably best way to go. one thing i'm leaving out is national pride. chinese have certain interest in doing them of is. even though they are doing these things 50 years after we and soviet union did. there is a matter of great pride moving quickly to the steps into space and if you listen to a lot of people in congress, we have some of that ourselves still. you know. we like to do our big sls moon rocket back to the moon, out to mars all by ourselves. is that realistic? probably not in this economic environment. so, yeah, international cooperation would be smart way to go. >> use this? >> yeah. >> i read science fiction novel by arthur clarke came out in the '70s. i remember he was discussing alternative ways getting from the surface of the planet into space. he mentioned the putt-putt bomb idea. said it would work. what they did in the futuristic novel, they had it like an elevator. went up into space, ran down a cable, that -- he was apparently convinced that was realistic. anybody talk about that sort of alternative to having to be a rocket? >> yeah. space elevators were a hot topic. they are studied to death. if you took all the studies done between that is a and universities and private groups, like some of the ones belong to, you can climb those up into orbit to forget about building a elevator at all. basic idea you have a tether attached to the ground. >> >> there are all kinds of reasons that water is valuable so this stuff to come back to earth is aluminum on the moon with balustrades rich in carbon there is a lot of there is one of entrepreneur rather the and mining that in orbit there have been some easing concerns. the problem is if you bring down that much platinum in one chunk so they will say look at all the money that they will make because it is like saying let all your diamonds out at once. we have to go robotic leave because it isn't easy. and then eventually probably both of these two major companies that were funded by a deep pockets working on that first stage of mining. and they have no concrete plans. and to see what you use out there because of the three-pointers -- printers now there is a beautiful component they put those up in space with a chunk of asteroid it sounds crazy and be done. >> is anything that the astronauts on the moon saw?. >> i feel i'm having the coast to coast moment. i don't know. david has met almost all of them. i did do a radio show in chicago that said i want to talk to your author about being on the moon because you are part of that conspiracy. i thought he was a nut but thank you for your question there are creatures out there that is fine. go look to the thousands of feet of film with all of the technology and talk to them and then tell me think they didn't do it. so the end of the answer is after i made fun of the question i was talking to buzz aldrin. and i said did you ever seen eating about men and pigeons? he said yes. the window lunar module top path took off all of the of mylar shielding flies away in little pieces and he said that looks like there were rude and pigeons and it turns out there was but not what i thought so i don't think so. >> so with the personalities to invest so i instructed you amassed any of them as young military pilots at that age what are the odds you'll lose your life in pursuit of what you are doing? so where will i get buried? so it is the impossible scenario everybody is familiar with the worse case scenario the odds are very good but those that were weeded out it is a reluctance to stand in the spotlight america loves it celebrities if you know, what in the beryl means that is the definition of what is like to be famous. so if somebody had a little too much it would draw attention. >> i said i would be very reserved but he's very out there in terms of his personality so was so wide range of people. >> it is interesting because if you meet somebody like gordon cooper he is a big personality guy who came back to earth and said that was great then he became a fine artist doing that ever since and he is shy and quiet and a very gentle soul . he is happy to you talk about a year at one of the events and has been doing that for about 48 years. spee mcfadyen day tough act to follow. >> but talk about printers and space i would love to see that show that would be fantastic of zero gravity with a complete vacuum out there? that is better than praying this back crashing to the earth. >> so that is for precious metals but that makes all kinds of since they said that to the one that is called made his base and has to be in the enclosure and pass certifications and cannot affect their air supply but they haven't tested yet printing with metall. and with the polymers and plastic there are simple tools and pieces and though day tested those in a vacuum that would be the next tap but there is no other way because if you try to do injection molding so printing makes a lot of sense i am afraid of getting there is some useful parts. >> but to get back to some of the earlier points, space-based wide was the meritocracies have a the best day of the brightest but space-age two stars to look like nothing more. so what do you think that will do to popular support for the space program?. >> i do think there is a lot of dealing going on and i think the johnson space center in florida in the other places are where they are. i do agree there was a lot of merit for the best in the brightest but it was also very expensive. now they are spending one-tenth of that budget from 1966. but and i am not thrilled about that but if you look at them they are less famous than besos or musk if you have spent at the nasa field centers. they spend money on it bin is cancelled they change the program but that brilliance and the drive is astonishing but i do think space is 2.zero and that is the date of the next book is the amazing thing and there will be some stunts that go on but we were a race to prove we had a better society we did not really have to go to the moon but we decided to do that to do that before the bad guys did and was one of the reasons. [applause] . >> here in portland oregon named after the governor with strong environmental policies andlo

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