Exploring the Cosmos with Styx
"Houston, We Have a Podcast" is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, the home of human spaceflight, stationed in Houston, Texas. We bring space right to you! On this podcast, you’ll learn from some of the brightest minds of America’s space agency as they discuss topics in engineering, science, technology and more. You’ll hear firsthand from astronauts what it’s like to launch atop a rocket, live in space and re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. And you’ll listen in to the more human side of space as our guests tell stories of behind-the-scenes moments never heard before.
Episode 8 features Glenn Lutz, Deputy Director of the Exploration Integration and Science Directorate (EISD) of the Johnson Space Center, and John Connolly, Head of NASA's Mars Study Capability Team under EISD, who chat with Tommy Shaw and Lawrence Gowan from the band Styx about human exploration of the solar system. The group discusses what NASA can accomplish, what NASA is planning for, and what NASA needs for future missions, and they draw parallels between human exploration missions into deep space and live music performances. This episode was recorded on July 28, 2017.
Transcript
Gary Jordan (Host): Houston, We Have a Podcast! Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center, episode 8, “Exploring the Cosmos.” I’m Gary Jordan and I’ll be your host today. So this is the podcast where we bring in NASA experts, and in the case of today’s episode, some super cool space fanatics to talk about everything NASA. So today we had quite a few special guests. We’re talking about human space exploration with Glenn Lutz, John Connolly, and the band Styx. Glenn is the deputy director of the Exploration Integration and Science Directorate, or EISD, here at the Johnson Space Center. John is the head of NASA’s Mars study capability team under EISD, and Styx, well, Styx is a rock band. We talked to Tommy Shaw, who does guitar, vocals, and a lot of the writing, and Lawrence Gowan on vocals and keys and also does some of the writing, too. Why is a rock band here at the NASA Johnson space center? Well, we have a lot of amazing things to show off and sometimes people come over to check it out. We had a great discussion about exploring the cosmos, what human exploration missions will look like in the future, and why we send humans to space in the first place. So, with no further delay, let’s go light speed to our talk with Mr. Glenn Lutz and Mr. John Connolly, as well as Mr. Tommy Shaw and Mr. Lawrence Gowan from Styx. Enjoy.
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T minus five seconds and counting! Mark!
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Houston, we have a podcast.
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From left: Tommy Shaw, John Connolly, Glenn Lutz, Lawrence Gowan, Gary Jordan, Alex Perryman
Credits: NASA
Host: Okay, so how are you guys liking the tour so far?
Lawrence Gowan: Do we have to leave?
Tommy Shaw: Yeah!
Lawrence Gowan: It’s a mind blower, is what it is.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: It’s a mind blower and getting to meet people that do this every day is-- that’s an honor and that alone, and then seeing them with the machinery is-- I can barely form words to describe how overwhelming it is.
Host: What makes it so overwhelming, though? Is it just the history or is it just the amount of stuff, maybe?
Tommy Shaw: Well, it’s kind of everything, you know?
Host: Okay.
Tommy Shaw: Just from being a child and from-- I still remember sputnik, and so I followed it-- my family would always follow everything that went on. And up until modern times now, I mean, all through our lives we’ve watched it, and then now to do-- we did a little story ourselves.
Host: Yeah!
Tommy Shaw: --about it and it involves some-- trying to get it right so it would be feasible, and now to see these-- the hardware that we were just sort of imagining.
Host: Right.
Tommy Shaw: To see the Orion, that was amazing, too. But also to see the control room that we’d all seen as a child. Just really, it’s just kind of overwhelming.
Host: Yeah! Mission control, right? A lot of history there. Like, this--we were talking about it on the bus, right? Just you-- you’re just-- you’re sitting in a room and you’re thinking about all the great things that happened here. You’re talking about landing on the moon, you’re talking about learning how to fly humans in space, all from this room.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah, the command center, basically of the greatest human history that’s unfolded in our lifetime.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: So, to be at the epicenter of that and drink in, and as Tommy just pointed out, it’s something we’ve had since we were children.
Host: Right.
Lawrence Gowan: So, you’re in touch with your entire-- this might be overly philosophizing, but it’s-- I can’t even speak.
Host: Overly philosophical.
Lawrence Gowan: Overly philosophical. Thank you so much, Gary. I needed that.
Host: It’s that-- that’s what I mean. This has been a long day. Yeah!
Lawrence Gowan: It’s this weightlessness condition here. It’s the-- no, you’re in touch with all of that and the fact that you’re so close to this-- what is the greatest human endeavor in our lifetime and all of that’s ensued because of it.
Host: Absolutely. So, what was so exciting, I think, for us, from our end, is to show you not only the history of kind of what we’ve been doing here at the Johnson space center for so long, but also kind of what we’re going to do, right? Like you said, we’re showing you Orion, we’re showing you exploration. We’re already talking about Mars, the moon, going beyond, going beyond the low earth orbit, and we’re kind of excited to show you that. So, I mean, just in terms of human exploration, just exploring, going out, seeing what is beyond.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: What do you think is that drive? Why do we have this drive to explore the-- explore space as humans?
Tommy Shaw: It’s just-- it’s human curiosity.
Host: I think so.
Tommy Shaw: What else is there? We’ve done this, you know, what’s out there?
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: And we keep finding out a little bit more and I’ve realized how serious the-- that quest is here. But, for all those questions, there’s all this detail and all this research and wanting to get it right here so that it’s right when you’re out there.
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: Just seeing all the manpower and all the research and development is kind of-- it’s kind of mind boggling.
Lawrence Gowan: It’s what-- it’s the most extreme example of how human beings have this built into our, this-- what else, is the question. Like what else?
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: And as I’m walking through there, even looking at those-- all those various vehicles, it’s like what else could you do with a vehicle that would work in a place that we don’t know about yet? So, just-- I guess that’s really another thing that separates us from any other form of life is that we’re driven in that way. Not to stay safe, but to do things that are risky and hard. I think I’m going to start quoting John Kennedy or captain kirk in a minute. Anyway, it’s great to be close to--
Host: You’re allowed to do that.
Lawrence Gowan: Are you? Okay!
Host: But, I think maybe it’s that human element. Right? It’s that passion that really drives us. And maybe it’s kind of built in our DNA to want to explore. Maybe that’s why we send humans. Humans can have a story when they explore that I don’t think robots can. It’s just-- it’s that personal-- the human element that we connect with.
Lawrence Gowan: Well, that’s it. What was it like?
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: You can’t, no matter how great your artificial intelligence is, it can never convey exactly what was it like.
Host: Exactly.
Lawrence Gowan: And speaking to Dan, astronaut Dan Burbank, he was able to, in very short order, give you a sense of what that felt like.
Host: Yeah!
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: Just from his personal experience. You can’t get that from data, from a robot or something. You feel what he’s feeling, sort of. You’re there.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah. And when he describes some of what he had to go through to do it, I’m glad I didn’t have to go through that. So I vicariously enjoy it.
Host: Well, what I think was fantastic-- so talking about human exploration, this is not something that is kind of brand new or just thinking about it. We’ve been thinking about it for a long time. In fact, we have people here at the Johnson space center dedicated to thinking about exploration. So, I want to formally introduce two folks that we have with us today, Glenn Lutz and John Connolly. Thank you so much for being here. You are part of our exploration group, in a sense. So, talk a little bit about what you guys do.
Glenn Lutz: All right. Well, we are put in place to do just that-- take us to those next steps.
Host: Mm-hmm.
Glenn Lutz: So, John’s in charge of putting out the plan and he’s got a group that’s making sure that everything that we need to go to Mars is thought about.
Host: Mm-hmm.
Glenn Lutz: There’s not a CVS or Walgreens on the way to stop in to pick up something. So these guys are in charge of putting that whole plan together from the number of rockets, how we are going to live on Mars. And we’ve got guys in our group that are working on technology gaps. What works today and what’s-- what we need and there’s a gap, so we’re closing them, in testing and et cetera. Our group also has the scientists in it. And so they’re saying, “okay, why? Why are we going?”
Host: Mm-hmm.
Glenn Lutz: And where? Where are we going to go? To the mixture that we take the best advantage of where we’re going.
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: So, Tommy mentioned that, you know, as kids we all kind of watched the Apollo program, looked up in the sky, saw sputnik, and I think that’s what got people like Glenn and I here in the first place. You know? We were turned on by that and kind of made that our life’s calling. And we’ve been looking at how we get people beyond low earth orbit, perhaps back to the moon, perhaps onto Mars as soon as we can. And that’s because we all think that human exploration is a fundamental-- a fundamental part of being human, you know, pushing outwards into the stars. And so, we do have plans to do that. So, that mission control that you saw, where we did all those great things back years ago, the best is yet to come. ‘
Host: So, I mean, Tommy and Lawrence, just from your perspective, just seeing what you saw today and maybe these-- some of the folks that have been talking to you today kind of got your mind jogging about Mars. And you’ve thought about Mars in the past just from your writing and stuff like that. So, in terms of Mars, what do you think it is that’s so intriguing? Why would we want to send humans there? In your eyes.
Tommy Shaw: Well, it’s been the subject of all different kind of creative writing, from Martian chronicles where it was literally little green men to that book that became the movie, “the Martian.”
Host: Right.
Host: So, it’s really been-- cartoons from when you’re growing up. The little green men and Mars. And you can-- and it stands out. It’s distinctive. And the nighttime sky, it is red.
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: Did get to see it a lot. And I guess it’s relatively close compared to what else is out there. So, it’s all of those things-- from fiction to fantasy, and real research, and all those things. We’re just fascinated by it. And the one thing that strikes me is just the more we see of things, how kind of small and insignificant we are compared to what we thought of when we were children. The world just seemed so magnificently large. And I used to just look up at the clouds and go, “how far up is that?” And now, to see what you’re planning on doing here, it’s awesome!
Host: I know a lot of the astronauts. I’m not sure if Dan Burbank brought it up, kind of in his talk, but they have something called the overview effect. Being up 250 miles, you have this view of the planet. You see this thin line that’s around the planet that’s just protecting us, and that’s it. And you kind of have exactly what you’re say, that effect of, “wow! We are so small! This planet is not as big as I thought!”
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: We’re all connected, but, you know, there’s so much more to this universe and to the earth, I guess.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: And someone said something about being on Mars and looking out and not being able to find earth.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: Which one of those is earth?
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: It’ll be the blue one, actually. You should be able to pick out earth, just like we could pick out Mars in the sky. Earth will be a little brighter, a little bluer than all the other things out there.
Host: So, John, there have been images from the surface of Mars. Can we see the earth? Is it blue?
John Connolly: Yes, we can.
Host: All right!
John Connolly: You can see the earth from Mars. With not much help, you could actually pick out the moon next to it.
Host: Oh, wow!
John Connolly: So--
Host: With the naked eye?
John Connolly: Yeah. So, while you’re-- well, it depends on how good your eyes are.
Host: Well, from the-- yeah.
Glenn Lutz: Inside a spacesuit.
John Connolly: So, yeah, when you’re on Mars, you’ll be able to look at it all.
Host: Amazing.
John Connolly: Comfy and--
Host: Yeah. So, I mean, kind of bouncing off of Tommy’s point of it being in our mind to explore Mars, from a practical sense, from your guys’ perspective in the exploration group here at the Johnson space center, what are we thinking about? Why Mars?
John Connolly: Well, because it’s next. It’s the next logical place to send humans. It’s the most earth-like of the planets. It’s a place that has incredible scientific value. It may have harbored life in the past. It may harbor life still. Those are huge, huge questions. Those answers, some of those big fundamental questions that we’ve had like, are we alone in the universe?
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: And it’s attainable, I think. Maybe that’s the biggest reason to go there is because we have the technology now, or in the next few years, that we could put together a mission and go there.
Lawrence Gowan: Actually, John, I have a question for you.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: From what we had-- know about Mars so far, is there any fossil record yet that-- where they’ve gone down and checked? “well, here’s what happened during this time,” and have they seen anything?
John Connolly: So, we’ve actually not really explored the z-dimension on Mars.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
John Connolly: Okay? We’ve roved across the surface, and one of the things that’s on the scientist’s plans is to get a drill to start drilling cores.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh.
John Connolly: And look at things like that. Probably the only fossil we may have seen are some fossil-- what we thought at the time were fossilized bacteria. Back about 1997, there were a few folks who thought they saw some remnants of bacteria, very, very small stuff.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
John Connolly: But, we haven’t really drilled down to find any trilobites yet.
Lawrence Gowan: Right. Boy.
Host: So, from a planning perspective, if you were to plan-- that’s what you’d do? You think about planning a mission to Mars, right? What are some of the key elements that are vital to make a successful mission to go to Mars?
John Connolly: So, it’s a pretty long list. So, you need a propulsion system that will accelerate you out of the gravitational pull of earth. You need a habitat that’s reliable enough to take you on a six-month to twelve-month trip to Mars. You need a landing system that will take you through the Mars atmosphere and down to the surface.
Host: Mm-hmm.
John Connolly: You need all the surface equipment, like the rovers that you guys were just in, and the spacesuits, and the habitats, and equipment to use Mars resources. And then you’d need a ride home. You’d need an ascent vehicle to get yourself back off the surface to the vehicle that’s going to bring you home again. And so, when you put all those together, there’s a lot of piece parts that it takes to do that mission.
Host: Amazing. Is that true for anywhere we want to go to, right? You would need sort of a similar profile?
John Connolly: Similar.
Host: Okay.
John Connolly: The moon is actually a little easier than Mars to get to.
Host: Oh.
John Connolly: You don’t have to deal with an atmosphere.
Host: Okay.
John Connolly: And it’s a lot closer, of course.
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: Right now, the moon is 250,000 miles away from us, Mars--
Host: A lot closer.
John Connolly: It’s 250 million miles away.
Host: Oh, wow! Yeah.
John Connolly: It’s at its furthest point from us right now. It’s actually hidden behind the sun. So, if you were on Mars right now, we couldn’t talk to you.
Host: Oh. Couldn’t at all? Because it gets the communication?
John Connolly: Yeah, for a week or two, you’re hidden behind the sun and we literally can’t talk to you.
Host: That long? A week or two?
John Connolly: Yeah.
Host: Wow! So, what’s-- I’m guessing you’re planning for that, right?
John Connolly: Of course.
Host: So, what would be-- in the situation where that were the case, right? You have folks on Mars and they don’t have communication with folks on earth for a week. What are they doing?
Lawrence Gowan: Listening to Styx.
John Connolly: They could be listening to music.
Host: Well, what was it-- in “the Martian”, what was the thing? It was-- It was “happy days” on the movie, but it was something else in the book.
Lawrence Gowan: We’ve got something way better than that.
John Connolly: So, our robotic missions that are there now, we put them kind of into a safe mode for a couple of weeks.
Host: Oh, okay.
John Connolly: We just don’t have them do very much. And in about two weeks, we have them start broadcasting until we pick them up again. So, the crew would probably have-- probably have about two weeks off, I’d say, where they don’t-- where they probably wouldn’t do very much.
Host: Wow.
Lawrence Gowan: Do you think the actual shot to go to Mars will launch from the moon or from earth?
John Connolly: So, ultimately, everything starts from earth. The question is, what’s the midpoint?
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
John Connolly: So, where do you actually assemble vehicles and things like that?
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
John Connolly: Energetically, it actually makes more sense to assemble things in space rather than on the surface of the moon. So, you could do that in lunar orbit.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
John Connolly: You could do that in a very high earth orbit, but in space makes the most sense. Right at the edge of leaving the earth’s sphere of influence, the earth’s-- the gravitational field of the earth, then just takes a little kick from there to kick you out to Mars.
Lawrence Gowan: Huh.
John Connolly: But you don’t want to-- you don’t want to go into a gravity field like down to the lunar surface because then you have to fight your way out of that again.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh, right.
Host: So, what would you be building around the--
John Connolly: Well, we’re currently working on some plans for building, for example, the transport that takes crews from the vicinity of the earth to Mars orbit.
Host: Huh.
John Connolly: And so, those are the kind of things you can’t launch in one launch because they’re too big. So, you have to put them together somewhere.
Host: Right.
John Connolly: And anywhere in cislunar space kind of makes sense to do that.
Lawrence Gowan: Okay. Interesting.
Tommy Shaw: So it seems like a coordinated mission, a venture with lots of advanced things. So, you have all the hardware.
John Connolly: Yeah, it’s going to take a lot of launches to put pieces together and get those things sequenced out to Mars in a way that has what you need on Mars when you need it.
Glenn Lutz: And that it’s up there and operational before we say, “okay, guys, it’s time to commit crew to go meet them.”
John Connolly: Right.
Tommy Shaw: So, do you think there would ever be a time where-- when you get all that worked out so you-- it’s just second nature, this is how you do that? To extend that to Mars so you’re building things in Mars to go beyond there?
John Connolly: I think if we figure out how to do it on Mars, that’ll be the next giant leap, if you will. And that’ll teach us a lot about surviving without being dependent on earth. And I think that’s the next big step.
Glenn Lutz: It goes back to your first comment that even as little kids, you see the 2-year-old, the next thing that’s just out of his reach, so if we get to Mars, that would be the next thing just out of our reach.
Host: So, Tommy, kind of thinking about the next big step. If-- thinking way out in the future, in your mind, what would kind of be some of the next places that would be really cool to see? Beyond Mars.
Tommy Shaw: Well, we have sort of a selfish--
Glenn Lutz: I know where you’re going here.
Lawrence Gowan: On the agenda.
Tommy Shaw: Yes. It would just be started upon the band’s name of the fifth moon of Pluto. And we’ve actually seen pictures of it and it’s not the greatest looking. If you were going to vacation anywhere in the area, we’d go to Pluto, just maybe take some snapshots.
Host: Yeah, to see if from the surface.
Lawrence Gowan: I don’t know. I think with a little work we could buff it up and make it a holiday destination.
Tommy Shaw: It’s a fixer-upper, there’s no doubt about it.
Lawrence Gowan: It’s a handyman’s dream.
John Connolly: It’s about the size of downtown Chicago, by the way.
Lawrence Gowan: Is it?
John Connolly: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: It’s not too big.
John Connolly: Yeah, it’s not that big.
Lawrence Gowan: Chicago’s nice.
John Connolly: Yeah. Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: A frozen Chicago.
Host: In an unbiased opinion.
John Connolly: I don’t think it has the waterfront.
[ indistinct ].
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: It’s come a long way since the world’s fair.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah. There you go. Another thing that-- back to where we were starting--
Host: Yeah?
Lawrence Gowan: That blows my mind, when I keep thinking that, you know, that one of the airports we go through, I think it’s St. Louis, is that the one that’s near kitty hawk or where the wright brothers?
Tommy Shaw: Spirit of St. Louis.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: Spirit of St. Louis.
Lawrence Gowan: Is that it?
Glenn Lutz: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence Gowan: Okay. So, I’m thinking human flight, it still boggles my mind. It’s just over a hundred years ago and now we’re talking about assembling things in space that can reach, you know, the next planet. So, that’s back to me, kind of being mind blowing.
Host: Yeah. I think that’s more of like the doing aspect, right? So, like, you know, I feel like we’ve been dreamers for so long.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: And we’re dreaming about the cosmos, and based on our limited knowledge, have come up with these fantastical realities of what it could be, but then once we realize that, you know, we can go into space and we have the technology to do it, and you actually build it and do it, that’s a whole new--
Lawrence Gowan: Well, that’s why meeting guys like this is so--
Host: Yeah!
Lawrence Gowan: --amazing for us. Yeah.
Host: All right. So, all right, going way back out to Pluto. You had the privilege of actually seeing new horizons, right? When it actually took photos of Pluto.
Tommy Shaw: We were invited-- we happened to be in the D.C. Area the day that they did their fly-by and we were invited out and we got to meet the principal investigator, Alan stern, and all of his people. And they were waiting there for us. I’ll never forget, they were there-- they had a banner and they had all kind of gathered in a room kind of like this
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: And they were welcoming us and we didn’t know who they are. We’d never met them before.
Host: Sure.
Tommy Shaw: We knew we were at their mission control, but-- so, little by little, we started getting introduced. It’s like guys like you with these-- who’ve done this amazing thing and we realize, this is all backwards. We need to have a banner for you.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah, exactly.
Tommy Shaw: It was like the we’re not worthy kind of thing.
Lawrence Gowan: It was like there they’d won their super bowl and the culmination of a nine-year mission. It was when they were get-- as these pictures were coming through, we were among the first people, earthlings, to see this-- to see this unfold. Actually, you just reminded me of something weird about that day that I remembered. I remember us getting lost on the way to get into the thing.
Tommy Shaw: We couldn’t find our way there.
Lawrence Gowan: We couldn’t find our way there! And they spent nine years getting to Pluto.
Tommy Shaw: We met the navigator who did the--
Host: Who actually flew it.
Tommy Shaw: Yes.
Lawrence Gowan: Yes.
Host: Wow. So, how did he describe that ride? Was it like-- I guess it’s a pretty intricate ride to get all the way out there.
Lawrence Gowan: The only thing I remember is that he said it was-- the craft itself was about the size of a baby grand piano.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: So, directing that through, you know, all that distance, you know? And it’s, I guess it’s the farthest we’ve gone, right? So, it was the farthest we’ve ever sent anything, I suppose. Am I right?
Host: I think voyager.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh, voyager’s even further.
Host: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: It got a head start.
Lawrence Gowan: Okay.
Host: Yeah.
Host: But it never took pictures of Pluto.
Lawrence Gowan: All right!
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: Well, I don’t’ want to put anything-- I don’t want to put voyager down in any way, but to have accomplished that with something-- oh, I remember. One question I asked that day was, “isn’t it likely that it’s going to be hit by something out there?” Because I’m always thinking about, you know, I was asking Dan about that, as well. And one of the scientists there explained to me that we-- it takes a long time before the concept of how vast space is finally sinks in, that the likelihood of actually colliding with something is so miniscule.
Host: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence Gowan: That it’s incredibly unlikely. And to my mind, it seems like, I don’t know, wouldn’t that be happening all the time? And apparently it doesn’t happen very much at all.
Host: Even the asteroid belt, I think, is a good example, right? How far-- how close are some of the closest things in the asteroid belt?
John Connolly: Well, not as close as the Star Wars movies portray them.
Host: That’s what I’m thinking. I’m thinking Han solo going through, yeah.
John Connolly: So, people think of, you know, asteroid belts and the Kuiper belt as being this sort of rock pile in space.
Host: Yes.
John Connolly: And it’s, you know, literally millions of miles between little specks of things.
Host: Yeah. So, is it fair to say that stuff in the Kuiper belt is even farther away? Like, are we talking about--
John Connolly: Oh yeah. So, that’s out beyond Pluto.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: One of the things I’ve heard is that we could land on an asteroid, though.
Glenn Lutz: We were working-- we have that technology to make that happen. In fact, there’s one of our ESA brethren across the pond, they did land on a comet.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh, really?
Tommy Shaw: When was that?
Glenn Lutz: Just recently. But we’ve-- we were working missions to put down on an asteroid and see what’s there. We’ve made some course directions and now are more focused on Mars.
Host: Are you talking about a human mission?
Glenn Lutz: No, it was a robotic mission to the asteroid--
Host: Okay.
Glenn Lutz: --to bring back the piece so we could study it here.
Host: Oh, got it.
Glenn Lutz: Around the moon.
Host: Okay. Okay.
John Connolly: You could land on the asteroid, but it has almost no gravity.
Glenn Lutz: More like rendezvous.
John Connolly: Yeah. And most people think that the moons of Mars are captured asteroids. So, Phobos and Deimos. You could go there. Very little gravity to hold you on the surface, though.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh.
Glenn Lutz: So, that makes it a little easier to get to, so you don’t have that gravity weld he was talking about to try and extract yourself from.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Host: Oh, okay, so you can actually just-- would you, in a scenario if you were to visit Phobos, right? If-- would you land on Phobos and then launch off again? Or would you do sort of an orbital thing.
Glenn Lutz: Or anchor, right?
Host: Anchor, okay.
John Connolly: Yeah, you could do either. You would kind of dock with it.
Glenn Lutz: Yeah.
Host: Oh!
John Connolly: You know, because it would just be kind of another thing floating in space.
Host: Ahh, so, you’d actually have to-- by landing it’s more like grabbing us.
Glenn Lutz: More like the boat in the pier.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh.
Glenn Lutz: Next to the tie-on. Do whatever exploration you could do, plant the flag.
Host: Okay. Very cool. So, I know kind of going back, you know, thinking about just exploring just different heavenly bodies, right? Talk about Phobos or even if you were to land on Styx, right? There’s something that we like to call ISRU. That’s one of the things that kind of we’re looking at. In-situ resource utilization, right?
Glenn Lutz: There you go.
Host: It’s using the stuff that’s there to create more stuff and, I guess, is the very layman way of saying that.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Host: So, if it was resources.
John Connolly: Living off the land.
Host: Living off the land!
John Connolly: That’s a good layman way of putting it.
Host: There you go. Very cool. So, where are some of the best places where you can live off the land that we know of in the solar system?
John Connolly: Well, Mars is probably the easiest. Mars has an atmosphere.
Host: Ah.
John Connolly: I mean, it’s carbon dioxide. You could easily craft carbon dioxide into oxygen and carbon monoxide and use the oxygen to breathe, or to make most of your rocket fuel.
Host: Hmm.
John Connolly: And, in fact, we have an experiment flying in 2020 to Mars that’s going to test exactly that. So, that-- and if that works, and it should because it’s very simple chemistry, that means that we--
Glenn Lutz: Knock on wood.
John Connolly: You don’t need to take everything with you anymore. When we went to the moon originally, we took everything we needed. Every piece of food, every breath of oxygen, every ounce of water. If you find that kind of stuff on planets, that really changes the equation entirely because now you’re living off the land, you’re living off the resources of those planets.
Tommy Shaw: And do you think it’s possible to add nutrients and nitrogen and phosphorus or whatever it took to plant--
John Connolly: Potatoes?
Tommy Shaw: Potatoes.
Host: Perhaps.
Tommy Shaw: Or beans, or corn, or whatever.
John Connolly: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: You still need oxygen, though.
John Connolly: Well, yeah, you need a lot of things. So, Mars’ soil has some of the things you need for growing things. You’d have to add nutrients and you’d have to wash a few of the other things out of the soil first.
Glenn Lutz: Right.
John Connolly: But, yeah, you could-- you could, with enough additives, grow stuff in Mars soil.
Tommy Shaw: So, you could make fuel and food.
John Connolly: Yep.
Lawrence Gowan: 3d printers. These-- I haven’t read enough about them, but is that part of what it is? You take the elements that are there and you’re able to fabricate something that-- whatever is necessary next? Or is that-- where is that?
Glenn Lutz: Yeah, I think 3d printers are on the station today, so, we can build-- if something breaks, we don’t have to wait to fly up a part. We can build it.
Lawrence Gowan: Okay.
Glenn Lutz: The part. 3d printers for the fuel that he was talking about, I think fuel is more of a chemical element thing.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: So, we wouldn’t really print anything, but we would craft it.
John Connolly: We are looking, actually, at 3d printers to take-- like the soil, you could find on Mars.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
John Connolly: And, you know, you add some additives to it and you use the soil to build habitats and things like that. It would be a big-scale 3d printer. There’s some NASA technology going on at some of our centers to look at that. So, I think 3d printing is in its infancy. And we haven’t really even explored all the cool things we could do with it.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: So, you could make a metal alloy kind of a thing.
John Connolly: Sure. There are already metal 3d printers.
Glenn Lutz: Or even an earthen place to live in.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
John Connolly: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: Out of the soil yourself.
Lawrence Gowan: That’s what I mean.
Tommy Shaw: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: That you-- the elements are there to build it.
John Connolly: Right.
Lawrence Gowan: So, you could actually, you know, construct something by basically doing-- it’s doing the mining and the manufacturing.
Glenn Lutz: And it helps in a lot of ways in that radiation is a big problem for the human being.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Glenn Lutz: And the earth’s atmosphere protects us. We’re leaving that behind.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh, right.
Glenn Lutz: To go to these other places.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: So, if we can’t build out of earth like they used to do in Wyoming, Oklahoma, build the sod houses, so to speak. That helps from that perspective as well.
Lawrence Gowan: Hmm.
Glenn Lutz: To have added protection than just the spherical dome that we would take with us.
Lawrence Gowan: I love it. I love it.
Tommy Shaw: And all the technology is almost there, or pretty much there, isn’t it?
John Connolly: For building houses through 3d printers?
Tommy Shaw: Well, for doing all those things. If you get yourself on the site.
Glenn Lutz: It’s his job to make sure it is.
John Connolly: But it’s--
Tommy Shaw: So, it doesn’t seem that outrageous
John Connolly: No, no, not at all. That’s within the realm of technologies that we could have in the timeframes we’re looking at to go to Mars.
Host: Is there any sort of “I wish I had’s,” that you guys are thinking of?
John Connolly: I wish I had better propulsion.
Host: Ahh.
John Connolly: Because right now, as a species, we are stuck in the inner solar system.
Host: Hmm.
John Connolly: Because the best we have is chemical propulsion. You know, we’ve advanced technology a little bit since Apollo, but-- and we have things like electric propulsion now, but we need some sort of different propulsion systems, some sort of new physics to really travel amongst the stars or really to get out of the inner solar system.
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: So, that’s my big “I wish I had.”
Host: So, with chemical propulsion, realistically, if you-- if you designed a mission to go like way out in the edge of the solar system, how long is that mission profile? To go out to the edge of the solar system and back.
John Connolly: Oh, man.
Host: Outside.
John Connolly: Yeah, it would be a multi-generational mission.
Host: Yeah. Wow.
John Connolly: And that’s the problem with chemical propulsion. It just-- it’s just not going to push you fast enough to get where you want to go. By the time you got there, another spacecraft would race past you with new technology.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Host: Wouldn’t it be nice where you could just flip a switch and just, “I’m going light speed,” and then, bam!
Lawrence Gowan: Can you speculate on what would exist other than chemical propulsion then?
John Connolly: Well, so if-- so right now we use, you know, we combine chemicals, we use-- we accelerate ions to push ourselves around. That all requires us to have a fuel. Okay? That we somehow accelerate off-- out the back-end of a rocket. The real-- the next big step in physics would come if you find a way where you don’t need fuel, that you could somehow create force without fuel.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
John Connolly: And there are some technology projects at NASA going on right now that are looking at that. If you’re a big fan of “star trek,” that’s kind of what warp drive is all about.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah. Can you explain that for me?
John Connolly: That would-- I would love to get another podcast.
Tommy Shaw: I read something on an astronomy site that I somehow link to now on Facebook about some experimental propulsion thing where-- because you’re generally-- you’re pushing off of something to go the other direction and there was something new that they were-- I don’t know if these plates or something that somehow created propulsion.
John Connolly: Yeah, and that’s the new physics I’m talking about. We need something like that to get that working. And we do have an engineer here in Houston who’s working on a propulsion system like that. They-- some people call it the quantum thrusting.
Glenn Lutz: Yes.
John Connolly: It pushes-- and they don’t really understand why it works, but it’s been tried a couple places around the country and it’s at the point where you have to be very skeptical about what’s going on. And-- but if it works, it could change the whole equation because it doesn’t need fuel. It’s using different forces that somehow is pushing against something and moving it.
Lawrence Gowan: Well then--
John Connolly: Again, another podcast.
Lawrence Gowan: We hear about gravity assist, right?
John Connolly: Mm-hmm.
Lawrence Gowan: Okay, so, I mean, is it something of that nature? Where there’s some magnetic exchange?
John Connolly: No, it’s a little different. Gravity assist is-- that’s basically capturing the energy of a planet like earth or Venus and taking a little bit of that planet’s energy and turning it into your energy as you fly by.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: And what’s good about --
Glenn Lutz: Roller derby around the edge, you get a little assist around the edge.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: What’s good about gravity assist, and correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s a good bang for your buck. You don’t put a lot of energy into it and what you get out of that gravity assist is a really big boost.
John Connolly: Right. In fact, most of the times you don’t put any energy into it.
Host: Oh, wow!
John Connolly: Get captured. But what you’re doing is you’re borrowing a little bit of energy from that planet’s orbit.
Lawrence Gowan: That’s incredible.
John Connolly: Yeah.
Host: So, kind of thinking about, you know, going back to Mars for a second. So, back to a Mars mission. What are some of the things that we have to be concerned about to put humans on the surface, to make it, I guess, friendly?
John Connolly: Friendly?
Host: Human friendly. What are the things we’d have to be concerned about?
John Connolly: Well, Glenn could talk maybe a little bit about space suites and EVA.
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: But, from my standpoint, getting people to the surface. So, it’s all a matter of changing velocities, first of all, right? You have to leave earth. You have to ride a big rocket. You then have to change your velocity enough to throw you out towards Mars. Then you have to slow down once you get to Mars and make your way through the atmosphere and slow down enough so that by the time you get to the surface, your relative velocity is zero. So, all that-- all those miracles of rocket propulsion and entry systems that have to happen keep me up at night. Okay? Then once you get to the surface, you need super reliable systems, because at Mars, like you said, you don’t have a 7-eleven next door. You don’t have a handyman you could call. You can’t send a Soyuz or a progress up in a couple of weeks with some new parts. So, everything has to work for the duration of the time you’re there or you have to be able to fix it. And so, it’s that super high reliability.
Glenn Lutz: Yeah. I think any endeavor across civilization, the logistics, logistics just gets to me. If they take on the alps, they have a train full of donkeys behind them to get them there. We don’t have that luxury. So, we’re going to have to have stuff that doesn’t break. And we’re going to have to have folks that instead of the super pilot, he’s the refrigerator repair guy. He can tear apart and put it back together and trust that it works because he’s living off of that machine doing its job.
Host: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: So, everything that you have in the grocery, you know, oxygen, et cetera, you have to take with you or build or supply while you’re there.
Host: But it takes good people to do that, right? You need folks that have kind of a variety of different disciplines that can actually work on this.
Glenn Lutz: Absolutely.
Host: So, tell me, Lawrence, in your perspective kind of what-- what are some of the key folks that you would need to bring with you on a mission out to space?
Tommy Shaw: Well, you need someone who’s-- I would think an engineer type.
Host: Definitely an engineer.
Tommy Shaw: Who, you know, would be skeptical and then have solutions. And I think you need somebody who’s got a great imagination, who can figure out how to get to the next-- what the thing is that you’re trying to get to.
Host: A leader. Yeah. In a way, I guess.
Tommy Shaw: And you need-- you need hands. You need helpers. And who are also-- who have specialties-- special talents of their own because otherwise you’re just a lonely, you know, you’re doing it all yourself, you know? It’s kind of like-- it’s a lot like being in a band. We all support each other, otherwise, otherwise we would just be one person out there with a microphone. And no matter how good you are, there’s limits to what you can do there.
Host: I think Styx would sound a little bit different with just one member. Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah, yeah. I think the, you know, we talk about the machines that are necessary to do all this, but, again, talking to astronaut Dan.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: I think medical is a huge necessity because our bodies morph and have to adapt and they do adapt and change in their-- so that changes the whole equation of what medically is required, you know, as the thing continues on. So, I’d say-- I’d say an engineer, a really good doctor, and, you know, probably a good drummer or bass player.
John Connolly: I would add a communicator.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh, yeah.
John Connolly: Someone who could talk back to the folks on earth and describe, in terms they understand, what they are experiencing.
Lawrence Gowan: Hmm.
Glenn Lutz: And the other thing is you almost have to have two of everything, or double training. Because that doctor, if he’s the guy that gets the problem--
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: Somebody else needs to step in.
Lawrence Gowan: Right. You were telling me something great about the-- or, frightening, actually, about the dust on Mars affecting your thyroid. That’s part of why my brain started moving toward that.
Glenn Lutz: Yeah. We’ve got to make sure we separate the bad actors from the human aspect of that. And so, all the systems we’re building, you saw the rover itself.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: The suit’s purposely on the back so the dust doesn’t come in with you. In Apollo, we didn’t have that separation.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Glenn Lutz: In those days, they used zippers to close up the suit and dust and zippers don’t like each other.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Glenn Lutz: This just in.
Lawrence Gowan: Mm-hmm.
Glenn Lutz: And so, the suit you saw didn’t have any zippers. We’ve gone away from that now.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Glenn Lutz: So, and everything’s on the back to separate. So, yeah, those are the little details that guys that work with John’s teams are thinking about every system.
Host: Yeah. And it kind of helps that we’ve explored the moon, right? Because if we didn’t think about, “yeah, you’re going to be walking on the surface, and then, oh, yeah, you’re going to track all that dust back into the cockpit,” or wherever you’re going to be flying from. Now we’re designing, like you said, you mentioned, it’s call the SEV, right? Space exploration vehicle? And it’s designed where the suits go on the outside of the vehicle so you never step inside with the suit, right? So that’s the general idea. And there’s a bunch of different examples like that, right?
Glenn Lutz: Yeah.
Host: Where you learn something and some kind of cool new technology that we need to explore a different planet or something comes out of it. Is there anything else that comes-- that you can think of besides the suits maybe?
Glenn Lutz: Well, we’ll have robots to assist us there. One of the things about the human aspect of this flight is robots can go and discover things, and we’ve got robots on Mars right now discovering stuff. But they really can’t explore. They can’t-- the human brain to see things and communicate back to earth what they’re seeing or if something doesn’t go exactly the way it was supposed to, to react and do something different. So, robots are going to be a big part of the mission and have them interact with this. And you guys saw some robots today that will be along as an assist.
Host: Mm-hmm.
Glenn Lutz: So, got to make sure they do their job as well.
Host: So, the robots will be helping like a human-- so, for a mission-- or, a mission to Mars. Right? How many crew members would we probably-- would probably be ideal to take on a mission to Mars?
John Connolly: So, my number is six.
Host: Six, okay.
John Connolly: Okay? And we’ve done what we call crew skill mix studies over the years.
Host: Okay.
John Connolly: And it’s like Glenn said, you have to take a doctor but you also have to take another person who’s medically trained in case the doctor gets sick. You need engineers, you need geologists, you need all the technical-- if you add up all the technical specialists, you probably need 25 people. So, then it’s a matter of how can you cross-train people to do-- to be a doctor/pilot/geologist. Okay?
Host: Wow!
John Connolly: And the best I’ve seen is that you can put all those specialties into about six people.
Host: Wow! That’s amazing. I mean, some of the folks from the new astronaut class, right? I actually had the pleasure of talking to some of them and we went through-- I talked with Anne Roemer on one of the earlier podcast episodes and we just went through all of the different folks that we brought on for the class of 2017. We have 12 new astronauts. Each of them does not just one thing.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Host: They do a bunch of different things.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: For example, Woody Hoburg is an engineer in four different types of-- he’s like computer science, and electrical, and aerospace, and mechanical. Like he’s all of them. And then when you’re talking about a doctor pilot, Frank Rubio is a doctor pilot. He flew helicopters, and then he did some skydiving, but then also is a medical doctor by training. It’s insane. So, they’re finding these folks that have all of these different specialties, but when you’re talking about scientist/medical doctor/pilot and then you have all of these different folks that are slash, slash, slash, it’s amazing. I have--
Tommy Shaw: And I would recommend having-- being able to play an instrument.
John Connolly: And many astronauts know how to.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Glenn Lutz: Yeah.
John Connolly: We have guitars and other things up in space right now.
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: Because music is really a part of life.
Host: Absolutely.
Tommy Shaw: And it’s one thing to have pre-recorded music, but to create music and make your own music would be part of it. Because you need joy.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah. Absolutely.
Tommy Shaw: You can’t do-- not just working all the time. You need to have the joy of life.
Host: And you’re right, some of the-- so, right, as we were saying, we have progressed from shuttle flights, which were a couple of days, all the way up to now international space station flights, which are several months.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: So, they’re up there for a long time and a lot of them, like you say, they do bring instruments.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah, Chris Hadfield.
Host: We have-- Chris Hadfield has his guitar, right?
Lawrence Gowan: He’s great.
Host: He’s jammin’. We’ve had folks bring flutes.
John Connolly: Cady Coleman.
Host: Cady Coleman, right. And then I think Kjell Lindgren brought bagpipes, right?
Lawrence Gowan: Wow!
Glenn Lutz: They made him practice way on the other side.
Host: Yeah!
Tommy Shaw: He wasn’t invited back!
Lawrence Gowan: You know what, it’s funny. Yeah, I think six is a good number. There’s six members of Styx as well, and we are very good at the music part.
Tommy Shaw: We do have a mechanical engineer.
Lawrence Gowan: Well, we do. We have one. That’s right. J. Y. Has a degree in rocket science.
John Connolly: Really?
Lawrence Gowan: He does, actually.
John Connolly: There you go!
John Connolly: And, you know, just like a band, a crew has to be a very cohesive group of people who get along and know how to solve their conflicts without leaving the band.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
John Connolly: Because there’s no place to go up there.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: Because they are constantly, they are adjusting to things, you know? And you’re-- a lot of times you’re working on not enough sleep, the weather doesn’t cooperate with you, you’re going into these habitats that are different every day, and different configurations of how our-- our dressing room sometimes we’re all in one room, sometimes we’re in-- we have individual rooms. So, you have to be adaptable and flexible and know when you are fatigued and--
Lawrence Gowan: Mm-hmm.
Glenn Lutz: Yep.
Tommy Shaw: And know yourself. And being in a band is-- we’re very fortunate to have the group that we have because somehow we’ve-- we just get through it all, do what we need to do, adapt, and then at the end of the night we get to go play, and that’s really what it’s all about. You’re willing to go through whatever it takes to get there and to get that 75 or 90 or 100 minutes.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: I think that’s-- that is what being a band is somewhat akin to what you’re saying. Like, you have to-- you have to keep-- the focus has to remain on what’s bigger than any one individual. And to be able to navigate your way through the-- human conflict is part of life, and it’s part of discovery, and it’s part of the friction that brings new things about. But, to do that over an extended period of time, as these people would be-- a crew of six would be faced with, they have to have those kinds of skills in addition to all those other talents.
Host: Absolutely.
Lawrence Gowan: So, that’s hard. How do you? It’s hard to pick those people.
Glenn Lutz: It’ll take a while to go through that evaluation. We’ll have lots of candidates to line up for those six spots.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
John Connolly: It’s going to fundamentally be a different kind of astronaut than we’ve had before, just because of the length of the mission, and the self-reliance, and you don’t have-- even communications. Right now, if we were to talk to someone on Mars, you’re 22 light minutes away, one way. So, if you were to ask them, “hey, can you guys hear me?” You all can’t answer back until 44 minutes later. And so, even the dynamics of how we control a mission and how we can help the people up there is going to be different. So, it’s going to be a much different mission than anything we’ve ever done, even out to the moon.
Host: And I think what’s even-- you know, another important point is the fact that these guys are going to have to be not only-- they’re going to have to have so many different types of expertise, but they’re going to be together for such a long period of time, so they definitely have to get along pretty well. And, you know, in moments of crisis they have to kind of work through different situations together. And at the drop of a hat, one thing you’re planning one way, and then it’s going to go a completely different way. Do you guys have any examples on stage where something just is not going according to plan?
Tommy Shaw: Every night, yeah.
Host: Every night!
Tommy Shaw: Absolutely.
Host: But I mean, you just have to push through, right?
Tommy Shaw: Yeah, as a band, you just-- you just pay attention to each other, and you get-- if it goes off the rails, which it does sometimes, because you’re all human--
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: Everybody just follows you back-- off the rails and then back on again.
Host: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: And you don’t let on.
Glenn Lutz: Yeah, I hear ya!
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah. It’s a two-sided thing. One is that the machinery has to work in order for you to play it properly. But at the same time, we’re all focused on the entertainment of the audience as to what we’re doing on stage. So, that’s more like the bigger picture is constantly being readjusted to.
Host: Yeah.
Lawrence Gowan: And that has to be-- some of that’s done almost-- I mean, I won’t say it’s telepathic, but it’s just a natural reaction that you have to each member of the group, because you really are playing together. You’re trying to speak as one voice.
Host: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: That cohesiveness is what we’ve got to strive for in our crews.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: And we’ll have international crews, so we’ll be mixing cultures, as well, but that cohesiveness is what is going to make us successful or unsuccessful.
Lawrence Gowan: Well –
Glenn Lutz: Or that would hinder our flight.
Lawrence Gowan: And that was so evident today about how the united states and Russia have combined, and when they’re sometimes at odds with each other is when finally a better solution comes out of a situation.
Glenn Lutz: And we’re practicing that with the international space station right now.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: Twelve, thirteen countries all participating, making that thing a success.
Host: Absolutely!
Lawrence Gowan: A Canadarm came, like—worked perfectly.
Host: So, you know, one of the things is we train on the international space station all the time. And we’re training for missions beyond and getting ourselves prepared. If anything goes wrong, we’ll be prepared for it because we’ve practiced so many times. And I’m guessing it’s the same for you guys, right? You’ve practiced so many times that if something goes wrong, at the drop of a hat, you can kind of-- you know, that’s how you’re able to pull through on all these nights.
Lawrence Gowan: How about the night in Carmel earlier this year when the power completely went out, 100%? Yeah. And fortunately, we were in a theater that kind of had a-- it had an almost steeple-like church type thing. So although there were a couple of thousand people there, you could actually hear from the stage acoustically. So, we basically-- this was great.
Tommy Shaw: While we were playing a song! I had to play an acoustic.
Lawrence Gowan: Oh, right! Man in the wilderness.
Tommy Shaw: Everything stopped.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Tommy Shaw: But the drums were acoustic and my guitar was acoustic, so we just kept playing.
Host: Just it turned into an acoustics! Oh, wow! That’s amazing.
John Connolly: Yeah. An unplugged set, right?
Lawrence Gowan: The weird thing is the audience, like, they got totally into it. And then eventually we found a piano about four floors down, so people on hand loved the piano. It wasn’t in great tune or anything, but we played for about another half hour before the-- we were out of hypergolic fumes.
Glenn Lutz: That’s flexibility, adaptability. There you go!
Lawrence Gowan: No refunds, which was great.
Tommy Shaw: Those are the ones you can remember, too, though. It’s like when it rains, or you have some kind of natural thing that gets in the way of it. Those are the ones that you remember because you see-- you really see what the band is made of, you know, and how you get through that. And your audience. They’re willing to-- if they’re willing to wait and stay through the weather, then we’re certainly going to do it.
Host: Absolutely.
Glenn Lutz: And you mentioned earlier kind of the big picture of the entertainment of the audience. Mars is really a destination, but getting there, we have to solve a lot of different problems that we hope to drive right back into life here on earth, to make life on earth even better for us as mankind.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Glenn Lutz: By solving the problems that would go into this place. So, Mars is a great draw because it really pushes us to solve some pretty tough problems. Water reclamation for third world countries.
Lawrence Gowan: Right.
Glenn Lutz: We have to have pure water for this trip. So, those kind of spin-offs are part of what we do, as well, in the big picture.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah, for sure.
Host: Those are kind of-- to your point, Lawrence, where you have all this technology and you have to worry about that, but then ultimately the goal. The goal for us is Mars. The goal for you guys is the entertainment of the audience. So, everything has to work, but if it doesn’t, you still have to achieve that goal.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: And that’s where you-- you’re bringing a piano from four floors under to still achieve that goal. And it’s working.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Host: But I guess for space it’s just a teeny bit harder.
Lawrence Gowan: I think so.
John Connolly: Yeah, no extra piano.
Lawrence Gowan: No, exactly.
Host: That’s one of the hardest parts for us, is like when you-- to your point, John, when you were saying for Apollo missions, we brought everything with us, right? No spare parts. I think a perfect example is Apollo 13, where things were going wrong. We didn’t have spare parts to fix things, but we still fixed them with the stuff we had on board, right? You’re talking about engineers getting together in mission control and just laying out all the stuff that they knew was in the capsule and saying, “all right, how can we fix this issue?” We actually had something very recently, too, where we had-- we were doing a spacewalk a couple of months ago, right, and we were supposed to put a shield on the outside of one of the modules. Well, the shield got inadvertently lost. So, there were four shields, and we were supposed to put up one, two, three, and then there’s this exposed part on one side, and we needed to cover it up. Well, it just so happened that during the same spacewalk we took another cover off of another part of the spacecraft. So, engineers took that cover and said, “okay, how can we fit this cover onto this part?” It was like-- it was kind of reminiscent of that time where you had to throw everything-- all right, what do we have and what can we do? And they figured it out. They actually figured out how to lay this cover over that exposed part. Insane. That’s, I guess, our grand piano moment, right?
Tommy Shaw: That’s got to be a great day for the crew, though, to--
Host: Oh, it really was.
Tommy Shaw: For everybody. To solve that problem.
Host: I think what’s even better is during that spacewalk, I think we got everything done, right?
Glenn Lutz: Oh, yeah.
Host: I think all the missions were-- even with that setback, we still accomplished the mission and got everything done we needed to. It’s really crazy. And that’s the stuff we’ve got to prepare for. And that’s the stuff you’re thinking about, right? And what happens-- how many situations, John, are you thinking, “okay, if this goes wrong, this is what we’re going to do”? How many times do you think that in a day?
Glenn Lutz: How long do you got?
John Connolly: So, we will take some spares with us, okay?
Host: Yeah!
John Connolly: We’re not just going to have the box of stuff we have.
Host: Yeah, yeah.
John Connolly: Because we know that over time some things break. And so, what we’re looking at is what things are most likely to break, and we’ll take spares for those and figure out ways to fix the stuff that goes wrong. So, yeah, you can’t assume everything is going to work just right.
Host: Mm-hmm.
John Connolly: So, a lot of the planning we do is figuring out what tools, what spares, what maintenance equipment to take with us to fix stuff that’s going to go wrong, because that’s all we got, you know? No piano in the basement.
Glenn Lutz: Yeah, he has a term called dissimilar redundancy. So, electric guitar and an acoustic guitar.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah.
Glenn Lutz: That’s on stage with you. And so we have something that builds oxygen and something else that builds oxygen over here, in case this one fails.
Tommy Shaw: And, you know, at a certain you’re going to have a lot of hardware on Mars. So, it stands to reason that you could do-- you could salvage parts, and--
John Connolly: Oh, sure, yeah. And that’s why it’s very important to use the same size screws for everything and things like that.
Tommy Shaw: Yeah.
Host: Wow, amazing. So, before we wrap up, Lawrence, Tommy, do you have any sort of-- just talking about exploring the solar system and all these different things, do you have any sort of floating questions that, you know, just sort of popped up, just based on the tour and this kind of conversation? Anything that you were wondering? Or maybe some thoughts about stuff that you weren’t wondering but have a better understanding of now?
Tommy Shaw: Well, what about, you know, you always see suspended animation, or like-- is there any reality to that concept?
Glenn Lutz: It makes for good entertaining.
John Connolly: Yeah, that’s-- I’m an engineer. That’s way out of my expertise.
Glenn Lutz: Yeah, that-- we’ll have to bring a doctor in for that. No, I don’t think we’re doing much in those fields, that I know of, anyway.
Tommy Shaw: That is-- it’s a good tool to get you places when you’re telling a story.
Glenn Lutz: Yep.
Host: Absolutely. But you know, for the missions that you guys are planning for, you’re talking-- you know, how will they get through those couple of months? Because what you’re talking about, I think the shortest time to get to Mars will be seven months, right? Maybe closer to nine. What are they going to be doing in that time to sort of fill it?
John Connolly: So, that’s a great question. So, they’re going to be exercising like crazy, because you want to arrive at Mars as healthy as you could possibly be.
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: They’re going to be keeping the systems running. But they’re going to be doing as much science as they can on the way, too. Now, most of the science will probably be science on themselves, science on the humans. Because we’ve never been in that deep space condition for that long before. There’s also-- you know; we’ve actually been talking about them doing astronomy along the way. So, there will be real science that they accomplish, not just trying to stay healthy.
Host: Do we have a good understanding of how, you know, the sky, I guess, will look on that transit to Mars? Will you be able to see a lot of different stars?
John Connolly: Yeah. In fact, that’s all you’ll be able to see.
Host: All right, cool! Because I guess the views--
John Connolly: Because the earth is going to become a little blue dot very quickly.
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: And Mars will still be our little red dot out the other window.
Glenn Lutz: Sun’s getting smaller and smaller.
John Connolly: Yeah, the sun is just a kind of a bigger star in the sky, and everything else is just stars.
Host: Amazing. But we have to think about weight, right? That’s one of the things we have to think about. How much stuff can we bring with us on that journey to Mars?
Glenn Lutz: Just enough. That’s how much we can bring.
Host: So now I’m guessing telescopes is part of that just enough.
John Connolly: Right.
Glenn Lutz: Oh, yeah.
John Connolly: Yeah. In space, in the human space travel, mass is almost equal to cost, right?
Host: Yeah.
John Connolly: So, you know, for every bit of mass you add, you’re adding cost, because you have to boost it into space and get it to where you need to get it. So, everything we do is all about saving mass. In the Apollo missions, they actually sawed the handle off of toothbrushes to save mass.
Lawrence Gowan: Wow.
Host: Huh!
John Connolly: Just because mass was so precious back then.
Host: Unbelievable.
John Connolly: They figure you could use a toothbrush that has a little one inch handle on it as good as you can use a toothbrush that has a six inch handle on it.
Host: Wow.
Lawrence Gowan: Wow, that’s amazing. That’s check-in luggage, right there.
Host: Yeah. A little bit stricter restrictions than the TSA, I think, for space flight.
John Connolly: Yeah, yeah.
Host: Any more dying questions before we wrap up?
Lawrence Gowan: I don’t have anything-- I don’t know if I have anything pertinent to either of you guys, because I think the thing that impressed me today, again, was when Dan was talking about how much exercise. Like you were saying, you have to arrive there healthy. It just got me thinking a lot about how much we-- our bodies change when we’re away from this planet, and over such a short period of time. And that gets me thinking about, well, what will humanity look like? How would-- what will we be like once we’ve spent a few years somewhere else? Like, it could actually physically change us incredibly. One of the good things I heard is apparently your wrinkles go away.
John Connolly: That’s good.
Lawrence Gowan: But I mean, as a species, it actually will change us.
John Connolly: Yeah, I think if we-- if there’s people who actually are born and live on Mars, within a few generations, yeah, you will be changed because you’re living in a lower gravity environment your entire life and-- sure.
Lawrence Gowan: Might even develop immunities to some of the things that you were talking about earlier, Glenn, but, you know, certain things-- I don’t know. I’m just spit balling here.
Host: Yeah!
Glenn Lutz: If I had a chance, I’ll talk to my great-great-great-grandson one day, and I’ll ask him the question.
Lawrence Gowan: Yeah, good!
Host: Yeah, awesome. Well, guys, it’s been an absolute pleasure to both talk to you as a part of this podcast, but also have you here today and kind of show you everything that we’re doing. And it’s just so exciting to see how engaged you were and to-- you know, it’s been a real absolute pleasure. And, of course, John and Glenn, thanks for talking about the real science that we’re doing here at the Johnson space center.
Tommy Shaw: Thank you for having us.
Lawrence Gowan: Thanks for asking us.
Host: Absolutely.
Tommy Shaw: It was unforgettable.
[ music ]
[ indistinct radio chatter ]
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
Houston, welcome to space.
[music]
Host: Hey, thanks for sticking around. So today we talked with Glenn Lutz, John Connolly, and some of the members of Styx, just about exploring the cosmos and human exploration. It was a fantastic conversation, as you probably know, because you’ve listened to the whole thing at this point. But if you go to NASA.gov on the front page you can see all of the things that we’re exploring, all the places we are in the universe, both robotic missions and human missions. If you want to know just about exploring the cosmos from the perspective of human exploration, go to NASA.gov/Johnson. We are the center for human exploration within NASA. So you can find all of the human missions there. On social media, we’re very active, so just follow us on any of the accounts on Facebook, twitter, Instagram, snapchat-- any of those guys. Look for NASA. And if you’re looking for the story of human exploration, look for NASA Johnson. You can also use the hashtag #asknasa on any one of the platforms and submit a question or idea for an episode that we should do in the future. You can also use the hashtag #hwhap -- h-w-h-a-p for “Houston, we have a podcast.” This podcast was recorded on July 28th. Thanks to Alex Perryman, John Stoll, jenny Knotts, and Jeanie Aquino. And thanks again to Mr. Glenn Lutz and Mr. John Connolly, as well as Mr. Tommy Shaw and Mr. Lawrence Gowan from Styx for coming on the show. We’ll be back next week.
Last Updated: Aug. 25, 2017
Editor: Gary Jordan
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