This Week in Space 112 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.

00:02 - Tariq Malik (Host)
We're Rod and Tarek and we're here to say we love Mars in a major way. We need Mars samples to understand, but it's a multi-billion budget. It's gotten out of hand. We've got Rob Manning here to explain why Mars sample return is such a pain.

00:18 - TWiT
Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is TWIT.

00:22 - Rod Pyle (Host)
 This is this Week in Space, episode number 112, recorded on May 24th 2024. Mars on pause. Hello and welcome to another episode of this Week in Space, the Mars on pause edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astra magazine, and I'm here, as always, with Tarek Malik, the impulsive Editor-in-Chief of Spacecom.

00:49 - Tariq Malik (Host)
How are you, my friend, I'm doing well Rod.

00:54 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm doing. Well, I'm wearing red from Mars. Right, I got my Curiosity shirt on. Well, I had to look at this. When's the last time you saw one of those? Oh, nice, nice, I saved it just for this event. The other one has holes burned in it. And, of course, appropriately, we're joined by Rob Manning, the chief engineer emeritus just recently of Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Thank you for joining us, rob. I feel like I saw you just yesterday.

01:14 - Rob Manning (Guest)
It feels like just yesterday, doesn't it?

01:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And we did see you.

01:18 - Rob Manning (Guest)
It's great to see you too, amalek. It's. My work at JPL has been very busy over the last few years, but now that I've transitioned- away from being chief engineer, I can breathe again.

01:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So the reason I mentioned it seemed like I saw Rob yesterday is because I did see Rob yesterday, because I'm at the International Space Development Conference out in West Los Angeles near the airport, and Rob was kind enough to come down and speak to about 500 very enthusiastic kids, and then also at the luncheon we had another large crowd where we talked about his career, which is something I've envied for a long time. So it's fun to hear the details. Before we start, however, I want to remind everybody, as I always do, to do two things One, be sure to like, subscribe and all that stuff to our podcast and two, be sure to send us your best works or most indifferent space joke, and you'll know why in a second. Because, hey tarik, yes, rod, this is from larry depont, by the way. Thank you, larry. Hey tarik, nasa is launching a satellite to say I'm sorry to the aliens. They're calling it the apology oh, I get it.

02:40 - Tariq Malik (Host)
It's a word pun. Thank you for pointing that out. Yeah, I know it's.

02:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
It's a word pun. Thank you for pointing that out. I know it's always painful, all right. So let's move away from that. Enough of that stuff, because I have another joke. Oh, you have two. It's called Starliner, oh no. So you know, of course there's been a lot of conversation here at the conference about Starliner delays, and we just had the BBC asking for interviews last night about hey, what's up with Starliner? And it's like what do you say?

03:15 - Tariq Malik (Host)
You know, well, Starliner, what?

03:16 - Rod Pyle (Host)
do you say yeah?

03:18 - Tariq Malik (Host)
What's up with Starliner is that Starliner is not up. In fact, just before we started recording this episode, nasa had another press release Actually a much-asked-for press conference where they finally dished about what's going on. When you and I last spoke, we were lamenting the latest delay with Boeing Starliner, and it was slated to launch on May 21st. They then delayed it again to May 25th. They then delayed it again to June 1st, no earlier than because of some challenges with this helium leak on the service module of the Starliner spacecraft itself. What we did hear from today the folks like Steve Stitch and over at Boeing 2, is that while they were researching this helium leak, they did find that there was potential concerns for the reaction control thrusters that the helium leak is part of Pressurizes.

04:13
Yeah, pressurizes that whole thing, that it could lead to a loss of redundancy during the re-entry portion of the mission, which is not good.

04:20
So they're working on resolving that.

04:22
They say that they do feel that they've got the margin that they need now, that they understand what the problem is now, but that it's been a very difficult problem to figure out because it came up while they were working on the replacement for the helium valve itself, anyway.

04:40
So a lot of kind of back and forth and there was a lot of animosity maybe not animosity, but a lot of a lot of kind of back and forth and there was a lot of animosity. Maybe not animosity, but a lot of public calling out in the space media over the last week because of the sheer lack of information. We were just getting one line like emails and updates saying oh, it's delayed again or because they need more time for this, and there wasn't anything explaining exactly what the issue was with this, this helium uh leak that they were, that they were, they were seeing. So we finally got that today and they apologized for the the lack, but they said it was because they they had their own challenges trying to understand what was going on and they wanted to make sure they understood that before they had the press conferences or calls to explain.

05:21 - Rod Pyle (Host)
okay so we have an engineer here today and, rob, I don't want to put you in a corner about, uh, spacex versus boeing or anything but a more generic question what is it about valves that's so tricky?

05:35 - Rob Manning (Guest)
that seems to really be bedeviling um this project uh, and that's really not so much valves, it's just that so many of these pieces of equipment, in particular propulsion, propulsion systems they have, they have, they're, they're pretty darn sensitive sometimes, particularly, um, they have very tight in order to keep the seals, especially no, especially things you're doing like helium, where atoms can get single atoms can sneak out so easily.

06:00
Yeah, seals have to be very, very tight and even the slightest bit of contaminant materials in the fuel or oxidizer, whatever that you're flowing, can gum these things up and stop them. You know, I'm a trumpet player and we have these valves Right and and, and it takes even the tiniest little hair in the valve to just jam it all up and it takes a fair amount of work to get it clean. So it's very difficult, it's so easy to get it wrong because of the precision required to get those seals and to open it up and close these valves elegantly and reliably. That's one issue We've challenged us with that, and there's also a wide variety of different kinds of valves with that and, and it's also a large, wide variety of different kind of valves. Um, the ones, the ones in these missions, tend to be reusable, um, which means that they've got to handle a lot of cycles and and that makes it even more challenging- all right.

06:55 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, let's move on to a happier topic. Uh, from spacecom also, we have euclid Space Telescope returning images of cosmic light.

07:06 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Yeah, yeah, that's right. So Euclid is a European Space Agency telescope, but there's scientists at JPL who are also involved in the studies too, and this is their big dark universe mission. It's designed to seek out the true mysteries of, like dark energy and dark matter to seek out the true mysteries of dark energy and dark matter. And while it's taken its first images in the past, what we got this week were just brand new science images that they were really looking forward to see. They're looking at galaxies that we've never really seen in such detail before, and they called it I'm going to quote it's absolutely amazing. It's just so much more than I ever expected. Euclid will be a game changing, game changer for astronomy. That's how excited these astronomers are, uh, about these images that they're getting from, uh, from the space telescope itself, and they they looked at, um, amazing views of images. In fact, we have a New York times link. That is really nice, uh for the folks on YouTube to to really be able to see it. Uh to on this one.

08:12
But, um, but you know, this is a mission that launched in 2023, had its first light uh shortly thereafter, and now it's getting into the science and the meat and potatoes of its, its mission.

08:22
You know they call it their early release observation.

08:26
So it's the first kind of big, beautiful images packed with data and science that now all of the scientists, both on the mission team and the folks that have access to the archive, can start looking into.

08:39
What it's telling us about dark energy, about dark matter, these unseeable, undetectable types of objects in space or of matter in space that we can only infer by its gravitational influence on the stuff around it. They think that like some 68% of the universe's energy and matter is comprised in these dark things and that dark energy makes up about 68% of the universe's you know matter budget and dark matter is 27% and we get like what you know about like 4% that we can see out there and they really want to crack that nut with this mission. So these images are just, they're truly spectacular and what it does suggest is that it's doing its job. Euclid is just like James Webb, is working well, is offering some tantalizing morsels of what's to come over the next years and hopefully decades, of the space telescope, and maybe we'll finally understand, you know, all of this unseeable, hidden stuff that continues to elude us.

09:40 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Rob, do you understand all this dark hidden stuff that continues to elude us?

09:44 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Oh, of course I have all the answers.

09:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That's why you're here.

09:50 - Rob Manning (Guest)
No, I find the excitement in astronomy right now is through the roof, and it's all justified from trying to figure out why the standard model doesn't do the job in terms of explaining the dark sector, as they're calling it. And it's really just. These are just fascinating mysteries and nothing excites an astronomer or any scientist more than a big mystery. And this is so cool, I mean. We're seeing, in fact we may be even seeing signs that you know, dark energy may not be something that's constant. It may be changing even more over time, kind of the force, forces of expansion. They are forces uh, or kind of out outracing uh, the gravitational um uh counterforce. Yet now we're seeing potential with the desi instrument on the on uh kit, peak um uh. Telescope is where we're seeing potential signs that the dark energy is not constant and with time, and so this I mean that's just, if that's true and still tentative, it's blowing people's minds because it may not be just a feature of space itself, it may be something else going on. And so this is an exciting time, oh my God, to to really understand our universe and and and these mysteries are just lingering uh, and you know the fact that the all experiments to see if we can find dark, a sign of dark matter.

11:38
Um have have so far not revealed very much. Wimps seem to be wimping out. Aneons I mean axions are looking, are looking, maybe a possibility, who knows? The cool thing is that they're actually whittling it down and eliminating. The question is you know what's left? It may be something we've never, never even possibly conceived of. So this is a great time. What an exciting time all right.

12:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, let's go from this to talking about mars, and we will do so right after the short break. Stay, all right. We're moving on to Mars, one of our favorite places to go, and when we go to Mars, we think of Rob Manning, because he's been to Mars as much as anybody on our planet. So, rob, if you could just give us a brief recap of where you've been, what you've done and what you're embarking on now, your new adventure.

12:43 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Well, most people know I I've been doing this mars stuff since uh, my mid-career at jpl in the early 90s with mars pathfinder and and help. We helped kind of open up the door to uh, surface exploration and uh and and you know, and helped create an open and and write new chapters about what we understand about the surface of Mars, along with a huge number of wonderfully talented people who develop science instruments and scientists from orbit. And it's huge, huge teams of people from all over the world. But I have to admit it's been just an incredible thrill to see so much about Mars being revealed over the last decades. It really does feel like I've been turning the page one after another with many other people and helping them do that by creating these machines that they can land and explore the surface of Mars and study it more carefully.

13:44 - Rod Pyle (Host)
But so lately we've been oh, go ahead, go ahead, go rod well, I was just going to ask if you could kind of update us on the current status of mars. So we have, uh, the two, two big american rovers still still exploring curiosity and perseverance, a whole fleet of orbiters, and then, of course, some international stuff happening too yes, no, yeah, we, um, it's in the nasa side.

14:05 - Rob Manning (Guest)
We have, we have several orbiters, uh, that are that are, of course, some international stuff happening too. Yes, no, yeah, it's in the NASA side. We have several orbiters that are doing their thing. It really are advancing our understanding of Mars, because Mars is an evolving place. It's not static, and as we collect more information about the surface of Mars globally, we learn a lot of things about it. We've learned, for example, that Mars is not just was a wet place and a habitable world for life three and a half billion years ago, but things. Mars continues to evolve and water plays a role in the form of ice and vast stores of it underground Great place. Anyway, mars has turned out to be a very exciting place.

14:47
So we have two rovers still working on Mars. Curiosity rover. It's been there since 2012. And it's been slowly walking its way up the layered terrain of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, up the layered terrain of Mount Sharp in Gale Crater, and it's you know, the cool thing about Curiosity was really, without you know, within a year or so of landing, we were able to confirm that at the crater floor where we landed, there was once water. There was water, not just a little bit of water, a large amount of water that had altered the clays, and, had we had that water from geochemical analysis we did on the rover convinced us that the water was freshwater drinkable. It was ideal for a place, an environment, for life to have survived and thrived. If life was there three and a half billion years ago, we couldn't see life though, because it's a long time ago and it's really hard. Very few things survive that length of time unless you go, unless you look at it very carefully, and we didn't have the equipment on board to do that. So it's since wandering up from the valley floor, it's been working its way up the hill mountain. It's since wandering up from the valley floor, it's been working its way up the hill mountain. It's a fantastic mountain. It's, you know, high as Denali in Alaska. It's just an amazing place and it's a layer cake of history of Mars, and it's been just a wonderful way for us to explore and basically do stratigraphic understanding of the history of Mars, like studying the Grand Canyon, the layers of the Grand Canyon, exactly like that.

16:32
Anyway, that's one side of Mars, and a few years later, some years later, quite a few years later we landed Perseverance rover and its job was to do something that our rovers cannot do, and that is to provide samples, collect samples, pristine samples, samples that have virtually no, not zero, but nearly zero contamination from Earth in the sample tubes and they're all sealed up in individual tubes, uh, tubes about this big. You can see this video. Oh, look at that. Yeah, there's a sample tube, um, put it right here by the uh, it's, it's actually a wonderful writing instrument, uh, but it's a sample to samples to kind of live in here, and they're sealed up. There's this little uh glove that holds on to them, the. This is basically the tube, but we've we've been leaving this. We call it the glove because the vehicle, in order not to contaminate this tube when it's open, we hold on the robotics hold on to the glove and this is the glove that the rover has and this is a glove for each sample tube and we've been collecting them and dropping off. So Perseverance has dropped off 10 sample tubes in the Three forks area, at mars, in in jesu or crater, and, and in the mean and meantime, it's it's now it's dropped those contingency samples off and the reason we drop them off on the ground is an event that we have something happen to the rover and those, because the samples that are it collects now are in the belly of the rover and they're very hard relatively hard to extract for some other robot to come along and pull them out. Um, but uh, it's now. The rover is now up on the hill collecting samples. We're heading along the uh, the, the western rim of jezero, which has incredible geologic diversity, and we're very excited.

18:29
The scientists are extraordinarily excited about the samples they've been collecting so far and as they're collecting the samples, they're actually doing science on the samples to understand what the samples are mostly made out of, to help select the best ones, and they've been doing that all along the way of to help select the best ones, and they've been doing that all along the way, and they're on the plan to do that for several years, going forward here and collecting and filling up the rest of the sample, to empty sample tubes and then eventually march back down toward Jezero crater, hopefully in time to rendezvous with a future Mars mission that would have a rocket on it that would bring those samples back to Earth, called Mars sample return. And and that's it's the challenge we have now is how do we fund and develop an affordable Mars sample return mission that that we can squeak into the budget and make happen? And and that's where we've been at now. That's really the part.

19:27
There's still plenty of other scientific questions. Many scientists would still like to have more rovers, like we had, with little, little spirit, not rover, a spirit opportunity rovers that we sent in 2004, landed in 2004, that lasted for several years, many years longer than we expected, but those are actually lower priority right now for NASA and those are kind of second order questions. The bulk of the scientific community really feels that we do not have the ability to send large, complex laboratories to Mars to do the kind of sample analysis that you need to do to really ask key questions. And so the scientific community has, even even today, with with better technologies and even in the near future, we just don't have the technology to be able to do what we think we can do on earth.

20:21
So the samples the scientific community believes very strongly the samples should come back to planet earth and that week the scientists can, over the course of decades, do this kind of deliberative focus, repeatable scientific experiments on those samples to be able to do um, to look for things like you know, that just you know, not just you know, not just life.

20:42
Look for signs of ancient life, residual life. If not, that is living life. We don't believe. We believe the surface is very sterile, but the organic residue of life that might still be there in some of the samples. And also other things like just understanding the times, uncovering the dating, the sequence of times, and you can do radiometric dating. You can do many other kinds of experiments on Earth that it's really hard to do on a mobile laboratory on Mars. So that's the next challenge and that's where we're at right now and we've been working on sample return. Now again, sample return is an old, old concept and it's been. We've been working on it now for since the late 60s and early 70s and in terms of iterating on the ideas and concepts and development, and there's been a lot of progress, huge amounts of progress of sample return over the years.

21:42 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, let's talk more about that, and we'll do that as soon as we come back for the short break. Stay with us.

21:49 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Well, you know, since you brought it up, rob, about Mars sample return, that's, you know that's one of the big questions that I had, you know, as, as someone that's been following the work that you and other scientists have been doing with these missions over time, I kind of feel like we were a little bit spoiled in the beginning because we were seeing missions to Mars popping off every couple of years for a good long stretch, you know, each time that there was like one of those windows for the faster transits to get there.

22:21
And now, since Perseverance, you know, we really don't see like too much more beyond Mars sample return. But, like you just said, there have been like thoughts and discussions about why we need to do this, how we could do it since the 60s, and we kind of find ourselves just, you know, recently hearing that NASA has to kind of go back to the drawing board because it's too expensive $11 billion, whatnot and I'm wondering what the biggest challenge really is, why we're kind of not ready yet to really pull this off, when it's been a bit of a dream of scientists for quite some time and it seems like the fact that we can put nuclear-powered cars on the surface of mars, uh, like perseverance and curiosity, that it would just be maybe like a short step up, but it sounds like it's more technical than that is. That is that, you know, I'm not trying to ask for people who maybe, you know, don't really get how technical it actually is to do well, uh, I will tart the great question.

23:27 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Um, I, I, personally, I I've been deeply involved in this for many years in tech sample. Um, in fact, I have a I didn't know my own math on this sample return has been, on average, nine months or nine years away from launch since the 1960s. Um, and a lot of this has to do with, I mean, there is no doubt. So check this. So, going back to history, so why, what's with this Mars drumbeat? Why was it so? Why were there so many missions that popped along, at least people's mind? Oh, there's so many of them Actually, not that many, but there's still enough, you know, handful or so.

24:08
The reason is, first of all, mars is close. It. You don't have to. You know, to send something like you know, a clipper to Jupiter takes years and has to swing by Mars. It has to go around the sun, get enough energy, enough spin. It takes forever to get out there, it takes a lot of money and they're very expensive. And, of course, the environment at Jupiter terrible for anything because of the radiation environment. Mars is really nice and convenient. It's still 20. Yeah, still, you only have 26 months between launch windows, which is launch periods, which is really, really irritating. I mean, you can, just you can't go whenever you want to, but still that's pretty frequent relative to other planets.

24:47
So we've been able to, and so, and because there was so much about mars we didn't know we didn't have to really equip these. Equip these missions like spirit good example, spirit opportunity, or even pathfinder uh, mars pathfinder, when sojourner rover we didn't have to do and to put a lot of stuff on there to actually be able to answer, you know, to be able to get science back and new science. And so what's happened is we've basically plucked the low hanging fruit. You know how to do those simple things and all these vehicles, of course, one way trips, they land, they send their data back. We've learned a ton and they've gotten more and more complex. You know, curiosity was a huge step in complexity and cost over spirit opportunity. Spirit opportunity where about 870 million bucks I I've got to adjust for inflation, so I can't quite do the math perfectly. It's on apples and apples, but um, whereas, whereas, uh, oops, I put my two thumbs up here, look, look at that. Yes, I have a Mac.

25:46 - Rod Pyle (Host)
That was an exciting moment.

25:48 - Rob Manning (Guest)
That was an exciting moment. I should do that again Whereas the cost for Curiosity because it's so much bigger rover we had to come up with a new landing architecture, you know the sky crane architecture, the sky crane maneuver, to lower this rover like a helicopter on the surface of Mars. And then we had to do all this stuff and it took us longer and we didn't make it in time. We had to delay our launch by two years in order to get the thing finished in time. I was chief engineer for Curiosity and I have to say it was a really hard road and the cost was many, was several times more than the cost of the combined spirit and opportunity caught budget and so, um, and so it's tougher, it gets hard, and and because the reason for that is because we were putting as much science inside, uh, inside curiosity, in terms of just mass, as the almost the entire weight of opportunity rover. So so put that in perspective, and, by the way, the science, the science equipment on spirit and opportunity rovers wait about as much as all sojourner. So so there seems to, if you see a trend here, the next mission needs the vehicle pay, the science payload, this the mass of an entire. So, and that's what's happened here, so we're. So.

27:11
The trouble with sample return is it's, it's we, we, we have to. In order to carry so much stuff to Mars. The vehicles have to get bigger, they get more complex. In order to land something as heavy as sample return, as we've envisioned, sample return with the very with and that's what we do rather heavy Mars ascent vehicle, 470 kilograms, which is no, just the rocket, compared to the mass of just the rocket that rides on top, is a little payload. It's a payload element, and that's not the only payload.

27:45
The thing has to carry the Mars. It's not very fast to carry. Compare that with 170 kilogram rover like Spirit Opportunity. I mean, it's three times as much. Right, it's incredible, I mean. And so it's not just the mass, it's the volume. Now the vehicle has to be bigger and because the mass is so much higher, we have to invent all this new tricks and new sensors in order to fly this thing to the surface of Mars without crashing. So you have to layer all these new inventions on top of each other. I don't personally the $11 billion. You know, if you look at it, if you peel that in, you're going to go like where'd you get that number? Because we never proposed $11 billion.

28:31 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So let's hold on that thought for a second. That was my next question. Okay, please do, rod, and we'll get to that right after this next break. Hold on.

28:41
So as a lay person and, I admit, a bit of a JPL fanboy I have to say that you know, I see this tension and I'm not sure I'm seeing it properly but it feels like there's a tension between all this great engineering that results in missions that go on sometimes for well over a decade, when they're originally scheduled for a few months, which builds expectations in the public and in Congress and in the executive branch, and then this big challenge, which is many multiples of what you've done before Mars sample return, the you know 8,000-pound gorilla, I guess. In this case, as we've said, we've talked about it for years and years, but the more you stare at it, the harder it seems to get right. Mars just keeps getting more and more greedy in terms of I don't give you enough atmosphere, but I've still got enough gravity to make it the pain in the neck and all that. So I mean, is this, is that a tension there, or is it just the raw cost that they're reacting to?

29:39 - Rob Manning (Guest)
There is that tension. I mean there's sample return has one feature that other Mars missions don't have, um, and that was even even our. Uh, even with perseverance, which is sort of slowly collecting samples, you can't call it mission success. It's considered by the mission success already because it's it's past its mission life already. Um, but most missions you go, you start, you land and and you start collecting science and you send the science back on by your radio and the scientists start going, yay, yay, we're getting more information, we're getting more, and they're getting more and more and more time.

30:15
Sample return has this really irritating property that, uh, you get no joy, zero joy, until the samples are, have landed on earth and have been stored and opened up inside a sample receiving facility years and years later.

30:34
So it's like it's the, it's the, it's it's the worst delayed gratification, vinnie Mars mission. It's like you've got to have incredible patience. Meanwhile you're forking out tons of money over years right to pay for all that stuff, and so there's a sense of investment that goes with sample return that is unlike any other Mars mission. So that's sort of an emotional and kind of a quasi political anxiety that goes with this. So you have to be super committed and super patient and in our, in our society, that's not one of our major attributes. Patience, I mean to say, hey, we're going to get this in the laboratory in 2032, 2033. That'd be great. It's like, oh my God, you know, am I going to be live then? So a lot of people are like you know, it's understandable, and if you're a scientist, you have to be willing to put out a lot and be willing to take the long game.

31:46 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I wanted to follow up on that because I was trying to look at the cost of one versus the cost of the other. You mentioned the kind of labels in terms of price tags that have been put on Mars after it returned itself. But, like Perseverance, I think is estimated at $2.7 billion and you get a lot for that. You've got these samples that are cashed. Now You've got a long-lived rover that's doing all sorts of things.

32:09
It's climbing a mountain on Mars and then the next evolution for a much larger vehicle, the cost that NASA has been talking about and saying is too expensive is that $11 billion number, which it sounds like you have some stuff, some thoughts to kind of really put that in perspective. But I did want to say my father-in-law has a saying you know that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys, which is you know like. Basically, you get what you pay for. So if you're not like to your point, willing to commit in advance and we discussed this at length about several other subjects, rod and I if you're not going to commit to spending the money for what you need to do the work, then no one's going to be happy. But it sounds like this number, this $11 billion might not be the sticking point that it sounds like, because it sounds like you've got some stuff to tell us about that.

33:00 - Rob Manning (Guest)
I think you're right To be fair. If you look at the $11 billion where it came from, it's actually a. They said, okay, well, what's the worst it could be? Yeah, and particularly if you live, given all the constraints the constraints NASA, for example let's listen. You know, hey, we don't have the budget we used to have. We've got other priorities Artemis, we've got other things to do. This is not number one in NASA's priority list.

33:27
You guys, it's great science, we love science, we're fans. But we've got other science too, and there are other scientists who are chomping at the bit. We want to go to Venus. We've got other things. We have more astronomy stuff to do. It's getting. You know, we, we can only allocate this much per year. And so they said, okay, if you did that, then you would have this in order to develop this stuff, you would have this small standing army that would do a little bit at a time. It's kind of like if you did build your house, but you can only afford a couple thousand dollars a year to your to your house, and then you start collecting wood from Home Depot, you start putting stuff up in the corner. You still have a few employees because you have to keep designing it to make sure it works, and you start putting the pieces gradually and you integrate that over long periods of time. It turns out and you add inflation on top of that. Pretty soon you're talking about some real money.

34:23 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and if you leave your wood out too long, it starts to rot before you have a chance to put up the roof.

34:27 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Well, I won't even go into those kind of details either, because there's human, human factors issues too, like, like, like, corporate knowledge and memory. Um so, and how do you retain that? Um, so, we, so that's what they did. So this is what the worst case, and that was considered. Oh, that's not, that's not acceptable.

34:46
Well, yeah, by the way, samples to get back in 2040, um, you know, and that's like, no one has that kind of patience apparently. Um, it's a long time from now, right, 2040, is that a long time? Well, and I bet you, if we had a time machine, I asked you in 2040, was that a long time ago, you go? No, it wasn't that long. I actually didn't take that long to go from 2024 to 2040. But in our world it is a long time. It's hard to commit anything for that period of time, so it's a lot of challenge. I mean. So the reason in some sense, there are ways of making the thing a lot cheaper, a lot easier to do, but it there are ways of making the thing a lot cheaper, a lot easier to do, but it requires something that NASA can't do right now because of the constant constraints, and that is putting a big pile of money on it over a small number of years, and you know cause.

35:33
You can fund it this way, or you could fund it and get it all the way. You know so many of our missions. You are, and that's the cool thing about Mars, with the two-year lifetime. There's this wonderful drumbeat of you know. We can't be late, we've got to get the money in there, we've got to make it happen. We've got to make it happen Because if you missed your launch window, your two-week launch period, you'd have to wait 28, 26 months before you can go again. And that's going to be ka-ching, because all these people have to kind of hang out and wait for operations and you just can't lay them all off and hire them back again because they're not going to be around. They're going to be working for Blue or SpaceX or whatever. So you're stuck.

36:16 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And we've seen examples of that with the European Space Agency's challenges with ExoMars. I mean they had delays, they missed a window, then they came up with the next window's challenges with ExoMars. I mean they had delays, they missed the window, then they came up with the next window, then there's a war in Ukraine and they lose their launch vehicle, I know, and then now they have to wait again another two years, and so there's other forces beyond just the technical ones too, that could happen, I feel so bad, yeah, yeah, I feel so bad for those guys.

36:49 - Rob Manning (Guest)
They worked so hard, hard for so long and they're great people there, but it feels Kafkaesque, get the kind of their scientific, that effort where something seems to happen and you just never couldn't get there. It's very frustrating and, I'll be honest, we have been, you know, incredibly lucky to have had a consistent funding, consistent drumbeat biting off things that were not too expensive, that were affordable, that people could actually commit to. But if that commitment level raises above a certain threshold, it's like no, we can't buy it, that's just too much to swallow for a particular launch window. And that's, I think that's the situation we're finding with the SEMPOR return. It's just like you know, today we look back at James Webb and we go, wow, that all that you know, $9, $10 billion worth every penny. We're getting some amazing things. We look back.

37:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Because it opened, yeah.

37:44 - Rob Manning (Guest)
It all opened, it all pulled together and you know the science we're getting is, you know, revolutionary, and it really is. And I'm so amazed and thrilled. But you know, if you had said, hey, hey, can I get $10 billion from you guys and they go, like you got to be kidding me. No, that would eat the rest of the science and astronomy missions lunch for the next decades, and that's all we'll be able to do and they go. Well, maybe that's the only thing we can do and that's what we did, but ultimately that's what happened. They actually did do it and they kept up and they didn't give up. That's what happened. They actually did do it and they kept up and they didn't give up. Nasa, you know, ironically I don't know if you know that sample return program we never got to the point of actually submitting a budget for it.

38:38 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So everybody's senses, guys are too expensive. Well, we actually haven't told you how much is expensive, how expensive it is. Yet we haven't even had our PDR yet, because we have this number thrown in our face over and over again. First it was 7.5 billion, now it's 11 billion, and the only way I can think of to get Congress to just say yes is to tell them North Korea is about to return robotic samples from Mars. But where's that number coming from if it's not from you?

39:02 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Because they keep pointing it back to you. Well, to JPL, I mean I, I I'm not going to answer that, I have no idea, and that's I mean. You know, I think they would like us to be cheaper, like you know, everybody wants, if you, you know. But we know how much things cost we. You've seen people, seen how much stuff you know. You know how tough it is to make curiosity and perseverance and spirit opportunity and pathfinder and mars, recent reconnaissance orbiter, all these different stuff we've been involved in. So you know, um, it's just, you know it listen the thing, what they're trying to do and they're doing the right thing. They're saying, hey, you guys, we don't know yet how much it's going to cost. First of all, we haven't finished doing the math, to do the estimate, so we have not submitted an estimate, official estimate, because the NASA has is something called a key decision point, kdpc, where you commit to a life cycle cost. We haven't got there yet. We had, we never got there and um, but there was no doubt that the way it was set up it was going to be expensive and no matter what number, whether it's 11, seven, six, doesn't matter, it's a big number. Just say big, don't say, don't say number, it's going to be big. Can NASA afford big? And the answer is I don't think NASA can afford big right now because we've got higher priorities than that. And it's really so. The people who are saying it would you know they can point to whoever they want, but it's, there is no doubt it's hard. I mean, I, I was, I'm on the review board for these things and these projects and it's daunting. You know the size of that lander is really big. I was, I was, I was the chair for the interdescent landing review.

40:53
You know they're pulling out all the stops. You know, for example, you know when this vehicle enters, in order not to hit the surface, they this this ballistic, ballistic entry. They dive as deep as they dare into the, into the atmosphere, quite steep, they fly horizontally and then they have, they lift, they, they pull the, they have they very large center of mass offset. It's the largest ever to pull up, try to get more lift and get it higher off by the ground, higher above the ground. So it actually does a scoop, a dive and a pull up where we can be high enough to open the parachute and have enough timeline to get to the surface. And while they're doing that, the vehicle doesn't know where it is and needs to help guidance and, especially when it's lofting in the air like this, it needs to look out the window. So now, for the first time normally we look out the window once the heat shield is gone. Now we have to add a window. Look out the window while you're still flying horizontally to the ground to see where the heck you are, so you can help, control and guide your entry better Again, all trying to squeeze this incredible mass into this, this fixed volume, and, and so it's.

42:11
It's a challenge, it's really it's a strong, difficult engineering challenge. And not to mention, we have to put a next step up in parachute size. You know, and and all that stuff is because we're trying to land this massive rocket, uh and uh, with a european arm in it, um, that does the sample, motion and handling. Um, all the other equipment we need to be able to control the temperature of of this system, um, and and have all the features.

42:38
You need to do the, the, the sample, the OS, we call it, the orbiting sample container has to be double sealed in order to prevent back contamination with Earth. There's a whole bunch of things and the orbiter has to carry all this stuff with it. I mean, it's even that the Europeans have been struggling with this growing mass of this equipment that we needed to bring with us in order to capture and seal up and store and return the samples back to a direct return back to earth. We just and all this stuff is because we're, because we're trying to find ways to capitalize in the partnerships and the relationships, and it turns out it's actually probably more expensive to do it that way. There's ways to do it cheaper, but you have to be willing to take risks yeah, you have to do that, and that's an interesting separate topic, is you know?

43:40 - Rod Pyle (Host)
this isn't again. As an outsider. My impression has always been, if you're working on NASA missions, which are of course funded by the public and overseen by the executive branch, which likes to affix a certain amount of status to success, failure really is not an option, Whereas if you're SpaceX, you can fail all you want, as long as it's not being paid for by government. But before we get back into that, let's take one more break and then we'll be able to ask Tarek's next question, which I can tell he's bursting at the seams.

44:11 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Rob, you know it sounds exciting what a Mars sample return mission would be like, but it also sounds like it's super complicated, which we've been talking about this whole time, and I know that there have been like a few hundred, you know, actual Mars samples that we've discovered on earth with meteorites and whatnot, right, and I'm just wondering what story they're not telling us. That pristine samples, that sounds a little paranoid to me, Well, well well, you know well, because it's it's, it's, it's.

44:38
It's a general question about what those pristine samples, either of Martian regolith or the rocks themselves, and, I guess, these special samples that Perseverance collected? Because there's a difference, right, perseverance has some, I guess some what is it Not genealogy? Some provenance to their samples, whereas just landing, grabbing a scoop of dirt to their samples, whereas just landing, grabbing a scoop of dirt, shoving it in a rocket and bringing it back is a little bit, you know, different than than that, the kind of approach that, that that we're looking at right now. So what, what do you glean?

45:14 - Rob Manning (Guest)
from the pristine part that you don't get from this. Okay, so so it's actually a pristine, is one of the pieces. You asked a good question. Well, you know. Well, I'd say what, what don't our so-called SNCC meteorites discovered on earth? Uh, the Mars samples, uh, mars, of meteorites, rocks that have come from um by high, very high confidence. We know it came from Mars because they contain the? Uh, the trapped gases match the isotopic ratios. You see a Mars samples, um, that we've measured on mars, uh, so quite what don't they? How can? We can't get the infinite. We get a lot from them. There's no doubt about it. But there's a lot of things that, a lot of things I love. We love to ask this rock about its history that it's not willing to tell us. One of the problems is these rocks, have you know, in order to get to earth, they were shocked and send into space, so they were altered by the actual impact which launched them off of Mars.

46:05 - Tariq Malik (Host)
And they by like another, something hit Mars.

46:08 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Something whacked into Mars and spit them up, and they got, they got. They got affected there. So, whatever history they had, some of it is not. It's wiped out, some of it isn't. And then they spend millions of years in orbit around the sun, many millions of years, before they get a chance to bump into our little planet. Okay, and so they get altered. They get altered by cosmic rays, they're exposed to the environments and the temperatures in orbit around the sun. They're like little, tiny little planets of their own right, asteroids, and eventually bump into Earth and, of course, they go through the entry phase, which is not, you know, most of us.

46:50
If you were a rock, you would melt a little bit and so you get affected, and then you end up spending thousands of maybe not in some cases, hundreds of thousands of years on the surface of the Earth, getting rained on, snowed on, and so your story is there, but it's stomped on by the rather tough history to get here. So there's certain things and so much of what you lose. You have to ask the question is that because? Is that rock? And this was true for the infamous ALH 84001 asteroid, a meteor that landed and was found in Allen Hills area of Antarctica in 1984. And they thought was you know these? They tell a really interesting story. The question is is that's another thing that was missing about that, because there's many parts of it that go like this did not, this was not affected by that journey. This is little wormy looking things.

47:53 - Rod Pyle (Host)
We found that turned out to be geological in nature, right, exactly?

47:57 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Well, no, it turned out to have a possible geologic origin story. In other words, we don't know, but we can't say for sure it was biological. So, as Carl Sagan says, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. And this evidence had at least two possible explanations. So the problem was the context, context. Context is everything. So what the cool thing that perseverance is doing when it collects a rock? It knows the context of which it is being collected. It knows this geological region it was collected in. We know something about its overall temporal structure, whether it was a rock that had been laid down um billions of years ago or had been altered by recent millions of years ago, kind of events. And you can get that context. And so by putting that story together, they'll be able to layer all the other observables they have into the story line that goes associated with these samples. You can discount all the impact the effect of the journey will have would be minuscule compared to the impact of a journey going from the surface of Mars to the surface of Antarctica. So that is the story, and that's what it is, and that's the architecture, and that's the reason, by the way. So you might ask well, rob, why don't we just can we get content? Can we just go out and grab a scoop, put it in? That's called a grab sample and that's been one of the many architectural elements of sample return for many years, decades, over time.

49:33
The story I just gave you about why the context is so important the trouble with grabbing a pile of regolith regolith has the same problem. Similar problem is that it's a pile of dirt and it's got. You don't know which rock it came from, whether where it landed from it's. You end up losing the historical context of that sample. So that's why we core into rock, because rock has not been um decimated. It's actually typically formed in that rock. Sorry, those were the minerals that were formed.

50:08
The idea of grab samples is fine. You'll learn something it definitely wouldn't be it. Here we have these little samples and we're able to pull them together in this incredible diversity and we'll be able to lay them on the surface of Mars or deliver directly to a lander. Whether it's a pile of rocks or deliver directly to a lander, whether it's a pile of rocks in a pile or a bunch of these sample tubes, it really doesn't matter. The sample return is still hard Because you need to put them into something the size of a soccer ball. Okay, the soccer ball has the samples in them. I don't care how you organize it, what you, how you, you know what you do. You need a bottle ball about this big and it's, it's a, it's a handful or so of kilograms, and that you need to get that in outer space. Okay, right, that's all you need to do. How tough can that be? How tough can come on, guys, you can just do it, throw it up there how tough can come on guys.

51:07 - Rod Pyle (Host)
You can just do it, throw it up there.

51:08
So you also, though, something you know if, if you can drive to many more places he said, a cannon, you can drive to places that are more interesting than where you can land, right? I mean, the engineers are always going to maybe not you, yeah, but the room of engineers when you're debating landing sites is going to say, okay, put us on that nice flat basaltic plane with a little bit of gravel on it. And then the geologists are saying, no, I want to be close to that river delta and okay. But my, my real question is and then I'm going to give Tarek is this probably all had time for?

51:33
You know, there's this and maybe I'm thinking it and you guys don't need to, but it seems like there's this tension. You know, because you're looking at this long timeline for MSR, mars Sample Return. Maybe there's this tension potentially between you know it's going to take us, say, 12 to 14 years to get a sample back from Mars, but we might be able to get human beings there in 18 to 20 years. You know, is it urgent to get those samples back before we send a human crew, or do we think that the human landing there is really going to be, you know, out in 2050 and let's just move on with samples?

52:11 - Rob Manning (Guest)
I, I think this, depending on who you talk to, um, uh, I, I. I think there's. I don't think there's a story. I'm gonna. I'm first of all. I'm not an expert here, so I'm going to defer. My personal understanding is that there are things that you would learn about crew safety from a sample. Hey, I really need to assess the biological potential of those samples for protection for possible back contamination into humans and back into our planet. Presumably, if an astronaut goes to Mars, they have some hope of coming back and if they're contaminated that would be bad. So they would like, so many people would like to be able to, to be able to say, certify that Mars is indeed a safe place to go in.

53:08
The samples and whatever residual samples, including the contamination to the astronauts themselves, are fine at the total by, because we're we've all these very intense forward contamination requirements. We are very, very careful to minimize the amount of biomass that we actually deliver to mars. Right, um, we have, we have this appears to be a large number three, three times ten to the five spores um per mission. It sounds like a lot, three hundred thousand spores. But you know, if you put that on the head of a pin, you still wouldn't see it. It's very it's. It doesn't weigh anything.

53:46
Um, a crew of people, I tell you, are dirty. It's the way we are. It's like part of us and it's going to be very hard for us not to contaminate, significantly, contaminate the area of mars that they land and provide and actually, you know, submit biological material to the surface of Mars from Earth. It's just so. The first human crews are going to be actually contaminating Mars, not the whole planet, but portions at least. Where they're at. Some of it will actually migrate through windstorms and dust storms and kind of fly around, but it's not going to ruin our ability to actually sample pristine samples of Mars. However, it's going to start the clocks ticking. You know we're starting to do it.

54:34
I mean everything again, everything we crashed into Mars or landed, everything we worked really hard to be super clean, including the Europeans, everybody does it that way. We follow, we follow norms that are established through the United Nations, and so it's. But the crew's going to change all that overnight. So there's a bunch of arguments like that. So, and we again, there are things about the sample We'd like to know more about the. You know, the potential for how the Mars particulates could, if ingested in the lungs, what happens to it? Of course we wouldn't actually test it. You know Rod might be available, but I think you know.

55:14 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Ow, ouch, ouch.

55:18 - Rob Manning (Guest)
No. So listen, listen. We thought almost fully half the samples we've been bringing back would be ingested by biological creatures on Earth as part of our test program to validate that the sample We've learned. Since we don't have to do that because we have equipment on Earth that could actually say no, we can just look at them, you know, with a microscope and so so, but still there are some of that. The question is there an imperative? Maybe I mean it's some of that. The question is there an imperative? Maybe I mean it's a risk thing. And the question is one of the reasons sample return is so expensive is we have an extra requirement that most emissions don't have. We have to make sure that we have a very low probability of inadvertently releasing samples into the Earth's environment.

56:03
So we don't get space plague, right, right, yeah, it's. It's the andromeda strain concern, right, the movie, um, andromeda strain, do you remember that? Um, now, I most people think it's extraordinarily low. I mean the pathogenic to be. You know, it takes a lot of work for pathogens to evolve in the first place. They tend to to evolve as part of a competitive environment, competitive in the sense of genetic competition, in a Darwinian sense. So it's unlikely that they would, but we don't know for sure. That's the thing. The probability is not zero.

56:42
And so we do this enormous amount of work and of sealing we call breaking the chain of contact, so everything that's delivered to earth, has is, is clean, guaranteed to be clean, of mars stuff and anything that's inside it. It's mars, is protected and sealed up from the outside, and so we put a lot of effort into doing that. And a lot of that equipment is what's burdening the mass of the orbiter and burning the mass of our, our, our samples that go up from our rocket. This is the kinds of thing and this takes a huge amount of effort to figure out, to get this right. And so we, you know we do a special ceiling techniques and special we were. Our plan was to surround the OS with this massive array of very bright ultraviolet sterilizing light. This would be the brightest thing, the biggest light bulbs ever sent to Mars that's surrounding our vehicle. This is the kind of thing that we had to do in order to convince ourselves that these are the kinds of requirements that cause things to be expensive. Yeah, yeah, and so so anyway.

57:53 - Tariq Malik (Host)
I had. I had one. I had one last question that you've got me thinking of, and it's just about the future, because we've been talking a lot about Mars sample return in the history of these Mars missions and how they got bigger, more complex and whatnot. But I'm wondering what's what's beyond? Uh, what's beyond Mars sample return? Is it something like we're seeing at the moon, where we're getting smaller but more targeted, like rovers to this spot to drill for ice, or that spot, or this orbiter to be a communications thing? What would the next few windows be that you would want to target, if you could pick them nothing.

58:27 - Rob Manning (Guest)
I'm an engineer, so I'm not. I can't speak for the scientific community, but the scientific community that I've heard so far have there are. Mars is so rich and diverse, so many cool things to look at. They, they, they could. They will give you a list pages long of things they'd like to see. They understand that we need to neck down to the single priority, and so a lot of them are just like okay, well, all the things I want to look at, we're not going to be looking at it until I'm an old person, but so so they're all kind of agreeing the sample return is the number one priority and that's budget is big enough, so it would gobble up all the other budgets to do that kind of thing. So the question is is are there other things? And, by the way and certainly NASA's view is well, you know, and maybe a SpaceX and Blue Origin's view is that Mars exploration is next and there's going to be a human doing this and all the all these questions that you want to answer it doesn't. You don't need a Sojourner or Spirit Opportunity rover, we'll just have astronauts do it.

59:29
Thank you, but something is really, you know, something we all need to be aware of about why Mars is more difficult than the average bear. You know, we're all because we're all engineering space groupies, right? I love watching the videos of the progress of Starship, you know, and the wonderful engineering, trial and error, iterative approach that they're able to use on a very fast turnover. It's just, you know, it gives me chills. I so wish that we could do that.

01:00:02
The problem is, how do we do trials if each trial is separated by 26 months? Yeah, and so it's very painful. And so you have to do all those trials here on this planet somehow, and faking out the tests that we do, or development to make it kind of Mars, like ish, you know, and it's really hard to do because Mars and earth are nothing close to the same in in so many different ways, and so it's it's hard to, it's hard to find that, you know, and that's one of the reasons our missions tend to be more expensive, because we're doing things. You know, when you see us cheering with our blue suits and going and crying and all that stuff, you know that's not happiness, that's relief that we didn't mess up, we, we, we've, we've gone through thousands and thousands of possible things in our mind's eye with tests and checking us. We have to get it right the first time on national television, everybody watching us, you know. Can you imagine that kind of pressure it's?

01:01:12
out there Actually yes, yes, you can.

01:01:17 - Rod Pyle (Host)
So just a quick lightning round answer on this one, if you can, and you know, depending on what happens with with mars sample return to go either way. But you know, in terms of sitting at jpl and looking towards washington, is there stuff coming down the pipeline or are we entering kind of a quiet period here?

01:01:39 - Rob Manning (Guest)
It appears to be very quiet. Yeah, it's very. I will admit this is we've had layoffs at JPL. It's been very. It's been challenging, very challenging. Our staff are concerned and my concern is not, I mean, the cool thing about the kind of work that we do. Almost everybody has no trouble finding a job outside if they want to go. I mean, there's plenty of other places that will pay them to do this kind of work. This is a we are a bit of a renaissance. I hope it lasts a little longer. In the space business, with the new space and this whole bunch of great inventors. There's no shortage of creativity out there and we've got people who are exceptionally creative and capable people and who will find things to do.

01:02:28 - Rod Pyle (Host)
I'm more concerned about just our memory of how to do this kind of stuff it's so because you experienced that firsthand with pathfinder right, you wanted correct go back to viking lander technology and it was gone gone.

01:02:41 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Yes, exactly right. People wonder why we did this silly airbag bound and rocket solid, rocket bouncing thing on Mars. It's because we couldn't afford the cost of to reinvent and redevelop throttled engines that would allow us to land like other, like Buck Rogers is supposed to do. And so so we end up with this goofy Rubeube, goldberg, uh and very low cost, mind you, very cheap landing system. That worked very well, and we copied that same design and and most of pathfinder in. We just put wheels on pathfinder and we call them spirit opportunity rovers, right and though, and and we so we use that to keep the cost down and complexity. But to do Curiosity we had to invent, we had to reinvent and fund over a long period of time, throughout the early 2000s, before we even launched well before we launched, curiosity, the new, those throttle engines, technology that had to be reinvented and that could. That budget just to do that was a significant fraction of all of Mars Pathfinder's budget. Right, and so.

01:03:43 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And this could happen again and again.

01:03:45 - Rob Manning (Guest)
Yeah, and and so this the kind of thing is. It's easy for our it's people think that we advance, we advance in steps and we go backwards. We don't go forwards all the time, and that and and, by the way, who's the we, a private company that can invent something and do something magical. If that company runs out of money or goes bankrupt, all that knowledge goes oof.

01:04:09 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Right Appears Well and that's a good argument for keeping things moving. But speaking of keeping things moving, I have to wrap up and I'd love to have you back. Personally, I'd love to do a whole episode on EDL, because it's such a fascinating story, but for now.

01:04:28
I want to thank you for coming on today. I want to thank everybody for listening to Episode 112, this Week in Space the Great Mars Pause, and don't forget to check us out on spacecom websites, in the name and the National Space Site, of course, at nssorg and if you happen to be in LA and you're looking for something to do, this weekend, our conference is running at the Gateway down by LAX and we've got all kinds of cool stuff happening. Unfortunately, the coolest thing was Rob on Thursday, so you missed that, but there's astronauts and other NASA luminaries and so forth. Even William Shatner is going to be rolling by, so if you get a chance to come down, please come say hi, rob. Where can we best track down?

01:05:09 - Rob Manning (Guest)
your adventures in the future. Well, just call me. You know where I am, rob. I met everybody else, oh everybody else. I don't actually do social media, so I don't do a very good job of sharing my stories. I have to kind of teach myself how to do that. But I might do that more. Now that I'm no longer representing JPL as a whole as a chief engineer, I might be able to do more of that and share my thoughts and ideas more as an opinion person as opposed to a representative of a big institution. Excellent.

01:05:45 - Rod Pyle (Host)
And Tarek, where can we find you wasting your life on video games?

01:05:47 - Tariq Malik (Host)
Wasting, wasting. That's the wave of the future, rod. But no, you can find me at spacecom. As always this weekend, we'll be not just celebrating Memorial Day as the holidays we're recording this but also watching Rocket Lab launch NASA's pre-fire mission to study the Earth like never before, so that'll be really exciting. It's the first of a couple of satellites for that mission and, as Rod alluded to, there's a new season of Fortnite, the wreck season with Fallout and everything is in it. There's not a lot of space, so I'm a little disappointed, but I'll probably be doing some of that this weekend.

01:06:20 - Rod Pyle (Host)
Well, and because I'm apparently backward-looking and curmudgeonly, you can find me at pilebookscom or at astromagazinecom, where we publish our quarterly magazine for the NSS. Please remember, you can always drop us a line at twist at twittv. That's T-W-I-S. At twittv. We welcome all your comments, and especially your jokes. They don't even have to be good ones. Actually, if you send us some of your worst, that could be for a good afternoon. But we love your comments and we do answer every email.

01:06:48
New episodes of this podcast actually publish every Friday on your favorite podcatcher, so make sure to subscribe, tell your friends and give us reviews. And don't forget, you can get all the great programming with video streams and all the extras that you don't see behind the firewall On Club Twit only $7 a month. It's a heck of a deal and we'd appreciate it, because podcasts are struggling and we don't want to struggle. We want to spend our time talking to cool people like Rob. You can follow the Twit Tech Podcast Network at Twit, on Twitter and on Facebook, and Twittv on Instagram. Thank you very much and we'll see you all next week.