Transcripts For CSPAN2 Beyond 20170412

Host how long have you been here . Guest thirty years. Host what is that entail . Guest im an administrator, teach online classes, over a hundred thousand and those so i keep my arm in teaching online. I do budgets and try to improve outreach for the college the various pigs. Science literacy is a big concern of mine for science students and the general public. Host what did you get interested in astronomy . Guest a little late. Theres always the little kids who had a telescope who traded them up for bigger and bigger. I grew up in big cities with no stars. I got in through physics. Its a gateway drug for strong me. You think wow i can apply physics to the universe and thats cool. Thats how i did it. Whats the connection between the university of arizona and astronomy . Were big astronomy department. Were on the way out of making the word worlds biggest telescope on a football stadium. Its a big business here. Astronomy and optics and related industries are worth about one quarter of a billion dollars of year. We have a space nations in big telescopes and research. It is a buzzing place for astronomy. Before we get into the book beyond future, can he go back to football field, was that about . Guest telescope building had reached a limit. Was built around the second world war, it was not exceeded for decades. So there was an obstacle because big mirrors are expensive and heavy and hard to move around and keep accurately shaped. One of my colleagues recently retired and invented a way of making nears large, thin, and very accurate. The trick, the secret is to put the glass blocks in an oven its been the oven fast enough the liquid takes the shape and then that it cool and take it up. You have a mere thats really large, bigger than any mere made in the u. S. And half a century. Host was the connection to the football field . Guest at the time those who only place that was big enough space to do this. You need a lot of vertical and horizontal space. You just have to avoid game day. So its under the angle of the stand. And the university was available space. Host why did it matter how big of a telescope . Guest were just greedy. You think 5 meters cert 10 meters should be big enough. Were trying for 22 meters now. More gathering, more light lets you see further away. Trying to look back toward the big bang and get as close to that as possible. You need bigger glass and bigger mirrors make sharper images. To see details you want to bigger mayor. Everything is driving you in the direction of bigger glass. Host where these physical telescopes . Guest we have our own telescopes on five mountaintops around tucson. The very biggest one is in chile. The 22 and a half meter that were building is in chile. Its the darkest, driest, best place to observe in the world. Host you wrote in your book that our dna tells the story of the profound human urge to explore. What is that mean . Guest while animals, whales, birds that might migrate large distances for food or mating, were the only creatures for the history of the planet that have traveled out of curiosity. When you go out of africa and migrated across the planet, it took a few thousand years ago from the Bering Strait to all the way to patagonia. Thats a few hundred generations in the didnt have to. There were plenty of feud sources. I believe we spread across the planet out of the urgent desire to explore. We have explored the whole planet. There is even better gene identified the of the explore gene which correlates with risktaking behavior and adhd. Things that might associate with being an explorer. It is built into us. When you have explored the earth you have to go up and out. In 1969 we landed on the moon. Is that like looking at a horseless carriage today . Or is that advance . Its an amazing achievement. Theres a tension between the fact that their gallup another pulls seven to make 10 of americans didnt think we did it. Even setting aside that so Many Americans were not alive when that happened. It is a dim cultural memory. On one hand to is most stunning technical achievement humans have ever achieved. Hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers, thousands of different companies, enormous amount of money dealing with computers ever so primitive to get to the moon. It was th an extraordinary achievement. Host how does nasa fit in with all different aspects of potential states exploration . Guest mass is critical because its the government space agency. They have had hard time. The budget sword during apollo and then retrenched as the vietnam war was starting up. You cannot afford to spend that much. But the budget has gone down in the last 20 years. Nasa has to do more with less. Things are expensive and technology is challenging. Its a very important space player, but now there are new players. Probably three dozen private Space Companies. A few funded by billionaires and have other investors. In the aggregate, these private Space Enterprises rival nasas budget and will eventually exceeded. Host are they cooperating with each other . Guest with nasa, i think theres frustration on that that things are moving so slowly. The Space Shuttle was Obsolete Technology by the time it was retired. It is not loved universally. Some of the private Space Companies wanted to do their own things. Yvonne maas wants to reinvent rockets from the ground up. There was rivalry. But recently theres cooperation. First of all the private Space Companies to not have a Good Business model yet. So over time with spacex and several others have multibilliondollar contracts with nasa to ship freight and eventually astronauts in orbit. That money is important to them because nasa cannot put an american in space and hasnt been able to for six years. So theres rivalry and cooperation. Also nasa is trying to be more noble. Theyre trying to encourage entrepreneurial outfits not at the level of spacex but student groups and small startups to put microsatellites up. Masses trying to learn and roll with the time to be more entrepreneurial. Host youve mentioned that university of arizona has its own Space Program. Guest we have been entrusted by nasa twice to do everything except launch itself for Space Program. First the phoenix lander which went to the polar region. Host beyond a future station what about the importance of asteroids . Guest asteroids come if you want to get the glitter in your eye, they are valuable commodities, a 500meter asteroid happens to be coming near the earth that you could capture by altering its orbit has probably 2 trillion worth of Precious Metals at current market prices. In about the same amount of rare earth. So these are huge Mineral Resources that are out there and available. There is little practical problem of how you get them in a safe orbit without threatening the earth and then harvest that mother load at an economic level without destroying the market because you have so much of it. That is not discouraging people. Maybe not five years or 1015 years from the there will be viable asteroid mining. Host is a time to retire the Space Shuttle . Guest absolutely. It never lived up to promises. It was supposed to go up once a week and it never went out more than once a month in its history. The tiles were problem in two orbiters were lost. Was devastating to the city Space Program each time it happened. It was long overdue to retire it. Is an Important International space station continue to orbit . Guest i think so but never scientific reason. The truth is scientists have not flocked to it. Companies have not flocked to do Microgravity Research on drugs was heavily subsidized. So what has been is a demonstration that we can live and work in space. Seventeen countries involved including our superpower is kind of an emblem and learning how to do it. Until you do it all the practical stuff its electrical and plumbing and not very glamorous. Its important in that regard but very expensive. 120 billion and counting. The idea of the moon is about flow. That seems very disappointing to share sites in the near spot a half a century after we had been back. The moon is a very good as the space station is a good place to live and work in space just half a days drive. The moon is a very good place to learn how to move in itself selfsufficient economy. The soil is extremely soil and you can get a liter of oil out of a on the soil. You can trim the rock water into rocket fuel. You can use it for plans to go there. If you want to learn how to live beyond their the moon is the best place to do it. Also just a staging post for the rest of the solar system. In your book beyond her future in space where would you like to see us go. Guest the outer solar system takes longer and is more ambitious. Some of the moons are so interesting. We have a europa clipper going to the waterworld around jupiter. It could be the next place where we can find life in the of. Some of the other moons solar system and fascinating places. Its just multiyear more expensive proposition to go out there. Host is there life in your view beyond our earth . Guest beyond earth includes a few hundred billion stars in our galaxy but typically cant stay for sure but im almost certain. The work on actual planets in this traffic system and the news has shown us their tens of billions of planets in habitable situations just in our own galaxy. The ads of billions of years i think that are very low. I believe there is life out there. Host what is the pipedream you have when it comes to Space Exploration . Guest obviously that i get to go. This bmi means im not great to be an astronaut. I would like to experience earth orbit. My pipedream for the all activities is to keep you on the solar system with the stars. Unknown systems are tens of thousands of times greater. So will need some technology, will probably need new fuel but we just need to do r d. And heading to the stars would be an ordinary thing. Host is anyone doing that . Guest nasas resuscitated visionary ideas which is to the nearest star system. Theyre now hosting conferences on Propulsion Systems and they stop doing it the medical research on how humans could be taken into away state for own medical reasons. Host what is it about you that a hundred thousand students take your courses online. Guest to be honest a hundred thousand is a lot but not outrageous. Youre tapping the whole world. My courses about the cutting edge of astronomy. So rather than marching through the subject the way i would with students at the university, and give them the good stuff. Talk about xo planets and how we make huge beers mear mirrors. We have a good online discussion. It is a lot of fun teaching online. Host your book is a trait title. Not an academic title. Was that purposeful . Guest i have written a lot of technical articles in my crew. Career. To be able to explain it is a challenge and it makes you know your subject better. Those are exotic abstract concepts and it challenges you to know your subject well and explain it to anyone. I like to challenge of a Popular Science book. Science is important now so i am extra motivated to communicate to the public. Host we been talking with chris, his book is called beyond our future in space. Guest think you. Host tomorrow on cspan to the museum hosted discussion about the Trump Administration with the press. Members of the press corps and press secretary will participate. That is at 8 00 a. M. Eastern time. At 1130, five coverage of the Canadian Parliament first speech. The pakistani human rights advocate is the severed Nobel Peace Prize winner. Five coverage on cspan2, cspan. Org, and on the cspan radio app. Washington journals live every day with new some policy issues that impact too. Coming up on wednesday morning, emily, writer for form policy discusses the trip by rex to listen to moscow on the future of u. S. Russian relations. Then, douglas discusses what republicans could face as they attempt to replace the repeal the Affordable Care act. Editor of the nation, the key progressive priorities and how to achieve the in a gop control government. The future of the supreme court, the conflict in syria. Watch cspans washington journal, live at 7 00 a. M. Wednesday morning. Join the discussion. The Los Angeles Times has been putting on the festival of books from other 20 years. It has become an institution that is part of the community. Its a way we can celebrate with the readers of the paper and with the city as a whole. The very notion of reading. Today, when the idea of there being something called fake news is out there, i think books help us celebrate the way that words and facts are grounded in storytelling and in history. In his book, Amazing Stories of the space age, rob tells true stories of lesserknown Space Missions by nasa and others. He recently spoke at a bookstore, this is one hour. Thank you for joining us tonight. Rod is author of the book is also the author of [inaudible] im happy to introduce him. He has been an assistant professor