This Week in Space 100

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

00:01 - Tariq Malik (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space. It's episode 100 and we're going to celebrate with Dr Alan Cernan and find out what it takes to ride in space on Virgin Galactic. Also, the Odysseus Moon Lander still on the moon, an air leak on the International Space Station. And when will SpaceX actually launch its first astronaut mission of the year? Stay tuned and find out. This is this Week in Space Episode 100, recorded on March 1, 2024, riding to space with the Virgin Galactic.

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01:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Welcome to this Week in Space the writing with the Virgin Galactic Edition. I'm Tarek Malik, editor-in-chief of spacecom, and of course, my partner, rod, is off gallivanting around Ecuador or the Galapagos Islands this week. He sends his best, but he's going to miss our amazing episode 100, where we're going to talk to Dr Alan Stern, southwest Research Institute astronaut, planetary scientist and the principal investigator of New Horizons. You may have remembered that he joined us before to talk all about Pluto, but the one thing we won't have is Rod bothering us with his goofy questions. Alan recently flew into space on the Virgin Galactic Spaceship Unity and we're going to find out all about that. But before we start, please don't forget to do SS Solid and make sure you like and subscribe and all that cool podcast stuff. We are counting on you.

02:54
And of course, now we've got our traditional space joke, this one from loyal listener David Eckerd. I'm going to need help on this because Rod's not here. So, anthony, where did the private Odysseus moon lander go before it landed on the moon? I don't know. Tarek, tell me it went to the bar. Now it can't stand up. That joke's going to make a lot more sense in a few minutes when we get to the news section. So let's get to some headlines real quick and then we'll get into our fun interview with Dr Alan Stern.

03:35
I've got three cool stories. We'll go through them really quick. The first one is the Odysseus moon probe and it's going to make sense in a minute, because last week we were talking or last episode we were talking all about the intuitive machine's private mission to the moon, the Odysseus spacecraft on the IM1 mission, and unfortunately this week the mission ended, which we expected. It wasn't supposed to last more than about a week on the surface. But the big twist is that when they landed on the moon it didn't actually set down easily. It broke a leg, which is why it tipped and fell over on the lunar surface. And despite that, nasa and intuitive machines are calling it a success, and that's because the spacecraft itself is about 14 feet tall, if memory serves managed to make the first soft landing of a private company ever, the first soft landing at the South Pole of the moon. It was the first successful landing of it in a way of the commercial lunar payload services mission, nasa's CLIPS program. And not only did it tip over and break that leg, but it took pictures from the lunar surface. It beanbacked data from the payloads that were on board and everything. I mean basically everything worked, except it broke the leg and fell on over, which was really exciting to see, and in its last photo, before it went silent this week, was of the crescent earth looking at its home, which is very, very sad to see it go. There is hope, though, that after the 14-day lunar night that is now kind of blanketing the area that odyssey spacecraft, it might actually wake back up and phone home again. We saw it happen with Japan's slim moon lander, and so it could in fact happen with this. The slim moon lander, by the way, also shut back down again in the lunar night, so we'll have to see how that one does, but very exciting to see the final sunset of this mission, especially after it broke its leg, and can't wait to see the next one. By the way, they call it Odie now for short, instead of Odysseus, which is an interesting twist. That was from spacecom. In fact, all of these stories I think that I picked are from spacecom. I might be a little bit biased, of course.

06:01
The second one I've got here is a bit of a more of a concern. It's an air leak on the International Space Station, and this actually came earlier this week. In a NASA press conference, nasa's Joel Montalbano, the Space Station Program Manager, said that there is a small but increasing leak coming out of the aft end of the service module section, a service section of the Russian segment of the International Space Station. It's not strong enough or powerful enough to be a threat to the crew right now. There's seven people on board the space station currently, but it is something that they're trying to pin down. They've traced the leak to somewhere in the vicinity of where the aft end, where the docking port, is. That's where the Russian Progress Vehicles park themselves autonomously. There's like a three-foot section that they think the leak is in and they're going to have to figure out where that is and then patch it up to try to stop that in the future.

07:03
It's always a little bit disconcerting when you have these kind of air leaks, because the astronauts need that to survive, but the space station is 20-plus years old, so it has shown these types of leaks and these types of growing pains in the past. Actually, more recently, more famously, there was a Soyuz leak in a hole in a spacecraft that required the replacement of that vehicle at the station. They can't really replace the service module, but Montobano of NASA said that they're not worried for the crew yet and it's not at that point. So they're going to keep tracking it down, try to isolate it and hopefully repair it over time. And that's great, because going into our third story is that next crew. The reason that Joel Montalbano was talking about this leak is because he was talking about how ready the space station is for its next crew.

07:54
And our final story is that SpaceX is getting ready to launch their first astronaut mission of the year of 2024. And that mission is the crew 8 expedition to the International Space Station. This is a mission that will send four astronauts on the crew Dragon Endeavour. This is SpaceX's most flown Dragon spacecraft making its fifth flight, which is, I believe, what the vehicles themselves were approved for or rated for Basically five flights and they'd be done, but NASA is now looking to maybe even extend that to 15 flights with SpaceX to get more use out of these. And this crew 8 mission is kind of an interesting one because it's launching three rookie astronauts and then one big veteran, and the astronaut crew is, I believe it's NASA astronaut, matthew Dominic. He's the commander and this is his first time ever flying. The pilot is Michael Barrett, a physician and NASA flight surgeon turned astronaut, who actually has flown a couple of times before, one on a shuttle mission and one on a long duration mission to the space station, and he's the pilot and the sole veteran of the flight Coming up.

09:03
The crew is another astronaut, jeanette Epps, making her first flight. She was actually supposed to fly on a Boeing Starliner way back when and then they reassigned her to SpaceX, when clearly we've seen that Starliners have been delayed for quite some time. Maybe April 22nd they actually packed the Starliner vehicle up with cargo, so we can Rod and I can talk about that when he's back. And finally, russian Cosmonaut, alexander Grubenkin, another first time flyer and former Russian military pilot. So they're going to spend about six months on the space station, but their mission has already been delayed.

09:38
We talked about the Odysseus Moonlander earlier. This crew eight mission was supposed to launch on the 22nd of February. They delayed it to the 28th and then to March 1st because SpaceX had to launch that Odysseus Moonlander from the same pad, pad 39 and a at the Kennedy Space Center on February 18th. That mission went fine, but now they're facing weather concerns and NASA is looking at launching it on March 2nd at 11 o'clock at night. So it'll be a Saturday night fever in space for SpaceX and NASA, if they can get this off the ground. But it's not looking good. Weather is 40% go. So if not, they'll try for Sunday and then make sure that they fly in good time.

10:21
But that's our headlines for the week. It's going to spend a pretty big, busy one and when we come back we're going to talk about what's like to fly on a Virgin Galactic Spaceplane with Alan Stern. Stay tuned. And here we are with Dr Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, a Southwest Research Institute astronaut. And, of course, if you're new to the show, the last time we saw Alan he was here because he is also the principal investigator of the New Horizon spacecraft, which visited Pluto, some Quaper Belt objects, and is out there on the fringes of our fellow system. Alan, welcome back to show 100 of this week in space. It's so great to have you here today.

11:01 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Number 100. That's so cool. Thank you, Tariq Super to be back.

11:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yes, and Rod does send his hellos from the Ecuadorian area and the Galapagos, of course. So that's so great yeah thanks, but you've been busy since we last spoke to you. But just to give our listeners a bit of a refresher, can you kind of just remind us just a little bit about yourself, your path to space, before we get into what seems to be one of the most exciting plane trips I've ever heard of in a bit.

11:38 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Yeah, Well, I'm a kid that grew up wanting to be in space exploration, space science, and it really worked out. I've now spent a fairly long career being a nerdy planetary scientist, but also being involved in now 30 NASA and European space agency missions that have flown or are about to launch. That includes Europa Clipper that's got to fly in October.

12:12 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And I saw that in the clean room. It's really exciting.

12:15 - Alan Stern (Guest)
It's a big spacecraft, very important one, and I've had the honor and privilege of leading the principal investigator of one kind of or another on 15 of those 30 missions. So I've done a lot of that. I worked at NASA headquarters for a time running the science mission directorate. I've been very heavily involved in the last 15 years in the development of commercial space flight and wanted to go into space all my life and had a chance to do that last year for the first time.

12:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And that is one of the key reasons we wanted to have you back. Obviously, I love talking to you, alan, but it's not every day that a guest on the show comes back after flying to space to let us know exactly what happened. By the way, just really quick, when we did have you on the show, we were talking about New Horizons and its future, and since then, you did get the mission extension through 2029. Is that right?

13:18 - Alan Stern (Guest)
And NASA announced in September that New Horizons would get extended and technically through 2028 or 2029, they still have to decide. But obviously a lot of people in the scientific community have congratulated us and of course, our team is just ecstatic because we're finding that there are lots more corporate belts ahead of us and we're sent there to study the corporate belt. We're the only spacecraft ever purpose built sent to study the corporate belt and we want to get the most out of it that we possibly can before we leave the belt.

13:49 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And there was a study and I'm sorry this is a bit of a segue, but there was a study, like just last week that we were writing about that said that the corporate belt is bigger than we even thought in the beginning and we knew it was pretty big.

13:59 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Yeah, there's a number of lines of evidence that it may stretch out quite a bit further or have an extension to it, or maybe the second belt no one knows the details yet. Second, but there are building lines of evidence that the corporate belt is a bigger structure than even what we thought and that New Horizons could be in it the rest of the decade, maybe even into the 23rd.

14:22 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, that's exciting. I can't wait to see what more science you're able to pull from that region as you fly through it. But, new Horizons aside because that's an awesome mission, in October you had a series of blogs that came out because you did launch on Virgin Galactic's Galactic Five mission, on the Spaceship Two vehicle, the Unity Spaceplane. Basically, you jumped on a rocket plane and you flew into space, alan, and then you came back and I just think that's amazing and very sci-fi future, and I know it's something that, as you mentioned, you've been looking forward to both personally and professionally your whole life. And I just had to ask is that as awesome as it sounds? Because it sounds pretty crazy.

15:14 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Yeah, I will tell you, Terry, it was the best work day ever. It was, you know, as a personal experience, from the rocket ride up to space to the time that we were there to the reentry and landing, the camaraderie, the crew, all that was even better than I expected. And then, you know, I went there to do a job and we had nine separate objectives and all nine got accomplished. So I'm really happy and really proud that we were able to bat a thousand on my rookie spaceflight and I'm looking forward to flying again.

15:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and you have additional flights in like basically on your schedule. You've got like a flight plan for additional science missions. Does that make?

16:04 - Alan Stern (Guest)
sense we have one more suborbital flight that I'll be flying with Virgin Galactic.

16:09
This will be to perform an experiment that NASA's funding to look at how well the vehicle can do astronomy. You know, unmanned rockets, ones called sounding rockets have been used for decades, but the Virgin Galactic system and, for that matter, the Blue Origin system are both much less expensive to use, and so it would be a boon for NASA if they can be pressed into the service of astronomy. We already know they can be used for microgravity science. We already know that for human physiology they're going to be useful. For educators they're going to be useful. The experiment I'm doing has to do with looking at the same star fields that we looked at with a space shuttle experiment that I was PIA, using the same gear, the space shuttle gear, but now doing it from Virgin spacecraft, to see if there are any differences. If there aren't, then we know that we can do at least as good a job as we could have on the space shuttle, and that'll open up some important avenues of new, lower cost research.

17:13 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, the science. I really want to ask you about that a little bit later in the talk, because it seems like there's a lot of promise there.

17:20
I want to know how you can even focus on work when you're on a rocket plane and then where it could lead the future of science both on Earth and in space in the future.

17:32
But how does one book a trip, alan, on Virgin Galactic For our listeners, if you're unaware, virgin Galactic is a private company founded by Sir Richard Branson. They launch the spaceship to Unity Planes, soon to be a new Delta variant that is going to fly a little bit more quickly with turnaround to suborbital space and back. It's piloted by two pilots and then you have the crew members, like yourself, alan, who strap in for that ride. They get up in the waitlist environment, they do their science work or their observations. I guess you have to get back in to your seats and then they come back to Earth and you launch out of a spaceport America in New Mexico. But someone has to buy that ticket and I'm just curious how did this flight happen? Because Virgin Galactic was really ramping up to fly passage in space. But it's been a long road getting to the part where they can start flying people and someone has to book that trip.

18:36 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Yeah Well, first I should say that, of course, I flew as a researcher and I'll tell you the story of how we came to purchase the flight A. The initial reason for developing the Virgin Capactic system and the Blue Origin system are Earth-based tourists, for people who want to go and experience the overview of fact, the weightlessness and lock it right as a personal experience, and so anyone can go to the websites and start the process of getting in line to fly. In our case, back in 2009 and 10, at the Southwest Research Institute where I worked, funds got 3,000 employees based in San Antonio, texas, but actually with offices spread around the United States and even across the world. We started a commercial space flight suborbital research program and it was really ahead of its time on the principal investigator back program and, as a part of it, we wanted to gain a competitive advantage in this new era. So we went out and purchased seats for experiments and the experimenter to go with, so we could be in the lead in this field.

19:56
Now we had to sign those contracts back in 2011 and 2012. And at the time we thought we would fly it sooner than 2023, but it was worth the wait, no question, and, in fact flying along with another researcher named Kelly Girardi and a space tourist named Kedi Mezal Rouge. The three of us flew together in the space with those two pilots and with a Virgin trainer and coordinator on board. So the six of us flew to space on November 2nd and Kelly and I were there to get work done and Kedi was there to have a space tourist experience, and it all worked out just great.

20:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's amazing. And how much training did you have to get then for that? Because you've been in this field for a while and we should mention that you're no stranger to flying in fast vehicles. I mean, I've seen the images of you in the W57 doing scientific research from high altitude, and then I learned that you were slotted to fly on the space shuttle. You actually mentioned it a few minutes ago about having an experiment there, and then that opportunity was changed, but I didn't even know. You applied to be an astronaut and went through the screening process. Alan, that's amazing to get that far in that selection process.

21:26 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Well, I think they started off with close to 10,000 people and ended up selecting about 30. I was not selected but I was in the last group who went through all the physicals and the psychological exams and so forth. So I got a real good US government physical out of that, Fairly healthy, but I was very disappointed not to be selected. Regardless, you asked about the training and let me just say, for a space tourist, the primary training is just a four day course in which you're down at Spaceport America in Virgin Galactic, Get you real familiar with the vehicle and the flight suits and both nominal and off-neighborhood and its emergency procedures, and they put you in a simulator and you practice, practice, practice and they take you out on an airplane, an aerobatic airplane, and get you used to pulling jeans and for a tourist, I think that's probably about all you need. Some of the people that also their tourists want to go fly in a zero-g airplane before that's a separate thing you can buy seats on.

22:37
In my case, as a worker, as a researcher going to space, I wanted to make sure that we had the highest possible probability of it working, so we did a lot more training. Of course, I trained with the gear that we developed for the experiments and practiced with that over and over. But I went to centrifuge runs flying the Virgin Galactic launch and entry profiles three different times. I flew training flights on zero-g airplanes, flew in high performance F-104 jets to do high G flying and just practice, practice, practice so that we try to refine the procedures, get familiar with all the sensations.

23:25
But the only thing you can't really simulate is looking out the window and try and take as much of the risk as you can the risk of not performing Well, and it's in a very compressed amount of time. You have to get a lot done. You don't get a second shot at it. The whole space flight from lift off off the runway to landing on the runways hour and 15 minutes or a little less. Actually the microgravity portion is a little under four minutes. So it's a very compressed timeline. Nine objectives it was challenging and so we practiced, practiced, practiced and it all worked out real well.

24:09 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And just a quick follow-up then, so that training the Southwest Research Institute organized and yourself organized that separately, then it wasn't something that was kind of baked into the research scientist flight plan that Virgin Galactic would put together.

24:26 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Right, virgin provided the same four day course that I spoke about earlier. Yeah, in the four days before we flew as a very intensive bit of training, just like space tourists do. But we and every time we did a simulation and we did dozens of them we practiced the experiment operations with a timer to make sure that we could get it all done in the amount of time and that we were getting better and better at it. But all the other training that I spoke to is training that we undertook at the Southwest Research Institute because we want to be crackerjack at this. It's the coming era and this is really the 21st century now, when researchers confine space.

25:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I have a question about that science and those objectives coming up, but first let's take a real quick break and then we'll get back to it. Well, thank you, alan. Yeah, and just to follow up, because we were just talking about the training that you had gone through for the flight and then you said you had what about like 90 minutes hour, 15 minutes from takeoff to landing, four minutes of weightlessness. I imagine that's like the sweet spot where your science is going to get done.

25:42 - Alan Stern (Guest)
When you're actually in the weightless condition, some of the science was done during acid and entry, because I was wearing a biomedical harness that was taking data on my react, my physiological reactions, throughout, in fact, from the time that I suited up two hours before the flight until after the flight, when we got back to the locker room and could go back to civilian clothes.

26:07 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Great. So that's, is that one objective, that the biomedical harness kind of test, or so what are the other things that you were looking at for this flight? And then, how did you design the experiment to take advantage of the environment you knew you'd be in?

26:22 - Alan Stern (Guest)
The primary purpose of this flight was a training and risk reduction flight in advance of the NASA flight. Okay, so we took along a mock-up of the experiment gear for the NASA experiment I'll be doing on flight two, and we also put in a number of training objectives so that we could reduce the risk. And we partitioned the objectives. There were six that were required to declare success. There were what we call minimum mission success. There were two more that, if we got those done, we would call it full mission success. And then we had a ninth objective that's actually a little bit of work relevant to the second flight that we call the get-ahead objective.

27:12
And so I wore a biomedical harness. Actually, I wore two different biomedical harnesses. They were collecting information about my blood pressure as a function of time, my respiration rate, my heart rate, etc. Because no one had ever instrumented a researcher on a suborbital flight before and we wanted to get a database that what we hope is that over the years that we'll get a real statistical database of different researchers flying with the same kind of measurements made so we can see what's typical. But we had to start somewhere. So we started with me I was like any big and then all the other objectives had to do with training for the flight, practicing things with the mock-up that we will do on the NASA flight later down the road.

27:59 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Great. And then that's you mean that's going through the actual motions of taking the data, or what you will do, how you will interact with the experiment hardware.

28:09 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Exactly.

28:10 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Okay Now I mentioned earlier that you've done a lot of aerial science on F-18 jets, on the W-57. How is working on an actual space plane, then? Different than that, because those other environments they look a lot more confined. You're in like a tiny cockpit with flying very fast and I imagine it must be different to shift between those different environments.

28:36 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Well, there are some differences, of course, and I've flown as a researcher on zero-g aircraft, doing research for both Southwest research and for NASA over the years. But on all the other things that I did you could always go back and do it again. Sometimes we had to for one reason or another. We just fly another flight because the space flights are so much more expensive. It's not really a good thing if you have to repeat. So you train a lot more.

29:06
Each flight counts a lot more, but in addition you have the very high G boost phase, a couple of assets that you really don't have when you're flying the jets of the zero-g, because we're pretty much flying straight and level. Occasionally we fly supersonic and for training purposes, sometimes that flew jets that were doing high speed assets to 30,000 feet. Sort of simulate what you get on a space flight and then a zero-g airplane. You can only get 20 or 30 seconds at a time, whereas on a space flight like this one it's four, four minutes, so that's more than ten times as long. Yeah, you can't really simulate that. And then you have the rear-entry, which is actually higher Gs than the S end, and all the buffeting and aerodynamic Forces of entry and that the sounds that are very different from being even on a jet fighter like an F 18.

30:03 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Wow, you mentioned that the one thing you couldn't Simulate was the view earlier and of course, virgin Galactic's Unity space plane and the spaceship to is known for those giant round windows and While you were kind of going through your objectives was there. There was their time to like look out and kind of absorb, look what was happening in those different phases of flights. I mean, I would imagine it could be a little difficult to look away and focus on work when you have that view right right at your fingertips there. Well, it.

30:35 - Alan Stern (Guest)
It, you're absolutely right and, and we realized before the flight, the view is gonna be magnetizing, right? It just incredible and it was. But you know I was there to get a job done, many even more so for the second flight. So we actually set aside a little time for me to look out the window. I couldn't just pass my face the window the whole time because we were Running through a timeline with lots and lots of steps in it, but I did take time to look out the window on three occasions Right as we cut the engines off, after I finished all my work, and then during entry, again when it didn't have any assigned tasks, and so I got a pretty good look at the earth.

31:20
I will say I did not have the time to soak it in, to really experience the overview effect, like a lot of space tourists do, because they can really soak it in, and a lot of my time was spent in the cabin getting things done on the training and research aspects of it was that view and I, you know what, what little time you could absorb it personally and not focus on the actual work, you know, was it what you expected to see?

31:48 - Tariq Malik (Host)
you know, based on all of your other experience, all of your other preparations, or was there something that surprised even you, you know, as experienced as you are in just all things? Space, to get that, that glimpse there.

32:02 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Well, it was pretty much what I expected, but it was real. And my own eyes and all looking at a picture, and there's the giant in fact I would call it the vast planet below Stretched out. You know, a whole continent stretched out before you, with that altitude and the atmosphere and and and all the landforms over to Mexico. Looking west, you know, for example, out to across to California and the Pacific, there's a lot of mountain ranges and it's just beautiful. It's absolutely stunning to see it for yourself.

32:32
There were things that surprised me about the flight, but they weren't in the view. Now, I think if I had a more time to really study the view then, 10 seconds here and 10 seconds there I would have probably picked out more things that were surprising in the view. But you know, for example, when we're, we're in zero gravity, the control jets are firing on the spacecraft and you can hear that they go bang, bang, bang, bang, bang and you're you're hearing it like somebody's taking a hammer to the, to the fuselage almost turns out. You can see those jets when they fire and when the vehicle starts to move and you're in the cabin, the walls will move away towards you and that's something that you can't really practice in an aircraft, and so I'd get used to that in real time.

33:19 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Wow, well, and did you? Um, I'm trying to imagine what that transition experience is like when it, when orbital astronauts, you know, like the NASA launches them to the space station or whatnot, they, you know, the engines cut off eight and a half minutes in they're in there and orbit. They have like an acclimatized Acclimatized I can't say that word acclimatized they get acclimatized.

33:45 - Alan Stern (Guest)
It's absolutely right.

33:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And so they take a little bit of time to do that. But then, of course, like the environment doesn't change there in weightlessness or microgravity for the duration of the mission two weeks, six months a year, whatever it is you had like four minutes you know of you you shift into that that environment, you've got a job to do, you've got a view to absorb, and then you have to, I guess, find your way back to your seat and then adjust again back to feeling gravity. You just mentioned, you know, more G's on the way down then then coming up, how, what was that transition between the, the microgravity, the gravity effects like? Was it jarring or Was it gentle? I'm just curious about what that was like before.

34:27 - Alan Stern (Guest)
It's a little bit like somebody on on on launch. What happens is your. For those who don't know, the virgin galactic spacecraft is carried up to altitude by a carrier aircraft and the spacecraft is slung under under the wing and, just like the old X 15, when you're up at altitude and everything checks out, you're ready to fly, they release the spacecraft and it falls for a moment or two. And then the engines are I do and when the engine ignites you're immediately pressed back in your seat for about two seconds. The engines not running at full thrust and then it really hits and at that point it's some serious G's or a half G's from. It'll get your attention.

35:07
And as soon as the vehicle goes supersonic, the pilots pull, pull the yoke back and the vehicle goes vertical and you're lying on your back being shoved up into space Like you're going up the biggest, most powerful roller coaster you could ever imagine. And then what? When the engines finished and you go to micro gravity, the engine tails off and thrust. So it's a little bit like taking a dimmer switch, but with the G forces, not the light bubbles, and just turning it down for a couple of seconds. You so the Gs wash away and then suddenly you notice, you know, the seat belts are floating and you're in microgravity and you can get out of your seat. And then at the end of the microgravity portion you'd be back in your seat, which has, you know, a five point harness and really good seat belts, or the reentry portion, and then the Gs ramp back up over a few seconds until the vehicle you know slows down considerably and the Gs wash away again.

36:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So you're climbing into the seat before the gravity starts coming back. Is that you need to do that?

36:11 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Because, because the Gs ramp so fast that it would be like falling, you know, in a four or five G field. You don't want to do that.

36:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, I went on the gravity.

36:21 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Yeah. I was just going to practice, we practice that a lot.

36:25 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Alan, I went on the gravatron a lot at the carnival, you know, and the fair, and even that was a little much for me, so and that that was not even like two Gs, I think. So I don't know, I don't know. I did. I did take a trip on on zero gravities plane before and and that 30 seconds, and how surreal it was. I think at one time one of the university students was floating around a pink penguin. That's the one. The one thing I remember is that weird pink penguin floating around while I had no hand hold at all, but but that was just 30 seconds and I can't imagine what you got to do the 30 second zero G, a number of probably 15.

37:05 - Alan Stern (Guest)
20 times.

37:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Or perhaps perhaps a few more than I would have liked. I did have to. Katie Caldwell or Katie Coleman did have to hold me down and make sure I didn't lose my lunch at the end of it, but it was, it was still worth it. I think we did like about 30 parabolas, 32 parabolas on that flight.

37:27 - Alan Stern (Guest)
And between each one you pulled about two Gs almost.

37:30 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Exactly.

37:31 - Alan Stern (Guest)
You get a little bit of a feeling of the acceleration. For that we always call it vitamin G.

37:39 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I've got a few more questions about what you think that these types of opportunities will mean for the future of space science, and I'm going to ask those right after this quick break.

37:50
Well, like you mentioned earlier when we were starting to talk about just the work that you were doing, why?

37:57
Why you and the scientists at Southwest Research Institute, you know, started a suborbital science program that you saw this as kind of a new and kind of wide open opportunity for scientists, and I did want to ask a bit about that because, as you mentioned, you've got another flight coming to do to do science, and Virgin Galactic seems to be banking on scientists as a key, a key user of the system, and not just Virgin Galactic, but Blue Origin, obviously, is another company that offers. It's not a space plane, but they offer a vertical takeoff, vertical landing for for experience, they flown several uncrewed NASA flights as well and it's and it seems like there will be more opportunities on different vehicles to come, and is that something we go? How valuable do you see that additional option? So it's, you're not launching on a sounding rocket where you've got maybe like a very small payload size but you're not going all the way to orbit and spending tens of millions of dollars or more on something like that. Where does this fall in the schema?

39:04 - Alan Stern (Guest)
I think, it's fundamentally a game changer. Let me explain why. There's three elements to this to read. The first is that, unlike the sounding rockets that fly and I'm a big proponent of those, by the way, they're not, they're never going to replace one another. I mean more than I like to say. You know, when you sit down at the table, you have a fork and knife and a spoon, and they're not in competition. They're different tools for different purposes. Right, it's really hard to eat your soup with a fork. It's really hard to cut at your your your steak with the with the spoon. They're not competing with one another. They're different tools for different purposes, and the sounding rockets and the new generation vehicles that carry humans are really complementary.

39:49
Two major advantages of the new generation vehicles like Virgin and Spaceship Unity is first, they fly for dramatically less money. Is that millions and millions of dollars? The cost of flying a researcher in space is a tenth of that, something like a tenth of that. So that's a huge advantage in getting the cost down. The second thing is the vehicles fly much more often. When I was an experimenter on sounding rockets, which I did for 15 years, in 15 years I flew 14 sounding, so about one a year. We have the opportunity on vehicles like Spaceship 2 and the new Delta vehicles to be flying almost daily in the future, and probably Blue Origin will be at a higher flight rates too. So it's it's it's really a game changer and it's that combination of being much more routine, much more frequent and with the lower cost that lets us do things we could never do with the sounding rock. Now the sounding rockets go higher and they have more accurate pointing systems. So I guess each other advantages but the low cost and frequent nature and lets you do a lot more data taking and afford to do the data taking. And then, thirdly, it also by flying the experimenter. You get rid of all the costs and all the failure modes of automating experiments, because humans naturally conduct experiments very well if they're trained at it.

41:21
You know if it's been very strange in the space sciences that we always operate things by remote control, with automation. That's not true of any other science. If you're a volcanologist, you go to volcanoes. If you're an astronomer, you go to the observatory, the telescope. If you're a geologist, you go out in the field. If you're an oceanographer, you go out on the ocean or deep diving, what have you and in space science, we've had to automate and go to mission control ever since it started because the costs were so high that you really couldn't afford to send the experiment. Now we can. It's the normalization of that. Sending the experimenters along is going to raise the success rates and lower the cost, and I'm really excited about it because it's the 21st century. It's about time.

42:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Now I had a question because I know that the cost for Virgin Galactic that what they've stated publicly has changed over time. I think it was 200,000 when they were first recruiting tickets. That went up to 250 for a while. Now it's around 500 or so. They had a call earlier this week where it seems like it's still moving around. It's still much cheaper than the 20 to 40 million I believe some folks paid to travel to the International Space Station.

42:33 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Those are longer orbital missions, but you can just comparing to the suborbital sounding rockets of it, more than apples to apples comparison, there's still five to 10 times cheaper. That's a huge amount. When any price drops, imagine if anything you go and buy food, meals out, entertainment, a car, a house. What if the price dropped by a factor of five or 10? How that would be a game changer.

43:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I guess the question there was do you see a time where a researcher or a university or a company that wants to do research will be able to choose, almost like if you're booking a flight, but if I want to get this type of science condition for my experiment, I can sign on to a Virgin Galactic flight for this flight profile, for this price tag for that research versus. I'll go to Blue Origin. I'll know it'll be like a. You'll be able to compare like the sticker price for those flights for the experiments and the conditions you want to set for your experiment. Is that kind of like the end goal that you're hoping to see from the different flight?

43:44 - Alan Stern (Guest)
I think we will see that, and I think we'll see that within a few years, and I think that when a lot of the backlog gets flown people have been waiting a long time, both researchers and tourists you'll be able to do call up flights on fairly short order. You can do it every day or next week, but certainly you can get in line now with a matter of weeks or months, just like you can buy an airline ticket. We will reach that point. That's not going to happen next year or two years, but you look out, in the 2030s and 40s, this is going to be much more like flying on an airline, in the sense that you can book a flight quickly and there'll be a number of competitive price point options for you different vehicles that have different capabilities. And then you go to your science. You do whatever. Your job is up there.

44:36 - Tariq Malik (Host)
When I take a trip, though on I don't know United versus Delta versus Southwest I used to fly it to go home to California from the East Coast. I don't have to worry too much about the risk and whatnot. And that is different to flying space on these spacecraft, that there is a different risk element that I'm sure you would have to get comfortable with and whatnot. Was that something that was a concern even in the early kind of planning for a mission like this with Virgin Galactic? For you or for your family to say you know, this is what the risk is, I accept it, or this is why I'm comfortable with it? Or how future scientists might have to deal with a similar question.

45:24 - Alan Stern (Guest)
That's a good question. I wrote a blog about this, called risk and reward, and I think it's a balance In my case. There's no question that spaceflight is riskier today than stepping on a commercial airliner, but it's not so risky that I thought it was unreasonable at all. So you have to think about that. There's no question you're taking a bigger risk. I didn't think taking an unreasonable risk, and particularly for the reward of moving this field forward and getting a chance to see the earth from space and experience a spaceflight. It was. The equation was right side up, if you will.

46:07
I was looking at the available services, I think it'll get a lot safer too. I mean, it's safe now, maybe not as safe as the airlines, because they've been at it for decades and decades making it better and better all the time. I remember when I was a boy that the airliners crashed much more frequently than they crashed now, and with spaceflight, as we gain more and more experience, it's naturally going to get more memory, routine and safer even than it is now.

46:33 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, there was an interesting report out of the FAA this month, or maybe actually today is March as we're recording it, so it was last month, in February that they have to prepare for the eventual I don't want to say onslaught, but the amplification of these commercial flights so that they can follow it. And I can imagine I mean, you're from the Southwest Research Institute, but this is the kind of thing that NASA has their own flight opportunities and other agencies I'm sure would want to follow in there too, so that'll be very interesting to see. I was kind of going through a list of the services that are available to now. We've been talking a lot about Virgin Galactic and their spaceplane. We talked a little bit about Blue Origin and their new Shepard vehicle, but there are a few other ones that are coming out.

47:25
Space perspective and World View are planning balloon capsules to fly up to that high altitude, provide a different type of experience, and of course, balloon science is something that is done now too and that might give scientists a way to shepherd their payloads directly. And then there's already orbital experiences available now with SpaceX. They've been flying private missions to space, to orbit, and there's a few more companies that are planning that too? Is there a limit? Do you think? Now to the services that scientists like, non-professional astronaut scientists I guess it would be a term for it or we'll have to face, or really, is it really whatever the providers can come up with? I mean, there was a private mission to the moon that succeeded just recently, despite all odds, and even a broken leg too, and it seems that that could set the stage for not even the suborbital sciences, but for scientists like yourself walking on the moon to do one type of project or another.

48:33 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Yeah, I think that's what's going to happen. Over the decades we're going to see the suborbital research move out to be orbital is already some of that and then beyond Earth orbit to the moon and eventually Mars, across the solar system. Where we're headed is to a start for a future. It will take centuries to get there, but I really believe that when people look back from that faraway century they'll look back to the 2020s and say that's where Star Trek began. That's where the inflection point, where it all started to happen.

49:03
We're taking baby steps now, but they're going to get to be bigger and bigger steps. They're going to be more and more spaceflight. For the time being it's going to be very capacity limited. There's only so many spacecraft and so many flights per month that they can do. But you know, airlines started off being a lot less than what they are now and I think if the demand is there, the market will service that demand. There'll be more competitors in the field. The existing competitors will offer more capacity and new features. For example, the spacecraft that are flying now don't have windows that let you do experiments for ultraviolet astralline In the future. They will just like the Space Shuttle did, but they have to see that there's a market at demand for that.

49:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
When's your next flight, alan? Do you have a target date yet, or are you waiting for those shiny new Delta ships to come down the pipeline That'll fly a little bit more frequently?

50:04 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Well, we don't have a date just yet. We do have a contract for that flight and so I would just say ask me again in a few months, I think on no more. With a little luck it'll be this year, if not, then it'll be later in the 20s. But I'm also looking at opportunities to fly other ways suborbitably, because this is such a powerful research tool, and very interested in longer missions in Earth orbit to do other kinds of research that you can't do necessarily suborbitably.

50:37 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, alan, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being our 100th episode star and for walking us through what it's like to fly the Virgin Galactic skies there. That's really exciting. Where can people follow what your next space mission, your next big project, is with New Horizons, with all the other projects that you have going on at the Institute?

51:02 - Alan Stern (Guest)
Right, well, thank you and Tariq, thanks for having me on. I do have a Twitter or X feed. It's real simple. It's just my name, alan Stern, alan STERN. You can follow that. In addition, I write articles for magazines and I blog from time to time. So try to make it easy. If you're interested in New Horizons, you can Google the website, which is budojhuapledu, but you don't have to remember that, you can just Google it. But in NASA, new Horizons and at that website, you can sign up for regular updates and so forth, so you get push notifications. So plenty of ways to follow along. And there's a lot of other great stuff going on in space exploration, astronomy and people that write about it for a living, like yourself. Spacecom. That is one of the most authoritative and frequent sources of news, so plenty of ways for people to stay informed.

52:00 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, thank you so much. We turn 25 this year, by the way, spacecom, so we're very excited to still be around. That's fantastic and for me. Dear listeners, you can always find me over at spacecom and on Tariq J Malik at the X, if you will, the Twitter, and of course, ry is not here, but he is at the National Space Society, nssorg, and they're great places to satisfy your spaceflight cravings, as Rod likes to say.

52:28
Remember, you can always drop us a line at twistv, that's T-W-I-S, at T-W-I-T-T-V, and we welcome your comments, suggestions and ideas and those space jokes. You got to keep those coming and we love getting your comments and we answer each of them. So our new episodes publish every Friday on your favorite podcaster. So you can make sure to like and subscribe and tell your friends and give us a good, give us some reviews. Rod always wants five stars.

52:56
I'll take a few, whatever you want, but you can always head to our website at twittv and, of course, you can get all of the great programming at the Twit Network ad free with Club Twit, as well as some extras that are only available there. Rod likes to always point out the part where I fall off the chair, but I ordered replacement parts for real this time. That's not going to happen anymore. You can get Club Twit for $7 a month. That's like what two coffees and you've heard Leo talk about the tough times facing podcasters, so this is your chance to step up and be counted. You can follow the Twit Tech podcast at Twit on X or Twitter, facebook and Twittv and Instagram. So thank you all and we will catch you all in the next one.