Transcripts For CSPAN2 Amazing Stories Of The Space Age 20170412

The part that doesnt show in pasadena Public Schools is all the classrooms had the floor to ceiling windows. You are under your halfinch of formica with a huge sheet glass window is the bomb just going to shut up get under the desk that is the setting, if you will, of the stories we are talking about. One of my favorites is project horizon, this was turned into the Eisenhower Administration in 1958, very short study of four to six month, werner von braun was part of this but i dont think he was as intimately involved as he would like to have been. I have read this a couple times. It doesnt to the attention to deal about detail but the general idea was we needed to build a base on the moon before the russians got there. To hold that piece of real estate against invasion and by the way, we are not going to talk about it much but we could put Nuclear Weapons there. It would take two days to get here but that was a consideration. Here is the moon base, this proposal is graphically challenged, that is as good as illustrations get. You see the general idea was they were going to dig these trenches and fly these Cargo Containers and assembly lunar base on the surface using a number of large rockets. This was the u. S. Army. The first flight would be in 1965, they were going to send three men in a rocket. When i say rocket they didnt have the saturn 5 back yet. We are talking about smaller rockets at the time that have to fly into orbit, fuel up there, fly another one up, then take off for the moon, land directly, none of this rendezvousing in orbit that apollo did. Like the bugs bunny cartoon, straight to the moon, do your thing, come back. The first three would spend 90 days record ordering on the surface. You had never seen it through anything but a telescope at this point so they were going to select a landing site for the base, then fly upwards of 100 to 130 cargo runs with rockets, 130, not the 16 with apollo but 130, launching out of the central pacific, could launch from Cape Canaveral but this was the army and Cape Canaveral belong to the air force. They said we will ship everything to Christmas Island and lunch from there. Obviously didnt work. Big plans, big ideas. Once they decided where to put this, and they sent 9 people, in the 1950s, they had 15 days to dig these trenches, put together their block and tackle, build their moon tractor, move everything over, connect the wires, build the bunks, build the office, get the weapons situated, ready to go, it was a little bit ambitious. The crew by 1966, if theres anything good about this, besides blind ambition, it would be open as a program and might still be there which is something we didnt get from the Apollo Program but the best part is last, the moon soldiers. You cant have an army moon base without folders, right . These arent just astronauts, these are soldiers. Here they moon soldier in full combat it up for being on the lunar surface the entire time, which my favorite part, these arent ice skate, these are large footpads because we know how much dust there was, he might step in a crater and sink up to his antenna. They had ways to deal with bodily functions, heat radiators, that was all they marked up on not sure why it was so incomplete. That is what a welldressed moon soldier is wearing. People say that is not quite how we did it. If you have soldiers on the moons ymoon you got to have weapons. In the vacuum in the moon they were concerned about shooting a. 45 pistol in a vacuum, the metal might seize up due to temperature or metal rubbing against each other, they were concerned because there was no air the smoke might collect in front of the gun and obscure the view but my favorite concert was using a rifle at the right angle at the right caliber of bullet you might fire, miss the bad guy and it goes all the way around the moon and hits you in the back of the helmet so that is very bad. They decided rather than have Something Like that lets have Nuclear Bazooka instead. Surely that is a good weapon against the invading soldiers over the crater so this is the Davy Crockett and 28, and 29 nuclear mortar with an instruction book on the right and 51 ton warhead just under a kiloton, moves 10 or 15 kt so you get the general idea, big explosion in the range of 2. 3 miles, wasnt very accurate but when you are talking Nuclear Explosions accuracy doesnt matter. Hit the trigger, ducked down behind rocks and hope they dont get swelled up at the nuclear blast. If you deploy these things, they send them to europe. This is a large backpack, if you test them here is a test on a sunny day in nevada. Thrill physicists with dark sunglasses, getting radiated with about 8 million equivalents of their yearly xrays. We knew that it worked, that was good. The other weapon they wanted on the moon was the lunar play horn which they resurfaced. Widely used us up through. Anybody in the military, and eat it is good to have instruction on things. It is important. It is bad enough to get hit by one of these on earth. You dont want to kill anybody, dragging them off the surface this was really kind of an ideal moon weapon, they didnt have anything taken. If that wasnt enough, a few years later after this project was shelved it was turned into the Eisenhower Administration, my understanding, although it is not written down as such, he looked at it, took off the glasses and said you got to be getting me kind of looks. He didnt want to see, despite his background in world war ii, he didnt want to see war extended to space, he said we are not going to do this, we have a civilian Space Program. That is not going to stop the armory. In 1965 i never did find the name of the person who wrote it. The meanderings of a weapon oriented mind when applied in a vacuum such as the moon. I assume he is applying it as a problem of weapons. This is a study complete with welldressed lunar soldiers, flying tank or something over there. What kind of firearms you might want to use on the moon. A very buck rogers example, there are six, and this fires pellets are little darts here. It is roughly the power of a 22 pistol. No reason to have little heat fins here but it looks really cool if youre proposing a weapon in the 1960s, why not make it look cool . This would be thin stabilized micro guns. 19 little holes there and used interchangeably. With rocket propelled bullets that spin as they go. And you can whip out the sausage gun. These are two of six, they got progressively weirder but the ideal was you got to have special mood weapons. To close on project horizon. You got to have some generally realistic idea what is going to cost. We know project apollo because it is a matter of history, 11 flights cost 20 to 24 billion depending how you slice it in money at that time. Project horizon would have 155 plus with developments in the base in the caroline islands, a Permanent Moon base and so forth, i think they underbid a little bit but the government contract inflates a little bit, but 100 flights would have been a challenge on anybodys budget. That was probably a nonstarter. And we did not have the Apollo Program which was a much better decision. Scenario number 2, doing two chapters, atomic rockets. Up until now, including elon musk and jeff bezos and the buccaneers in the space project, all rockets leave the earth powered by chemical reaction. The big, powerful, great, have limits, they way a lot, they can only get so much in orbit at one time unless you ask elon musk who keeps thinking he will make them bigger and bigger which he may will do but how could you bypass that . What is a good way to do it . We are talking 1950s, Nuclear Power is all the rage. We are looking at everything from power plants to airplanes to military ships and submarines, one designed a car that would have a fission reactor in the trunk so had to fuel everything here. Would have been a shame if something went wrong in the neighborhood. In the 40s and 50s they had rockets like these, semichemical powered, some nuclear. They are cool looking, they are big, have a lot of cabin space for the crew, passengers, tiny engines and not a lot of room left over for fuel, chemical fuel, which is how we want to do it if we want to fly into space a lot but no one has figured that out. You may recognize this, destination moon, one of my favorite movies. This is what rockets were supposed to look like and they promised this. A nice big bridge where everybody could walk around and chat, some young maidens in their velcro miniskirts handing clipboards to the captain which he would sign and not meaningfully and these things. It was supposed to be like star trek, dont get hung up on the gravity, you push a gravity button but we didnt get this is what we got was more like this. This is the apollo capsule. A matting a imagine sitting in there for two weeks which they never did that long. They set two weeks in gemini which was two guys and much smaller, you have two astronaut to the gemini capsule two weeks, shoulders touching, this much clearance for the helmet and the hatch and you cant over it. No thank you. What we want is a bigger more robust environment that can go places faster and carry more stuff. We could have had this. Leslie nielsen, by the way. If we had done this, project orion. This was late 1960s in san diego, studies that had been done a few years before and we got a lot of Nuclear Bombs around the country, we can use those for propulsion and one of the other engineers said surely you seen it nuclear reactor. No, bombs. Think about it. They have a little bit of a push, right . They do. They designed a number of versions of spacecraft, this is one of the larger ones. Small, medium, large, mega large to interstellar, i like this one because it looks like a bullet. That is the orion spacecraft as proportion to the statue of liberty so you get an idea of size. 170 feet tall, weighed 22 Million Pounds at launch, the saturn 5 ways 7. 5 Million Pounds. This gives you 6. 5 million, this weighs a lot more but has 4000 times plus, it can carry 7 to 100 people as far as you want to go until you run out of atomic bombs, tons of cargo. Anywhere in the solar system worth going. It was studied as recently as a couple years ago and as of yet no engineers have found a reason it couldnt work. It would be challenging but all the numbers and everything seems to add up that it would be possible. The crew quarters is here. These are all atomic bombs. These are shock absorbers because you dont want atomic bombs going off down here with that bank being transmitted into you. The little tube is where the bombs go out and go back a couple hundred feet from the bottom of it, that is an apollo astronaut to give an idea of the scale. It would have been sensational. Freeman dyson was a part of the study. My favorite quote of his in 1965, saturn by 1970, he wasnt kidding, he was dead serious. It would have probably been the same cost or cheaper than the Apollo Program. What do you suppose the problem was . Atomic bombs are nonstarter. It was a Great Program with a sound engineering logic behind it but taking off of the ground using Nuclear Weapons was not the best way to go. Dyson calculated it would have only added 1 to the fallout in the atmosphere given how much Nuclear Testing was going on at the time. We all breathe some of it one time or another if we are a certain age and he said there are only one or two deaths prelaunch on average in the public. Which sounds bad until you realize 36,400 people were dying every year in their buicks and whatever large american monstrosities they were driving at the time. In terms of raw numbers the prices too high. Morally a little shifty. Is a nonstarter, could have been this. If they had launched with chemical records and they got into a but, they did test conventional explosives to make sure the idea would work. I thought i would show a little bit of that. Is 3 feet across, just setting off tnt as it goes up but it shows that it works. You have these things at the right time with a nice solid plate at the bottom to prevent the astronauts from getting cooked, they can function. What stopped it . The Nuclear Test Ban treaty was signed in 1963 which rained on their parade. The outerspace treaty was signed in 1967 saying you cant weatherize space and cant own anything. That was a downer for project orion because it was nuclear and earth day came along, we got environmental awareness and people said is a good idea . Even if you get stuff up there with regular rockets do you think it is a great idea to be launching wads of plutonium and uranium into space . Rockets blow up sometimes and these things come back down. We have launched plutonium on at least three mars missions. A couple deep space missions, all the apollo missions, apollo 11. We have done it a bunch of times. The russians have done it more times than we have. One or two came back, they are sitting at the bottom of the ocean not bothering anybody. It is not a good thing but not as dangerous as we thought. We are not talking the scale of orion. If it had gone bad it would have been a bad day. Other scenarios in the book, the idea of using the gemini spacecraft to land on the moon because the air force thought they could do that with apollo. To keep the apollo assemblyline in 1972, ideas, very seriously considered about flying loops with crews of 3 or more around venus or mars or both, it would take a few years. Do the math. It all works out. Radiation is a concern too. On braun defined an inflatable space station in 1953, the big ringshaped one that i had in the beginning, looks like steel but it is a bicycle tire space and would have worked. There are concerns with contractors, if some astronaut gets over exuberant and punctures a whole, this thing goes flying around like a balloon, wouldnt have it space stations and a lot more. What is coming up . What we are heading into, nasa retired the Space Shuttle in 2011, we have a wonderful space station that flies overhead every 90 minutes but since 2011 we havent had a way to get our people up there. We pay for most of it which is a problem. We have been buying rides from the russians on their soyuz spacecraft which ironically was designed to beat us to the moon when we were flying apollo. Didnt succeed at that. When we retired the shuttle, the soyuz is 38 million and is not like the fuel has gotten worse. That is what is remarkable there. A lot of people are not happy about this so nasa, the space lunch system, some call it the senate launch system. This is a saturn 5 rocket that does many things the saturn 5 would do, we can launch a number of them, a lot of uses for it, the problem is slow to build. If you are nasa that is something you are used to and how you have been doing business a long time with space contracts and so forth. This is an example how it would look in lunar configuration and things are going along, elon musk says 2002, i am starting a rocket, nasa, air force and i want to hire cargo. Basically that is nice, get out. Let us know when you are ready. Much to the surprise of a lot of us he did that and he is flying rockets regularly, large payloads, getting ready to fly astronauts probably later this year or early next year in tests of his new spacecraft dragon 2 capsule. Nasa with their sls have flown one test flight of the capsule in 2014, not with that rocket. Each year they are commissioned, that is fine. The next flight isnt until 2018, another unmanned test flight and then they will fly in 2021. We went from 15 minutes of time in space to landing on the moon in eight years but that has taken this long, there is a lot less money at stake and intent of the budget they used to have in the 60s so there are good reasons for that but it too long. In comes the trump administration, suggestion things could be sped up, they are studying, havent committed to but studying putting astronauts on it for major flight and sending it on a loop around the moon which is a cool idea unless you are the people you have to go, then it is rather scary. They announced that a couple weeks ago. 6 days later here comes elon musk in the news saying that is really great, by the way i meant to tell you i will be flying my falcon heavy rocket next year and once i test that once or twice i will let a couple paying passengers go on my spacecraft on a loop around the moon 6 months before yours does. That was an interesting moment that surprised a lot of us. The falcon 9, what is revolutionary about the rocket, amazon is doing this as well, they come back. The second stage continues, third stage comes back, it flies back to the launch site or a barge in the pacific or Atlantic Ocean depending on which launch sites they are it is completely autonomous. No one joysticking this, just talking the rocket. It comes down, usually landing perfectly and he is refurbishing them and getting ready to fly one soon. This is a major change because this is a huge reduction in cost. This is the falcon heavy, the big one going up in probably a year. Basically three falcon 9s put together that will separate and fly back. Pitched in september in guadalajara, mexico, interplanetary transport system. This is his idea for a huge solar system class rocket carrying crews to saturn so it is like orion that is it next to the saturn v so you get used to the scope. That is the passenger vehicle which could carry 70, 80 people. This is basically intended for his plan to colonize mars was the whole reason he got into the Space Business is because he wants to send humanity to mars, have this backup environment there so when we wreck this planet we can build on that one. It has a long way to go, mars is not a nice place but it is an interesting idea. Jeff bezos runs amazon, he has a rocket company, he wants to colonize space. He is not sure about mars. For scale here is an astronaut, it is big. If you want to go into space, youre like me, you break into a cold sweat when the elevator doors take too long to open, this is your rocket, not the one with the bucket here and the windows like the old guys. Before we end i have a spaceage quiz and three copies of the book to give away. There are a couple ringers in here so you shouldnt weigh in at for your civilians, you know what im talking about. Who was the third man to step foot on the moon. Give a man a hand. Pete conrad. Most people dont get that one. That was easy. Who was the first woman to fly in space. Valentine terrace gover e teeshkova. Most people say sally ride. A female cosmonaut in 1963. Was he wearing a shirt. Question number 3. What is elon musk most often compared to . Iron man. Capn crunch, did you say . Very good. That is quick. I am happy to sign, it is savory. Welcome to the new space age, we are here, thank you very much. [applause] we are going to do a q and a. I would like the gentleman in the redshirt to stand up for a moment. Special thanks to david, lets give him a round of applause. He goes through my books because hes a nice guy. I dont pay him anything for it. Keeps me from making embarrassing mistakes. And wherever you are, take about. I will take questions. What is the governments plan for landing on mars . What is the governments plan for landing on mars . The plan as it has been put forward which has been called the journey to mars, or since we cant build the constellation program, is an overarching plan to incrementally work our way to mars with humans some time by 2036 and what i have given you is as much detail is really nailed down. There is a larger plan. I interviewed the Senior National official in charge of the program in charge of human spaceflight a couple months ago who said what is the plan to go to mars . He gave me a very long answer. It is a good answer. To build our capability on earth, build the sls rocket, get crews in it, retires the space station because it is expensive to operate, get stations in sizzler space, get experience there and get that step to mars in 2030. He said something i thought was very profound which is we design lifesupport systems, experimental hardware and test it on earth for a year all the time, get it to the space station and in two weeks it goes kerplunk so you have to get it fixed and that is why we have a space station. There is a good point there. On the other hand you have guys like elon musk saying that is not the way to do it. Build a really large rocket, fill it with a lot of chemicals, get in it and go. He has a point too. We are still figuring out how to deal with radiation which is much worse than we thought. The effects are worse than we thought. The effect of weightlessness is worse than we thought. I interviewed for a new book im working on, at Johnson Space center a couple weeks ago, he said after 50 years of space we are still finding stuff it does to people that is not good. Flattens the eyeball, it may cook the neurons in your brain and lead to eventual like symptoms, it may bring cardiovascular issues into the picture. It will take time to figure it out. If you just send robots or take human brains and put them in a lead sphere, this would be a lot easier but if you are going to send people, theres a lot to do but that is the 9 answer to your question. Musk content to do it by 2025, the chinese say we will see you there. Anybody else . Cooperation no thanks. Cooperation of the International Space station and continue to cooperate on the way . The question is can we have more cooperation in this ongoing human Space Exploration . That is another one of those answers that gets stretched out. Simple answer is yes. The initial batch of cooperation with japan, and the political move when the soviet union fell apart, a bunch of hardware for the next mere 2 space station, bring it to the party and that is what happened. It did provide a model for international cooperation. Major partners out there. The Russian Space agency, lots of experience in orbit, lots of experience with lifesupport, large rockets, struggling financially so we need to pay them to do it. The partner of choice would be china. They have flown in orbit, launch two small space station that launched a third in a few years, it would be bigger. They are landing unmanned probes on the moon, sending them to mars pretty soon, they will send astronauts to the moon, they think, in the 2020s but we have this thing, a set of laws designed to prevent intellectual property from being transferred to hostile powers which depending is everybody other than hawaii. It is frustrating. Because of those regulations, a lot of people in nassau are trying to figure out how to work past this. It will be a trilateral agreement, bilateral ones, that way you work other parts to come together. The answer is the best way to go. One thing i am leaving out his national pride. The chinese have a certain interest in doing it themselves even though they are doing things 50 years after we did. There is a matter of great pride over moving quickly to get to space and if you listen to a lot of people in congress we have that ourselves. We like to do our big sls moon rocket all by ourselves. Is that realistic . Possibly not in the economic environment. International cooperation would be a smart way to go. I read a Science Fiction novel by Arthur C Clarke that came out in a 70s. He was discussing alternative ways of getting to the surface of the planet into space and he mentioned the pot that idea and said it would work. What they did in this futuristic novel is headed like an elevator, they went into space and ran down the cable and that solved a lot of problems. He was convinced that was realistic. Can you talk about that alternative . A space elevator, that is a hot topic, they are studied to death and if you look at the studies between nasa and the private groups like the ones i belong to you can climb those into orbit, Forget Building the elevator at all. The basic ideas is have a tether attached to the ground and it goes to a mass in space the proper distance, geosynchronous so staying in one place over the ground and just run a cab or car up and down this tether. The biggest problem besides scale and expense is what you make the tether out of. Until they get nanotechnology to the point you get something Strong Enough and light enough to go out 25,000 miles, it is a problem. It is one of those things like orion, no reason it cant work. It just how do we get it to work and who pays for it . Honestly, i said welcome to the second space age, we would not have a second space age, a lot of people dont think we would if it wasnt for guys like elon musk and jeff bezos, internetbased billionaires who have come along and said im going to do this because i want to. Jeff bezos is not hiring launch services yet. He has a contract to go to rocket engines for a third company, united launch alliance, elon musks big competitor for military flights. He says he will take passengers into space at some point but so far 90 with his money his money his money because he wantss to make rockets. He has these space station resupply contracts, the drive of these people in the money they put up, by 115 million of his own money, that is a lot the first four launches didnt work. It is a brave step but jeff bezos announced today that he is going to put astronauts in his new rocket next year. We are getting there. Government funding and political will driven by personal stories about the astronauts haswell is who is going to be the first man on the moon and all that stuff. A lot of it is the notoriety of the individuals. And their bravery and the incidents that happened along the way, i had a career with cds and was lucky enough to meet chuck yeager, john glenn and buzz aldrin in the course of the broadcasts. To me that was the most interesting thing. I never met ralph clinton. My question for you is do you think that notoriety is important to drive future Space Exploration . Is it still about the individuals anymore . That is really good question. I dont know but i think we are seeing it certainly is a big part of it. It is interesting, you are in journalism, if you are in the News Business trying to cover space working at nasa is what it has always been, us questions and they give an answer. Space x is more challenging, us questions you might not hear anything for a while, it will answer part of your question. Usually getting stuff out of blue origin which is jeff bezoss Companies Like News Releases from north korea. I should make an exception. I did contact them about the new space age, the president of the company gave me an interview in a couple weeks, and you dont know what is going on here, these little bits when they want to do it. Those guys in particular have a personal space on this, and not be here is going into space. Does anybody know the names of the pilots that have done the Virgin Galactic flight tests. They are dashing young men in white scarves which i am sure we will know the names of the first couple people to go into space very soon. And those who paid an undisclosed sum, large percentage of undisclosed on this virgin flight. Jim camerons name comes up a lot which makes sense if you have ever seen his titanic documentaries or popping his head into a video selfy every 20 seconds. Some of the investors in space x have been mentioned as possibilities. The name of the coin for a wild. I would like to know what you happen to know. If there are Natural Resources on the moon that human beings for human beings. It depends how you define value. There are two classes of things to mine for master words. Water is one big thing and theres plenty of water in asteroids, lots of water on mars. We got lots of it on earth but anytime we want to launch a gallon of it into space and cost 36,000. You have rocket fuel, breathable oxygen, all kinds of drinkable water, all kinds of reasons water is valuable. In terms of stuff to bring back to earth for value, there is aluminum on the moon, lots of glass, asteroids are rich in carbon. There are a lot of rare earth metals, one person i talked to who i cant name has a plan, rather than minding it in orbit pieces we will just landed in australia. Wont there be concerns for people in australia . We got it half worked out. We bring down that much platinum in one big chunk, the space Mining Companies tell you look at the money we are going to make. Look at the market youre going to depress, it is like taking let your diamonds out of one. We have to go after it robotically. It is not going to be easy or economically feasible to have people out there doing it. Planetary resources and deep space industry funded by deep pockets. They are working on the first stages of asteroid locations. They are using robots, they dont have concrete plans for human mining but robots can do an awful lot, certainly the first step. Most of the value is what you find out there that you use out there because with 3d printers you can print metal structures. I saw one the other way, a beautiful component, cinder metal powder, melt a chunk of asteroid and printed a rocket, it is doable. Is there anything our astronauts on the moon saw that nasa doesnt want us to know about . [laughter] having a coasttocoast moment. I dont know. I have interviewed a bunch of those guys. David met almost all of them. That has never come up. I did do a radio show, a midnight on wgn in chicago when somebody called up and said i want to talk to your offer about what buzz aldrin saw on the moon because they are not telling us stuff, they are taking secret and you are part of the conspiracy. I thought he was a nut. I said thank you for your question. If you think there are creatures out there that is fine. He was one of those guys who thought maybe we never went was go to museums, look at the rockets, the thousands and thousands of feet of film the photographs, transcripts, all the technology, talk to those guys, they are very special people, then tell me you think we never did it because if you think so it is the best conspiracy we have ever seen. An end of the answer is after i made fun of mister moon pigeon question i was talking to buzz aldrin some months later, we talked twice a year which im fortunate to do. I dont talk, he talks, hes a lot smarter than i am. Did you ever see anything about moon pigeon . He said yes. I said what . It was the mylar, when the lunar module top half took off, descent stage, all that mylar shielding on the lower stage would fly away. He said those look like moon pigeons. It turns out there were moon pigeons but they were and what this guy thought. The answer is i dont know but i dont think so. Back to your question, the personalities doing this. I that a lot of these guys. Im often struck by if you asked any of them when they got selected to be an astronaut, young military pilots the what are the odds, if you asked them and that is what are the odds you will lose your life in the pursuit of what you are doing, versus you sitting at a table signing autographs until 80 years old for reverend fans like me, where do i get buried . That is what is going to happen. It is an impossible scenario. All of them are familiar with worstcase scenario in their lives, among their friends. The odds are very good people, lots of test flights or in combat, the same seekers got weeded out and among all the guys, reluctance to stand in the spotlight knowing you had to be in there. America loves its celebrities, it was a duty. They call it in the barrel. If you know what in the barrel is, completely obscene definition of what it is like to be famous. Go back to your job as fast as you could. It made tension at nasa. To be very reserved. Chuck yeager was probably the most interesting person i ever met. It was out there in terms of his personality so it was a wide range of people willing to stick their next out. They were test pilot after all. You were talking about the people we met. People like gordon cooper, he was a big personality, he made someone like how been allen being, he said that was great, i want to paint, he is a wonderful artist and that is what he has been doing ever since and he is a shy, quiet, reserved, very gentle soul, gentlemen in the classic cast. He went to the moon, very exciting, he will talk about it if you are at one of these eventss. That is what he has been doing for 48 years. It does take all kinds. More back there. That is a tough act to follow talking about astronauts but you were talking about bringing asteroids down. I would love to see that show coming from outer space in australia. That would be fantastic. What about manufacturing in space . 0 gravity, complete vacuum out there. Do you know anything about that . Seems to me it would be better than bringing those things and crashing them into the earth. When i was talking about bringing stuff back that is for rare earth metals, precious metals. As far as things you want to make up there that is all kinds of sense. They sent a 3d printer to the space station, much tougher than you think, you have to have it in a concealed enclosure with nasa certifications, melting plastic cant make toxic gas that might affect the air supply and so forth so they tested that in 0g. What they havent tested is printing with metal which is a big one. You can only do so much with polymer and plastic. They printed some simple tools. Metal is the holy grail of all this so that has yet to be figured out. 0g doesnt to be the problem. They tested them in vacuum on the surface of a planet. I dont think they tested in a vacuum yet. That would be the next step. But there is no other way because you dont want boundaries, Injection Molding and so forth and that is tough. Printing makes a lot of sense. [inaudible question] what is that called . A transmute or . They made wrenches, a couple statues, some useful parts but mainly it was an experiment one more back there. Okay. Back to your earlier points. Spaceage one if we can call it that was a meritocracy, the best and brightest married to large quantities of the right stuff, or the right stuffski if you were over the pond. Spaceage 2 is starting to look like nothing more than a bunch of rich jerks buying a ride up. What do you think that will due to Popular Support for Space Program . That is a good question. It is more complicated because spaceage one was a meritocracy, there were a lot of smokefilled rooms, dealing going on, you see that in companies, a Large Business that doesnt publish prices like musk does, a lot of politicking as you know, theres a reason the Johnson Space center is in texas and kennedy is in florida and other places that there are. It was more complicated, the merit, there was a lot of merit, what they did with the best and brightest and a lot of wonderful things. Getting to the moon in 1966, as far as the people buying the ride, there will be a lot of kardashians in space metaphorically speaking and im not thrilled about that. You got to fit the capsule but that is another story. We are on television. A lot of names in that area, spent a lot of money or out raising other peoples money. If you read them they are so driven, for anyone who has worked or spent time at jpl or nasa build centers, those folks are exhausted by the flipflopping and change, they study it, spend money on it, the level of passion i see, the brilliance, drive, the love for what they do is astonishing. I think space 2. 0, that is the name of my next book, is going to be a really amazing thing and there will be some stunts that go on for sure. Depending how you look at it, it was a bit of a stunt. We were in a race to prove that we had a Better Society in terms of technology and society and government and so forth. Did we have to go to the moon . Know. We decided to do it because we were pretty sure we could do it before the bad guys did and that was one of the big reasons. I think it will be okay. Thank you. [applause] tonight on booktv books on modern feminism. At 8 00 eastern, free women, free men. Part of booktv in primetime all this week on cspan2. Sunday night on afterwards, Washington Times National Security Columnist Bill gertz with his book i wore which examines how modern warfare has evolved with new technologies. He is interviewed by a member of the House Committee on electronics and the emerging threats and capabilities. It is a look at what i feel is the new form of warfare emerging in the 21st century. I have covered National Security affairs for over 30 years, been all over the world covering these issues. It is a reflection of the Information Age that we are now looking at a new form of warfare that i Call Information warfare. I define that as the technical cipher we have seen so much of in terms of cyberattacks as well as the content influence type of thing that emerged in the last president ial election, what was called the cyberenabled influence. These are the dominant form of warfare. Watch afterwards sunday night at 9 00 eastern on cspan2s booktv. This weekend cspan cities tour along with the help of our Comcast Cable partners will explore the literary scene and history of charlottesville, virginia. At noon eastern on booktv. We see their exhibit on william faulkner, Nobel Prize Winner and first writer in residence. A lot of wonderful artifacts, many have come from va sources, the typewriter he was issued by the university at the University Property stamp on the back. If you look at the jacketed is torn up and ratty. He left his jacket hanging in his office to oxford, mississippi. At 2 00 pm eastern on American History tv we go to Thomas Jeffersons monticello. When we see jeffersons beautiful neoclassical villa, what we want to do is change that. When you came up the mountain top in jefferson, first thing you have seen most likely would be this. There would be no place on the mountaintop where slavery was not visible and we want to restore that, make that known to those who come here today. At the university of virginia we learn about the first year project which explores challenges us president s face in their first year on the job. Lyndon johnson said when he became president no matter how big your majority you get one year before congress stops thinking about you, the president and start thinking about themselves, their own reelection and in january of your second year after you have done your first year all the members of congress are thinking of the Midterm Election and are really cautious about taking a risk to help you get your mandate through. Watch cspan cities tour of charlottesville, virginia at noon eastern on cspan2s booktv and sunday at 2 00 pm on American History tv on cspan3 working with cable affiliate and visiting cities across the