Podcast: Jerod Isaacman Speaks with Ross Douthat

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Image (Credit): NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat speaking on the Interesting Times program. (New York Times)

New York Times columnist Ross Douthat sat down with NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently to discuss the future of NASA and more. You can listen to the interview, titled ‘The New Space Race,” via the New York Times‘ Interesting Times podcast or watch it on YouTube.

I was a little skeptical about what I would learn from NASA’s new administrator, a billionaire space tourist until recently, but Jared Isaacman was well spoken during the interview. He seemed both candid with his answers as well as well comfortable with everything Ross tossed his way. His only stumble in my opinion was when he was trying to cover for the proposed draconian cuts to NASA by the White House in 2025. Fortunately, Congress saved the agency and his butt, though you would not know that from his answer.

I particularly liked his openness about his own space travels as well as the return mission to the Moon. In terms of himself, he compared his own gravity-free experience in space as the equivalent of being an upside down chipmunk. He also did not appear overwhelmed by his privileged view of the Earth from low Earth orbit. He said the high-definition images from the International Space Station (ISS) over the years has given everyone a great view of the Earth.

As far as establishing an early settlement on the Moon, he did not try to oversell it. He stated:

For the first maybe, I don’t know, 10 years, it’s going to look like a pretty cool futuristic junkyard with lots of landers and rovers around.

Mr. Isaacman also restated his critique of NASA’s handing of the Boeing Starliner mission to the ISS, did not exaggerate the profits to be made in space at the moment, expressed his opinions on intelligent life elsewhere as well as the public’s interest in UFOs, and stated he expected a manned mission to land on Mars within about 10 years.

Check it out for yourself if you want to learn a little more about the man running NASA. The interview runs for about an hour.

Space Quote: SETI and the Swimming Pool

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Image (Credit): Illustration of the Drake Equation. (University of Rochester)

“My inner eight-year-old, my inner Star Trek nerd, started putting this together that we should use the data that we have and try to figure out how to pull the knowledge from 60 years of radio astronomy and apply it into this optical, visible-light astronomy. My hope in pushing this from the radio into the visible light, into the infrared, and other domains of astronomy that are so active is that we can actually push this from a hot tub to maybe an Olympic swimming pool.”

-Comment by James Davenport, an astronomer from the University of Washington, discussing the ongoing search for intelligent life (SETI) with Regina Barber, host of NPR’s Short Wave podcast. They were discussing how the SETI efforts to date equate to searching a hot-tub worth of water compared to the entire ocean. You can hear more in the episode titled “The Serious Hunt for Alien Life.”

Americans May Be a Bit Too Optimistic About Space Travel

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The latest Harper’s Index from Harper’s magazine had a few interesting statistics related to space travel and alien encounters (something discussed in Friday’s post).

Here are the two stastistics:

  • Portion of Americans in 1998 who believed that space travel would be common for ordinary Americans by 2025:  3/10
  • Portion of Americans in 1998 who believed that humans would make contact with extraterrestrial life by 2025:  1/4

Both come from a Gallup poll conducted back in 1998. You can read more about the various survey results in this Gallup story.

Given that the Artemis II mission is still struggling to get to the Moon, and the only new life we seem to have encountered was created in a laboratory by OpenAI and others, I would say we are far from this mark. However, Americans were a little better at predicting some of the social trends, including the 69 percent who expected the country would elect a Black president by 2025.

It is also good that some of the predictions were off, particularly those related to disease, disaster, and war (shown below). Then again, the respondents (76 percent) who predicted the emergence of a deadly new disease were spot on regarding COVID.

Space Stories: NASA Probes the Northern Lights, India Announces New Telescopes, and Titan May Be a Moon Merger

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Image (Credit): The northern lights from October 2013 as captured by Astronaut Mike Hopkins aboard the International Space Station. (NASA)

Here are some recent space-related stories of interest.

—Space.com “NASA Launches Twin Rocket Missions from Alaska to Study Mysterious Black Auroras“

NASA launched two rockets from Alaska this week to learn more about the electrical “circuitry” within auroras, the colorful light shows that occur when solar wind collides with Earth’s atmosphere. The missions saw two suborbital sounding rockets launch from the Poker Flat Research Range near Fairbanks, Alaska loaded with scientific equipment that will fly into the atmosphere for a short period of time to gather data. The destination for the rockets in both missions was the northern lights, or aurora borealis.

—Physics World: “India Announces Three New Telescopes in the Himalayan Desert“

India has unveiled plans to build two new optical-infrared telescopes and a dedicated solar telescope in the Himalayan desert region of Ladakh. The three new facilities, expected to cost INR 35bn (about £284m), were announced by the Indian finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman on 1 February.

—SETI Institute: “Saturn’s Moon Titan Could Have Formed in a Merger of Two Old Moons“

Recent research suggests that Saturn’s bright rings and its largest moon, Titan, may have both originated in collisions among its moons. While Cassini’s 13-year mission expanded our understanding of Saturn, the discoveries of its young rings and Titan’s rapidly shifting orbit raised new questions. Now, a study led by SETI Institute scientist Matija Ćuk proposes an explanation linking the formation of the moons and rings, centering on the possibility that Titan is the product of a moon merger.

Television: Pluribus and Kepler-22 b

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Image (Credit): NASA provide of Kepler-22 b. (NASA)

We will have to wait for season two of Apple TV’s Pluribus series before learning more about the inhabitants of the fictional Kepler-22 b, which is the source of the “virus” that turned humans in to docile livestock. In the meantime, we can look into facts about the actual exoplanet.

According to NASA, we know that Kepler-22 b is:

  • potentially a rocky world, that is larger than Earth,
  • orbits within the habitable zone of a G-type host star (similar to our sun),
  • the only exoplanet discovered around this host star to date, and
  • about 635 light-years away.

You might also remember this exoplanet from HBO Max’s series Raised by Wolves. It is the exoplanet that the main characters escape to after a brutal war on Earth. Kepler-22 b is a strange world in the series, contained odd vegetation, bottomless pits, and an acidic sea. It is not what space dreams are made of, but at least it is not sending out signals to destroy other exoplanets hundreds of light-years away.

While we may not learn anything more about Kepler-22 b from Pluribus, I suppose it may encourage a few individuals to seek out information on the Kepler mission. Who knows, it may even stimulate more interest in our SETI efforts. Then again, if this is the future of space communications, we may want to reconsider the whole enterprise.

Credit: NASA/Ames/JPL-Caltech 

Note: Under the Kepler numbering scheme, the “22” in Kepler-22 b means that it was the 22nd host star discovered, while the “b” indicates it was the first exoplanet found orbitting that host star.