This episode is a unique one. On this episode, I've invited Richard Campbell, developer and
podcaster who also dives deep into science and tech topics. We're going to dig into his Geek Out
series and spend some time talking realistically about moon bases and space travel. I think you're
really going to enjoy this conversation, but I would love to hear either way if you like this
minor diversion from the pure Python topics, although we do talk some Python and some programming.
We can do more like these in the future if you all enjoyed listening to them as much as I enjoyed
making them. This is Talk Python to Me, episode 253, recorded February 14th, 2020.
Welcome to Talk Python to Me, a weekly podcast on Python, the language, the libraries, the ecosystem,
and the personalities. This is your host, Michael Kennedy. Follow me on Twitter where I'm at
mkennedy. Keep up with the show and listen to past episodes at talkpython.fm and follow the
show on Twitter via at Talk Python. This episode is sponsored by Clubhouse and Linode. Please
check out what they're offering during their segments. It really helps support the show.
Richard, welcome to Talk Python to Me.
Nice to be here, Michael. Thanks so much for inviting me.
It's really great to have you here. I'm super excited about our topic. There's a lot of things
that we cover on Talk Python to Me that is Python plus some other really cool topic. Python plus
large hadron collider. Python plus philosophy and machine image recognition. Stuff like that,
right?
You know, the LHG makes total sense to me because Python is such a great language for mashing huge
amounts of data. And the LHG spits out huge amounts of data. Like it is stunning.
It's unbelievable.
Yeah.
Yeah. It's really, there's like layers and layers, almost like the CPUs have like cache layers and
stuff. There's like that in like huge infrastructure at the LHG. It's amazing that place.
Yeah. And it's interesting, funny truth about the geek outs. Not that I want to jump ahead here
is that the first show we made that could have been called a geek out, which at the time we did not
call it that was about a space antenna was a radio antenna where the big, the main problem was so much
data. And it was just the, I was interested in the data problem, but later came to appreciate,
Hey, you know, that's kind of a geek out long before the geek outs were geek out.
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So this idea of a geek out, this is something I have enjoyed
for years. And this is something that is very special that you have been doing. I don't even
know how much work this is. I know it's a tremendous amount of work and I'm super excited to get into it,
but let's start at the beginning of this whole story here. Let's start with just how you got into
programming.
I'm one of the original like generation zero microcomputer programmers, right? And
I was 10 years old in 1977 when I wandered into a radio shack buying parts for an electronic rocket
countdown timer.
That's very appropriate for this topic.
Well, I'm cause I'm that kind of lazy too. Like even saying five, four, three, two, one,
too much work. I don't want to do that. So I was building a little, my father is an electrical
engineer. He taught me to solder from a very early age. So, you know, building gizmos was never a big
deal. So there I was in radio shack buying parts.
Is this an Estes rocket? You could like push the button that would count down that you did or
you're correct. Yeah.
Cause literally five, five, four, three, two, one.
So, so you were in there and you saw this weird machine that you could talk to.
Yeah. Well, later on, came to appreciate that the Tirasati model one, which is a very basic
microcomputer, only 4k RAM in it. They put one in every store. And so it was sort of sitting in the
corner of the store, somewhat neglected. And I just started playing with it and it had me immediately,
you know, for better or worse, I've just not done anything else. By the time I was 12,
I was working in a Tirasati repair shop, a computer repair shop. So my basic first job
was repairing microcomputers. And that's so awesome. I've just, I haven't done anything.
Like I don't know anything else really. I've worked every level of microcomputers you can think of
from repairing them and programming them and selling them and building networks. I was network certified
back in the two days. Like I've just worked on the whole thing. So there's no magic here. I've just
been in it longer than most people. Yeah. What were some of your first programming languages?
Uh, well, of course the, the tiny basic that was on that Tirasati with its three error messages,
what, how, and sorry. And, you know, learn Z80 assembler shortly after that, because you've only
got 4k of RAM. And so trying to get the most out of the machine was kind of a big deal. Right.
And then as they, hardware evolved, like I couldn't even fold it for the Tirasati as a kid
that young. So, but the shop I was working for at H and S when I was 12, they had a lot of S100 bus
parts come through. And so I sort of scavenged my way through an S100 bus with an 8080.
And, so that started out. So programming in 8080 and then some of the quick basics running on CPM.
And then, you know, first real language of the one that made me money when I'm like 13 or 14 was the
original D base. Oh yeah. Right on. Uh-huh. So then now, you know, I, for better or worse, just sort of
followed my nose one language to the next. Where were the opportunities, right? And, and, making
some money and really in the eighties, I made more money restoring old hardware. So that was a, you know,
that was during the, at the end, end of OPEC when inflation was crazy and so forth and lots of
companies were going bankrupt. And so I had written software for a bailiff service and they were
possessing computers and damaging them in the process, not knowing that they were doing.
And so I would buy them at 10 cents on the dollar, repair them, and then sell them for 50 cents on the
dollar. Yeah. That's, that's a cool project as a young person. Yeah. So as a teenager, like I was
doing all right, making decent money on, on good equipment and, and setting up software and customizing
things. And, you know, one thing just leads to another. Yeah. Super cool. And what are you up to today?
You got a lot of irons in the fire from looking in from the outside.
I like working on a lot of different things. Like I, I, that's my, my passion. Obviously I've been
doing, starting at rocks now for 15 years and I'm still the new guy, right? I'm the third co-host
run as radio. I started back in 2007. So every Wednesday since April, 2007, I make the, the dev
intersection conferences. So I've been involved in conferences since the nineties. This particular
imprint is particular brand we started in 2012 for a variety of reasons. And so those,
all those things sort of hold together. They're kind of the same thing. They are, what do technology
people, developers, IT people, so forth need to know three to six months from now.
Right. And whether, and it's just different ways of making things like that. And I advise a lot of
different companies. So I'm involved in the startup community and I've helped a bunch of businesses grow,
uh, had a few of my own along the way and had some, you know, been acquired, been the acquirer,
like they'd gone through all those different, permutations. My, the last sort of big wave of that
was 2013, 2014. And, and since then I've been, you know, just playing with a few companies I think are
cool and, advising some others, on directions and opportunities that are out there. It's an interesting
way to work. There's always new things. I can't do the same thing two days in a row, Michael. I'm not
that guy. Well, it sounds like you definitely have got it set up that way. And you know, it's, I don't
have that many irons, but I do have like that kind of mix and that fluidity. And I don't know about you,
but I think I might be partially broken if I had to go back to a job with a commute.
Oh yeah. No, look, I wouldn't hire me. I'm kind of, I'm very difficult to work with. I would not.
Yeah, no, I'm not, I'm not employable anymore.
Yeah. It's a great life. Yeah. Just so, your, your podcast, so .NET rocks,
I actually was on there not long ago, but I've known you since before then. So thanks for having
me on there. Well, you have that amazing mix of having an experience in .NET and also, you know,
embraced Python in a big way. I thought your tone about talking about Python was very relatable to
the average .NET developer. I really appreciate that show. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you. And then,
run as radio, tell people more what that shows about. That's me exercising the IT side of my head
because I've, I've always lived in both worlds. Never been afraid of hardware. We care about
networking. You know, those are all the useful skills. And I just felt like, you know, back in
2007, the, the podcasts out there that spoke to the IT professional were pretty hostile to Microsoft.
Now admittedly, you know, 2007 was not a great time for Microsoft. We did just come out of the
Vista debacle and you know, it was ugly, right? There was some dark times. Oh, it was a great time
to start an IT podcast with Microsoft technology while Vista is out, right? Like, woo, good, good one.
But just having a coherent conversation about these are the stacks we're dealing with and you know,
what works together and how you have some success. And I'm not saying I'm Microsoft only,
I'm saying I'm just not Microsoft hostile. So, you know, a long time we talked about virtualization.
Hyper-V was a joke. We talked about VMware because that was the real product. You know,
V sphere had that cloud architecture working long before, Hyper-V ever figured it out.
Yeah. Although there's a whole interesting conversation about virtualization and what
it's done for like creating a cloud and whatnot. But yeah, absolutely.
Let's move on to talking about this concept of the geek outs. Now for this show, we're going to talk
about space and the moon because you're passionate about it. I'm passionate about it. It's something
you've been doing recently. Sure. But maybe this idea you said earlier, there was this antenna and you
were studying how much data was coming off of it. You know, like all this data problem is pretty
interesting, but actually like actually the science is as well. And so I've listened to many of your
geek outs, for example, the one on supersonic air travel is super interesting. So maybe give us like
a quick overview or high level overview rather of these geek outs and what you've been up to and just,
you know, how do you research these things as people will see it's very deeply researched.
Well, and it's research I do anyway, right? Like I'm someone who, who thinks a perfect Sunday morning
is reading several scientific papers and just to learn, to know what's going on. And I take notes.
And I always have, right? It's a sort of a normal thing for me to do to sort of organize my thoughts. I
live in one note for that side of stuff. The geek outs are really, was ultimately Carl's idea. It goes
back to 2011. Carl being your co-host. On .NET Rocks. Yeah. And so back in 2011, when the last shuttle
landed, when Atlantis landed, we were on the phone together and not recording. And I ranted about
everything wrong with the shuttle and just how frustrating it was that he, you know, this was
the sort of ignoble end of this machine. And after I wound down, it must've been 20 minutes or so. And
he said like, are you done? And he said, you know, we should have recorded that. I think people want to
know that. I'm like, whatever. Like, I don't think anything of that. He says, no, no, we should do a
show on it. I really disagreed with him. I thought, you know, we're a developer show. This is not
relevant. We're going to be told to keep to our knitting. Anyway, I was wrong.
We recorded the show and the main reaction was people asking questions, basically asking for more.
And so it took a while to sort of come up with a format. Like we played with that. But at the time
at .NET Rocks, we were making three shows a week. So the idea of taking one of those shows per month,
you know, we're doing 12 to 15 shows in a week, in a month, one of those in sort of going off the
reservation. Let's go talk about whatever people are interested in. So I put up surveys and, you know,
took solicitations or ideas from the audience and they sort of sorted into this some, a lot of
alternative energy questions. What about solar? What about wind? What about nuclear? Lots of aerospace
stuff, more space, space, space, space, and other, then there's sort of another, so the other topics
that came along. And we'd put out one a month. And most for me, it was finishing research. So,
you know, you're taking notes all the time, but they never organized them to actually go back and say,
is there something here? Is there a narrative? How do we tell the story of this particular
technology? That is a different exercise. And so the pressure of, hey, on Saturday, I have to talk
for an hour with Carl, Carl being the everyman in a geek out, right? Asking the questions that everybody
would ask. How do I get that organized properly? And different topics came out different ways. You know,
I didn't set out to make three shows on nuclear fusion, but as I organized the notes, I saw there
were three distinct areas. There was the government led, you know, high budget, the national ignition
group, and I turn jet. And then there was another group, which was all the tech billionaires. Like,
you can't be a cool tech billionaire if you don't have a fusion project.
You need a rocket company and you need some kind of fusion project.
You know, I do own the domain name tech billionaire or supervillain.com. I've been meaning to build this
site where he's like, who's closest to being Dr. No? And it's like, yeah, do you have an island?
Does your island have a volcano? Do you have a fusion power plant that, you know, doesn't work?
And you just go, can you fly yourself into space? Like eventually you get a long enough list where you're
like, I think you're Dr. No. Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Just another project. I've never,
I've not gotten to, right. It's another thing to do, but it was interesting. The third one actually
ended up being cold fusion, not only explaining what happened, but also where some of the real
science exists in that space, which that was a surprise for me when I found what catalyzed that
was finding the Mitsubishi papers where they showed there is a catalytic reaction with palladium in heavy
water that involves transmutation of elements with, by fusing different protons. And that's,
that's miraculous. It doesn't make electricity, but it is a remarkable thing, right? It's an article
science and it's buried under all of this crazy conspiracy theory around, you know, world government
suppressing energy generation. Like that's a thing.
Yeah, absolutely. That is a little wacky.
Yeah. It's just, you know, I understand conspiracy theories for this, you know, because people want
to believe that someone's actually in charge. That's the great thing about a conspiracy theory.
Even if you're not party to the plan, at least there is a plan because the reality that there
is no plan is terrifying.
Yeah, it absolutely is. And it's probably mostly the case. A lot of bouncing off of walls and
just to write their dude. People are just trying to find their way. I would say, you know, they,
obviously all the aerospace stuff is fun. All the energy stuff is fun in the others category. I would
bring up, I mean, barbecue and whiskey is us just getting drunk and talking, but they're good shows.
I'm very happy. I'm pleased with how they came out. The genetically modified food series is an
interesting series for no other reason. It was hugely demanded and it's extremely controversial.
I got the remarkable amount of nasty email about them and Monsanto called me, which is an interesting
day all by itself. And so, Oh my gosh, really? You've gotten some interesting calls. I have gotten
some interesting calls. And so the third GMO show is actually a radio lab style edit of my multi-hour
interview with a couple of scientists from Monsanto. And it's the only show of the thousands of podcasts
I've made over 15 or so years that my wife routinely refers to. Well, when people want to, you know,
bring up some of the crazy conspiracy around GMO, she says, have you ever listened to this? And
hands that particular show out. And the other one that I mentioned in the other category is the
antibiotic show for no other reason than it was, I would argue it was the hardest work I've done
directly to make a show where I had read a couple of interesting papers, especially in the tech
so back in his area about new generation antibiotics, because this is big concern that antibiotics are
failing and we are finding new ones, but it's hard. But to actually fill out my knowledge enough to be
able to tell you why texobactins was so important, I crammed medical student journey, training
material into my head to be able to speak comprehensively about antibiotics, which was hard work and
disturbingly enjoyable. Right. Like to really, when's the last time you really sat down, like crammed for
an exam? Although in this case, the exam was a one hour conversation about antibiotics.
Yeah. It was like an oral exam and the judge, the graders were your listeners.
And then funny thing, of course, there's a bunch of folks that are actually in biology fields that
were listeners to the show. It's like, finally, you're doing a topic I know something about so I
can figure out if you're just making this stuff up. And I'm like, awesome. How'd I do? It's like,
nailed it. And that really pisses me off. Like, okay. It's like, I try very hard. I'm not saying I get
everything right. I try hard. Well, I think that that's really sums up all these shows. They're not
just interesting diversions from the developer side of things that you work on, but they're,
they're legitimate science. And you've brought up a lot of really interesting things. I feel like
they're, they're massively well-researched. So I, I love them. How many have you done?
There's about 80 of them now.
80. Yeah. So I'll link to them all in the show notes and we'll talk about that.
Yeah. Geekout.show is the shortcut link to the, just those. And right. Geekout.show. Perfect.
Yeah. Cool.
And it's easy way to go for no other reason than there's like 1700 .NET rocks. So trying to skim
the 80 out that are considered Geekouts, like good luck.
Yeah. It's definitely not, not super easy.
Yeah.
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All right. Well, let's take it and focus in on one of these topics that you spent some time working on. And that's around the idea of a moon base. So I don't know about you, but the moon has just fascinated me. I just moon in the stars. And it's, I don't know if it's science fiction, if it's just growing up in a place where you could see the night sky very clearly and shooting stars. And you could just look out there and just go, wow.
But we're also a generation.
Look at what is out at night. You know, it's, I just love.
Although we don't see near as much now with the amount of light pollution up there, but we're also children of Star Trek and heaven help us space 1999, which by the way, don't ever go back and watch that show.
Your childhood memories of those shows are awesome and they're way better than the reality. That show is terrible. I found a torrent of it. Don't do it.
Yeah. I tried to show the old James Bond shows to my daughters when they were like 13, 14. Like, oh, we're going to start at the beginning. It's going to be so amazing. We'll watch all of them. And they're like, these effects are so bad. We can't watch this show. And it's just like, it's just, you know, some of those things have to be experienced in the moment. You shouldn't go back to them.
Well, and here we are in the post me too world. Don't watch Roger Moore. You'll be shocked.
I know.
It's just like, that is not acceptable.
No, no, it is definitely, definitely not. You got to take it in context, I guess.
But again, it's childhood memories are awesome. Don't ruin them. Right.
Perfect.
Yeah. Don't go back.
For sure. So, you know, for me, it's probably a mix of science fiction. And then just, I spent a decent amount of time looking up at the sky at night, warm summer evenings. What got you interested in this, in space? And then in particular, this idea of the moon base.
I mean, again, grew up in the generation where we just missed Apollo. You know, I was, what, five years old when the last moon landing happened. So, you know, we don't know that. We were too little. We saw the space shuttle go up and go around the earth over and over to boldly go where many people have gone before. It was the moon base particularly. I mean, this is just my geek out chain, right? So you're working through subjects.
But it was a European Space Agency paper in like 2016 that I read where they were speaking very coherently about a research base on the South Pole of the moon. So not, you know, pie in the sky. We've got to expand humanity, surprise, and so forth. But the same way, it was very much the same style paper as deciding on putting another base in Antarctica, which they still do.
Right.
It started to make sense. And that was interesting to me, is it no longer was, as Apollo was, is sort of, this is what we do to establish our dominance in society, like the space race was in the 60s.
Right. The whole space race in the 60s was, we're going to spend 20 times what we've been spending on space because it's a technological race, right?
Yeah.
This doesn't make as much sense anymore.
At the height of the Apollo program, 5% of the U.S. budget was being spent on space.
It's a tremendously huge number compared to what's being spent right now, which is slightly less than 0.5%.
Yeah.
So a 5% expenditure is Manhattan Project money. It is literally moonshot money. And so, of course, it's going to end because you're going to achieve the goal. And the goal was to beat the Soviets at something in space because America was coming from behind, right?
Right.
All four failed. And then they stopped.
Right.
And the Americans established it. But, you know, there was a strong case once in Apollo 8 went around the moon. That was a strong case to stop there. At that point, they'd beaten the Soviets. And the risk was so high. There were so many failure modes in landing on the moon that were unrecoverable.
The bottom line was that lunar module had a bunch of failure modes. And it only had life support for two people for three days. And the minimum time to launch a rescue mission was three days.
There was just no way to get those guys. It was impossible. And so, each time they tried it, they were taking huge risks. And, you know, take the hint. Everybody that flew Apollo, with the exception of one, were military test pilots.
Like, if you think it was not a military mission, like, you're fooling yourself. And only on Apollo 17 do you have Harrison Schmidt, who was a geologist, the only scientist to walk on the moon.
Yeah. And there's some funny stories of him getting over-exuberant.
Yes.
And just going after the science, almost to his own risk or detriment.
Well, this is the rewrite of this story. So, I mean, the original moon-based geek out I did back in 2017. And much like every other geek out. It's, you know, they're fun. You get them done. You move on. But in this case, a few months later, I got a phone call from NASA.
Which, I mean, it's not, I would say this. It's not the first time I got a call from NASA, which is a ridiculous thing to say.
That's awesome.
When we did the space telescopes geek out, NASA called and said, hey, would you like to see a space telescope? We got the James Webb over here in Washington. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I would. And we went.
And I also got a chance.
Packing my badge right now.
And we did some other shows around that, too. I actually got to interview an amazing fellow who subsequently passed away about building spacecraft.
But, yeah, this call was from Ames, which is a facility in California. And they did something different. It wasn't just like, hey, do you want to come for a tour? We really like your podcast. It was like, hey, we really like your podcast. Have you ever thought about doing a presentation on it?
I'm like, no, but, and it's like, well, you know, we'd love to see it. And like, you want to see me do a presentation about the moon? I'm like, yeah. It's like, it's your stuff, right? Like, I'm reading your stuff.
Like, yeah, we know. Okay.
But we love the way you tell the story.
It's just a good story, right? And so, yeah, there's a picture. And if you've seen the slide deck or the video, there's a picture of driving into Ames.
And the big board in the entranceway of Ames has my name on it as the, you know, moon gateway to the solar system, which is a good day, right? I took that picture.
You're like a bucket list item check.
Yeah.
I didn't know this was on my bucket list, but it was now.
Actually, I got to stay in the hotel at the Ames facility, which is like basically only for NASA people and managed to, you know, beg a second day just because I couldn't get over that I was there, right? Like that was really a thing.
That's beautiful.
Yeah. And so the fun part, that was enough. At that point, I'm already blown away, totally excited. That was amazing. Let it go. But then I mentioned it on the show that all that craziness had happened. And I think it was a conference in New Zealand, a conference called Co-mania, that reached out to me and said, well, we love that story. Do you think you could do it as a keynote?
For our conference, just sort of an inspiration piece. And I'm like, yeah, okay. But that's different. It was one thing. The presentation to NASA people is one thing. The presentation to tech people is another thing. And so, and then it ballooned. Like I've done a bunch of them and used a few different videos and I've rewritten a couple of times. Like I've now emphasized the latest version of that where I emphasize Harrison Smith is really talking about what we would do on the moon.
Like what's the point? Not just going there to go there, but it's like, right, right. We don't really have anything to prove anymore. And if we could do a 1960s technology, surely you can do it again.
But you can do it with 1960s technology with a constant risk of death where you're literally rolling the dice each time you do it.
I feel like back in that era, people just accepted more risk.
Well, there's more tragedy, you know, but they were also soldiers, right?
Like that was their job and they were on a mission. It may have been wrapped in a banner of science and stuff. It was a military mission.
Yeah. Yeah.
There are American military people at risk at this moment all over the world, right? It's, they are a very unusual group of people.
I think I have tremendous respect for them. They take tremendous chances.
Yeah, it's true.
But if we're really going to get into scientists work on the moon, scientists are good at math.
They're not going to take that kind of risk.
They can calculate the odds and they know what's going on.
Nope, not going.
I would bet though that there are some scientists that are so dedicated to what they could discover.
They would take a lot of risk.
I tend to agree. And certainly, you know, and plus also mitigate some of this risk as well.
We can, it doesn't make sense to do this camping trip approach to the moon.
You can't dash in, you know, try and gather some rocks and dash back out.
Real science takes time.
The challenge here, and I bring this up when we talk about Harrison Schmidt, it doesn't matter how much you train a test pilot to look for rocks.
The rock you're looking for is an exception.
What you actually need to know is what is normal in rocks, and that is a lifetime of training as a geologist.
But when you put a geologist in that place, they make real discoveries.
Because real discoveries are not Eureka, I found it.
It's, what the heck is that?
Right?
It's what is anomalous.
Yeah, one of those discoveries on the moon was made by, what was the guy's name who's a geologist?
Harrison Schmidt.
By Harrison Schmidt.
Yeah.
Was about the volcanic behavior or features of the moon, right?
Yeah, it was an unshocked piece of olivine from the moon, which to a geologist is a huge deal, and everybody else is just a bunch of syllables, right?
But the point was, this rock only forms under high pressures, and there's only two forms of pressure that matter.
Either volcanic activity inside of a body or meteoric impacts, but they look different.
So, it was not only a piece of olivine, but it was not shocked, because meteorotic impacts create shock, which is a particular look to the stone.
This one had been spat onto the surface of the moon in a volcanic eruption.
So, it was clear proof of eruption and clear proof of extensive volcanic activity on the moon.
So, it spoke to a bunch of understanding about the moon's formation, and it was just one rock.
And from a guy who got three days to look for rocks on the moon in an area maybe two kilometers across.
One of the things that you mentioned before was all the times that humans have visited the moon, they've visited something like the equivalent of the Sahara Desert.
Right.
Space, right?
So, how much do you really know?
We don't know very much.
You know, just a few days in six locations in a very narrow band of the moon because of the limitations of the spacecraft and the technology at the time.
And part of what came out of Apollo was this belief that the moon wasn't worth it because of that limited amount of data.
There just wasn't the resources there.
We've learned.
It's like, we went to the Sahara.
Yeah.
There's not really many plants or not much water to work with.
Yeah.
Didn't find a Starbucks.
Don't bother.
But subsequent spacecraft, right?
Lunar Prospector and the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and LADEE and these other spacecraft that have gone to the moon since then and given us much more detail and understanding of it have demonstrated categorically that there is water on the moon.
When it's on the moon, it's on the moon.
It gives us a possibility of decreasing the cost of operating there.
And any technology we develop on the moon to be able to do those things is useful elsewhere in the solar system.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, also, the moon could be a gateway to further exploration, right?
If you could get water, maybe you could somehow manufacture fuel, hydrogen or something.
Yeah.
It's much easier to fly away from the moon than it is from the sun.
I'm sorry, from the Earth.
Yes.
Well, so we talk about the cost of travel in space in a term called delta V or the amount of energy, amount of power you need to change your vector, change your delta.
And so escaping the Earth, getting into low Earth orbit is roughly 12 to 13 kilometers per second of delta V.
And on the moon, it's two.
Wow.
Yeah.
Right.
Once you're in low Earth orbit, the energy to get to the moon again is, I mean, two.
And the energy to get to Mars is three.
You know, this is Robert Heinlein's old line is, once you're in low Earth orbit, you're halfway to everywhere.
Yeah, that's about true.
As long as you got time.
Well, and so the point being that if we can manufacture fuel on the moon and figure out how to refuel spacecraft doing that, we can build bigger ships and go further and do more.
As long as you're pulling things out of this pretty hefty gravity well on Earth, the costs are going to be high.
Right.
And you're burning up the entire delicate space machine every time.
Well, then that's part of the challenge of the rocket equation makes us be that efficient, right?
That intense, that 98% of the vehicle will be consumed in the process of getting the 2% into orbit.
Yeah.
But we've made improvements on that, right?
This is SpaceX's magic is the recovery of the first day.
That to me really signifies a tremendous shift in how space is done.
Because you see the Saturn V go up and it gets destroyed.
The space shuttle, ride that, but it was trying to be too many things, too many people and became...
It's a white elephant.
It can't be used, right?
It was just too complicated.
It was too fragile.
And so the reason it wasn't reusable weekly is the amount of maintenance that it needed, right?
That it was tens of thousands of hours each time you flew a shuttle to get it ready to fly again.
It's all wages.
It's people dismantling the vehicle and inspecting everything and repairing what needed to be repaired and reassembling it.
A jet airliner wouldn't be profitable if you had to dismantle it every time you flew it.
That trip to Europe was super expensive.
We threw away the 747 or the A380.
Well, even if you didn't throw it away, if you just took it apart and put it back together again, A, it takes a month, right?
And B, you've got to pay all the people that do that.
It's expensive, right?
You're not actually fully discarding it.
They were discarding relatively cheap pieces of it.
But the labor of restoring the orbiter to flight status again was just too high.
And it kept getting higher as they learned more failure modes, that they understood the vehicle better.
And as the vehicles aged, it got more expensive.
Absolutely.
So one of the angles that you've been thinking about here is, let me step back and ask a question that we can go down that path.
Sure.
So to me, it seems like, I don't know, it's basically since I've been paying attention that NASA bounces from focus to focus or project to project to project without really getting going, right?
Like, we're going to go set up a base here.
We're going to fly to Mars and spend some time there.
You know, it seems like every time that there's new presidents or new administration or something, there's always like, that was great.
We're not doing that.
Yeah.
What we're going to do is this.
It's not up to NASA, right?
NASA does not set its own agenda.
It has ideas.
It makes proposals.
But you've got two forces acting there.
You have the executive that nominally is deciding on missions and sort of putting emphasis on things.
Right.
They're kind of fickle.
Yeah.
And then you've got the politicians pouring like sand and molasses into it to make sure that their people still get paid.
Well, the Congress ultimately controls the Perth.
And so the budget that goes to NASA is based on congressional needs.
And this, you know, this is where you get space launch system from.
The space launch system.
That's their latest huge rocket.
And it's not that late.
The basic design of the space launch system came in the 90s.
Right.
It was repurposed space shuttle hardware.
Solid rocket boosters extended.
Same basic tank designs.
Literally the same engines as the shuttle.
So it was what if we, you know, the space shuttle itself weighs nearly 100 metric tons and we take it up and over and bring it back.
What if we didn't use a shuttle anymore?
What if we use that 100 metric tons for lift for actual usable payload?
That's the essence of the SLS.
It was called constellation before that.
But the reality was that it didn't have a mission.
Right.
You can't just build a rock because you want to build a rocket.
It needs a mission.
Right.
It needs constraints and a goal that you build around.
Yeah.
And so you keep proposing different missions that repurpose the hardware.
Even NASA, when they didn't have a mission, said, well, we should stop spending money on this new rocket.
But then the Congress would step in and insist on funding it because Congress has Congress members have constituents and those constituents want to stay employed.
And when NASA was set up in the 60s, they did a very good job of making sure that there were offices in lots of different states that all collaborated to build these projects, which meant many congressmen were affected by what happened with NASA.
And so NASA kept getting funding for a rocket they didn't have a mission for, but only enough to keep everybody employed.
So they'd never bent any metal.
They didn't actually make anything.
But a crazy thing happened over the intervening 30 years that kind of finished the plan with minimum funding to the point where it's like, all we've really got left to do now is bend the metal.
We kind of got this figured out.
Right.
So it's a cool rocket.
It's just a cool rocket if it was 1995.
Yeah.
It looks a little obsolete in the face of SpaceX and Blue Origin and even the new Vulcan from ULA.
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Yeah, Blue Origin being the one from Bezos' company.
Yes, and we really, you know, Bezos' new Shepard is not a big deal rocket, right?
It's a toy.
It's a technology demonstrator possibly used for tourism, although I don't think any of these tourism rockets are ever going to go anywhere because we're just so close to economically viable orbital tourism that the suborbital stuff may not amount to anything.
But he's bending metal right now on New Glenn, and New Glenn probably renders SLS obsolete.
It's a seven-meter rocket with modern engines and a modern design, probably a reasonable first stage.
Not that he's done it yet.
We won't know until it works.
But we know it's possible.
Yeah, we've definitely seen first stages land.
The New Glenn first stage will be twice the size of the Falcon 9 first stage.
So it's a beast.
But yeah, once that rocket flies, you're going to look at SLS and go, does this make any sense?
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, so the direction I was going with my question is you've talked about having a moon base would add some political stability for organizations like NASA or other participants, right?
Well, one of the things that NASA has learned to do, and this has really came about with the space station, was if you get international agreements to do something in space, you're creating things that persist from administration to administration and from Congress to Congress.
So one of the reasons the international space station has been successful is that you can't change on a whim.
You have agreements in place.
And that, to me, is what makes the lunar gateway make so much sense.
That they want to build a space station around the moon.
And they want it to be international.
They want it.
A, I think they want a do-over.
There's problems with the space station.
They've learned some things.
They'd like to build a new station with the new things they know.
You know what some of the problems are?
Yeah.
I mean, one of the...
So, A, it's actually too big.
It's so large, there's a non-trivial amount of time spent finding things.
There are so many storage locations, it's easy to lose things.
And so they spend a lot of time looking for stuff.
A new station will have a better storage management solution that is much more carefully organized so that you don't waste so much time looking for stuff.
It can't do its own station keeping.
Even though it's 400 kilometers up, it's low enough, the atmosphere is still dragging on it.
And so it needs constant reboost.
That means every time a Soyuz or a Progress or an H-2, any of these different ships visit, one of the things they do is they give it a little push to get it higher in its orbit, to persist its orbit.
It can't be untended.
You need people in it all the time.
There's enough maintenance and fragility going on inside that vehicle that if it was left untended for just a few months, it's very likely it would break down.
Wow.
Okay.
And to build a new station that is man-tended, that will function well on its own for certain periods of time, maybe six months at a go, can do its own station keeping and is better organized.
And all of those things are checked off in the design for Lunar Gateway.
It's a better design.
Now, that's not a good enough reason to build a space, but there's also particular things it can do.
It is outside of the Van Allen Belt.
It's in orbit around the moon.
So, extended exposure to higher radiation levels.
So, understanding more about that radiation environment, how equipment stands up, and man-rated equipment can survive in those environments.
The particular orbit they pick, which is an unusual orbit, orbits close to the north side of the moon and then distant to the south side.
It's called a near-rectilinear halo orbit.
And it has a bunch of advantages.
One is that it is always in view of the Earth.
It's also always in view of the sun.
So, you don't have the complexities with solar power that you have on the International Space Station, where it spends 45 minutes in light, 45 minutes in dark.
Like, you just think about what that would do to a battery.
That you discharge it for 45 minutes and you charge it again.
Then you discharge it for 45 minutes and you charge it again.
The way they would set up Lunar Gateway, you'd just be in the sun all the time.
And you have this seven-day orbit, this one-week orbit, where six of the days you have a good view of the south pole.
So, there's a lot of science that can be done that way.
It's easier to teleoperate robots from that position.
You're about a second away when you're back on the Earth and you don't have a good view of the south pole anyway.
So, that particular orbit allows them to do work remotely on the south pole pretty efficiently.
Right.
And there's a lot of interesting things about that.
First of all, speaking about the orbit, one of the big challenges is that the moon doesn't have even gravity.
Yes.
Consistent, smooth gravity like the Earth does.
Right.
So, a circular orbit gets wobbly or weird or something like that, right?
Well, there's variations of plus or minus 2% due to these things called mass cons or mass concentrations.
And that's enough to destabilize an orbit that if you don't do station keeping, you eventually will lose control and plow into the moon sooner or later.
It cleans its own self up.
The longest operating vehicle orbiting the moon now is the lunar constant orbiter at 10 years.
But one of the reasons the LRO works so well is it has a particular orbit where most of the time it's not that close to the moon.
It orbits away from the moon, then it comes back in.
But the orbit shifts so that it has these great, all the photographs you've seen of the moon, the pictures of the Apollo landing sites, that all came from LRO.
And it's been carefully nursing its view.
Right.
Like the footprint in the dust type of pictures.
Yes.
Or other crashed orbiters or landers that didn't quite make it.
Yes.
All of those things come from LRO.
And so LRO is mapped something like 98% of the moon, the 2% being the continuously shaded areas that it can't actually see into.
But otherwise, you know, everything else plows into it.
But this near rectilinear halo orbit is same thing.
It needs some station keeping, but very little.
And the station keeping module they want for Lunar Gateway is a Maxar designed ion engine thrust unit, Hall Effect engine, about 10 metric times.
That just seems like science fiction.
Totally is.
And it's the, you know, we've had Hall Effect thrusters for quite a while for smaller satellites.
This by far would be the biggest one.
And it's already been ordered.
Like NASA has ordered two of them.
The design is actually 10 years old.
It was originally developed for the asteroid redirect mission, and now it's been repurposed into the station keeping for the Lunar Gateway.
So they're going to build them.
Now, whether or not they're actually going to build Lunar Gateway is another question entirely.
Right, right.
But they'll have these engines hanging around for something.
Yeah, they could make them into something, right?
But Congress has yet to fund any of this.
What's being asked for is not a huge amount of money in the scheme of things.
It's about $5 billion a year, $30 billion over six years.
That takes NASA's funding from 0.48% to 0.72% of the national budget.
Yeah.
But that would be in their proposal.
That's enough for the four Artemis missions, the SLS missions, to build the Gateway and to land humans back on the moon by 2024.
Well, I think it would be super inspiring to do.
But would it be maybe also practical?
So one thing, you know, just thinking about all this stuff as we're talking and, you know, other times as well, it's just it seems like there's obvious basic infrastructure that could be in place that would make future work, future exploration, future missions much cheaper.
So, for example, if there was some mechanism to shoot stuff up and stage it, almost like a warehouse type of place, like the space station, but maybe not that thing actually.
Put supplies up there, click them together and then shoot them off.
You know, you could do some Falcons fly up there, reuse a lot of pieces and then send more stuff or having, you know, a base on the moon that could refuel things or having, you know, maybe a gravity driven sort of round trip set of like buses almost or trucks just going around and around.
That you can just, hey, we're going to hitch a ride the next one comes in two days type of thing.
Like, could stuff like that come out of this that would then make many things cheaper in the future?
Yeah.
What do you think?
You understand that most of the rockets we have operating today, the most efficient ones we have, only have enough power to put things into low Earth orbit.
We work so hard to get rockets out of the Earth's gravity that we don't have a lot of excess capacity afterwards.
And so it's not simple to make a rocket more powerful than simply fly to the moon.
It's more complicated than that.
But if we're going to stay, if we're going to spend extended periods of time on the moon, rather in orbit in that lunar gateway or on the surface, it makes sense to start building tugs.
Especially cargo tugs.
So that same module I was talking about, the station keep module for the lunar gateway would also serve very well as a tug.
So you use a Falcon 9, which pretty much uses itself up to get 20 metric tons to low Earth orbit or even 10 metric tons to low Earth orbit, where it's met by a tug that then uses its Hall effect thrusters, its ion engines, to fly the payload the rest of the way to the moon.
Now it's not going to fly to the moon the way you think of in science fiction, where it's like point at the moon, press a button, off we go.
It's actually got, the Hall effect thrusters are very low thrust.
Like so low thrust, the amount of thrust is the equivalent of you holding two apples in your hand.
Like the pressure that's on your hand when you're holding two apples.
That's how much thrust we're talking about.
Which doesn't seem like much, but it's super consistent.
But so the way that you actually go to the moon with that kind of thrusters is you use what's called the Oberth effect.
So when you're on the far side of the Earth from the moon, you fire these thrusters for about 15 minutes and it raises your orbit towards the moon a little bit.
Then you go around in orbit and when you get back to that far side again, you fire them again.
So over a period of two weeks, you gradually raise your orbit until you're going to intersect the lunar gravity.
You're going to go into the lunar orbit.
And that point, when you go out there, you're going to get to the moon.
You're going to fly to the far side of the moon.
You're going to fire in the opposite direction and start pulling your orbit in so that you no longer fly behind the Earth anymore.
Until gradually over another week or so, you reduce your orbit into or just around the moon.
Now, so you're talking a month to move a payload to the moon.
What's the upside?
The upside is you can do it over and over and over again.
It's very little fuel.
It's very efficient flying, but it takes a lot of time.
So it's not good for humans because that whole time humans are being exposed to radiation and needing to eat.
But for cargo, it's great.
Yeah, absolutely.
Well, and if you had 30 of them going all offset by a day, you could send stuff up daily.
It just would take a month to show up.
You could actually get there.
Yeah.
And so now you get back to, this is the other advantage of that lunar gateway is once you have the gateway there, which is unique, and a one-off kind of thing you build, now you put on another commercial license, a commercial contract.
The same way you have commercial resupply to the International Space Station, you have commercial resupply to the lunar gateway, which are much less expensive missions.
And they're actually incented to get cheaper.
Now you're paying a flat rate per kilo for supply, and the company's opportunity to make money is to get less expensive over time.
You know, those first few missions that SpaceX flew to the space station didn't make them much money.
But as they got better at it and more efficient at it, they started making more money off that contract.
Well, and there was this piece of news recently about SpaceX and Boeing both sending folks up to the space station.
And the Boeing, folks, the Boeing contract was like 60% more than what SpaceX was getting for the same thing is something like that.
Is that, did I read that right?
Yeah, you're correct.
And again, you know, normally Boeing and United Launch Alliance, which is the conglomerate of Lockheed Martin and Boeing together that used to fly the shuttle and now flies Atlas V and Delta IVs.
All of their contracts are what are called cost plus contracts.
And this is kind of normal in the military, and it's been normal for NASA as well.
But cost plus contract essentially says, here is what we want you to achieve.
And we tolerate no failure.
You're going to make sure it's perfect.
And if you get it done on time, you'll get this additional bonus.
And if you meet these milestones, you'll get this bonus.
The problem with that contract is you're not incented to improve.
You're only incented to make sure it works.
And so, and in fact, if you spend more money making sure it works, you're going to get that money.
Yeah.
So you're actually advantaged to sort of blow budgets to some degree and make to just to be absolutely certain.
And so you tend to build a lot of bureaucracy, a lot of testing and more testing and, you know,
testing that may not actually do much, but increases certainty that the thing's going to fly successfully.
And you can't argue with like the Atlas V's flight success rate.
It's 100%.
But at extreme, at a $25,000 a kilo to low Earth orbit price range, right?
Where SpaceX is literally a tenth of that.
These fixed cost contracts that NASA's had for a few years, the COTS contracts, actually incent companies to get more efficient.
Until SpaceX started working on Crew Dragon, no Falcon 9 flight was the same.
They modified the rocket every time it flew, always making improvements.
This is something that never happened in the Atlas V's.
They don't improve them because that's not how the contract is structured.
Right.
Now, there's no incentive for it, right?
And even Falcon 9 is no longer being modified.
And the reason it's no longer being modified is that part of the crew qualifications is that identical hardware flies multiple times with success.
So in order to qualify to actually lift crews to the space station under those rules, they can't change the rocket anymore.
Yeah.
Now, the good news is they've kind of tweaked out Falcon 9.
Like Falcon 9 full thrust Rev 5 is as much as they're going to get out of that rocket design.
There's not a lot left to do there anymore.
Yeah.
The Falcon 9 is pretty amazing.
The Falcon Heavy really captured my imagination watching that go off.
Yeah.
You're not alone.
Everybody loved the Falcon Heavy.
Oh my goodness.
It doesn't help that he flew a sports car.
I know not everyone out there is listening is like following all the SpaceX rockets.
So maybe like a quick description of this whole, what it is and that whole event for everyone.
Well, Falcon Heavy was a proposal in the early stages of Falcon 9 when Falcon 9 was substantially smaller, right?
They've used the same name over and again, but there's been five versions of the rocket and it's gotten bigger, taller, not wider.
It's always been 3.7 meters across.
Falcon Heavy was saying, hey, let's strap three of them together, right?
That'll work.
That'll be cool.
Which is a much harder problem than you actually think.
But when it wasn't, when Falcon 9 hadn't been tricked out as far as it has, it made more sense.
But as they continued to improve Falcon 9, they got to a point where Falcon Heavy almost didn't make sense.
And Elon actually seriously considered never flying a Falcon Heavy, but he finally got to a point where they were close enough that they wanted to test it.
It has some reusability benefits.
And so the original Falcon 9 flight in February of 2018, they needed a test payload.
Now look, every other space company flies a block of concrete.
And Elon's like, that's so boring.
Fly my sports car.
It's the same weight.
So he literally took one of the original Tesla Roadsters and that was the payload.
Oh, no, that wasn't enough.
They also put an early space suit set up like a mannequin sitting in the seat.
They put Don't Panic on the screen.
They put a Lego car of the Tesla Roadster on the dashboard.
And that was the payload.
And they put the top down and a camera on it.
And many cameras on it.
And they only had power for a couple of hours.
Right.
And what they were really doing is they, you know, they were doing a proper rocket test in the sense of, yeah, they flew it.
And then they burned the second stage as hard as they could just to see how far it would actually fly.
And effectively put it into an orbit that goes beyond the orbit of Mars.
But the footage was astonishing.
The second stage, the outside boosters landed just like the videos, the CGI's they'd made of it.
And it was incredibly inspiring.
It was one of those few times that transcends national boundaries.
It was one of those moments where all of humanity was like, look what we can do.
Admittedly, what we could do was fly a red sports car to an orbit beyond Mars.
But, you know, which is hilarious.
You're a wild billionaire.
That's.
Yeah.
You know.
That's not a bad demonstration.
If you think a couple of hundred years in the future when they're writing the history, they're going to talk about this period of these crazy billionaires.
And the fact that one of them flew a sport, his own sports car into space, ruining it.
You know, it's going to, the paint's going to have peeled off.
The tires are going to be racked.
Like, it's ridiculous.
But for that moment, it's like, things are different.
The Falcon Heavy has got a problem.
The problem is thing called the fineness ratio.
So the rocket's only 3.7 meters wide.
And there's a basic rule of rocketry that says you really shouldn't be more than 15 times taller your width.
And it's not easy to make it wider because it has to drive.
It's a different rocket at that point.
Well, it changes the rocket.
If you're going to make it wider, you're making a different rocket.
You can make a rocket taller, but only up to a certain point.
And the Falcon 9 full thrust, the latest version, is 18 to 1.
It is already past the safe ratio of the fineness ratio.
And the problem now is you get these flexing moments where you're going to bend the rocket and it'll tear itself apart.
And so it's very challenging to do anything with it.
And the issue is this.
The payload fairing on a Falcon Heavy is 5 meters wide.
And it's 13 meters long.
It's actually a relatively small payload fairing.
There's not enough room in it.
It's enough room to put a school bus in, which sounds like a lot of room, but it's not a lot of room in space world.
You've got this rocket with a tremendous amount of power.
It can lift a lot of stuff, but you can't get a big enough fairing on it for the bigger stuff.
You couldn't lift space station components in that fairing.
You need something bigger.
And you can make a fairing larger than the rocket, but not when it's this long.
So they're kind of at the limit of its flexing thing on the front.
It's just not going to make it easier.
No, it's going to likely tear the rocket apart.
And so that's why they've sort of walked, moved away from Falcon Heavy for certain payloads for heavy, dense, smaller payloads that want to go to geostationary orbit.
The fact that it can lift seven metric tons to geostationary orbit, fully reusable, that you get the all three boosters back is astonishing.
That reduces the price to GTO tremendously.
That's more interesting than the fact that it could lift 50 metric tons fully expended.
Because there's no 50 metric ton payload that'll fit in that little space.
Are you shipping pure uranium?
Yeah.
You know, you're on it.
It's like we don't make anything that's that small, that's that heavy.
Right.
Well, the other thing that SpaceX is working on that's farther out there in the science fiction side of things is that silver giant rocket called Starship.
Yes.
Which is meant to be 100% reusable and it's supposed to be the thing that takes people to Mars.
So what Elon's doing is he went from a small airliner to I want to build a 747.
If he pulls it off, it changes everything.
Right.
A DC-3 or DC-9 or whatever.
Yeah.
From a DC-3 to an A380 without intervening.
Like the logical thing for him to do now, now that you know it's the 3.7 meter constraint on the Falcon 9 that's the problem, is he should build a 7 meter rocket.
Something twice the width.
Right.
He's got the Raptor engine, which is his high performance methane engine that seems to be working, knocking out the last of the bugs on that.
A 7 meter rocket or maybe a 10 meter rocket, but basically the same design, bigger payload, bigger fairing, reusable first stage, non-reusable second stage.
Nobody would doubt for a second that Elon could make that rocket.
He's already done it with an orbital class rocket.
It's totally feasible.
And the joke, of course, is that Jeff Bezos is building that rocket.
That's New Glenn.
But Bezos were not as convinced he can build it because he's never built an orbital class rocket before.
But the rocket he's producing in New Glenn is exactly that.
A 7 meter rocket with the first stage being reusable.
Starship is the step beyond.
It's going for 100% reusability.
The booster stage, the first stage.
It's even more reusable than the space shuttle.
Well, absolutely.
Because everything's going to come back.
There's no used up parts.
There's not that giant tank.
What we don't know is how much maintenance it needs.
Because SpaceX is privately held, he's never actually admitted how much work needs to be done to the first stage of a Falcon 9 after it's returned.
We know he's flown at least one of them four times.
Which is impressive.
And if you fly them ten times, that's awesome.
It's got to be less than the space shuttle, though.
Because you're not servicing an entire airplane, effectively.
Yes.
Plus two rockets.
It's just rocket bits.
A pair of tanks and nine engines.
And there is an issue with the engines, which is that the Merlin engines run a Kerilox.
So that's RP1, which is a kind of highly refined kerosene and liquid oxygen.
Great fuel, but it's a hydrocarbon.
And so when it gets up to altitude, those hydrocarbons, they have a lot of soot in them.
And they tend to acid etch the bells of the engines.
So there's a question as to how long those Merlin engines will last.
And this is different from long firings at sea level.
It's specifically at low pressures that you have problems with RP1 etching.
So, and it's again, stuff he's never talked about publicly is how much damage are those
engines actually taking going up to 60 kilometers or so, which is about as high as they get before
they turn around and come back.
Switching over to methane engines, we don't have that problem, right?
So the new engines that are supposed to be part of Starship and that also New Glenn is using
burning methane and liquid oxygen.
So the Methalox design burns a lot cleaner.
It doesn't have the same residues.
It's better for reusable engines.
More efficient.
It's somewhat simpler in the plumbing side and it lends itself to a more expensive engine,
but a more reusable engine.
So we're only just starting to modify the way we make rockets based on the fact that you might
use them multiple times.
You know, an example of this on the Falcon 9 were the grid fins.
Original grid fins were made of aircraft grade aluminum and they burned on re-entry.
They took a lot of damage.
They were good for one flight essentially.
And then they were damaged enough.
You had to replace them.
But once he realized he was going to get multiple flights out of these rockets, he started making
titanium ones.
Titanium ones are dramatically more expensive, much more difficult to make.
But if you're going to get 10 uses out of them, great.
Makes total sense.
They're actually even lighter than the aluminum ones.
But same thing with engine design.
The Merlins were built as the most efficient and they truly are the most efficient Karalox engines
ever made.
But we don't really know how they're going to behave over a dozen launches and all of the
impacts that have.
And so moving over the Raptor engines and the Metalox design lends itself to more reusability
in that area.
But the big dumb booster part of Starship, they know they can build that.
In fact, they're not even trying to build that right now.
They're trying to build Starship because Starship is pushing impossible.
Like this is nuts.
The 100 metric ton payload vehicle that can go up to orbital velocities and come back and
not burn up and not need to be rebuilt.
Yeah.
It's incredible.
The big thing if it works is now you have 100% reusable vehicle and you're starting to
pay for fuel and maintenance instead of new components.
And so where Falcon 9 is coming in at under $2,000 a kilo, now we're talking under $20 a
kilo to orbit.
And that is regular people going to space pricing.
That would dramatically change things, wouldn't it?
It would.
Well, one of the craziest things to think about when you think about Starship, if it works
the way it's supposed to and as reliable as it should be, is that means it's less than
an hour to any point on Earth.
Right.
It becomes like a really fast airplane that just happens to go in space.
Yeah, it just happens.
It takes the shortcut.
It goes up above the atmosphere, moves halfway around the planet and comes back down again.
So, you know, you live in New York and you want to have lunch in Sydney.
No problem.
You'll be back for the afternoon.
And at those pricing.
That's a whole new level of jet lag.
Well, I don't know if you even have time to get jet lag.
You just turn around, fly back.
Right.
Like it's, you know, who's going to adopt?
Why would you stay overnight anywhere?
It would just be a weird time to have dinner.
I had breakfast and I felt like it was dinner, but then I went back and had lunch.
Yeah.
Right.
And in those pricings, you're basically talking, if you can afford a first class ticket,
you can fly an hour anywhere on the planet.
Now, there are some issues.
It's awful noisy.
It's a big machine.
You don't want it anywhere near town.
Like you thought the airport was out of town.
Wait till you see the spaceport.
It's way out of town.
So you might spend longer getting to it than your flight.
And, you know, the maybe can fit a hundred people per flight.
So that's a lot of people to fly, find for a point to point flying.
That's still a pretty expensive notion, but that's the reality of a hundred percent usable
reusable spacecraft is that's how big the change is.
Right.
Or you can bring a bunch of stuff up to those tugs you talked about.
Yeah.
Well, keep it moving.
He's also talking about refueling.
So imagine you fly up into orbit, then a fuel tanker comes and refuels you enough that you
just fly the whole vehicle to the moon, land on the moon on your tail.
Cause that's what you can do.
You know, take your hundred ton payload and distribute it on it.
By the way, you know, that will be more mass than has ever been taken to the moon so far
and then fly it back.
Yeah.
And if you have the water, you can probably pretty easily with solar power generate methane.
Uh, well, methane, we need carbon and the moon is somewhat carbon poor.
So that's the tricky part about the methane.
Like you can do the liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen is easy with water.
The problem is that liquid hydrogen is a terrible fuel.
It's very efficient, but it's incredibly low density and it's intensely hard to store.
Liquid oxygen is only a liquid between six degrees Kelvin and 20 degrees Kelvin.
So it's got a very, you know, like water has a hundred degree temperature range where it's
liquid, liquid hydrogen has a 14 degree range.
And it's a hard degrees to attain that low temperature, right?
It's extremely cold.
And, and, and the substance itself, you know how helium leaks out of your balloon?
Hydrogen is way worse.
It's very, very tough to store.
Yeah.
And there's also effects of hydrogen because it's essentially just a proton.
There's this whole process called hydrogen embrittlement where these hydrogen atoms actually
invade the metal that's in containing them and alter it.
It is a very difficult fuel to store.
You can use it for a brief amount of time and it has some advantages, but we have not come
up with storage solutions that work well.
Methane's interesting in that space because it's roughly, it operates roughly at the same
temperatures as a liquid, as liquid oxygen.
Liquid oxygen is much easier to handle.
It's liquid over a larger range.
It's substantially warmer.
We have doers and cryo regeneration systems that maintain it.
And the same gear works for methane as well with a couple of minor tweaks.
So if we can get the carbon producing methane on the moon, makes a lot of sense.
And we already know, you've read Robert Zubrin's case for Mars, plenty of carbon on, on Mars.
So you want to use methane fuel on Mars as well.
The same technologies would apply.
Just a question of where you get the carbon from on the moon.
I'm presuming that some of the mass concentration, those same things that disrupt the gravity
on the moon actually come from large asteroid collisions and that some of those large asteroid
conditions will be chondrotic asteroids, which are the most common kind, which are made largely
of carbon.
So you can imagine we would.
Right.
So you can go find it.
We'd be mining deposits of carbon, mining deposits of ice and making and storing methane.
Yeah.
Amazing.
So we're getting pretty short on time.
I just do want to ask you one more question or talk about one more thing real quick on
the moon.
You talked about this north-south elliptical orbit.
The halo or...
The other thing that's really...
Yeah.
The thing that's really interesting is that there's this huge city of Sydney size crater
that the rim is always in the sun.
It may have water in it.
And that would be an incredible place to sit down and start working.
You're talking about the Shackleton crater on the south pole.
Yes, exactly.
Yeah.
There are parts of the rim that are lit like 98% of the time.
It's not 100%, but it's close enough that you'd have a lot of solar.
Although you need so many...
To get enough power, you need a lot of solar panels.
Even when you're in vacuum, you're still only talking 1,300 watts per meter per square meter
of electricity coming from the sun at this distance.
And so then you have the conversion ratio of the solar panels itself, which is like 25% to
30%.
All right?
So realistically, you're only getting about 300 to 400 watts per meter of solar panel.
And you need kilowatts.
Like you need huge solar panels.
You have to get them up there.
I mean, we also have the ingredients on the moon to manufacture solar panels.
So at some point we could get to that there.
But I don't think it's feasible for us to really work on the moon without building small nuclear
power plants.
And there are agencies, including the Glenn Agency and NASA, that have developed kilowatt,
compact, sterling engine nuclear power plants that are really safe and stable.
They literally the kind where you would turn this thing on and it would make power for 20
years and not much, you know, almost no moving parts.
Like there's not much to do.
It just operates.
That's amazing.
Well, and the joke about nuclear power is that the Chernobyl's and the three mile islands in
Fukushima is all of the same essential issue, which is that they are old, large designs that
are hard to manage.
You don't think about the 300 to 400 megawatt reactor designs.
You don't think about the hundreds of 60 megawatt reactors that the military have, both American,
Russian, French, British, that you never hear about because they just work.
And because they're small enough that when they have a problem, they can shut them off
and they don't melt.
They just shut off.
And we don't even need that much power.
We're talking about a megawatt.
Compact reactors are very efficient, very safe, very stable, and they will work in the dark.
They will work in the light.
And they, what's interesting about a reactor design like that is they're about 25% efficient
in the sense that the, with a Sterling engine, they would make maybe a hundred kilowatts of
electricity, but also 400 kilowatts of heat, right?
They're always ready.
And it's probably cold.
You probably want a heater up there.
You're right.
And, oh, you wanted to melt some ice too, didn't you?
Right.
Gee.
So here's this device that produces two things you need a lot of and is particularly safe in
a vacuum.
So maturing those technologies, I'm saying maturing because largely they're developed.
You know, they've been proven to work.
They just have to scale them and mature them and then lift them would be the turning point
for really building a long, sustainable base and being able to do that kind of mining and
extraction and learning that would get us to a place where we would have continuous habitation
on the moon.
We've had humans in orbit around the earth, three to six of them now, for more than 20 years.
It's a milestone in civilization.
Yeah.
It absolutely is.
That's incredible.
In our lifetime, we're going to have two to four people continuously inhabiting the moon.
We're going to change them out because they'll go a little crazy.
But, you know, every few months, a different group will go up there and the moon will become
like Antarctica.
It'll be a place mostly for scientists, mostly for science.
Right.
Do a six-month stint on it when you come back.
Yeah.
Maybe shorter, right?
We deal with radiation concerns.
I think they're talking about 45 to 60 days.
And then you'll come back.
So, steady rotation is going on there.
But, you know, there is a little bit of tourism these days to Antarctica.
If you want to spend the money, if you're looking for the adventure of a lifetime, you can go
to Antarctica.
The moon will get there.
You get those first bases up there.
You get some operations in place.
Sooner or later, the tourists will come.
Yeah.
They definitely will.
If they're willing to go pay a ton to just go float around in the space station or go
low Earth orbit.
Yes.
That's a whole other level.
Yeah.
This is just the next step after that.
You know, the Richard Garriots of the world who have that kind of money, of course they want
to go.
Yeah.
Absolutely.
Well, Richard, this is a really interesting view of this whole thing going on with the
moon base.
I really hope it happens.
I think it would be great just for the inspiration that it brings, you know, not even the science
necessarily.
I've left out a part of this conversation that is significant, but I prefer, I hope it's
not true.
I hope that it's that small increase in budget, the 0.48 to 0.72 is enough that Congress sees
their way forward.
But if America doesn't do it, the Chinese will.
Yeah.
You know, the Chinese space program is no fooling.
They're pushing hard.
They currently have a capability that America doesn't have.
They have a satellite sitting in the Lagrange point two on the far side of the moon that allows
them to communicate with their rover on the far side of the moon.
The America can't do that.
They have not put that satellite up.
They could, but they haven't.
And so, you know, China is actually well placed if they want to push to establish a base on the
moon as well.
And I guess it's a question of whether that is an incentive.
I hope it's not the incentive, but it could be the incentive for continuing to drive this
forward.
Yeah.
Well, it's a little bit of a history repeating itself, maybe a little bit.
Well, super interesting.
One thing I do want to just throw out at the end of this conversation is this album by this,
I guess you call them a band.
They definitely make music and it's very good, called Public Service Broadcasting.
Are you familiar with this, Richard?
I am.
Yeah.
So they've created an album called The Race for Space, and it's a musical album.
Like a lot of the undercurrents, what would be kind of almost the baseline is the actual radio
communication from the Apollo Race for Space.
And it's super interesting.
It's really a cool way to have sort of music plus this history plus just this whole space
thing going.
So check that out.
I'll link to it in the show notes.
Love it.
Yeah.
It's cool, right?
Yeah.
Well, and it also reminds us that one of the side effects of NASA and the way they were set
up is that absolutely everything that they make, they make available to the public, to the
world public, not just Americans, right?
Every image that the Lunar Conscious Orbiter takes is published.
In fact, it was an Indian software programmer that found the Vikram Lander remains.
He looked for it through the LRO objects.
He plowed the public publications.
NASA didn't find it.
He found it first.
They agreed that he found it, but he actually was the one who searched their data.
The reason we have all those audio recordings of all the Apollo stuff is that it was published
within 24 hours of it being recorded.
Wow.
That's cool.
It always has been.
And it's public domain.
You can do with it what you will.
They don't protect the logo of NASA or any of those things.
It's part of it being a quote unquote public service.
Same time when the Chinese found something unusual in a crater on the far side of the moon,
they didn't release it.
They just said they found something unusual.
When the Indian, the ISRU, realized their Vikram Lander was lost, they didn't publish the
pictures they found.
NASA did.
I think we take it for granted.
We've forgotten.
NASA publishes absolutely everything.
Every piece of data they've collected from every spacecraft ever is available in public
art.
That's a really great service, actually.
Yeah.
And it's not necessary, but it is.
It is true.
Like, we wonder if we're the good guys sometimes.
You know what I mean?
Like, this is a tough time in society where we're trying to figure out what's important,
what isn't.
We do this thing where we give away some of the most advanced science ever made.
And we always have.
And we just forget how important that actually is.
And now that there's others keeping secrets about that same kind of information, and NASA
continues to share it.
Let's not forget that being honest and being public and being visible to everything you
do is actually part of being in constructive society.
Yeah.
That's a great point.
And it's definitely more obvious in the contrast to the other ones.
Yeah.
It's more visible now than it's ever been.
Yep.
All right.
Well, before we call it a show, I want to just give you a quick chance to just tell the
folks about this book that you're working on.
It's really interesting.
And this is a book around the .NET space.
I would love to see the equivalent book written for the Python space.
And I don't have the time or ability to do it myself.
But tell folks real quick about this project you're working on.
It's almost out, right?
Almost is a great phrase.
It's been almost for five how many years?
Yeah.
It's been a couple of years.
You can drag it on.
It's been a couple of years of doing research on to the origins and sort of the story of .NET.
You know, .NET went through a pretty dark time a few years ago.
And as Microsoft sort of turned the corner and focused on cloud and de-emphasized Windows
and cared more about open source, .NET's kind of hip again, you know, doing well.
Number of users going up and people enjoying C# and using it in different ways is growing.
And so it seemed like a good time to sort of take a look back and see where we came from.
And I've got about 100 hours of interviews done now.
And I'm assembling this narrative of the role that .NET played in changing Microsoft.
You know, it was a tool that was built to facilitate the building of software by enterprise developers
working on Windows.
That's its origin.
And then along the way, you know, Windows had some serious issues.
And .NET was sometimes blamed for that.
And it finally hit a point where there was a realization that Microsoft wasn't about Windows.
That Microsoft was actually about cloud.
And that .NET could help facilitate its move to the cloud.
And this combination of open source and .NET have been one of the leaders of making Microsoft
into a cloud company.
And the story that I'm finding as I study the history of .NET is that it's part of the transformation
of the company.
Folks are asking me, like, why is Microsoft suddenly a hip place again?
They were IBM.
They were the fuddy-duddy technology company.
Now they're kind of cool.
Like, what happened?
And they completely changed.
They transformed themselves.
And .NET was part of that transformation.
Oh, that's cool.
I think the book will tell an interesting slice of the tech history.
And, you know, Python's going through a lot of changes now with retirement, official,
actually, obsolescence of Python.
And it might be time for an interesting look back as well in that space.
I think it would be.
But again, I wish I had time to do it.
All right.
Well, final quick question before you add it.
If you're going to write some code, what editor do you use these days?
VS Code.
If I'm not working strictly in .NET, I mean, Studio is always on my machine.
You know, I dabble in Python every so often.
And writing Python and VS Code is very pleasant.
Yeah.
Does it surprise you that the Python extension for VS Code is, by a factor of at least two,
the most popular extension over C#, over C++, over JavaScript, all the other things?
What that says to me is people are frustrated with other editors working in Python.
You know, that they need a better choice.
But I'm glad that that's true.
These new tools they've been making were not just for the incumbent users of Microsoft technology.
They're for everyone.
And you're seeing a larger group of people starting to embrace them.
Yeah.
Super cool.
It's definitely a good one.
All right.
Final call to action.
People are excited about this episode's topic, the moon base, or probably more generally,
I think they should check out the Geek Out shows.
What do they do?
Geek Out.show is the shortcut URL that'll take you to a filtered list of the 80 or so Geek
Outs that exist.
While I'm head down on the book, I have not been making as many Geek Outs.
I put them out once in a while.
They are a lot of work.
But we've also covered some fairly big chunks of data now.
So I'm wondering if some of those subjects need to be revisited, like a lot of the alternative
energy things.
You know, solar's evolved.
Wind's evolved.
So I'd love folks to go and poke on those shows that are a few years old now and tell
me, hey, you know, you've missed out on X or these things have changed and maybe get
me jazzed to do an update.
There's so much exciting news about those.
And I really enjoyed listening to these.
They're very similar to what we talked about on this show, right?
The core part of it in the middle, at least.
So if that was interesting to you, check out these shows because I think you've done a
lot of great work and I'm happy to share them with everyone.
I'm sure people will enjoy it.
Thank you, Michael.
You're welcome.
And thanks for being on the show.
My pleasure.
Bye.
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