Giant Leaps Symposium (session 3), "The Next Giant Leaps in Space Exploration” - MIT AeroAstro

[MUSIC PLAYING]

WAITZ: The session will focus on the future of space exploration, appropriately. Our moderator for this session is Professor Edward Crawley. Ed's the director of the Bernie Gordon MIT Engineering Leadership Program. He's also a Ford Professor of Engineering. And he has appointments in both the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems. Ed's research focuses on the domain of architecting and designing complex technical systems. And he's spent a great deal of time looking at architecting complex technical space systems in particular.

He's a former department head in Aero and Astro. And I had the pleasure of serving as his deputy during part of that time. He is also on the Augustine Commission, which has recently been named. So he has a very unique role in looking at the future vision for space exploration. Ed.

[APPLAUSE]

CRAWLEY: Thank you, Ian. Space has become a ubiquitous capability in our lifetime. We drive around with GPSs in our cars, watch television shows that were beamed down from satellite transceivers. We get scientific results back from space. We monitor the condition of the climate of the Earth from space. All of these things are accomplishments of the past and hopefully will carry on into the future. What we are going to be discussing in this panel session is the future of space and of space exploration.

But before we go to that, I want to point out just how ubiquitous the success of space has become in popular American culture. Since the advent of satellite radio, I've become a country music fan.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

Not something that a boy who grew up in New England would likely to have happen if you just had to listen to regular AM and FM radio. So I was beep-bopping down the road one day, listening to this Rodney Atkins song, and here's the refrain. The song is called "It's America." These are all the iconographic images of America. A high school prom, a Springsteen song, a ride in a Chevrolet, a man on the Moon, fireflies in June, and kids selling lemonade. Cities and farms, open arms, one nation under God. It's America. We're going to hear it now.

[MUSIC - RODNEY ATKINS, "IT'S AMERICA"]

(SINGING) --me my glass, smiling, thinking to myself. Man, what a picture perfect postcard this would make of America. It's a high school prom, it's a Springsteen song, it's a ride in a Chevrolet. It's a man on the Moon, and fireflies in June, and kids selling lemonade. It's cities and farms, it's open arms, one nation under God.

CRAWLEY: It's America. Now the interesting thing is that I listened to that song tens of times. And I could have sworn that that line said, it's a man on the Moon in five flights.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

And I said, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Boy, this Rodney Atkins guy, he really knows his space history. But of course, it actually, when I was preparing this script, it turns out to read, "A man on the Moon and fireflies in June." I have three laws on space flight-- Kepler and I have three. Mine might be more useful.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

I'll reveal the three of them to you over the course of this session. The first one is there are many uncertainties in the future of space flight. But the one thing I can say with confidence is that every two years, there will be a congressional election, and every four years, a presidential election. So space missions and space programs must be designed to continuously demonstrate value to the American people in a demonstrable way and in a cadence that's associated with his pattern. One of the unquestionable sources of the delivery of value to the American people is in the scientific space program.

And our first speaker today, who will address that in her keynote, is Maria Zuber, the professor and head of the MIT Department of Earth Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences, a member of the Aldridge Commission in 2004, which chartered the initial direction of the vision for space exploration, sort of the book end to the one that I'm now going to spend my summer vacation working on. She's also the principal investigator of the GRAIL mission. This is MIT's mission, which will send two scientific spacecraft to do gravity mapping of the Moon in the year 2011. Maria.

[APPLAUSE]

ZUBER: Great. Thank you very much. You have no idea how excited I am to be here today. Last fall, Ian and I got together. He said he wanted to talk to me. And his opening comment was, run and hide, I need your help. And then he told me about this event and what he wanted to do. And we came up with the ideas for the Women in Aerospace event and the Sally Ride science event. And how could you stay away from these things? What an honor it is.

My parents let me stay up late to watch the Apollo 11 astronauts walk on the Moon. I wrote long letters to every Apollo astronaut, telling them my impressions of the missions and asking them about theirs. And none of you guys ever answered me.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

But every time I sent a letter, NASA sent me an autographed picture of the astronauts from the mission. And I took that as great encouragement. And I'm still around. So it doesn't take much to encourage and inspire.

Today, in the short time I have available, I want to just offer some thoughts about how to move ahead, okay? And I thought I would start here with a recipe of what I consider to be success. My experience has been in robotic spacecraft. I've flown over a half a dozen experiments and I have several experiments in space right now. But I wanted to give this talk, I think, to do honor and justice to the magnitude of this event. To think more broadly than just my own field, but to think about the full suite of science that might be possible. And also to bring into that human space flight.

So what's the recipe for success in future space exploration? Well, I think certainly there needs to be exploration and discovery. Every time we've ever been somewhere that we haven't been or we've ever looked at something with a different set of eyes or a different wavelength or a different spectral resolution, we've discovered something. So discovery is assured when we go out and look.

I also think, very practically speaking, that it's very important that we contribute to human well-being. And certainly the capabilities that we have in space contribute to that. And just to give you an example from what we saw this morning, the image of Earthrise taken by Apollo 8 as it came from behind the Moon and the image of the Earth that Jack Schmitt took, looking back at the Earth as Apollo 17 went to the Moon, I think profoundly changed the way about people think about the Earth and certainly contributed in a very positive way to our humanity. And so those are just two examples, but there are many practical examples as well.

Any program that we have for space exploration really needs to be reality-based. It's great to be a dreamer, but the only good space mission is one that's in space, really working. So the greatest ideas that one can come up with for all the wonderful things that one can do, if they're not practical and they're not implementable, then their time has not yet come. And I'm very much a person who likes to think about the future, but live for the present.

We need a mixed portfolio. NASA has gotten into trouble in the past by going to all big missions and then going to all small missions. And I will describe a number of examples of a mixture of small, focused objectives and large grandiose things that can only be done with major, major technology investment. The combination of those two, I think, will lead to a healthy program.

So in keeping with that, I think balancing space flight heritage and technology development. In order to get the best people excited about being a part of the space program, you can't just simply take off-the-shelf hardware and re-fly it every single time. Okay? Although for some applications, space flight heritage is, of course, very useful. But if you only fly what you've flown before, you'll never fly anything, actually, because nothing will have ever flown.

The human presence in space. I'm a huge fan of the human space program. But I think the human presence in space should be for objectives which are worth risk. And so in this way, I echo some of the comments that we've heard earlier today. I believe that humans and robots should work in space together to their optimal advantage. I believe that things that could be done by robots should be done by robots. But there are plenty of things that humans can bring to space flight exploration the robot can't bring. And I'll give you example of just one of those things.

And I think it's also crucial that we inspire and train the next generation. When I was on the Aldridge Commission, we traveled around the country. We held town meetings and we held hearings. And I was absolutely astonished at the hundreds and hundreds of people who came up to me and told me how they became interested in being a scientist or an engineer because of getting to watch the Apollo missions. And it's a non-quantifiable arrangement. By and large, I can't remember any of these people that actually worked for the space program. They were telecom engineers. They were biologists. They were electrical engineers. But they realized that the math and science that they took in school could just have really a magnificent application of doing things that they were good at.

And what you don't see in here-- in the Aldridge Commission, one of the things that we found is that, certainly, national prestige, international cooperation, all of these things-- if you do all these things, the rest will follow. Okay? And all of these will contribute.

Okay. So in the 20 minutes that I've been allotted, we can't possibly cover all of what could be done in space exploration. So I'm just going to choose a number of examples and talk about them at a very high level. In some cases, they deal with particular missions or programs that have been suggested in decadal studies or in commissions. In other cases, I think that they would just be interesting questions to study. It's not at all clear that all of these could be done, certainly, in any particular sequence. And I do believe very, very strongly in presidential vision and in community input and bringing all of that together to bring together a great program.

So this is not going to be comprehensive by any stretch of the imagination, but illustrative of some of the points that I listed in the last slide. So, a bold diverse agenda in space could study human physiology, measure the variability of the sun, determine the extent and composition of the universe, discover other Earths in other solar systems, sustain our planet, and seek extraterrestrial life. And I will give you an example or two of each of these examples.

Okay. So human physiology and behavior. Okay? Basically, this is just an example. I mean two things by what I I'd like to talk about here. The first is that if humans are going to have a long term presence in space-- and I believe that they should-- then we're going to have to monitor physiological and behavioral effects over the long term. This is taking place now. It needs to continue to take place. I think putting people into space just to do this is probably not justification of itself in the risk. But doing other interesting things, certainly this kind of information should be collected.

The second point that I mean by this slide is to follow on John Holdren's comments from the last session and to say that we really need to think about a plan for the International Space Station. A great deal of effort has been and is being invested in assembling it in space. It is an absolutely magnificent facility. I believe there are one or more Nobel prizes to be won with science that could be done on the space station for the reasons that I talked to you before, about being in an environment that you're not in and studying something that you haven't studied before. I'm not sure if that Nobel prize is in the physical sciences, the biological sciences, or someplace else. But I think thinking about how to make use of this facility that we have invested so much and in good cooperation with international partners, I think is an extremely worthy goal.

The variability of the sun. Okay. The behavior of the sun is important for so many reasons. Okay. And we have only been able to measure solar irradiance from a spacecraft since the late 1970s with the Nimbus 7 spacecraft. And it looks like there are decadal variations in solar variability. And certainly this comes into questions about what is the role of the sun in climate in terms of what the flux of the sun is. And also, what is the effect of the sun on the upper atmosphere? On convective patterns, clouds, et cetera.

Solar predictability. Another reason that we need to understand the sun is that successful robotic and human exploration will require the prediction of space weather in the heliosphere. And this is a beautiful picture of the solar photosphere by the TRACE mission. But the interesting thing about this-- so this is a very practical application about a measurement that is going to be very important if we're going to send humans into space for an extended period. If we want to think about an outpost on the Moon. But it's a very interesting scientific question as well, because the sun, the heliosphere, the Earth, and the planets form a coupled system through a whole variety of space physics processes. And trying to understand the interaction between those processes and how they all fit together is just a fascinating systems problem.

With the recent flyby data that we've collected from the MESSENGER spacecraft at Mercury, the coupling that we're seeing between the heliosphere and the surface and Mercury's magnetosheath, it's just fascinating how dynamic-- people thought this was a dead planet, but there's actually a great amount of dynamism that is taking place. And understanding this, I think, is just a fascinating scientific problem.

Okay. We're now going to move on to astrophysics. And in fact, we're going to move on to the edge of the universe. So the universe is somewhere between 13.5 and 14 billion years old. And we have a mission that we'll be launching, hopefully, on about the 2014 time frame, the James Webb Space Telescope. This will be at the L2 point, 1.5 million kilometers from the Sun, away from the distraction of the Earth. And this mission will actually be able to measure or detect and image the first galaxies that formed after the Big Bang. What a fascinating thing to do to go back and see the universe in its formative stages.

Okay. That doesn't appear to be working. Okay. What I was going to show on that slide-- and I'll just talk about it, if I can't remember what I was going to say-- was the constitution of the universe. And one of the fascinating observations that we have made in about the last decade or so-- actually it's been a variety of independent observations-- has been the suggestion of a force called dark energy, which would make up about 3/4 of the mass of the universe.

So it turns out that there is a disconnect between the geometry of the universe and the amount of matter that we know about. And this has been determined from Hubble Space Telescope observations of type Ia supernova stars as well as measurements of anisotropy in the universe. This is a map of the cosmic microwave background by the WMAP spacecraft. And it shows that the universe is basically flat, which is basically calling for something with negative pressure to be filling the abyss, or else something quite unusual happening, like a breakdown of the inverse square law of gravity at large distances. And this gets down to the basic question of exactly what is the universe made of? And it is a very worthy goal for future exploration.

Okay. Next, I don't think I have to tell anybody about the excitement of directly detecting and characterizing terrestrial planets beyond the Earth. There are suggestions of a mission called Terrestrial Planet Finder, which think about two ways of detecting terrestrial-type planets around other stars. So if you have a terrestrial planet around a star in another system, there's a variation in brightness of about 10 to the 10th over a distance of a fraction of an arcsecond. And so it turns out to be incredibly challenging to separate the two.

And there's two ideas for doing this. One is to put an internal coronagraph in a spacecraft to block out the central star. The other calls for a nulling interferometer, where we put a spacecraft flying in very tight formation in which we have the light coming in about a half-wavelength apart, so we can have destructive interference and cancel out light that way. Terrestrial Planet Finder, these two aspects of it have been in planning some time. But there is not really sufficient funding in the budget to move ahead with it.

We want to do more than simply detect planets around other stars. We'd like to characterize their gases. So we have here Mars and Venus, where we can see the CO2 atmosphere that both of those planets have. But we're really looking for the signature of gases in the atmosphere that look like they could be produced by biological activity, which for the case of the Earth is ozone. So we certainly want to do that.

If something like the Terrestrial Planet Finder can't be done in the very near term because of reasons of cost, there are some interesting simpler approaches that are being suggested. Here is a paper that was published a couple of years ago in Nature for an occulter that could actually be placed externally to a telescope. And if one put one of these petal-shaped occulters for-- a 20 to 30 meter occulter in front of the James Webb Space Telescope, one could actually-- and one moved-- seven parsecs six from our solar system, one would actually be able to image Earth and Mars. So these are the kinds of things that could be done within about a decade, even with a somewhat constrained budget.

Okay. I want to move on to Earth exploration. And one of the things that I have been a very, very strong proponent for is a renewed commitment to observation of the Earth. I think it is essential that we take up and rejuvenate Earth monitoring. And John Holdren gave some examples about the gaps that are there. And it is very pleasing to see that the administration is taking this very seriously. I'm going to give you just one example of the kind of monitoring that would be very useful to do. And believe me, there is quite a bit more than this.

This is an image of the Antarctic continent. And we really need to make very quantitative measurements with small error bars about how ice sheet volume is changing and about how ice sheets are flowing. So here are some measurements of estimations of ice sheet flow. We don't have these going on on a regular basis. We have conflicting estimates of what ice sheet volumes are. There are some ideas of missions that could go in and measure this very precisely. This is the DESTINY mission, which is an L-band interferometric radar system, which could go in and measure that.

And we want to know the flow properties. We want to know the amount of water within the ice sheets. We want to know about the lakes that are forming beneath the ice sheets, which we're making attempts to estimate, but it's done basically by fieldwork. Because this lowers the viscosity at the base of the ice sheet. And it accelerates slip, reduces friction and accelerates slip, and accelerates flow of the ice sheet into the oceans. And it appears that the ice sheets are decreasing in magnitude faster than the models predict. And this is a part of it. And it is something that we need to understand.

So this is a plot of-- this is an orbital radar measurement of ice cap layering. It's about 700 or so kilometers across. And this is actually a figure that I showed in a talk last week out in Chicago. And it's actually the planet Mars. It's not the Earth. Okay? And I had somebody raise their hand at the end of the talk and say, could you please convince NASA to fly one of these around the Earth so that we could get the same kind of measurements for the Earth that we have now for Mars? And we have, in fact, also measured from a satellite snow accumulation over the seasons on Mars before we have done that for the Earth. So there's a variety of things that we've been able to do for the planets that we haven't been able to do for Earth.

So when we talk about challenges and opportunities, one of the things that we can think about-- okay, so we've taken quite a number of observations of Mars over the past decade and a half or so. In some ways, doing Mars is easier than Earth. In some ways, doing it is harder. It's farther away from the Sun. It's harder to get to. There's a lower solar flux, so it makes it more challenging to power instruments. So you need lower power instruments. You have more issues with data rate. You have higher surface gravity on the Earth than you do on Mars.

Earth has an atmosphere, which is problematic in terms of how low an orbiting spacecraft can orbit. Because drag decreases the size of the orbit. Earth has a surface ocean which causes complications. Mars has no surface ocean, although it appears to have a frozen underground sea. On Earth, we have the advantage of a GPS constellation, which is essential in helping us with positioning. And we don't have the advantage of that on Earth.

But here, I think is-- what I think is the biggest advantage of working on Mars to the Earth. On Earth, there's national security concerns with some of the observations that you take. And there's politics about making some measurements that would be controversial or not favorable for business interests. And those problems don't occur for Mars. I do both Earth research and planetary research, and it is so much easier to make the case to send an instrument to another planet than it is on Earth. And something is fundamentally wrong about that. And so I really am very hopeful that in the new presidential administration that we're going to set that right.

Finally, I want to talk about the challenge of finding life beyond Earth. And I said, seek life beyond Earth, not necessarily find it. Because we don't actually know that it's there. But whether it is or not is very fascinating. And let me just give you a few examples of fantastic places to look. So first of all, the planet Titan, which is being magnificently revealed by the Cassini spacecraft, which is in its extended mission. Titan is the only other planetary body in the solar system that has a nitrogen atmosphere like the Earth. The radar observations of Cassini have shown the presence of liquid methane lakes at high latitudes on that planetary body. It would be a fascinating place to land on the surface and look for evidence of carbon-based lifeforms in the outer solar system.

Europa. We now have very good evidence from magnetic induction measurements that have been taken by the Galileo spacecraft that there is a subsurface ocean around Europa. This is an area of Europa called Conamara Chaos. The big question is, how deep is this ocean beneath the surface and is this ocean accessible? So this is an area that appears pretty frozen. And actually, as an analogy, this is a Landsat image, I believe, of an area off the Wilkins ice sheet in Antarctica, which has very many morphological similarities to this area on Europa. And this area here has occurred where the ice has slid off the Antarctic continent and then ice blocks have tilted over.

These different colors that you see here correspond to the presence of salts, which indicates that the water below had contact with the surface. We don't know how long ago it is. But certainly looking for thin areas on the ice. And this is a very non-readable chart, but estimates range from hundreds of meters in some places to many tens of kilometers. And it would be extremely challenging to get to, but very much worth it.

And then finally, the last area that I'll talk about is looking for life in the subsurface of Mars. So this is what I'll call the frozen subsurface sea on Mars. And this-- what you see right here-- this is a map of not water, it is a map of neutron flux. And where you see blue means that there is a lack of neutrons being emitted from the surface. Neutrons get emitted due to the imposition of cosmic rays onto the surface. And water moderates neutrons and it picks them up and makes heavy water. So when you see a lack of neutrons, it's a good bet that there's water beneath the surface.

And this is the instrumentation here-- which is on the Mars Odyssey spacecraft, which is currently operating-- indicates that in some places there is more than 70% by volume water ice in the top meter of the surface. We don't know exactly how deep this goes. But as you go deeper on Mars, Mars is very-- Mars has a very fractured surface because it has been impacted. There is the thought that the crust is very fractured, which makes it a fantastic reservoir. So if Mars had a surface water ocean or lakes, that there could be water that was on the surface that is deep in the crust. And if it has the porosity and permeability similar to the Moon that we measured during Apollo, it's easy to fit an ocean beneath the surface.

But the best place to look for life, I would argue, is where it's warm and where it's still warm. And so the idea is to go to Mars and drill. And this is where you could really use humans. So this is a place where humans would contribute very, very significantly in a way that a robot would have a difficult time doing.

And so I'll just close by saying the things that I've talked about range from very, very doable, almost routine from a space flight basis, to being what I'll call flagship class to-- perhaps a submarine on Europa. And that's pretty long range and very difficult to do. But the question of, could we send people to Mars and could this be done in the next 40 years? Whenever I design a space flight mission, I sit down and I try to sketch out how many miracles do I need. And if it's more than two, I work on something else for a while. Okay? Because there's only so many things that you can solve and get your experiment into space.

So we're going to have a new crew vehicle. We need a heavy-lift launch vehicle. We need a surface module. We need a whole class of new spacesuits that allow astronauts sufficient mobility that they don't get weighed down and tired. Mars has a higher G than the Moon and it's very rocky in many places. So we need to think about the physiology there. And some of this work is actually going on at MIT and making good progress in this area. And we need transportation. So there's a lot more than two miracles, technologically, that are in this slide.

But let me just close here by saying what a wonderful thing that it would be. I believe these technological problems could be solved, because smart people want to work on them. And I'm just going to close here with a hopeful thought. This is a picture of Earth taken from the surface of Mars, from the Mars exploration Rover landing sites. And imagine the idea that maybe one of the students who are sitting in the auditorium today could see this site for themselves within the next several decades. Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

CRAWLEY: So, thank you, Maria for that tour de force. Since we're talking about the future of space exploration, we're going to use technology of the present rather than the past and take questions that are texted to my phone. So the text number will now appear. So all of you who know how to do this, go ahead and ask questions. And the rest of you should learn.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

I see the first text question has come in. It says, Professor Zuber, if you were hypothetically to advise a member of the Augustine committee on the priorities of humans and robotics working together within the Earth, Moon, Mars system, how would you rank those priorities?

ZUBER: Within the Earth--

CRAWLEY: The Earth, Moon, Mars system.

ZUBER: Okay.

CRAWLEY: The rest of you can start texting, because that was mine.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

ZUBER: Okay. All right. Great. Okay. So actually one of the things that I think it would be fascinating is-- think it's important that humans have access to low Earth orbit. Because once you're in low Earth orbit, you're out of the gravitational well. And then you can do anything you want, basically. But I would like to see humans get out of low Earth orbit. And even in the Earth, Moon, L1, L2 system, I think, is a good place to be. And I think it's worth giving some thought.

I was very inspired thinking about the thought of seeing the earliest universe when I was doing some reading in preparation for this talk. And there's been some thoughts about deployable mirrors and inflatable mirrors. And people are thinking about these, aerospace companies are thinking about these, university researchers. And I think that humans could be quite enabling in these things. We had humans fix Hubble. And fortunately, they were able to do that. There were thoughts about actually repairing Hubble robotically. And I remember during the Aldridge Commission, seeing fantastic video about how a robot would do it. And the people trying to push this said it would be cheaper than a shuttle flight. And there was no way that that could happen.

But I think in the Earth, Moon, L1, L2 system, humans in space could be deploying new kinds of mirrors that would have vast observing power.

CRAWLEY: How about a human Phobos mission? Would it be worth sending humans to rendezvous with Phobos and bring back samples?

ZUBER: The Phobos-- the moon Phobos?

CRAWLEY: Yes.

ZUBER: It certainly could be done and it's certainly feasible. Would I recommend doing that over something else? What I would do is, being a practical person, I would look at the technological feasibility of doing that versus something else. And I would, you know, I'm all for doing what you can do rather than something that's more difficult to do.

CRAWLEY: How do you think a layperson can best support the space program? I have about 20 now, by the way.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm going to take two or three more.

ZUBER: How a lay person can best support the space program? Well, vote. Okay?

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

And you've all done that. Most of you people have. Because we had a great outcome in the election. You know, I think people, just by their appreciation of what's gone on, their participation in the blogs, their support of education, all of that really contributes to the space program.

CRAWLEY: What do you think about ice at the south pole of the Moon?

ZUBER: What do I think about ice at the south pole of the Moon? Well--

CRAWLEY: Are we going to find it when we smash into it?

ZUBER: Well, I'm sending an experiment to look for it next week, so--

CRAWLEY: We got that one taken care of pretty fast.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

ZUBER: But I'll talk about it. So there's hydrogen at the south pole of the Moon. Okay? But what doesn't get a lot of airplay is that there's hydrogen in areas of the Moon that see sunlight every month. Okay? And so, to me, the big question is, is this hydrogen ice or is it implanted solar wind nuclei? And the fact that you see hydrogen in areas that are not shaded most of the time suggests to me that solar wind is at least a part of it. And I tend to take things conservatively, but I also believe in collecting data.

CRAWLEY: Last question. Why do we keep focusing on Mars? Why don't we spend more time on Venus?

ZUBER: Well, Venus is a great-- so there has been a remarkable Mars program for about the last decade and a half. And I feel very gifted and honored to have been a part of that. There was a remarkable mission to Venus in the early 90s, the Magellan mission, that mapped the surface. I believe in the budget roll out that Mars is not going to be its own program any more. At least there's discussion of it. And Mars is going to be considered in the context with the rest of the solar system. So that may address that question that the person has.

But what I will say is that before Venus had its greenhouse, if it had the right cloud cover and before it lost its water, it actually-- models indicate that for a period of time it actually could have been quite clement. So if we're looking for a planet where there was past life, you know, there's a small chance we've been looking in the wrong place.

CRAWLEY: Thank you very much.

[APPLAUSE]

By the way, that produced about 16 questions or comments, including, I like your tie.

[AUDIENCE LAUGHTER]

So I'll invite the panel now to come up here. And as they do, I'll give you law number two of my three laws of space flight. No one is likely to make money in space, as opposed to launching into space. No one is likely to make money in space moving atoms. Only moving bits and photons. If you notice that virtually everything Maria talked about, it was images. It was measurements. This is in the information sphere. And the question is, will anybody ever make money in space by doing something with stuff, with real molecules?

So for example, here's the question I pose to my students in the space system design class. If you were to fly to the surface of the Moon and find sitting there something that you put into your spacecraft and brought it back to the earth, what would you have to be able to sell it for at dollars per pound or dollars per kilogram in order to make money as a business proposition? And what would that substance be? Okay, you can think about that.

Now I'll introduce our panel. Let's see, from this side is James Garvin, who is the NASA chief scientist. Chris Scolese was not able to be with us today at the last minute. There's a flight readiness review, right?

GARVIN: Absolutely.

CRAWLEY: So Chris is doing the job of an acting NASA administrator being at the Cape. And we wish that process well. James Garvin is the NASA chief scientist, works on strategic issues at NASA, particularly in helping formulate the vision for space exploration. He worked on the first orbiter-based use of a Shuttle Laser Altimeter around the Earth. And he is, in fact, leading the studies of future missions to Venus.

Richard Garriott is a computer game developer and entrepreneur. He's the son of Owen Garriott, who was a Skylab astronaut. Which makes him the first second generation astronaut when he flew as the sixth private citizen to go to the International Space Station recently. And he's an investor in the space business. We'll have to ask him about that.

Erika Wagner is the Science Director of the MIT Mars Gravity Biosat. She's an alumna of the International Space University and is the Executive Director of the X Prize lab at MIT, studying how to incentivize the exploration of space with the use of prizes.

Dave Thompson is the Chairman and CEO of Orbital Sciences Corporation. He is a successful, I would say, space entrepreneur, having founded the company in 1982 based on a business plan idea that he wrote while he was finishing his degree at the Harvard Business School. Orbital has launched over 700 rocket satellites and other types of vehicles. And Dave, for his work in the Pegasus program, was awarded the National Medal of Technology by President Bush 41.

Jim Crocker is the Vice President and General Manager of Sensing and Exploration Systems for Lockheed Martin Space. He's responsible for a wide range of business lines associated with space missions and spacecraft. And among the things he's worked on were the corrective optics for the repair of the camera in the Hubble Space Telescope. And his team-- which by the way, Jeff Hoffman, the moderator in the morning was the one who installed. And his team successfully prepared and landed the Phoenix Lander on the north pole of Mars.

And then there's Maria at the end. So, welcome.

[APPLAUSE]

So we're going to follow the same format that Ian did and just ask sort of the appropriate leading questions down. And we'll give everyone about five minutes to respond. And I'll take some more questions at the end, including some of the ones that were texted in, which are really more appropriate for other panel members.

So James, what's NASA's going to do in the future of space exploration to help?

GARVIN: Well, thanks, Ed? Could I have the clicker? Since I thought images are sometimes better. Well, NASA's programs, of course, are guided by many of you. In fact, I thought before I answer, I would ask all the people in the room that worked on Apollo or the space shuttle or the International Space Station to stand up. Because those of you that did that have given us the legacy, the shoulders of thinking beyond. And let's have a little hand for these colleagues.

[APPLAUSE]

They've done it. Thank you all. Mars.

[CONTINUING APPLAUSE]

Thank you. So in crafting an answer, then, if I may have the first slide-- thanks-- I think we have to look beyond Apollo and remember that what Apollo was with pretty much all of NASA at the time that it went forward. And in fact, it was both catalytic and it gave us the confidence to do the next great thing. And so what did NASA do next? It diversified. And this is part of our, if you will, our legacy from Apollo.

We diversified from being on the Moon and doing the great science that Maria talked about to great advances in propulsion and aerothermal engineering. Some I know happened here at MIT. And the shuttle gave us, maybe, to many people a mixed blessing. It extended human space flight to low Earth orbit. And it seems to some that we've been grounded there, or flying there, forever. However, that's not really the case. It's important to look at the record.

What did shuttle do? Well, it's constructing International Space Station, our next great national laboratory in space. It also flew missions of discovery. The first ever global map of most of the Earth's topography was made from the shuttle in a way that only the shuttle could enable. Five servicing missions to Hubble, extending its life initially, by Jeff and others, after it was broken. This legacy was a combination of human space flight and robotic space flight that is really the hallmark of NASA that we're now proceeding with.

In addition, I think we need to remember that one of the things NASA does best is to build capability. The science is done in the universities and the national laboratories. The capabilities that are now on the table to be developed for the extension of human presence in space are all about those miracles that Maria was talking about. What do we need to do that? Well, we need access to space. You can't do things in space if you're not in space. I think my second grader gets that, even.

So given that, access to space needs to be assured. One of the big hallmarks of the last 10 years was a recognition that separating crew from cargo is important. And hence, a fleet of Ares launch vehicles to carry both the crew and an Orion capsule system, borrowed from the great legacy of Apollo, but also to a heavy lift launch vehicle, the Ares V, to carry the consumables, the big stuff. And in doing so, also enabling things that we could do robotically that we can't do today with our current fleet.

The other thing that's very important to recognize in this picture is the Earth departure stage. The propulsion system that carries people from beyond the gravity well to where we're going is vital. It worked beautifully on Apollo. Buzz is sitting here. Absolutely got him home, as testament to that. We haven't been back to that kind of technology since those days. We don't have human rated in-space propulsion systems. So this capability space I'm showing here is the plan for NASA, with the public support of this administration, to go forward. And it will leave the gaps that John and others talked about earlier.

In addition, we have ideas beyond that that really focus on looking at the Earth as a system beyond where we are today. And Maria touched on this. We are in a revolution of understanding the last 30 or 40 years of the Earth Science record. The National Academy Decadal Survey for Earth Science recommended 15 new missions, several with revolutionary technologies. I like to show this picture because it looks weird. But it's an image of this mission called Destiny, whose primary job, other than looking at the ice, is to measure, basically, the sources and sinks of carbon.

And as we go to a carbon offset economy and look at cap and trades, how much carbon are we sequestering? How much is there? What is the record of that carbon? Is it locked up in the boreal masses or is it in the ground? How is it in the oceans? We don't know. We have a missing carbon problem on Earth, and it's not just the hydrocarbons we burn. Missions like this and others recommended by the decadal survey are in our future. And this is an artist's concept of the 2015 Destiny mission. So looking at the Earth is very important.

Finally, my last comments I'd like to really talk about what's happened in the last 40 years and look beyond. So it was to have been a space age. We went to the Moon. We did all the great things. Not because they're easy, but because they're hard, as President Kennedy said. I can't help but saying that. It sounds good here in Boston. But anyway, what actually happened was human space flight focused on aerothermal engineering, shuttles, and space stations. And robotic space flight took over. And I like to show this picture of the Mini Cooper-sized-- no offense to other auto manufacturers in the room-- the Mini Cooper-sized Mars Science Lab, now named Curiosity by a young girl.

What's important about this picture is, in 1972 many, many-- not here, but in other places-- would not have believed this is possible. A 950 kilogram autonomous, mobile, analytical laboratory, carrying gear as sensitive as any in the United States on the ground when the Apollo samples came back in '69. That's in that now. And the price of this vehicle is 1/6th the price of the Viking mission we flew to Mars in 1976 in our first foray to look for life beyond. We have gotten better. And this is evidence of what has been a robotic information age, as we've learned in human space flight to now dream the bigger dream.

So let me conclude with a couple of final thoughts that echo Maria's comments about science. I think this picture says it all. Somewhere there is a sweet spot. And it's a realistic sweet spot between the robotic space flight that does the grand science, the grand challenges, and the human space flight that enables those. And whether it's drilling on Mars, or erecting gigantic inflatable telescopes, or in erecting giant apertures to look back at Earth to measure the radiative balance and other drivers of our climate, or looking at the sun. You can all imagine them better than I. That's a hallmark of our next 40, I think. And here's John Grunsfeld, an MIT grad-- go John-- doing what was not imaginable by the robotic servicing plans that Maria talked about after the Columbia disaster. And this all happened just two weeks ago.

So this is our future. And how to extend this to the surface of the Moon, or to a NEO, or to Mars, is really the ultimate question. So I'd like to finish with one final thought, which is, it's appropriate here in Boston-- you see the bridge-- that ultimately the question comes down to the capability to get there. And Earth to orbit and orbit to space is what we're all about. In the next 40, I think we'll see that revolution coming from NASA.

CRAWLEY: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

Richard, I actually have a question for you to lead in. This is symptomatic of the future generation. Are you ready for this? Why does Richard still have a Padawan-style haircut. He's been in space now. He must be a Jedi knight.

[APPLAUSE]

GARRIOTT: I think the question must be referring to these, my rat tails here, which I have to tell you, I've had since before it was cool. Before Star Wars, through the period of time that was cool, during Star Wars, and now long after. So, for better or worse.