This Week in Space 107 Transcript

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.

00:00 - Rod Pyle (Host)
On this episode of this Week in Space. We're talking about the Mars Sample Return Mission and it's in trouble. Stay with us. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT. This is this Week in Space, episode number 107, recorded on April 19th 2024, mars Sample Return Blues. Hello and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, the Mars Sample Return Blues edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Van Astor Magazine. I'm here, as always, with Tarek Malik, the implausible Editor-in-Chief of Spacecom.

00:42 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Implausible is right. How am I still here?

00:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm always looking for adjectives with an I when I remember to. And we're joined by the Clark Kent of Space Reporters, the super Leonard David. How are you, sir? I'm doing better.

00:58 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That's good. Leonard is craving illness to be with us today.

01:02 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yes, yes, he is working through the wilds of covid as we speak, so we really appreciate you coming on for this, uh, rather urgent discussion. Before we start, however, I would like to ask our friends and listeners and beloved audience to please don't forget to do us a solid make sure to like, subscribe and all the other podcast goodies, because we're counting on you for that. And now a space joke from loyal listener me. Yeah, are you ready? I'm ready, rod. I had a good space joke, but I ran out of room ah, ah, it's a fun, I love it oh, we got a single chuckle.

01:42
Leonard, on the other hand, is stone-faced, and deservedly so. Okay, I missed it. I don't know what it was, that's okay, you didn't miss anything. So, audience, please save us from yourselves. Send us your best work or most indifferent space joke at twisttv, and we'll be sure to credit you and add it for inclusion. All right, let's look at a couple of space headlines. And yeah, we'll, uh, we'll save the the mars sample return headline for for later, because that's a discussion that's the big one.

02:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But but we have dragonflies in space, that's right, that's right, and this is this one's from spacecom. I think some of these are are from maybe all actually uh all yeah, either from space or leonard, david or leonard, that's right, that's right.

02:30
but yeah, this, this was a really exciting one to see uh this week because nasa officially, you know, after years of saying they were studying it, they were planning to do it, they were, you know, hoping to budget for it, they have given the green light to the dragon fly nuclear powered helicopter to tighten the the atmosphere enshrouded moon of Saturn. And this is really exciting because it means that in 2028, which is really not that far from now the folks over at Johns Hopkins applied physics laboratory will put their, their nuclear powered drone on a rocket, will launch it uh to titan uh, and will hopefully fly the friendly skies uh that that methane sea covered world has, and we will be able to reconnoiter titan. You know much more uh in much more detail than we did with the hoygan's lander, uh back in. What was that? 2005? January 2005. It landed right Sometime after Christmas and it'll take a good long time to get there.

03:32
I think 2034 is when I saw that it's supposed to arrive. So this is great. This means that the mission's a go and that they're actually going to build the thing, they're going to get it up there, they're going to launch it on a rocket and we're going to hopefully see, like what it's like. And all of this was made, I think, much more possible from the success of the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars, which may be one of our other headlines that we're going to talk about, because you know that was a the first of its kind.

03:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
This is the kind of big brother, big sister, follow up to that uh, to go farther, further, faster, if you will, on another kind of, uh, cloudy world that's right and, uh, it noted in the article that it will hop once every 16 earth days, or once for every titan day, which I thought was, uh, appropriate. So that's pretty fast progress for something like that, yeah, and you've got this mobile counting on AI, of course.

04:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And you'll have this mobile, this mobile laboratory that you can pop around and and and try different places. You know, see what the different locations, like a big step up from hoidians which just kind of plopped on the surface, and that was it. That was. You got what you got and you didn't get upset.

04:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So stared at what it stared at. All right. And since you went ahead and gave us the transition, we have new clues to the demise of ingenuity little bits of blades scattered around, yeah.

04:52 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, this one is from Leonard's inside outer space blog. So, leonard, you know, tip of the hat to you, but Leonard, leonard found these photos, uh that nasa had on there, and I think a video too, it looks like uh of of folks, uh, by the way, leonard is mars boy on twitter. I'm not sure if anyone ever knew that so mars is in his place he's written.

05:14
He's written like how many books about mars, um, but yeah, he's got these, these new, new photos where it shows kind of the broken bits of of uh, ingenuity, where you can see uh resting place, taken, of course, by the Perseverance rover itself, and it comes also on the heels of NASA actually bidding a formal farewell to ingenuity. You know, the mission team saying their last goodbyes. It's not dead, it's just kind of beeping around being a stationary weather and tech demonstrator right now. But these are kind of the last photos that we're probably going to see. You can see in the images there's like a rotor that's a good distance away on a different dune, so it was a pretty violent impact that kicked those blades off there.

06:02
In these images you can see multiple pieces of the, the, the, the helicopter itself too. So you know it's a. It's a sad farewell that we can see it kind of in shambles now, but at least it's live and and sending little beeps and saying, hey, I'm here, here's what the conditions are like at my final resting place. Uh, you know, hopefully forever. You know I heard that they have something like 10 years worth of data space on the rover it's our part of it on the helicopter itself. So if it does survive that long, it has the memory space to hold all that data and maybe we can go get it later on with a Mars sample return mission. Rod.

06:39 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Oh, and just to be clear, the rover would have to drive back to it to retrieve that data. That's right. Not powerful enough to talk to Earth.

06:45 - Leonard David (Guest)
Exactly. Let me pop in there. I'm not going to take credit. Really I may be Mars boy, but Mars guy is Steve Ruff at Arizona State University and he has a video that he put together with another person providing some of those imagery and that, yeah, I was pretty telling. But Steve has done an incredible job with his kind of overviews of the helicopter crash and explaining kind of how the JPL about what, what he saw in those images. So the tip of the space helmet to Steve Ruff at ASU.

07:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
All right, and finally we have I was going to say more news, but I guess ongoing news on the Orion heat shield, which has shown a little more erosion than they had counted on. And just to set the stage for this, they're still using Avcoat, which is the same material they used for the Apollo heat shields, which worked brilliantly. But it's applied in a different way and, at least according to the mission manager when I spoke to him years ago, the formulation's a little different due to EPA regulations. So we have kind of two culprits here. We have a formulation, change in the chemistry of the thing it takes a lot longer to cure, among other things and a very different, much less labor-intensive method of creating it than we did back in the 1960s.

08:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, and this is a feature story at Spacecom that Leonard actually put together for us. Thank you so much, leonard, and so please chime in if I get anything wrong. But you know it's been a while since we had the Artemis 1, you know launch and reentry, you know back in what was that 10 years. Artemis 1, the 2021, right.

08:41 - Rod Pyle (Host)
No, but I mean we did the first test flight in 2014.

08:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, yeah, but didn mean we we did, uh, the first test flight in 2014.

08:48
Oh yeah, but didn't we throw that, that, that capsule, away?

08:51
This was the one that they wanted to keep the key, um, and and so this was like the, the big, the big test of the re-entry from, like lunar trip, you know speed, some coming in at like um, 25,000 miles an hour.

09:02
What is that? 40,000, uh000 miles an hour. What is that? 40,000 kilometers an hour, a reentry speed that they hadn't seen, you know, since the days of Apollo. And like the big ticket that came that NASA pulled away from them is that, while they have this, as you mentioned, this Avcoat heat shield on the bottom of the capsule itself, when they looked at it up close later, they saw, yeah, it did char the way that we thought it was going to do, but it also charred in ways that NASA wasn't really expecting. They had more of the material came off, burned away, you know, from the heat shield than they were expecting as well, and they really kind of want to know why, which is something that I think astronauts the four astronauts that are going to ride Artemis 2 would also like to know, to make sure that it's going to be OK Now.

09:49
The spacecraft did survive, you know just fine, on the on the way back, and so that gave them a lot of heart.

09:55
But they really want to understand this heat shield, you know, going forward, because they don't want to just send one mission and then, like, do extensive studies for years upon years. They want to send a mission every year for it, and it does seem like they are getting kind of closer to that, although they did push the Artemis 2 launch back a year from, like later this year to later in 2025. So they want to get to the bottom of this, understand it. If they have to make any formulations or changes, then they want to make sure that they don't have to introduce anything that's too disruptive to the whole process. That'll mess up all the other calculations. But, leonard, I mean, are there other greater concerns that you're reporting also turn? You know this is just a. It seems like it's a cherry type of engineering problem on top of the mission to get through, because they were fairly happy with it back in 2021. But it's 2024, or 2022, pardon me and they're still trying to get to the bottom of it.

10:54 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah, I think I wrote in there. They hope to get the final, final report out by spring, report out by spring, but I will tell you in my uh diving in on that story.

11:12
It took me months to get people to comment and the more that I didn't get comments back, I kept thinking is there more to this than you know what the story is about is? You know that we really have got to get I don't want to put people on a heat shield. You know that we're not sure exactly how it works. So that story was. You know it took me a while to get people to comment. I will say the jse orion office uh did respond to my uh queries and that was to their benefit. But I had a hard time working with the uh trying to find the contractors that actually did the test. You know I wanted to. I just all I wanted was pictures of the tests and I couldn't. I couldn't get those and, uh, it'd be over the months it got into.

12:08
I wonder what's going on with this story. Uh, so, uh, I keep an eye on this. I'm not uh, lockheed Martin at the 11th hour did, did uh come up with a good comment about what they were involved in there, helping to understand the problem. But let's see what the problem came out to be. I mean, how significant was it or wasn't it? So, yeah, I don't want to put people on something. We're not sure how the heat shield works. That's not a good thing. At 25,000 miles an hour it goes real fast.

12:48 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Just a point of detail. You know, if you ever burned a cork as a kid, maybe I was more of a firebug than most of you. It's kind of like that. So the heat shield's designed to char that's the whole point. And it's designed to ablate to a certain amount, because the erosion of the heat shield is actually part of what takes the heat away, besides the sort of plasma pellet forms. But you don't want material to depart unevenly or unexpectedly, so that's, I think, what they're trying to track down. All right, we are going to go to a short break and we'll be right back, so don't take your heat shields anywhere.

13:26
This episode of this Week in Space is brought to you by Wix Studio. You know, when I set out to build my own website many years ago, I started out with Wix and I've been a happy customer ever since. It gives me the tools I need to do a responsible job on my own, and you can go check it out at pilebookscom and tell me what you think. But for now, instead of reading another let's be honest boring ad script, wick studio just sent me a new, wild looking website to scroll through and tell you about. As you can tell, I'm already excited because it's a space themed site. I think they may have made this just for us.

13:59
Okay, let's see what this scrolly telling is all about. Here's an astronaut falling through the clouds. Now there's two planets that are crashing into each other. Look out and this text is popping up as I scroll. That's useful. It's telling me about the search for other species. And now we're talking. That's my kind of thing. We've got a spaceship. This is pretty amazing. I feel like I'm actually in space and I like being there. It's wild how you can do all this without using code. Now it's your turn to lift off. Build your next web project on Wix Studio, the platform for agencies and enterprises. Go to wixcom slash studio or click on the link on the show page to find out more. So, leonard, just as a reminder of your bona fides, if you will, um, you've been covering space for, I think, 150 years now.

14:48 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was there. You started in I helped uh see a Kosky uh do his equations.

14:57 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But you started in DC in the seventies, is that right? Um, yeah, yeah, okay. Well, he's excited about, about giving his career notes.

15:08 - Leonard David (Guest)
I remember well let's just say leonard's, at the the top of the pantheon of space reporters well, no, there's a lot of really great reporters and I'm just doing my bit of things that I'm interested in, and luckily spacecom still prints my my articles, and I'm happy with that.

15:28 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Oh, you're making me blush, leonard, make me blush.

15:32 - Leonard David (Guest)
I don't think you blush mosh.

15:35 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, can I, can I ask because a lot of your career has been looking at Mars, so you've written books with, I think, with buzz, with, with national J graphic about Mars. Is there something about Mars in particular that captivates you as opposed to other, you know, spaceflight, astronomy, types of things that you've covered or is it just that it's that next planet, over our next door neighbor that is forever out of reach, always 20, 30 years away from us, that has so grabbed you?

16:06 - Leonard David (Guest)
Well, you know, I really think you know what really locked me in on Mars was and again, I'm old here but Walt Disney and the Tomorrowland series on TV. There was a moment there, you know, where they did life on Mars and they had really some wild ideas about what life was like on Mars and that bolted me in pretty secure right in the 50s. And then to see the Mariner series and you know we were getting out there. And then Viking I w I was covering Viking.

16:48
You know I was there when they landed Viking uh on Mars at NASA headquarters and uh, I mean that was an amazing when you saw the first uh raster buildup of a picture from Mars and you got to see a rock and a foot you know one of the foot pads and it was pretty exciting times and I used to and then to have met a number of the Viking experimenters over the years was pretty exciting. There was just so much there and we need to go back and look at that data. There's still debate about whether or not the Viking spacecrafts the two of them did find life and it's still contentious and there's actually a growing community of scientists today that wonder whether or not we missed the cue there and we we actually found life, great story we should point out.

17:54 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We should point out real quick you said you were there to watch that raster image, come that first one from from mars. That's for people who don't know what those raster images are it's a pixel by pixel, filling in of every little little thing and it takes forever. We just get pictures from Mars at the tip of our tick tock or whatever it is.

18:11 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So it was. It was built line by line, from top to bottom, left to right, because it was a camera that had a swing mirror on it.

18:20
So it would it look like a coffee can with a slit in it. So it would swing top to bottom, take a strip that would come back, you know, 10 minutes later, however long it took at that particular distance. Then it would notch over to the right, do another swing, notch the right, do another swing. But seeing that first picture from the surface another planet well, mars anyway was truly extraordinary. So let me just give a brief backgrounder to MSR, if I might. I'll make it really short and then we can kick off here. So serious planning for sample return started in the 1960s before Mariner 4 even flew past Mars, which is pretty astonishing.

19:00
Nasa was looking at this. Lockheed Martin proposed a 15-ton vehicle which is large we're getting into the lunar module class here Would have required one or two Saturn V launches to accomplish. Then Langley, jpl, langley, the NASA field center. Langley and JPL studied in the Viking era in the 1970s. About the same time the Soviet Union studied a huge two-launch system that was really complicated. It's the days when their computers were kind of like electronic abacus. You know they hadn't had a lot of luck with them, so that was quite ambitious. It was called Mars five N M, based on the N one moon booster, which failed four times. So that took care of that idea. They looked at it again in 1979, but canceled due to technical challenges.

19:44
1980s, multiple NASA field centers worked on a proposal called Mars Rover Sample Return that was slimmed down to 12 tons. Jpl then proposed its own lander rover, mars Ascent Vehicle System for the 1990s. And the beat goes on. In 2005, nasa started talking with France and the European space agency towards something called XO Mars, which unfortunately was canceled because NASA had to pull out of it. And finally we had Mars 2020, the perseverance Rover, which is taking samples, and I personally I'm still a little confused about how the distributing them. Some are left on the rover, some are being placed at a depot, and I thought others were being left on site where they were gathered, but Leonard may know more about that. But that's what we're here to talk about today, is this grand vision of bringing back rocks from Mars. So what's our current status here, Leonard?

20:47 - Leonard David (Guest)
If I'm NASA, I'm going to go confused. You know, I think Monday was a pretty telling diatribe from NASA about you know how messed up everything is. And everybody is responding to this independent review board who pretty much put the kibosh on our sample return. As we now see it, nelson, the NASA chief, you know, on Monday pretty much said, hey, this doesn't make sense for $11 billion and moving it out to 2040 to return samples. What are we going to do? So they're going to open it up to industry and they're going to open it up to academia.

21:40
And I've been here dozens of times and here we go again. So there's something. You know. This Mars sample return is sort of a symbol for NASA and how things are going with the agency at large. So you've got some really fundamental problems here.

22:08
And you know one fallback they keep bringing up. It's in the decadal. You know it's in the decadal. It has to be done. It's in the decadal. You know the way I look at it. This it's in the decadal. You know the way I look at it. This Mars sample return was in the Dead Sea Scrolls. I mean. You know this thing has been going on forever. We were either cut bait with this thing and move on and we just talked about Firefly and some of the exciting missions that are coming to look for life in other worlds Is it time to cut bait with a sample return as we see it today? I'm almost livid, you know, with given what NASA came up with and they're going to have to be held accountable, and I've been on the emails this morning. They're going to have to be held accountable and I've been on the emails this morning. There's a lot of people mad. You haven't seen this story yet. What the reaction from the community is going to be?

23:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, the reactions to JPL have not been happy, and it is worth reminding ourselves that, as far as the United States is concerned, they're the only people that have conducted successful Mars landings over and, over, and, over and over again and are world beaters in that category. So I think they're a little understandably dismayed. And you know, it's worth reminding ourselves that when budgets come in for NASA projects, they tend to initially be low, because that's what it takes to get Congress to give the nod, because you know they're not always the most well-informed people on these things. There can be some kind of knee-jerk reactions coming from there and then the budgets expand. They always have and they always will. If you look at Webb, it doubled, I think, more than doubled actually. So this is not unusual. Unusual, but the response was indeed unusual, and we'll talk more about that in just a moment when we come back after this short break tarik yeah.

24:14 - Tariq Malik (Host)
So before I ask a question, I wanted to kind of touch for our readers who may not be as in the loop as, of course, leonard. Uh, leonard is a lot. Of the things that leonard was talking about is why we're talking about the mar sample return as a subject with Leonard this week, to understand what's happening. Because on Monday, as we're recording this, nasa had a press conference with Bill Nelson, the NASA chief, and others to essentially say that they've completed an independent review of their plans for Mars sample.

24:40
Another, another one, the latest one which, which, as of now, was estimated, as Leonard pointed out, to cost $11 billion and not even be able to get samples back by until 2040. That's a long time from now and you know, a 2020 estimate was something in the order of $2.5 to $3 billion. That tells you how big the cost overruns have been for the mission. And Bill Nelson basically said look, it's too expensive, that's the bottom line. He actually said the bottom line is $11 billion is too expensive. That's a direct quote, and he was saying something on the order of like maybe $5 to $7 billion is what they want to see now, and you know, to get samples back, these, what these, these dozen or so samples, that curiosity, perseverance, dropped on the on the surface back before that 2040 timeframe. So that's kind of the nutshell that has really shaken everything, because they've designed that mission already, you know, with a lander that has a solid rocket inside it that will, you know, and a rover to go collect the samples, put them in the rocket, launch it back into space, an orbiter to catch them, bring them back here, reentry capsule to, you know, bring them back to Earth, all that stuff. And now they have to kind of figure out how to half that cost.

25:58
But, leonard, why? Why has it? Why are we here again? Right, you just said that you're livid, that you've been in this position before. Uh, and, as rod just pointed out, uh, these types of you know the discussion for wanting to do this has been going on for decades upon decades, upon decades, so it's not a a surprise what capabilities are needed, it's just a matter of how to implement them, it would seem. And yet here we find ourselves, after years of development, uh, having to rework the whole mission and wait who knows how many more years to get it off the ground. It just seems like a bit of a groundhog day. I don't know. Is that what you're referring to? A bit there.

26:37 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah, it's deja vu all over again. You know that kind of thing Now. We've been here many times and this one seems more dramatic to me as the timing goes down the road. And one thing that doesn't come up out of this is you know, we're talking jobs. You get the California delegation going and trying to defend JPL and jobs.

27:07
They already lopped off 500 people many that were associated with the Mars sample return program, and contractors and this kind of thing, and so you're kind of wondering whether or not this project should be done. And why are we doing it? Is it something you know that is a necessary item in our portfolio of progress about exploring Mars? And you start asking people OK, let's just kill the program. And so you don't want to kill Mars exploration. So what do we do now? And I haven't heard that yet. I mean, nasa is suggesting that somehow we're going to find some dollar levels over the years and still get a Mars sample return program.

28:07
Well, you know, and I know samples are really important to the community because we've seen it over and over again there's no question in my mind that samples from another world in the lab, with new equipment that you can't haul to Mars, it all makes sense? Yeah, you can, but should this be a given to the human exploration of Mars? Do we just forget the robotic side of it or we launch much more dedicated life science detection missions? If that's what we're trying to find, I'm tired of hearing about? Is there a life on Mars? You know, I don't want to hear about it anymore. You know, let's find it or not find it, or whatever we got to do to convince ourselves that we've either detected it or we didn't detect it, or so many bad things. It's not there. Proving that is going to be impossible. So can you haul to Mars life science detection equipment? And the answer is yes, you can do it on site. It also breaks the chain of worry about Andromeda strain coming back with a robotic mission and it goes out of control. And we got people dying in Utah or something.

29:29 - Tariq Malik (Host)
A space plague.

29:31 - Leonard David (Guest)
There are just so many little you know off things going on here that conspire to implode the whole program and you know. The one cost number that we have not yet heard is let's say the robotic mission does happen. How much is that return sample facility going to cost to do the analysis that hasn't shown up yet? Somewhere out there are studies and they've got them going. How much is that going to be? It's a CDC for extraterrestrials. What is it going to be?

30:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's going to be a biohazard level 19 laboratory, if it's going to happen at all. So you know, there's other considerations here too which have been brought up by the science community. One is that the places that something like Perseverance can sample, which tend to be the floor of the crater and and maybe a little bit of sedimentation, could provide fossil evidence of life, but it's unlikely to provide anything currently living, for a whole bunch of reasons, one of which is it's been sitting out there, bathed in radiation, for a billion years and, of course, these samples are going to be sitting in these titanium tubes for at least a decade before they're grabbed. So there's a lot of I wouldn't call them downsides, but there are limitations to doing it the way we're doing it, and if you're really looking for living things, you're probably talking about deep drilling, probably near water, maybe looking at some of the lava pits or lava tubes where these things are sheltered, or at least prominent rock overhangs, which, for the most part, isn't what they've been able to do so far. I would also add that one of the recent developments, tarek, which I think was in one of your stories was I couldn't quite get a full beat on it, but it sounds like they've canceled the idea of a Fetch helicopter at least for now, paused it, let's say and maybe even of a Fetch rover, because they're estimating that Perse, that perseverance will be robust enough to drive back to wherever this vehicle would come down. Does the sample grab a return vehicle and be able to, made up with the Rover, and just pull what's out of its onboard cash, which, you know, makes the backup samples that it has? Yeah, it makes an awful lot of sense.

31:53
And finally, I would just add that there are also those, including our own, pascal lee, who pointed out well, it would be very cool to have current surface samples. We have pieces of mars on earth. We have 300 and something like 350 identified meteorites that are clearly, you know things, bits of mars that got knocked off by a collision and came here. So, while they're far from pristine, having traveled through space for God knows how long before they reentered at high temperature, we do have Mars minerals. So it's, it's, I think, more about soil chemistry and, like Leonard saying, possible organics that we might find.

32:31
That would make this interesting. So, leonard, I think one of the things you've written about and that we hear a lot about is this Mars ascent vehicle. This appears to be a major tripwire in this whole thing because of mass and complexity, because basically you have to land a rocket on Mars, you have to land this thing on Mars that can rocket back up to orbit, and then it's got to rendezvous with something else in orbit that's going to bring everything home. And apparently this is a lot harder than we might think.

32:59 - Leonard David (Guest)
Right, well, that's you know. They spent already a pretty good chunk of money on lobbing that thing off the lander and then air igniting the vehicle with the samples already in there and getting them up.

33:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Yeah, so it's kind of like a Polaris missile, right. Yeah, I mean that's.

33:21 - Leonard David (Guest)
Lockheed Martin in Northrop and they got involved in this and they are using some of that kind of technology. I will say the looming thing is back to China and it's with ExoMars and looking for life. So it's the drill baby drill scenario. You got to go down. You know, if life is there we may find a subsurface.

34:12 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Is ExoMars still going or are you talking about the Chinese rover?

34:15 - Leonard David (Guest)
Well, both the Chinese, you know they're looking at. I think the last thing I heard was 2030. And here's let me, before I forget, what's not showing up in China literature yet is what are they doing about back contamination? I'm not seeing one iota about what, and you know we don't want the Wuhan lab scenario for Mars. We've got to understand what they're thinking about when they bring samples back. Exomars is on. Exomars is on. Nasa is going to be providing the launcher and the retro rocket engines and a power pack nuclear power pack, so that's what the ESA guys said. So we're supposedly in pretty good lockstep on ExoMars as a robotic mission from Europe, and that mission has been delayed. It's not confusing at all.

35:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
That ExoMars mission has been delayed, of course, because it was originally going to fly on a Russian rocket, and then Russia invaded Ukraine and they scrapped all those plans. But now they've got a rover and lander with no ride, and so they're able to come up with different plans. Uh, for that there too so all right.

35:39
Well, we will be back with tarik's next brilliant question after this short break, so hold your breath leonard, I wanted to kind of go back to something that you just mentioned earlier about does it matter where we do sample return? You know we've been talking a lot about Mars sample return on Earth and you know NASA has that whole Ares facility for astro materials at the Johnson Space Program, a space center where they just recently got, I think, some samples from the OSIRIS-REx asteroid Bennu and they got those ones opened. Can you imagine getting samples from Mars and not being able to open the container?

36:19 - Leonard David (Guest)
like they did with.

36:20 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Bennu.

36:23 - Leonard David (Guest)
Keep those screwdrivers.

36:24 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I know, I know so, but you said something that I was surprised to hear was that the types of instruments that we have now that we would use to analyze Mars samples on Earth, that we could in fact get them with a crew onto the surface of Mars. And so I'm curious what are the key, fundamental types of gear that you're hearing from the scientists that they want to test? You're hearing from the scientists that they want to test and then, just to kind of as a caveat, we've we've talked about all these tantalizing samples, that perseverance put together, but they want these astronauts on Mars to look for water, and it seems like that's a better place to look in the ice for signs of life. Anyway, you know to to get the samples there. So why not just go straight to do that, cause on earth you why not just go straight to do that? Because on Earth you know where there's ice and water. There's like little critters and bacteria and all sorts of stuff life, you know, teeming in that stuff.

37:25 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah well, I think you know, with a little bit of money, I think you know you put it out there and ask people, what are today's technologies, from micro devices to perhaps slam dunk a finding on Mars itself, about life? I mean, what would it take? And again, I want to go back and I agree with everybody it's great to have the samples back in the lab. I agree, it's now we're just talking about it. Would they be returned by humans? Would they be returned by robotic craft? Could we? How much can we do on the surface to better understand the conditions of Mars? And whether you have to drill and do that kind of analysis or not?

38:17
So you know, all this has been always in the background for decades. It's been going on forever. I was fortunate to know Gil Levin, you know, one of the principal Viking scientists who you, you know, before he died, I mean, he was seriously, he was adamant about his life detection did what it was supposed to do. It detected life. You know, his experiment worked and he it's been an uphill battle since he uh, since he uh started talking about that, and again more people seem to be looking at other things that may have been detected by that experiment and perhaps he was correct. So we got to go back and look at that Viking data.

39:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
But that seems to make the point. You know, steve Squires has said and this is kind of a follow-up to that that all of the amazing stuff, that spirit and opportunity, those rovers, those long-lived rovers, you know 90 days but they lasted for years, you know a decade, even for opportunity, all of that stuff that they were able to accomplish like an astronaut, a human scientist could do it so much faster with the gear on mars and find it, you know, for for, for gill's experiment. They could go and oh, you know I'm going to double check that. You know I can go and, and, and, and and solve it right then and there, instead of being, you know, be wondering for for decades to follow. So it seems to like the average person looking, looking in, that we should just be doing that first.

39:58
I mean, I'm all for getting samples from anywhere. I love the idea of getting that stuff back and I know it's insanely difficult. But it seems like if you really want to get it done and get it done fast, then just commit and get everything else that you need. I mean, there's more complications in sending people because you have to keep the people alive and you got to keep them safe and you got to keep them fed and healthy so that they can do the science when you get there, and that is not a small task. I totally get that in a lab that you can be fundamentally, I guess, secure and that it's going to clean without contamination. It seems it might be easier to set up a control room or a clean room on Mars in an already sterile spacecraft environment than add so many different layers of transfer for the vehicle.

40:50 - Leonard David (Guest)
Well, I think you hit on it right up front. There is that why not go to the ice, I mean, where you know, mars is so diversified, with so many great areas to explore? I mean, if that's the driving thing, I mean, you know, is it the search for life or are we trying to become a multi-planetary species? You know, I mean there's a dichotomy there in a weird way. I mean, there are people that are just want Elon to succeed and let's go colonize Mars. Then you have the life on Mars.

41:24
People, you know, is there life on Mars? Is it a template for everywhere else, or is it unique to Mars? Is it our life that's gone awry or done something different on Mars? Are we the Martians? I mean, you know how many times we can write all this stuff over and over again, and you know, meanwhile, people down here on Earth are finding all kinds of microbes in weird places that they shouldn't be, and it seems like life is pretty tenacious, and I would. You know, I always felt that everywhere we go, if we don't find life, it'd be odd, it's just going to be weird, and to try to, it's like study. You know, how do you prove there's no life in the universe. How do you prove there's no life on Mars? Maybe it's hidden, maybe it's over there, maybe it's not there. They're still debating whether or not the you know these little channels or water spouts coming out. Should we go there?

42:32
You've already got the scientific community, you know, kind of creating a matrix of Mars, like don't go there places, oh, maybe we explore there. Oh, we use the helicopter to fly over. You know so. You know it's exciting, but it's also as I get older, I'm getting more and more, you know, distraught that you know that somehow we can't sort this out and it just becomes a. You know again, I don't know how many times you can write the same damn articles over and over again of you know, is there life on Mars Apparently?

43:13
quite a few again of you know. Is there life on Mars Apparently?

43:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
quite a few. I just want to clarify a couple of things. When Leonard's talking about, you know, is Mars life, earth life and that kind of thing. We've talked about this on the show before. It's the panspermia idea that life may have migrated from early Earth to early Mars or, more likely in most opinions, since Mars settled down atmospherically and environmentally before Earth did in this development, that life might have begun there and traveled to Earth on meteorite fragments and so forth, knocked off of the planet. So that's that. The other thing I want to clarify is for Gil Levine's experiment that Leonard referenced.

43:52
This was one of three or four life science experiments on the vikings, pretty simplistic by today's standards, but basically they would take samples of martian regolith soil and put various uh, nutrient, broth or water in them to see what happened and then measure what might outgas from it. And of of those experiments, lubin's was the only one that showed a significant reaction. It was a very fast ramp up and a fast decay and uh did not repeat. So the general consensus, led by stormy Norman Horowitz, who was not historically my favorite figure in that drama um, was that it was just soil chemistry and it was probably something like perchlorate reacting. And we did later and I think 2008, with Phoenix, mars-phoenix confirmed that there is perchlorate in the soil, so that makes a certain amount of sense, but there's all kinds of people that are way smarter than the three of us put together that looked at it and said well, I'm still not convinced. You know, I think this might be microbiology at work. So that seems to be an open question. I did want to mention, before we lose track that, who the foreign challenges are and what they're proposing. So, of course, china, because they are very well budgeted still less money than NASA, as far as we know, but significantly more than they've had in years past being invested in this and they, long term, which we have trouble with.

45:17
Um, this is, uh, planning a lander rover sample return mission called 1013. Uh, japan is planning a mission that would go to phobos and grab samples. So that's primarily, you know, unless there's a real surprise waiting there that's primarily looking at geology and planetary formation and so forth. It's not a life science mission. And good old Russia, which has yet to successfully land something that would operate on the Martian surface, has been talking since 2011 about a two-stage architecture with an orbiter and lander and return vehicle, but no rovers, so those would be static samples, as near as I can tell. Good luck, guys. It's been a far stretch for you so far.

46:02
So let's come back after this next break and talk, leonard, about Starship, because we seem to have opened the door and invited without specifically saying so. But a lot of people think what nelson was basically doing was kind of throwing open the door to spacex, saying, hey, can you please do this with your gigantic rocket and take 13 lead rovers up to mars and let them go gather samples and bring them home with only 150 orbital refuelings? No, I just made that last one up. We will be right back. You're not far off. We will be right back, stand by. So, leonard, what do you think about this possible SpaceX to Mars idea? Not in broad terms, I mean specific to this, sorry.

46:50 - Leonard David (Guest)
Oh for the Mars. I haven't picked up any vibes on what Alon and company might. They've been looking at this. They had a thing called and they have Red Mars or what are they called Red Dragon.

47:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Red Dragon yeah.

47:06 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah, that way back. So you know. And Martin, what was his name? Wooster? Martin, what was his name? Wooster? He was running around at conferences and I listened to. You know they're trying to identify a place that they could land and would be near water. So they, you know, but I don't know. You know it's great Again, the artwork is great. The artwork is great.

47:32 - Rod Pyle (Host)
If only artwork would get us there right.

47:34 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah well, I love artwork and you I. If only artwork would get us there, right? Yeah Well, I love artwork and you know I like to write, but I think the artwork speaks volumes. Um, but uh, you know, we'll see how Alon does on. Uh, you know, if he gets to the moon with the starship, that'd be a that'd be a positive thing, I would think. So that's very subtly put, and he did tweet out.

47:59 - Rod Pyle (Host)
After, uh, nelson's press conference, he did tweet out something. I don't have it written down specifically here, but something to the effect of uh, yeah, we could do that, it's easy yeah, I'm paraphrasing here a bit, but it ain't easy and and that huge vehicle, you know, as you point out, we still have uh, we have to see it, there's some challenges there land on the moon, but it's got to make orbit and be able to come back and so forth. So, yeah, that would be. I mean, the cargo capacity is sensational. If the thing works, you could take I mean, ultimately you would be taking people to mars but you could take a whole squadron of you would be taking people to Mars, but you could take a whole squadron of robots that look like Gort from the day the Earth stood still and could walk around and pick up whatever samples they wanted and stuff in their pockets and bring them home, just like Neil Armstrong.

48:45 - Tariq Malik (Host)
They're building those robots too.

48:48 - Leonard David (Guest)
Nelson wanted innovation and you know, I'm sure you know, let's ramp it up and I hope SpaceX gets a proposal in there of how to do this.

48:59
And you know, you know that'd be great if Elon can pull that together. I just, you know, at the end of the day, you know, if this is a milestone making enterprise, you know, after a while in history let's see how these private concerns can do, and you know Nelson threw open the door not only to you know, alon and all those guys, but other groups. Like you know, I expect people like Applied Physics Lab, I expect other groups that are known for innovation to come up with some good ideas. And if it's a jobs program, that's one thing. You know, if we're going to try to save JPL or is that the mandate what is it we're trying to do here with this sample return? And there are people that I've talked to that could care less if China brings back the samples. Mars is so, again, diverse that you know we got a long road to go with Mars exploration, and Mars is wide open for all kinds of landing sites and recovery of material from those areas.

50:26 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and you bring up a really good point, which is does it really matter who brings back the first rocks?

50:31 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yes, uh some people are, you know, I mean I I just saw lou friedman had a nice uh editorial in uh space news and you know a little bit of a flag waving thing. You know your loss of american leadership and this kind of thing, and that's fine. I mean there are people that, uh, you know what. You know europe and america leading the charge and bringing samples back from Mars Is that really and at what cost? And you know what gets deferred, you know, because I don't even know what kind of numbers we're going to be talking about a year from now. They'll probably be wrong, because then you get into the test program and things go awry, right, and you wind up needing more money for these things. And so, yeah, it's definitely a shake-up time. And you know we're beyond wake-up call. Yeah, we're beyond wake-up call. This is an ultimate room service that's required here to clean out the bugs of the past and try to stamp together a program that makes sense, given budget, reality and leadership and all the other things you want to throw on the wall.

51:57 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, I meant to ask Leonard. By the way you asked Rod about if it doesn't matter if it isn't us. There is at least some precedent now with China opening up samples of the moon's far side right to foreign scientists too. So we've seen that cooperation, although it did take several years for that sharing to take place, and I can see there'd be a much bigger scramble for samples from Mars to any country that is able to bring them back first.

52:30
But what you mentioned earlier about kind of cleaning house, leonard, it really struck me of a similar vibe from 2019 when Mike Pence stood in front of the National Space Council and said you know that the Artemis program at that point was so far off track, they had to get it back on track, you know, quote by any means necessary. And here we are with another mission that they're saying they want to, that it's off track and they have to get it back on through new innovation and some other kind of not a magic bullet, but the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer. No, we're not going to do that, even though we've already built this billion-dollar device for the International Space Station, and they eventually greenlit an extra space shuttle mission to deliver that before they retired the program and James Webb too. You mentioned that so far over budget, so many missteps and mistakes in the testing and everything that they had to do things over and over again. And yet, even though it was so far over budget, they did get it up there. It went okay, I think, more than okay when they deployed it and it's returning really good science and will continue to do so.

53:51
So the payoffs and the challenges we've seen in so many other programs and it, it, it feels like we've seen, uh, we've seen them go one way, you know, kind of like the, the, the, the good way.

54:04
With James Webb, where they had all these tribulations, they came out on top the set, the space, the space telescope is up, they're doing amazing science. And then we had the, the really arduous experience of trying to build a moon rocket, you know, in 2004,. You know, with the Ares program and watching that program devolve to the point during the Augustine Commission where they say, hey, you could build your moon rocket but not be able to land on the moon, or you could build your lander and not have a rocket to get to the moon. You know you have to pick one right now and it's a no-win scenario and then they had to really go back and revise everything you know to get to Artemis 1 in 2022 when they got there. So it seems like there's two different ways that it can go and I'm wondering is it too early to know which way? This whole MSL Mars sample return, uh, uh, msr, I keep saying MSL.

55:00
So um, uh, it's going to go, or, or, or. Do you? Do you think that the trend will be towards the positive? That they will? That means jet propulsion. But there are smart people there, uh, that they dare. Am I anything? I think that they dare to remind anything. I think, actually, I'm wearing I didn't mean to, but I'm wearing my chemical laboratory.

55:18 - Leonard David (Guest)
T-shirt.

55:26
I mean is it too early to see how that's going to go, or is this ship? I can tell you just this morning. You know, get ready, this is going to be a free-for-all. Oh man, the science community is upset. They didn't like what NASA came up with. I think they're going to have some statements coming and so it's going to be a real bare knuckle activity from here on. But you, you gotta, you gotta, back away from. You know how to do it. To the question should we do it and at what expense and at what cost? Is it going to be? The other programs, as you know, our whole search for life question that's partially driven. This Mars sample return is already open to other worlds. And how much is that going to be a part of the future of NASA?

56:25
So yeah, there's just some really dynamics here. That's going to be very, you know, for reporters. It's great because there's total confusion Work. I love it. I love the yelling. Yeah, I know it's great because there's total confusion Work you know, I love it.

56:38 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I love the yelling.

56:39 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah, I know, let's get that going.

56:42
But you know and maybe it's time to bring back a Mars czar. I mean there's going to have to be. You know, scott Hubbard played that role when we had a multiple failure at Mars and he cobbled together a great program. And Scott is still very much engaged in the background of trying to understand the dynamics of where we're going to go and how we should go and why we should go, why we should go. So, yeah, it's a really crazy time for a Mars sample return and you know, I mean Scott Hubbard's even gotten back to. You know, did we look Starship one thing? Maybe we should go back and look at the Senate launch system and you know how much capability that has, you know, to do an all-in-one mission. You know.

57:43 - Tariq Malik (Host)
He means the space launch system dealers.

57:47 - Leonard David (Guest)
You get all those people upset. You know the Starship people and whatever. But you know, I do think you know, somewhere in this we need to get back to a lower cost Mars exploration program that doesn't fly out the window budgetarily, and to me that's getting back to some very good ideas that JPL have had on landing a small spacecraft, multiple mini rovers, you know. And get to the issue of you know, is it the life on Mars question is still driving everything. Are we trying to satisfy geological questions about the origin of Mars? I mean, what is it that we're trying to get to? And so, yeah, it's just, there's just so many angles here and I wish I, you know, could write the penultimate article. But yeah, I think we're too early. I think you're going to see the science community coming back at NASA not happy. There are other people that are really beside themselves of what happened on Monday.

59:04 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Is there a fear, leonard, of slipping into a faster, better, cheaper mentality that led to a lot of very embarrassing failures during the golden era at NASA in the 90s, where you had spacecraft missing the planet entirely because of a metrics thing or the Mars Polar Lander crashing into it because of this mistake or not. Or and this is the second part of this question is there an embrace of that, like what we've seen with the Artemis program, where they launched 10 different other spacecraft on the artemis one mission and they said nasa did at the go get. Hey, these are cheap spacecraft, they may not all make it, but if they do, if one or two does, hey, it's like gravy, you know, for it do. Is that the kind of mentality for Mars that can get more things done in a faster way with this new embrace of commercial industry, to say, hey, there's a big piece of pie there for whoever can get it and build a spacecraft that gets it, because that seems like a fundamental shift in Mars but that they're already testing at the moon right now?

01:00:17 - Leonard David (Guest)
Well, you know you're asking questions and I wish I had answers. You know, yeah, we're gone, but I don't want to get into the CubeSat fiasco that was on the first SLS. You know that to me, is a, you know, also mirrors a little bit of where we are on clips with the moon. You know, uh, you know anyway. Uh, yeah, we got some issues there on just low cost and what that means. It doesn't mean failure is an option, you know, and that's in some ways they're saying that. You know, failure is an option. Unfortunately, this is a weird thing and I think you brought it up there about after a while with Jim Webb, james Webb Space Telescope being so successful, people forget the cost, and you know, but God help them. If it failed They'd be on the rails, you know.

01:01:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Special investigation.

01:01:27 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah, how many mishap boards do we have to have here?

01:01:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And what do they really accomplish?

01:01:32 - Leonard David (Guest)
They don't come cheap by themselves. You know, mishap boards are expensive. We're still waiting for Astrobotic and their Eclipse lander, what happened there and what the repercussions of that are. So you know I don't know where I'm going here. But yeah, low cost doesn't mean failure is an option. So I think you know, at the end of the day you want to have success and again, jpl has done some really creative looks at low cost landers, rovers, and if you had a Mars czar trying to piece together a sensible program, perhaps we can get back in the groove and not have to worry about Mars sample return as the end-all, be-all mission.

01:02:25 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And I'd just like to close on and people know I'm kind of a JPL fanboy. I'm close to the organization, but when you look at return on the money bang for the buck. They've had a pretty spectacular history. There is a lot of expertise contained up there and to steer projects like this away from that NASA field center seems to me to be a bit risky. Eventually, as the organization is forced to slim down due to budget cuts and, in some cases, lack of lack of missions, you start losing a serious amount of brain trust because those people, as we've seen with Mimi Ong, who was the original chief of the Mars helicopter, and others, they go off to Apple and and God, I almost said Yahoo, not Yahoo Amazon and Google and earn much higher paychecks and we lose that part of the brain trust. And it's worth pointing out JPL is the only NASA field center that is not employed as civil servants. They're operated through contract with Caltech, which means it's a lot easier to start getting rid of people. That may sound a little paranoid but it's just a fact.

01:03:39
And you know, I don't know how much that played into some of these decisions. Clearly their bid was expensive. But you also have to wonder. You know who's setting the parameters. If you allow the organization to set its own parameters and say, okay, give me a low, medium and high, maybe you get a different answer than if you say, okay, congress, on X, y and Z, tell us how much? Wait, we can't pay that much. So, leonard, I wonder if you have any thoughts on just their position, jpl's position on this, because if this is taken away, you basically have flying out Europa Clipper and a handful of other small missions and then there isn't much on the docket moving ahead for them.

01:04:18 - Leonard David (Guest)
Well, Laurie, you know.

01:04:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Leshen.

01:04:22 - Leonard David (Guest)
Yeah, leshen had him JPL. Now I mean that was a tough. This woman has had a rough, you know, year or so. You know she got in there and had to deal with psyche issues and you know now we got Europa Clipper coming and getting that off and then she had to lay off 500 people and in talking with her I'm still not clear how that was delegated. You know what parts of JPL were cut. You know her comeback is always they didn't hurt any of the core capabilities of JPL. Okay, what's that mean? I mean, what are the core capabilities? One of them is Mars exploration.

01:05:12
Right, and so she is hard over in trying to maintain a group that you know I'm with you, rob, they're an amazing team out there. It's a family. It is a family kind of feel that you have at that lab and you'd hate to damage that. You know, they just got Veritas back in gear on Venus and it looks like that. And Neo Surveyor, these are the things that NASA said. Well, you know, nelson on Monday was talking about those programs. Well, we're back with Veritas and because we're going to cut the budget for MSR and so we're going to make those programs healthy, but that it's just an, an erratic, you know kind of situation to be in, because it almost gets to the point that the more success NASA has proving its ability, the more they get under duress.

01:06:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You know, and you're like you know what.

01:06:19 - Leonard David (Guest)
You know what is going on. So they got what. How much? We're at 25 billion for NASA, I mean whenever the number is uh. It's one of the reasons I left you know, Washington DC trying to follow those numbers.

01:06:35
It never was the money to me, it was how well it was being spent. And this is. You know, nasa is an agency that's getting old and it probably needs a shakeout and you're going to have to fine-tune the field centers. This comes and goes. I've been there in DC for 30 years. Every once in a while they're going to have to look at the field centers and say, okay, are we up to snuff with the 21st century?

01:07:06
You know, and I'm not sure they are and you're going to have to have some really come-to-Jesus moments and NASA as a social construct for the country. About space exploration, about its role as a diplomatic tool in the world community of nations. Of how space plays for America. Does it play well today with all the issues America has? We're back to some really fundamental issues about space exploration and its value as a commodity for a country.

01:07:47 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and you bring up an extra point there that I'll close on, which is this is kind of a soft power thing. Unfortunately for us, a place like China doesn't have to worry about operating under continuing resolutions and reduced budgets and interagency squabbles so much. I'm sure there's stuff like that that happens there, but in general they plan long term, they commit funds long term and they're achieving some pretty spectacular things with a lot of technology. That was proven out here and in the Soviet Union years past, but that's fair game. So you know, if it matters to us to remain leaders in this area, which the polls that we've talked about in the show many times Pew and Gallup and others clearly show the American public supports over 50 percent. Show the american public supports over 50.

01:08:39
It's when you start asking about specific things like do we need to find life on mars, that it goes down into the low double digits. Be that as it may, we'd like to thank you all for joining us today for episode 107 of this week in speed, this week in space, this week in speech, the msr blues edition. Don't forget to check out spacecom the website is, of course, the name and the national space society at NSSorg. Both are good places to satisfy your space flight cravings. And, of course, be sure to check out Leonard Davidcom, which is an even fresher place to assuage your needs. Uh, leonard, is there another place we ought to be looking to? Uh, track your investigative efforts.

01:09:17 - Leonard David (Guest)
No, Keep an eye on spacecom. We've got some hot topics coming out and you know I appreciate the opportunity to talk one more time. Sorry, I'm on more of a rant.

01:09:34 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Hey, I'm with you. Hey, we love it, we love it. Don't you worry, every time you put something in Spacebasecom, dr Clickbait here will get you a groovy, awesome title. Oh, he gives a big sigh and of course it's not Clickbait. I just love it because you hate it so much, Kirk. Where do we?

01:09:55 - Tariq Malik (Host)
track you down, you game-playing animal, you, you can find me on you can find me on well, at spacecom, as always, trying to find out the next, the next big thing. My whole personal experience about seeing the solar eclipse with my daughter at a university was the last story that I had there about how it was a teachable moment. You can google it teachable moment, solar eclipse, and you'll find it for sure. And on Twitter, you know, just trying to share the space love. And if you will be in Suffern New York this weekend, on Sunday I will be at the Northeast Astronomy Forum finding out all the new goodies that are coming to night skies near you from Celestron and Mead and all of those fun folks, and hopefully meeting up with our columnist, joe Rao, who we just had on the podcast talking about the eclipse, so I can find out exactly how his eclipse went in Plattsburgh, new York. So looking forward to that.

01:10:50 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Okay, and you can always find me at filebookscom or at astromagazinecom and other corners of the internet. Please remember to drop us a line if you wish, at twisttv that's T-W-I-S. At twittv, we welcome your comments, suggestions, ideas, even criticisms, I guess, and I'll answer all the nice emails and I'll let Tarek answer all the other ones. New episodes published every Friday on your favorite podcatcher. So make sure to subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews. We'll take multiple thumbs up or whatever you want. Also, don't forget, you can get all the great programming on the Twit Network ad-free if you join Club Twit, as well as some extras that are only found there For just $7 a month. That's a deal and a half. You've heard Leo talk about the tough times facing the podcast world, and this is your chance to step up and be counted, and we're counting on you. You can also follow the TwitTech Podcast Network at Twit, on Twitter and on Facebook, at twittv, on Instagram. Thanks, and we'll see you next week. Thank you.