Ramses and rockets: Commercial space adventures and the race to Apophis

Sarah Al-Ahmed: The European Space Agency enters the race to Apophis, this week on Planetary Radio. I'm Sarah Al-Ahmed of The Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. If you've been paying attention to commercial space these days, it's been eventful to say the least. Matt Kaplan, our senior communications advisor, returns with an update on the fate of the Boeing Starliner astronauts, the imploding and exploding adventures of Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket, and a brief look forward to SpaceX's Polaris Dawn mission. Then Asa Stahl, our science editor, shares the good news about the European Space Agency's Ramses mission, which hopes to rendezvous with asteroid Apophis before it's closed pass by Earth in 2029. And since we're talking about asteroids coming closer to Earth than our geostationary satellites, it's a perfect moment for Kate Howells, our public education specialist, to talk about her new article, What would happen if we Nuked an Asteroid? I'm looking at you, Bruce Willis. We'll end our show with Bruce Betts, our chief scientist, and a new random space fact. If you love Planetary Radio and want to stay informed about the latest space discoveries, make sure you hit that subscribe button on your favorite podcasting platform. By subscribing, you'll never miss an episode filled with new and awe-inspiring ways to know the and our place within it. Those who are chronically online like me have probably noticed an increase in interest in the story of Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore, two astronauts that launched to the International Space Station in June on the first crude test of Boeing's Starliner. I've seen everything from cat videos to conspiracy theories about whether or not we're going to be able to bring these astronauts home. Rest assured, it's all going to be okay. Issues with their launch vehicle have left them on an extended stay aboard the International Space Station. We've got an update on how NASA plans to get them home safely. But that's just one of the many interesting things going on in commercial space right now. Collaborations between companies and space agencies have long been a part of humanity's journey to space. But with more companies than ever working on their own launch vehicles and private space missions, there's a lot to consider. Matt Kaplan, the creator of Planetary Radio and our senior communications advisor, is here with an update. Hey Matt, welcome back.

Mat Kaplan: It is always a pleasure as I hope you know, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, every time I have you back on, there's something really interesting going on in commercial space, but this week feels unique in that we've gotten just a whole info dump of stuff going on. So let's start with Blue Origin, because I've been trying to follow this story of the New Glenn rocket ever since I got really lucky. Bruce Betts and I, during the Artemis I launch, got to take some time and go to that Blue Origin factory and see the New Glenn rocket in production. And I was really hoping this whole thing come together, but it sounds like they've been having some recent issues as they approach this October 1st launch date.

Mat Kaplan: Let me tell you a story, Sarah. Years ago, I got to be a lab assistant to the boss, the science guy, on stage at this giant science fair in Washington, DC. And we had pulled together, I had kind of produced it for Bill, and we had to find a beer keg, liquid nitrogen, a big burner. And the idea was Bill wanted to do his famous imploding beer keg demonstration. So we put this open beer keg over this big flame and got it just super hot and then pounded in the little bung that goes in the bung hole. And so it was sealed off from the outside. And then we took it off the fire very carefully and then you wait, because as it cools, you expect the beer keg to not just sit there, but to eventually implode. This thing just sat and sat and sat. And finally we poured some of the liquid nitrogen on it, which was not why we had it on the stage, and sure enough, wolf the thing imploded. Blue Origin didn't need the liquid nitrogen. Let's just say that. This is just tragically, dare I say it, dumb. They had the body of one of these Blue Origin New Glenn rockets, a rocket that is now four years behind schedule that was supposed to be there to compete with the Falcon 9, and they had it outside in the heat. They brought it inside. Somebody forgot apparently to open some valves or to open them in the right order. It was a lot cooler in the air-conditioned warehouse. Rockets are made of stuff that looks like a beer can. And sure enough, the thing imploded. This was not just a test article. This was a rocket that was intended for a future flight that New Glenn had already been contracted to run. Now the other New Glenn rocket, it's a little more understandable because it exploded, not imploded, during a test. And that's why you test of course. But somebody's computer model, I'm guessing, had a zero where 1 should have been, or maybe they went a little bit too far with the test because this thing blew out. They called in an explosion. It may have been more of a rupture, I'm not sure. But regardless, quite an embarrassment for Blue Origin. I think, as you probably know, they are still supposed to launch that dual orbiter mission escapade to Mars, and it's supposedly still on track for the end of this year because you got to hit that two-year window. And let's hope it happens. Blue Origin says it will. I'm not sure if NASA is quite as confident. But I'm telling you, it must just have Jeff Bezos who's putting $2 billion a year of his own money into Blue Origin now. It's got to have, well, if he had hair, I share this problem with him, he'd be pulling it out.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, I'm really rooting for this because I want ESCAPADE to go up. It's a collaboration between Rocket Lab and UC Berkeley, my alma mater. They named these twin probes Blue and Gold after the school colors, and I would be just so sad if they exploded or imploded, depending. But yeah, there's kind of a limited launch window there and we want to get them to Mars in order to do the science. We've seen other missions in these situations where the rocket gets delayed and then they launch and they don't have proper battery or something goes wrong and the missions go sideways.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Do we know what's going to happen with these ones? Are we going to just kind of keep them in storage or do we have any idea about what's going to happen with those?

Mat Kaplan: I don't know that that's been announced. It's possible that I missed it because of course everybody's still hoping, hoping upon hope, that they're going to go in that window this fall, that limited window. My guess is that they'll put them in storage. I mean, I don't think there's a Falcon 9 hanging out that could boost them to Mars during that window on short notice, or any other rocket for that matter. The Vulcan rocket from United Launch Alliance, ULA, is still waiting for more of those Vulcan engines, the BE-4s being built by, oh yeah, Blue Origin, the engines that have also been badly delayed, though ULA now says they're on track. My guess is they'll put them in storage, but you are absolutely right. Sometimes bad things happen when spacecraft are unexpectedly put in storage. Best example to my thinking, the Galileo probe that went to Jupiter, which was left in storage because originally was going to go on the space shuttle, then the Challenger disaster happened, and when it came time to launch, they couldn't open the antenna because the thing had just become stuck over the time that it had been in storage. So yeah, let's hope that ESCAPADE doesn't have to wait two years, but that if it does, that they take really good care of those spacecraft.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It is a little disappointing that New Glenn is kind of four years behind its target for when it was going to be able to launch. But after seeing it in person, I'm going to put an image that shows the size comparison of all these rockets on this page for Planetary Radio because just to give you an idea of this, the original Blue Origin rocket is so small compared to New Glenn. This thing is ginormous, so I'm not surprised that they're having issues in these first tests. I want to give them a little grace on this, because honestly, going to space is really complicated. And as with a lot of these stories these days, it seems like SpaceX is kind of becoming the hero in this story of commercial space. We've been covering this story of the two astronauts that went up on the Boeing Starliner to go to the ISS back in June, Sunita Williams and Butch Wilmore. They were only supposed to be up there about 10 days, and they've been stuck up there for a while as we've been waiting to hear from NASA and Boeing about whether or not they could come down in this capsule, and it sounds like we've finally made a decision on how we're going to get them home.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, this has not been without controversy, of course. There was a press conference, a meeting, a discussion, including the NASA administrator, Bill Nelson, and then a press conference on Saturday. Apparently, all the NASA folks, because NASA's going to be NASA, and if there are humans involved, they're going to be ultra careful because you don't want to have a problem with a human crude flight because when that happens, everything comes to a screeching halt. We've seen it happen several times. All the NASA people apparently said, "Yeah, we really got to hold off. Let's bring this thing home with nobody in it and just see if it works as well as Boeing says it will." The Boeing engineers apparently feel that there's no reason to not let Suni and Butch make the trip home. They have complete confidence in their spacecraft, and there was a quote from Ken Bowersox at this press conference. Basically he underplayed it, but he said something like, "Yeah, there was a little bit of a heat between the NASA folks and the Boeing folks," which means that, I'm guessing there was quite a yelling match. But it's NASA's mission and NASA's astronauts. So Suni and Butch, now, astronauts, they take what's handed to them. And I know they like it up there. They have lived up there of course. But I have to think that even the most dedicated astronauts, knowing now that their three-hour tour, if you will, their 10 days in space, is going to take them well into 2025 when there will be a Dragon Capsule from SpaceX available to bring them home. I mean, this has changed a lot of plans. They're now figuring out which two astronauts that are supposed to go up on the Falcon 9 soon are not going to go because there were going to be four going up. And now they're going to eliminate two of them because that will make room for Butch and Suni to come home with two other astronauts early next year, I believe in February. And so these things ripple out. And of course, we were all thinking that this capsule, the CST-100, its official name, was going to be the competition for the SpaceX Dragon because we wanted to have two systems to get humans up there and back just like we wanted to have multiple rockets to put those capsules on top of to compliment the Falcon 9 from SpaceX. And so there's Blue Origin, there's ULA with its Vulcan, delayed partly because of those Blue Origin engines. SpaceX just comes out smelling like a rose in all of this, and I got to mention at least one more thing that ripples out from this, and it goes back to Blue Origin. Blue Origin of course has now gotten a second contract to build a lander for the moon, and this can't be helping those plans if they're putting more resources into getting the New Glenn up into space. That makes me worry even more about whether we're going to see humans on the surface of the moon with Artemis III. Can I also add, Sarah? NASA's still trying to figure out what's going on with the Orion heat shield, which is supposed to get those Artemis astronauts back even on Artemis II, which is not far off that trip by humans around the moon. And boy, there's just a lot to talk about in human spaceflight.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Space is hard. I know we keep saying it, but we did see that incident also with Astrobotic's lander on the moon and that whole situation now leading to the cancellation of the VIPER rover going to the moon as well. This Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, the CLPS program that allows NASA to partner with these commercial entities, seems like it's slowing down the process in a lot of ways, but because we're trying to bring so many new companies into this fold, for so long, this has been a NASA centric kind of thing. Going to space is really difficult and trying to get all of these new companies acclimated to this is going to take a little while. So I guess we're going to have to be patient, but it still doesn't bode well in a lot of these instances.

Mat Kaplan: Talking to our colleague Casey Dreier about this kind of stuff, commercial space development, it is a huge experiment exactly as you've described. And in a way, thanks for SpaceX, because if SpaceX had not been the shining example of the success of this kind of commercial development, who knows if Congress and NASA would've allowed it to continue as it has? So I hope it continues. And you mentioned VIPER. I guess we should add that The Planetary Society with Casey involved and some of our other colleagues like Jack Curley, we've just issued our position on the VIPER rover and the belief that it really deserves to be up there near the South Pole, so let's figure out how to get it there.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, the United States taxpayers have paid in over half a billion dollars on this rover at this point. If we can find some way to save that, I think that's a really good idea. We can't bank on all of these commercial entities being able to hit all of their deadlines clearly because it's more complicated than we expected. Sometimes things implode or land sideways, but I really don't want that to be the end of these wonderful missions that have been built and are ready to launch. In the case of both VIPER and now ESCAPADE, it sounds like

Mat Kaplan: Hear, hear. And you said it, space is hard. People get tired of hearing us say that, but we get proof of it almost every day, maybe every week at least, but almost every day.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I was just pleased that the two astronauts made it to the ISS on the Boeing Starliner considering it was their first crewed flight test. Given the situation with it, I might've waited for one more launch before they put humans on it. But they still made it up there safely, right? So this is actually a pretty triumphant story, even if it's getting a little hairy.

Mat Kaplan: I felt the same way. I was a little worried. I thought, "Gee," with the troubles, because even the second uncrewed test wasn't perfect. They called it a complete success. Nah, that's stretching it a bit. I was kind of worried, but it was such a relief when they made it up there and they came in with those big smiles into the ISS. I hope they're still smiling as they consider their long stay. I would just say Suni and Butch spent a lot of time in the Cupola. My grandson, my eight-year-old grandson when he heard about this, he said, "Do they have enough supplies?" And I said, "Don't worry, Ron. They had seven people. Now they have nine. They have plenty of air and they're going to send up more stuff and hopefully they're going to send up some of their personal belongings so they can feel a little bit more at home while they're circling over our heads."

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, this is part of why I want to keep bringing this story up in the show because I think the public perception on the internet is that these two poor people are stuck in a capsule up there running out of food and water and air, and everyone's panicked about how to get them back down. But we want to double down and reassure everyone they're totally safe. They're just spending a little extra time and space, which were I an astronaut, I would actually be a little excited about this, getting to spend that extra time up there.

Mat Kaplan: Would I take it? Yes, absolutely. I mean, they've been there before. I should be the one who's stuck up there. Wouldn't that be great? I mean, you're there with people you love, people that you want to work with. They're going to put them to work, they're going to be doing science, they're going to be doing maintenance. I mean, these people are too experienced just to let them sit around. And what NASA has done is prudent. Is it over prudent, overly prudent? I don't know. We want to make sure that they're going to be absolutely safe not just to protect future missions, but because we have two heroic astronauts who have proven their value and we want to make sure that they get home to their families safely.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Just imagine how much they're going to laugh when that Boeing Starliner capsule comes down totally safely and they're still up there watching.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah, it's going to hurt a little bit, but what good news for Boeing. And man, could Boeing use some good news.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh, definitely. And the more of these companies that succeed, the better for all of us. It's beginning to seem like there's this kind of rivalry and SpaceX is winning out. But honestly, we all win when they all succeed. We need more of these vehicles to be able to transport us to and from space so that we can create a more robust system with redundancies so that if there's a situation where two people get stuck on the ISS, we can save them.

Mat Kaplan: Even Elon Musk, you may have heard of him, he's the head of a SpaceX and the majority stockholder, he even said that... Now, I don't know what he says in private, but publicly he says he wishes Blue Origin all luck in the world because competition is a good thing. There's some proof in his actions that he actually believes that. And he wants them to be successful. I guess he feels there's enough work to go around.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, before I let you go, there is one more commercial space story that I did want to bring up. We're recording this on Monday, August 26th, but coming up tomorrow is the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission, which is another SpaceX mission. Very similar to the Inspiration4 mission if anybody remembers that from a few years back. This is one of those cases where it's a fully civilian crew. No one aboard who is going to be a previous astronaut. But one of them on board, Jared Isaacman, does have experience with this and that he was on the original Inspiration4 flight.

Mat Kaplan: I am looking right now at a artist conception of Polaris Dawn. What really makes this unique is that I'm looking at a space walker, a person doing extravehicular activity just emerging from this gigantic hatch in the nose of the Dragon spacecraft. Emerging into space in, I have to say it, I said it the first time I saw it, the SpaceX space suits look like they are straight out of sci-fi, a good sci-fi film.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: They look so cool.

Mat Kaplan: They designed these with design in mind, they wanted them to look cool. I had a designer on the show who talked about that. And this will be the first commercial EVA, the first commercial space walk in history. And so I know you joined everybody else in wishing them all the luck in the world. I sure hope that as people hear this show, they're hearing about this great new success by people who are a little bit closer to being like you and me, Sarah, than NASA astronauts or cosmonauts or astronauts from anywhere else.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: It seems super ambitious though. They're not just doing an EVA, but they are going further away from the Earth than anyone has been since the Apollo era and out into what could be some intense radiation belts. So this is some really important science to do, but wow, those people are brave. I mean, probably worth it just to float up above the Earth, but wow.

Mat Kaplan: Yeah. And doing it near solar maximum, so let's just... Everybody, don't make too much noise. You don't want to wake up the sun while these folks are up there because yeah, they're going to be out there a little beyond where they get all the maximum protection from the magnetic field of our lovely home, the Earth.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, wishing them and Suni and Butch and everyone on all these missions some good luck and some happy times in space. And hopefully by the time the show comes out, we'll still have good news about the Polaris Dawn mission.

Mat Kaplan: You bet, Sarah. And best of luck to everybody involved, Boeing, Blue Origin, and everybody else who's leading us up there on the final frontier.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thanks for joining us again, Matt.

Mat Kaplan: My pleasure.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: One small note, since Matt and I had that conversation, the Polaris Dawn launch has been postponed by at least a day due to helium leak. Good luck, space travelers. We'll keep you in our thoughts. If you are hearing this in time and you're a Planetary Society member, you can join us in our member community for the watch party for the Polaris Dawn mission. We always like to hang out and chat during launches. It makes those tensed moments a little more palatable when you know you've got a lot of other space fans with you. Now we turn to the flyby of asteroid Apophis, which is going to happen on April 13th, 2029. And yes, that is a Friday the 13th, but don't panic, Apophis is not going to hit the Earth, but it will fly closer to our planet than our geostationary satellites, which is a little nail-biting. It does present an excellent opportunity for observing how a close pass by our planet can affect Asteroids. A new mission from the European Space Agency called the Rapid Apophis Mission for Space Safety or Ramses mission hopes to beat the clock and meet up with Apophis before its closest point to our planet. Here's Doctor Asa Stahl, our science editor, with more information on the mission. Hey, Asa.

Asa Stahl: Hey, how's it going?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Pretty good, and extra happy because now we've got another Apophis mission that we can look forward to.

Asa Stahl: Hopefully.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Hopefully. Fingers crossed. Asteroid Apophis close approach by Earth is a little less than five years away, which feels like not very long. And the race to learn as much about this asteroid as possible is definitely heating up. In the past, we've spoken on the show about the OSIRIS-REx mission, which is now the OSIRIS-APEX mission, which is going to be rendezvousing with Apophis, but now the European Space Agency has announced that they're going to be moving forward with the Ramses mission, although it's not fully approved yet. But can you tell us a little bit about that?

Asa Stahl: Yeah, so the idea is that OSIRIS-APEX is going to get to Apophis after it's already passed by Earth, after the asteroid has already passed by Earth, and it's going to be so close too. It's almost comical. After asteroid Apophis flies by, OSIRIS-APEX will be one hour later whizzing by Earth on its way to catch up to the asteroid. But it won't actually catch up to Apophis until about a week later or so, and by then it'll have missed a lot of really cool stuff, a lot of really important science potentially. So the whole idea with the Ramses is that you get the before, during, and after that encounter with Earth when Apophis will be passing so close to Earth. There'll be closer than the orbits of certain satellites, and that means it'll be really under the influence of Earth's gravitational field and Earth's magnetic field, and it'll change as a result. And we're not sure how. Quite scientists have different expectations and we'll see, and that's going to be some of the fun hopefully. But the idea is that just as when OSIRIS-REx went to Bennu and then it poked it with TAGSAM, not to collect samples, but also to watch and see what happens, you have a test tube and you want to flick it and stir it around, you want to see what happens when you disturb things, and with something like an asteroid, that's so ideal, so having this show put on by Apophis in this dance with Earth will be this incredible opportunity if we can get a mission there before the actual encounter with Earth. And so that's the whole idea with Ramses. It's an idea that's been going around for years, is to have a mission like this, and only recently has it really caught on that it would not only be possible to do this, but possible to do it quickly enough that we can get it there in time, but it's going to be tight. Yeah, like you said, less than five years. So ESA has already given the Ramses team approval to begin work on spacecraft and essentially the mission, and has given them some money, but it can't be officially confirmed until ESA has a council meeting next fall in November. So it's not officially approved, but having recently spoken with a member of the team or someone who's currently involved, he doesn't have an official position because there is no official anything, that they would be quite surprised if it didn't go through when you already have these resources dedicated and it seems like it's pretty doable to make it in time. Not guaranteed, still risky, but doable.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'm really glad they're moving forward with this even though they haven't officially approved the mission yet, because this is such a tight timeline for trying to turn around a mission like this. But we've seen in the past that ESA has a record of being able to actually do this. The Hera mission is a really good example.

Asa Stahl: Yes, exactly. And so almost everyone on Hera will essentially be moving on to Ramses, or doing both at the same time. So speaking with these people, this was a huge part of what gave them confidence, that at the beginning when developing Hera, there was a lot of doubt apparently, that they would be able to get Hera off the ground as fast as they did, which was essentially five years after approval is when it's going to be launching, I believe. So quite quickly and essentially almost on the same timescale as Ramses. And sure, there's a bit more sort of design lead up to that, but still a really tight turnaround. And especially for a deep space mission, it's so impressive that they could turn around that fast. But now that Hera is launching in just a couple months in October, it, I think, has really given them the confidence and proven to, I guess, the ESA brass that they can do something like this with Ramses. But that's the secret. That's the key to being able to turn around Ramses so fast without anything really in place until just a few months ago, is that they're essentially just going to copy Hera as much as they can. And obviously, it won't be totally the same because they're different missions with different needs, different sides that they're going to accomplish, but the spacecraft bus is going to be the same. They're going to have a Milani like CubeSat. So there's a CubeSat called Milani that's going with Hera to bad asteroid. So there's going to a lot of things that are very similar, and then also obviously the expertise will be the same. And if they can find that perfect balance of copy pasting the stuff that is useful to copy paste, but then innovating where they need to innovate.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Total sidebar, but with Hera launching in October, Europa Clipper launching in October, we've got the ESCAPADE mission, which is going to be the first launch of the New Glenn rocket, hypothetically if it takes off, October is going to be a big month in space exploration.

Asa Stahl: I was just thinking about that earlier today when I saw the news about ESCAPADE, like, "Should I just go down to Florida and pitch a tent and hang out for three weeks and see three rocket launches in a row?" Because what are the chances all three of these things converge at the same time?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really though, we should just take a road trip across the country. Just go camp out on the beach for a month. It would be great.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, be Space Beach bums.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: But you did mention the Hera mission is taking one CubeSat up with it. Ramses is taking two, is that correct?

Asa Stahl: Yes, that's right.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: How are these three going to work together in order to give us a better understanding of Apophis? Why are these two CubeSats necessary when you're going to get a main spacecraft so close,

Asa Stahl: One of the CubeSats is going to be in orbit around the asteroid, like the main Ramses spacecraft. And then the other one is going to physically land on Apophis, and that's going to be super cool because there's nothing on OSIRIS-APEX that is meant to do that. They have TAGSAM still. So if OSIRIS-APEX really wants to, maybe at the end of its mission when it's done all the science it wants to do, maybe OSIRIS-APEX can tap Apophis and Ramses could watch or something. That could be fun. I would love to get some footage from Ramses and OSIRIS-APEX doing some crazy stuff. But that's still just tapping, right? That's actually landing on it. And what landing on it does is it allows you to deploy a seismometer. So that's one of the instruments that they're pretty confident is going to be on the lander and the people designing the instrument will essentially be another version of SEIS, I'm guessing, is how it's pronounced, S-E-I-S, the instrument that was on Mars InSight Lander. So that same team essentially doing that again, but for this asteroid. That way, when Apophis is getting these tidal forces, the gravitational forces of passing near Earth and sort of creaking and cracking and stretching and compressing, they'll ideally look beforehand using these two orbiting spacecraft that keeps that in the main spacecraft and try and figure out exactly, as best they can, the internal structure of the asteroid from afar and predict where the tidal forces is going to be strongest. And then that's where they'll actually land the lander, and just kind of put an ear to the ground and listen and then get this kind of sound-based mapping of what it's like deep inside. And that will be super useful for future planetary defense type models.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've seen how useful that InSight seismometer has been for our understanding of the internal workings of Mars. I mean, even recently that big headline about the potential amount of water underneath the surface out of that was just mind-blowing, and thinking that we could get a better read on the internal structure of this kind of object, especially given the unpredictable nature of some of these asteroids we've been dealing with. When TAGSAM tried to touch asteroid Bennu, it basically went right into it like it was a ball pit. We did not see that coming.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, totally. I feel like we're going to be able to expect some unexpected stuff if both these spacecraft go up there. I mean, I'm racking my mind trying to think of some parallel to this. I mean, it's obviously a historic first in many ways because you're having this crazy, potentially dangerous asteroid swing right by us, and we're taking advantage of that historic moment. But then also, two separate spacecraft arriving, being around the same place at the same time, it's not like two spacecraft orbiting Mars at the same time. That's a whole planet. They'd be able to wave to each other, they'll see each other. The whole asteroid is as big as a building, right? It's so cool. It would be a meeting of essentially all the major spacefaring nations in space because I know that Ramses mission team is in talks with the Korean Space Agency, with the Indian Space Research Organization, with JAXA, with NASA, to have other instruments aboard and make it this sort of fast international response to a major historical event. And if that were the case, and it's also meeting up with OSIRIS-APEX, I mean, you have a little UN around an asteroid.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We'll be right back after the short break.

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Sarah Al-Ahmed: But I mean of all the things that you could get everyone in on internationally, an asteroid coming this close to Earth, that's the thing to do it around. That is something that is important to all the people on this planet. Because let's be real, if we're not serious about this, at some point we're going to get beamed right in the face with an asteroid because we just didn't prepare well enough.

Asa Stahl: Yes, I think beamed in the face is the technical term, regardless of the scientific importance of whatever is discovered by Ramses. If it just happens, if they are fully confirming it and they're able to whip it together so fast and NASA is able to throw them a spare camera and the Korean Space Agency gives them a spare polarimeter or whatever, and then they launch that on a short timeline and it makes it, then we just accomplish a fast international response to an incoming asteroid, and that would be a huge turning point in planetary defense history, right?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: There is something that I've seen cropping up online and discussions about this spacecraft, which I want to put to rest right now, which is that people are concerned that one or two getting this close to the asteroid could accidentally pull it off course and potentially perturb it into a place where it could hit the Earth. That is not the case. Can we put that to bed right now?

Asa Stahl: Yes, absolutely. I mean, it would be very dramatic and cool. No, not really. It would be terrible. If Apophis hit there, it would be the biggest explosion in recorded history. But no, it's not going to happen. The spacecraft are tiny compared to Apophis, which like I said before, is the size of a building. It's the size about as tall as the Empire State Building and three times as wide around. So it's gigantic. It's massive. And these spacecrafts, yeah, they're like flies by comparison buzzing around an elephant. It's not going to do anything. And even in the future, we talk about sometimes this notion of a gravitational keyhole that even like this spacecraft, there's no chance they're going to actually shove Apophis directly into Earth like a cue ball hitting a billiard ball. But the more nuanced worry would be that, there's some point in space near where the asteroid is going, where if you push it there, then a thousand years from now it circles back and hits Earth. You just tweak the trajectory just right. Even that is essentially impossible. The nearest keyhole is thousands of kilometers away. There's no way that the spacecraft can push it in that direction to that extent. There's just no chance.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That's good to hear. And we know in the least this thing isn't going to hit Earth for at least a hundred years at least. That's still not super comforting in the long term given how close this thing is coming to us. But that's part of why these missions are so important. The more we can understand where this thing is going and how this close brush past Earth affects it, that'll give us so much more understanding of how these things change over time when they do these close passes by Earth and will teach us more about where it's going to be going in the future.

Asa Stahl: Right. Exactly. It really nicely covers two major sides of planetary defense technology and places we need to improve upon if we want to be able to defend Earth. And one is being able to understand what these asteroids are on the inside and being able to figure that out from without having to send maybe a spacecraft like this in the future or not like this exactly. So that if we smash an impactor into it, like DART, we know what we're doing, or if we blow it up with a nuke, we know what we're doing. And then also being able to study its thermal properties on its surface to understand nuanced physical effects that then tweak these asteroids orbits very small amounts over time, but that add up. And that are currently preventing us from doing things like predicting the orbit of an asteroid, like Apophis, more than a hundred years into the future, at least easily. And so yeah, there's some poetic justice to it, to have a mission to an asteroid that is almost hitting Earth actually help us prevent such things happening in the future. Only science gives you a story like that, right?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So what happens if they don't manage to make their launch window with this thing, if they actually move forward with it, they build the whole thing and then they just don't have enough time to launch it?

Asa Stahl: Well, they launch it with an inert mass instead. No, that's the VIPER mission. So they would still launch, but they would not launch to Apophis. They have a couple of backup asteroids in mind, which are still potentially dangerous near Earth asteroids that could hit us in the future maybe, not anytime soon as far as we know. But we could go to them and we wouldn't get the benefit of the interaction with Earth's gravitational magnetic fields. We wouldn't get that same poke, but we would still be going to a new asteroid and learning something new and being able to improve our planetary defense efforts as a result. But yeah, the grand prize, definitely Apophis.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, when we're done with our ridiculous camping on the beach in October, then we can just prepare for our time camping out for Apophis in maybe in Northern Africa or somewhere in Europe in 2029, because I mean, come on, being able to look up in the sky and see that, if you're in the right place at the right time with the right equipment, beautiful things to look forward to in the future. And I'm hoping that we can have someone from the Ramses team come on in the future weeks and tell us more about this because there is so much nuance. I want to know what this CubeSat's going to do when it touches down on the surface. There's so much there. And I want to know what they think is going to happen to this thing when it flies by Earth. How do they think it's going to affect it?

Asa Stahl: I tried to ask this. And yeah, I mean, they don't know. No one is going to give a confident estimate because we don't know, right? Papers have been published where they say maybe we anticipate a movement of about 1% of the surface, some short distance, like less than a meter. But then other people say, "Well, maybe you get some boulders that roll. Or maybe you completely reshape the surface of the asteroid on one extreme." That's probably not going to happen, but we don't know. What is crazy to me to picture is that because of the interaction with Earth's magnetic field, we'll have some small dust that just rises off the surface of the asteroid, and that's some sci-fi stuff right there. That's so cool to picture. I want that in IMAX.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh, I do. I mean just the images from comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko when Rosetta was there, of just the snow coming off of the comet, is some of the most beautiful imagery I've ever seen. I want to see images of this asteroid with Earth in the background. I asked the OSIRIS-APEX team if that was going to be possible. They said it wouldn't be possible because it was getting there too late. But maybe with a good camera on Ramses, we can get the coolest image in the history of planetary defense.

Asa Stahl: I mean, honestly, they better. That's what I'm hoping. I mean, I'm hoping for it. I'm honestly kind of expecting. How do you miss that photo op, right? It's going to be so cool. Something that I've been keeping in the back of my mind, I mentioned this earlier that maybe OSIRIS-APEX can tag Apophis and Ramses could watch. Well, there's going to come a time where both these spacecraft have basically thoroughly done all the science that they're going to be able to do, and they both have fuel left. And if there were no Ramses in the equation, then I know the OSIRIS-APEX team was considering, "Okay, maybe we can tag it again. Maybe we land on it and just keep OSIRIS-APEX on Apophis as a radio beacon essentially. Or maybe we just crash into it and see what happens for science," which is the best kind of for science. But if you have not just OSIRIS-APEX in that position, but also Ramses, what kind of grand finale can they cook up or would they do? And that's just so cool to think about it.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: That is so cool. Well, thanks for coming on and telling us more about this, because this is a mission I want everyone to get really hyped for. I mean, come on, Apophis 2029. This is going to be one of the biggest moments for us.

Asa Stahl: Yeah, it's exciting.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Thanks, Asa.

Asa Stahl: Thanks for having me.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'll leave a link to Asa's article about Ramses on this episode page for Planetary Radio if you'd like to learn more. Honestly, missions like Ramses, DART, Hayabusa2, and of course OSIRIS-REx are so much more important than people give them credit for. Someday, if we're ever presented with a dire threat of an asteroid headed right for our planet, we will actually have a chance of doing something to save the world. That will be because of the amazing science done by space agencies and asteroid hunters. Which brings me to my next point. What do we do if an asteroid has Earth in its sights? Kate Howells, our public education specialist just recently released a new article called What Would Happen If We Nuked An Asteroid? Hey, Kate.

Kate Howells: Hi, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: So I just spoke with Asa about asteroid Apophis. This is going to be a really great opportunity to learn more about what we can do about asteroids and planetary defense, but I can already hear the people online asking, "Why don't we just nuke it?" And I'm pretty sure that this is all Armageddon's fault, but since you just wrote an article on this subject, I feel like you'd be a good person to ask. So why don't we just nuke these asteroids?

Kate Howells: Yeah, so great question. And yes, Armageddon and Deep Impact, both great '90s crash movies that completely misrepresented asteroid defense, but that did effectively plant this idea in people's heads that if an asteroid is coming our way, that's the best thing to do, is just blow it up. What do you do with any problem? You nuke it. The reality is more complicated. Of course, everything in science is generally more complicated than you might think. The same is true of asteroids and asteroid defense, and a big part of it has to do with the varied nature of themselves. Yeah, if you have a asteroid that's heading your way, nuking it might be the best option, but it might actually make the situation much, much worse depending on things like the size and whether it's a solid hunk of metal or just a loosely held together pile of boulders. And the problem with nuking it is that you could actually blow something up into several pieces that are smaller, but still big enough to cause major devastation on Earth, which actually the movie Deep Impact did depict. So they got one thing right.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Seriously, those movies really, forgive me for it, but they impacted me as a kid. I think it's still the reason why I'm so scared that we're going to get hit by something like this. What are some better answers we can use for how to either deflect or maybe blow these things apart?

Kate Howells: One thing I will say right off the bat is that nuking an asteroid is still one of the options that we have. It is still a viable option in some cases. And so when I first wrote this article on what would happen if we nuked an asteroid, I set out to say there are better options. And our chief scientist, Dr. Bruce Betts, actually said, "No, there are other options. We shouldn't call them better options because sometimes nuking it is the best option, and it sort of depends on how much heads up you have." So with an asteroid like Apophis where we've known its trajectory for a long time, many, many years, and we know its size, I think we have some general idea of its composition, it's not a complete mystery, with something like that where we have enough heads up notice, we can actually deflect it through something like DART, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test mission demonstrated, which is the kinetic impactor technique, which is just smashing a spacecraft into the asteroid to nudge it. Because if an asteroid is very far from impacting Earth, potentially several orbits of the sun away from when it would eventually cross paths with us, if you nudge it even just a tiny bit early on in its orbit, that change adds up. So if we have a lot of advanced notice, we can use something like a kinetic impactor to deflect it. Nukes come in handy when you have very little notice. So there was a study that the article I wrote referenced. It came out in 2021 that showed that if you detonate a nuke next to an asteroid that's about 100 meters wide. Sorry, that's 328 feet. I'm Canadian. I just think in meters and kilometers, but I have the references here. If you do that at least two months before impact, it would blast 99.9% of the asteroid's mass out of the way. It wouldn't hit Earth. So this is the kind of thing where if you have very little notice, we have the technology pretty much available right now to send a nuclear weapon into space and explode something. Building a spacecraft like DART that's capable of taking a very long trajectory to get to an asteroid and impact it is more complicated, more difficult. Some of the other techniques we have are also just not in as advanced estate of development as we want them to be if we found an asteroid heading our way very soon. But nuking it is sort of the quick and dirty way of getting something done. So it is very possible.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: The one problem I'm seeing there is that the Outer Space Treaty explicitly forbids the use of nukes in space. We might end up with the situation where an asteroid is coming our way and we don't have the time politically to sort it out in order to actually nuke the thing.

Kate Howells: Yeah. I think generally what's needed is more international coordination on what to do if an asteroid is found to be on an impact trajectory with Earth, because yes, an addendum to the Outer Space Treaty that makes this exception for using nukes in this context that would be useful, but also determining who pays for a mission to deflect an asteroid. If an asteroid is heading to Earth and it's going to impact Russia, say, I would still expect NASA to make a major contribution to deflecting that asteroid, not just say, "Oh, it's up to Roscosmos." I think we should have some plans in place early on before we need to to figure out how does a collaborative mission get done? Who pays for what? And what happens if, say, an asteroid is on track to impact New York City? If we're going to go classic Hollywood-style scenario. And then we are able to deflect it, but it deflects it not enough to completely miss the Earth and it impacts another part of the planet, another country, what do we do in that case? How do you coordinate getting everybody out of harm's way, evacuating cities, countries? All of these things would become very real problems very quickly if we discovered something that was on an impact trajectory and wasn't years and years out. Doing the homework ahead of time to prepare for these things is just one of the most important things we can do, and it's the kind of thing that The Planetary Society advocates for. Also, I will say, the earlier we find something, the better prepared we will be to deflect it, whether it's with nukes or any other technique. So finding, tracking, characterizing asteroids that are out there is extremely important, and that's another thing that we are here working to make happen.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, I want to give a special shout out to the NEOWISE mission that only just recently ended. It did so much to help us track these things, and it was the precursor to what's coming up next, NEO Surveyor. I'm really looking forward to knowing that we're going to have most of these things cataloged because that's going to give us much more of a fighting chance in these instances.

Kate Howells: Yeah. It's very reassuring to know that of all of the asteroids that have been found and tracked in the solar system, which is a huge number of asteroids, none of them are on a collision courts with Earth. That's very reassuring because you could very easily imagine that not being the case, we could very easily imagine, "Oh yes, we have an asteroid that we're tracking and we think it's probably going to impact the Earth in 70 years." I would be very curious to see what humanity's response to that would be because it's such a far off prospect, but even that is not the case. So it's nice to know that we're safe for now, but you never know when something's going to come sneaking out of the dark. We often find asteroids that are going to pass close to Earth right before they pass, so who knows when the next surprise could come? So the more prepared we are, and the more we look, the better off we are.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, we're finally getting a good start on it. I think the non-avian dinosaurs, if they were capable of it, would be proud of us.

Kate Howells: Yes, I like to think so. All the dinosaur ghosts that are watching over us are cheering us on.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, thanks so much, Kate.

Kate Howells: Thanks, Sarah.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Now let's check in with Dr. Bruce Betts, the chief scientist of The Planetary Society for What's Up. Hey, Bruce.

Bruce Betts: Hi there, Sarah. How you doing?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Pretty good. I mean, last week we did this episode about potentially whether or not crickets could be a viable source of protein for space travelers. And since then, I have been getting all of these emails and messages in the community about different cricket recipes.

Bruce Betts: Oh my gosh. We have that many cricket aficionados?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, I mean, apparently. I need to check out Mexican Cricket Tacos, you know?

Bruce Betts: Okay, great.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'll try anything once. That actually sounds like it could be pretty good. But I also asked in our member community along that line, because we were talking about diversity and inclusion in space food so that people don't feel so lonely when they go to space if they're missing their cultures. And I asked people what foods from their cultures they would hope we'd take to Mars with them. We got a lot of really cool answers.

Bruce Betts: Oh, interesting.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I mean, I put in my vote for hummus or something like that because I'd feel really sad without that. But one of our guests last week, Newton Campbell Jr. said, Jamaican beef patties. I'd never had one of those before, so I got to learn all about those. And we had two separate people write in matzo balls because they dehydrate really well, and that's cool. I like that idea. What about you? What's a food you really miss?

Bruce Betts: No crumbs.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: No crumbs. We don't want that corned beef sandwich incident all over again.

Bruce Betts: Yeah, they're very uptight about that now.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I mean, that one sandwich, this is a whole story for people who don't know, but that one sandwich that an astronaut snuck on to a spacecraft in the early days of space exploration launched a whole congressional review. And that's part of why we don't have bread on our spacecraft.

Bruce Betts: And that's why we can't have anything nice.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Right. Tortillas make pretty good sandwiches.

Bruce Betts: They do. Yes, they do. But that is not the one thing I would miss. Did you say one thing?

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah. I mean, you can have more than one.

Bruce Betts: No, ice cream.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Ice cream. Not just regular astronaut ice cream, like legit ice cream?

Bruce Betts: Even the astronauts don't eat astronaut ice cream.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Really? You just broke my childhood longing for astronaut ice cream.

Bruce Betts: So anyway, I feel like we've gone pretty far from space-related items, but I'm sure people were interested in my dietary desires.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, I mean, being able to feel comfortable in space as we try to do this for long-term is important. I spoke with Matt earlier about the astronauts that have been on the ISS longer than expected, these Boeing astronauts, and about the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission. There's so much to talk about there, but part of this is that the people on the ISS are up there longer than expected. And a lot of the comments I've been seeing from people are concerned that maybe being in space that long will hurt their bodies or that the people going on this Polaris Dawn mission, which is going to be going further from Earth than people have been in over 50 years, that that amount of radiation exposure will do something to them. What is it that being in space does to the human body if you're there in the long term?

Bruce Betts: Oh, all sorts of fun stuff. They've discovered more, but obviously... Well may not obviously. Radiation exposure is higher because you don't have the protection of the Earth's atmosphere walking out some of the stuff that's coming in, flying from charge particles from the sun, from even cosmic rays from distant places. And that can cause damage to things, which my impression, again, not a medical doctor, I just want to be clear, or researcher, that it causes things like cancers eventually. But you also have other issues they've struggled with, which is loss of bone density. And so that's one reason exercise apparently helps fight that. So they exercise an hour or two hours a day and that helps with it, but there's still over time, you lose some of the good stuff in the bones.And there are other things that go, and that's why people have been trying to figure out that. The bone density loss is a low microgravity response. Anyway, I'll stop there, but there's various stuff. The good news is most of it's pretty slow acting. And things like radiation exposure, typically it's how much did you absorb. And so if you're not up there that long or you're in a can like the International Space Station that has some protection, then you're in much better shape. Plus, they're down inside the Earth's magnetosphere, so you get even more from the altitudes they typically use.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Yeah, we're going to have to figure out some way of dealing with this if we're going to be out in space in the long term.

Bruce Betts: A lot of, at least, the NASA astronauts, and I would not be surprised if other countries as well, they will actually invite them to come back and get probed even after they're out of the Astronaut Corps by doctors over years and decades to figure out whether there might be long-term issues. It is tricky though, because there's still a fairly small statistical pool.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I really liked that study that they did with the Kelly brothers, that twin study where one of them went into space. Scott Kelly, I think, was up there for almost a year, and then they compared what happened between those two astronauts. I mean, that's going to be really interesting to see how that falls out in the long term. But it also sounded like there were some potentially beneficial effects genetically. Something about his telomeres shortening and some anti-aging effects that were short-lived, but still really interesting.

Bruce Betts: If your anti-aging effects are short-lived, were they actually anti-aging effects? I'm just a little [inaudible 00:54:32].

Sarah Al-Ahmed: These questions.

Bruce Betts: You can think about that.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Well, all right. What is our random space fact this week?

Bruce Betts: Random, random, random space fact!

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I love this one. My brother was at a car racing school this last weekend. Anyway.

Bruce Betts: Perfect. Yes, I knew that. No, I didn't. So length of time and space. I didn't properly report that earlier this year, the record for the longest total time over multiple missions in space was broken. And so congratulations belatedly to Oleg Kononenko, who is still on the space station, setting a record as time passes, just increasing his record. He has now spent, well, as of June 4th of 2024, which is now a couple months ago as we record this, at least he was the first astronaut or cosmonaut to go above 1,000 days total in space.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Dude, that's a long time.

Bruce Betts: That is. That's a long time. Yeah. He'll be pushing three years total, adding up several missions. And then in terms of one single mission, it's Valeri Polyakov who did it on Mir, the Mir Space Station at 437 days and 18 hours, which is also a very long trip.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: How did the inside of Mir compare size-wise to the ISS? Was it smaller? I'm guessing there was less room to chill out.

Bruce Betts: There was. There also tended to be smaller crews. But it was extensive and multiple modules, but it was not as large by any... Well, the ISS is several times bigger in terms of volume is my understanding, but that's not something that I have right off the top of my head, so I apologize. But definitely ISS is significantly bigger.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Man, astronauts are so brave. As much as I want to think I'm the kind of person who could be in space for a thousand days, that is intense.

Bruce Betts: Well, we want to give you that test, Sarah. Congratulations, you've won... Oh, no. No. Not yet.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Not yet. Maybe one of these days, Bruce. One of these days.

Bruce Betts: Maybe we'll start you a little shorter trip, but I think once you get past the first few days, you're golden.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: As long as I get over that whole falling forever thing.

Bruce Betts: Well, yeah. I mean there's that space sickness thing, which is a good time.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Oh, man. Nope.

Bruce Betts: Oh, and aliens. Got to be careful of those.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: Got to be careful of those. That's even more reason why I'd want to do it. I want to be the first person to be like, "Dude, do you want to play video games?"

Bruce Betts: Dude, I want you to be the first person to greet the aliens while the rest of us huddle in our bunkers.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We come in peace for all Sarah kind.

Bruce Betts: Oh, oh, she kicks it up a notch. I think you know how we talked about you not exposing your desires to rule the world, I think it's coming out a little bit.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: I'll stuff that back into the box. Anyway.

Bruce Betts: All right, everybody. Go out there, look up the night sky and think about how long you'd like Sarah to be in space. Thank you. Good night.

Sarah Al-Ahmed: We've reached the end of this week's episode of Planetary Radio, but we'll be back next week as always with more space science and exploration. Love the show? You can get Planetary Radio t-shirts at planetary.org/shop, along with lots of other cool spacey merchandise. That includes a bunch of stuff related to planetary defense if you need yourself a sticker with a dinosaur telling you to kick asteroid. Help others discover the passion, beauty, and joy of space science and exploration by leaving a review and a rating on platforms like Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Your feedback not only brightens our day, but helps other curious minds find their place in space through Planetary Radio. Who knows how that could impact the next generation of asteroid hunters and planetary defenders? You can also send us your space thoughts, questions, and poetry at our email, [email protected]. Or if you're a Planetary Society member, you can leave a comment in the Planetary Radio Space in our member community app. Planetary Radio is produced by The Planetary Society in Pasadena, California and is made possible by our members. You can join us as we cheer on the innovators and planetary defenders pushing forward our understanding of space at planetary.org/join. Mark Hilverda and Rae Paoletta are our associate producers. Andrew Lucas is our audio editor. Josh Doyle composed our theme, which is arranged and performed by Peter Schlosser. And until next week, ad astra.