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CHRIS DIBONA: Hi, everyone.
My name's Chris DiBona.
I look after some space stuff here at Google--
I mean, I'm sort of, kind of a relationship guy with Ames.
And we're pleased and honored today to have Dr. Worden with
us from Ames.
Are you-- what's the title there, Grand Poobah?
Emperor Liege?
Or what's the title they have for you at Ames?
S. PETE WORDEN: Unindicted co-conspirator.
CHRIS DIBONA: Unindicted co-conspirator.
Not a bad day in Washington, yeah.
So Pete leads NASA Ames Center, our next-door neighbor
and our landlord there for our space there.
And thank you so much for coming over--
or having us there but then coming over
and visiting us today.
Pete has a very long history both with space and working
for our country and moving science forward, which is how
I got to meet him in the first place.
Your career goes back 20 years in the Air Force?
S. PETE WORDEN: 29.
CHRIS DIBONA: 29 years in the Air Force.
And then short--
S. PETE WORDEN: 29 years, three weeks, two days.
CHRIS DIBONA: Really?
You can count it off?
S. PETE WORDEN: That's right.
CHRIS DIBONA: And when you were in the Air Force, you
worked for the Air Force Space Command.
S. PETE WORDEN: For part of my assignment, yeah.
CHRIS DIBONA: So I've always been interested in this about
you, but also about the relationship between NASA and
the Air Force.
Because there was a lot of tension at the time around the
Shuttle program, around other things, wasn't there?
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, NASA had--
CHRIS DIBONA: This is weird because you're at NASA.
S. PETE WORDEN: NASA has a long history, and the Air
Force an even longer history.
In the 1950s, many in the Air Force began to understand
space was pretty important, even in the early '50s.
And the ICBM program was--
they probably don't like me calling it, but they were
space weapons.
And so they developed ICBMs.
And about the same time, the country got very interested in
space programs in general.
And then 1957, when the Soviets surprised us with
Sputnik, there was a lot of turmoil about what we were
going to do.
And there were really two options.
One was to have the military run the space program and
expand greatly to do satellites and so forth.
And then the other one was to set up a civilian agency.
And there was a lot of turmoil back and forth.
But President Eisenhower decided that he wanted to have
the face to the world being a civil space program.
And it turns out I actually worked very closely with NASA
in the national security space program, although it's
important to understand there's really two national
security space programs.
There's the national security space program that the Air
Force leads that has things like the Global Positioning
System and communication satellites, and then there's
the other program, which I couldn't even talk about until
about 10 years ago.
But it's the National Reconnaissance Office, one of
those "no such agency" organizations that do spy
satellites.
CHRIS DIBONA: The story about how the world found out about
the NRO was when they were paying too much taxes on their
Fairfax buildings.
And people are like, well, who is this actually paying all
these taxes?
Is this the government paying taxes just so
it can remain secret?
And then they got outed because of that.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's right.
Well, there was a lot of different issues.
But we've worked very closely together
and sometimes competed.
I think probably the really interesting thing about the
history is that the Apollo program was really a surrogate
national security effort, that the Soviets and the United
States sort of mutually decided to compete in space,
and it was a surrogate for a hot war.
It was part of the Cold War.
And the issue was that whoever won that basically scared the
other one, to say that, look, don't challenge us.
Look what we can do.
And it was a closely run thing.
But it turned out most of the people that
started NASA were military.
And we still work very closely with the military, although
there have been times--
probably the most interesting one was the Space Shuttle.
When it was developed, the military decided it didn't
want anything to do with it.
And it turned out one of my predecessors as the director
of NASA Ames was Hans Mark, and he was the Secretary of
the Air Force.
And he said, by golly, we're going to rely on the Space
Shuttle, and so started to convert the whole military
space program over to use the Space Shuttle.
And they picked military astronauts, and there was a
huge launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base that
was for the Blue Shuttles.
And then the--
CHRIS DIBONA: You should have painted them blue.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, actually, we
were going to do that.
CHRIS DIBONA: It was too heavy.
Was blue the heaviest color?
S. PETE WORDEN: White is kind of a NASA color.
And blue is--
light blue, sky blue.
But it turned out the Challenger disaster occurred,
and the Air Force said, OK, that did it.
We want to use expendable boosters, which probably was a
good idea not to put everything in one-- but it's a
long history.
And my boss, the NASA administrator, Charlie Bolden,
is a Marine general.
Not all of us can be Air Force people.
CHRIS DIBONA: What rank did you achieve in the Air Force?
S. PETE WORDEN: I was a brigadier general.
CHRIS DIBONA: You were a brigadier general, yeah.
S. PETE WORDEN: Sometimes called a baby general.
It's one star.
CHRIS DIBONA: A baby general?
Just one star?
Oh, just one star.
Well, come on.
S. PETE WORDEN: I found out that nobody knows the
difference between a brigadier general and a lieutenant
general and a major general and a full general, unless
you're in the military.
CHRIS DIBONA: Yeah, I have no clue.
How many-- is that a star for every--
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah.
Full generals have four stars.
CHRIS DIBONA: And isn't the president like six stars?
Is that officially what he is?
S. PETE WORDEN: No, he's just the boss.
CHRIS DIBONA: He's just the boss.
Well, that's good.
That's really interesting.
I've just always found the relationship to be an
interesting thing to watch.
So we have questions from the audience.
But I have many little questions.
So I'm going to hit a couple other things.
You and I have been talking recently
about propulsion methods.
And you had mentioned during lunch today that you are
looking into a solar sailer mission.
Do you want to say anything about that?
S. PETE WORDEN: Sure.
I think maybe if--
take just a minute to say--
CHRIS DIBONA: It's a little far out there.
S. PETE WORDEN: No, it's not very far out.
It's pretty cool.
But--
CHRIS DIBONA: I meant time-wise.
S. PETE WORDEN: I like to think that NASA does three
things, to kind of give you an introduction.
The first one, because I'm a scientist, is science.
And we basically are trying to find out the
secrets of the universe.
And there's two fundamental ones.
One is, how did the universe begin,
and what's its structure.
And the other one is, how did life begin, and
where else is it.
And what's its future.
And much of what we do is around those topics.
The second thing NASA does is--
where a lot of the controversy is--
our human space program.
But I think we're on the verge of humanity will expand in the
solar system this century, and NASA and its partners around
the world are leading the way.
The third one we probably don't talk enough about.
And it may be the most important, is to make life
better here on Earth.
And the first A in NASA is Aeronautics.
And we're going to have to transition
sometime to green aviation.
One of the big initiatives NASA has is green aviation.
At Ames, we're doing the next generation air traffic control
system, so it affects everybody.
And the other one is really studying the Earth and
understanding how climate change affects us.
Most of the data that we base our climate change models on
is based on NASA data.
But to get to the solar sail issue is that it's really a
kind of cool concept.
I grew up on "Star Trek" and "Star Wars." As a military
guy, more "Star Wars," I guess.
But I sort of thought we ought to be building starships.
And in fact, a few years ago, we started a program between
DARPA and NASA.
But it caused enough controversy so DARPA and NASA
dropped it.
But now the private sector is picking it up,
which is really cool.
But the technology is there in the next 10, 20 years that we
can get access to near interstellar space.
And one of the cool ways to do it was actually thought of--
CHRIS DIBONA: You mean post the heliopause.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, outside.
So you're really in interstellar space.
--is, and I have to confess this wasn't Ames work.
It was actually done at Caltech and JPL, just to
mention our competitor that we love dearly, for the record.
Just as you love Microsoft and Facebook.
CHRIS DIBONA: Love's an interesting word.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, it certainly is.
But it turns out if you're going to get to near
interstellar space, you have to get very high speeds.
The highest speed object we have are the Voyagers, which
are something like 18 kilometers a second.
And the Voyager is like 120 astronomical units, which is
the distance between the Earth and the sun.
So it's just now getting close to the boundary between what's
called the heliosphere, which is where the sun dominates in
interstellar space.
And it took 30 years or so.
CHRIS DIBONA: [INAUDIBLE] how people treat that, because
we've had like 10, 12 different headlines.
We're exiting the solar system.
No, we're really doing it.
S. PETE WORDEN: No, we're not.
We're still kind of close.
But we really want to get a couple hundred
kilometers a second.
And that's possible, but hard to do.
But there was a concept about 20 years ago that said, let's
use a solar sail, just using the pressure from photons.
But the problem then is that the satellites were kind of
big and heavy.
So it was kind of hard to do it.
But with the development of these little micro, mini,
nano-satellites, whatever you want to call them, that weigh
grams, hundreds of grams, maybe, a solar sail can
actually get you at high speeds if you go close to the
sun, so like a tenth of the 10 million kilometers from the
sun, for example.
And it's a little toasty, but machines can handle that.
And you do a couple passes by that, and you might be able to
get a couple hundred kilometers a second.
So we're doing a little bit of a study on
how we could do that.
And we think it could be fairly cheap.
And there's a couple of interesting places that you'd
like to get to.
One of them is called the gravitational lens point.
The sun actually can act as a lens, so that gravity bends
the light around it.
And that's 600, 800 astronomical units out.
So if you could kind of align things right, you could maybe
image planets around a nearby star or image
the core of the galaxy.
And so it's a really cool concept, and I think it may be
the next step in what we can do.
So we're looking at how do you get these really high speeds.
But it's not too soon to start thinking about true near
interstellar missions with-- we don't have to have
wormholes or other exotic physics.
This is--
not that those aren't cool.
But--
CHRIS DIBONA: Yeah, but that's not what we're seeing in the
next 15 years.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, I don't know.
There's a guy at Johnson Space Center that's actually working
on warp drives and so on.
CHRIS DIBONA: Yeah, but isn't that one of those things that
starts with, assuming you have a wormhole handy, then you
could-- you know, that kind of thing.
Or you have a negative mass.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, I guess a lot of people--
NASA sometimes gets criticism when we work on far out stuff.
But that's our job.
CHRIS DIBONA: It is.
S. PETE WORDEN: It's reasonable for an agency like
NASA to have a few people that are really
looking at exotic stuff.
And most of the stuff is rubbish.
But if somebody doesn't work on it, you never know--
CHRIS DIBONA: When rubbish begins and facts--
S. PETE WORDEN: I mean, there's a guy by the name of
Nikola Tesla that did a lot of rubbish, but a few other
interesting things like alternating current and other
ideas everybody thought was bad.
And so I tend to refer to it as fruitcake science, but
fruitcakes can be delicious.
CHRIS DIBONA: Yeah, they can be, especially if you put
enough bourbon in.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's right.
CHRIS DIBONA: Or cognac.
I don't know what you put in fruitcake.
So near interstellar space is interesting, but what about
going to see the closest other solar systems?
If you had to game this, how would you get there in the
next 30 years?
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, speed is--
CHRIS DIBONA: It's about speed, right?
S. PETE WORDEN: It's all about speed.
And--
CHRIS DIBONA: And then deceleration.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, initially you just fly by.
But I think by the end of the century, we'll be looking at
things even on our present course.
One of the things I'm kind of intrigued with, and since I'm
here at Google, you guys got a lot of money, you say--
that if you have some extra, we'd be happy to help.
But the--
CHRIS DIBONA: We just bought [INAUDIBLE] theory, you know.
S. PETE WORDEN: Let the attorneys note that I wasn't
asking for any money.
But one of the ideas we've got about speed is supposing we
did a race, a space race that you set a race track, say 1/10
of an astronomical unit in from the sun and 1/10 of an
astronomical unit out, and you had a cup and let the private
sector compete.
Whoever did that the fastest every three or four
years gets this cup.
I mean, people spend hundreds of millions on
the America's Cup.
And I think these kind of things are
going to be a big deal.
And all kidding aside, the private sector is increasingly
important for our space effort.
Private sector space endeavors, whether it's to
make money mining asteroids or whether it's to do cool things
like get to interstellar space, or just leave a legacy,
is I think the next step.
And a speed race is kind of a neat idea that--
so OK, the first winner goes 30 kilometers a second.
And you find after a while, people are motivated to say, I
want to get up to a couple thousand kilometers a second.
That starts to give you the ability to really think about
nearby stars in decades.
Still a ways to go, but at some point, the nearby stars
are an interesting target.
Probably our first job as NASA is to figure out what's there.
And the next big thing that NASA's going to do in science
is to see if we can image planets like the Earth around
nearby stars.
One of NASA's missions, which Ames is lead for, is Kepler.
And we're finding that essentially every star in the
galaxy has planets.
Probably 10%, 20% of them have planets that are in the
habitable zone.
A lot of those might be Earth-sized.
So that means a lot of these nearby stars are likely to
have planets that at least what we know would be in the
habitable zone about the size of the Earth.
So our next big step is how do we image those.
And the technology--
CHRIS DIBONA: And terraform them.
No, wait.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yes.
Well, actually, I'll tell you, there is a way--
and I have to-- this isn't my idea.
You might have heard of Craig Venter.
He came up with this a few years ago, said if you
actually wanted to send something or go to those
places, it wouldn't be Captain Kirk and the Enterprise, this
sort of 10,000 ton ship.
He said, you might be able to send a little box.
And the--
CHRIS DIBONA: Put kudzu in the box.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, it's better than that.
You actually beam it genetic information.
It then prints out the genetic-- the correct--
and uses the raw materials to start life there.
You could print out humans or---
CHRIS DIBONA: [INAUDIBLE].
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, whatever you wanted.
And I suspect that that may be the way we'll spread to the
nearby stars.
Of course, there might already be life there that might have
a different point of view, but--
CHRIS DIBONA: Whatever.
S. PETE WORDEN: The little box lands, and that's--
if you see a little box out in the backyard, be suspicious.
CHRIS DIBONA: Go ahead and step on it.
Along those lines, we've had, I think, "we" meaning the
world through NASA's efforts, we've had remarkable success
with the robotic missions.
And I understand that a lot of that's come out of Ames.
How much would you say that--
I don't want to exaggerate.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, it's important to--
most of our science is our robotic missions.
And Ames certainly has played a big role in that,
particularly recently.
But there's a lot of other parts of NASA.
Obviously, the biggest centers for robotic missions are JPL
and Goddard Space Flight Center.
We've sort of focused at Ames on small things, cheap things,
which is good in this fiscal environment.
CHRIS DIBONA: You had a lot of missions this year.
I seem to remember you showing me a poster, and it's like 32,
I want to say.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, there's something like 20 to 30
satellites in the next year that we're launching.
Most of them are little tiny ones.
But let me talk about robotics for--
the thing that Ames really works on is autonomy.
I don't want to use the word artificial intelligence
because that sort of raises scary things.
CHRIS DIBONA: Well, people-- that's a loaded term.
S. PETE WORDEN: But autonomy is something.
So a good bit of the autonomous work, of how do we
program something to be autonomous, is
based on Ames's work.
So it may say JPL on the outside, but it's got some
Ames on the inside.
They might not admit that, but It does.
CHRIS DIBONA: Southern California.
S. PETE WORDEN: But this is a really exciting area.
And you mentioned the work we're doing with Google on the
Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab.
Now I didn't pick the AI part.
CHRIS DIBONA: [INAUDIBLE].
S. PETE WORDEN: But we are convinced that perhaps the
next step to autonomy is a quantum computational
capability.
And if I can--
and I'm probably going to get this goofed up, but the
problem with a conventional computer is that each time you
add a variable, you double the size of the computer.
So it's an exponential function.
So you get above 32, 33 variables, you
can't solve the problem.
In principle, a quantum computer is linear with the
number of variables and the number of quantum bits.
So you could have hundreds of variables.
Now say I want a robot to go into a cave on Mars and look
for life, which is something we would want to do.
Inside caves on Mars, which we know there's quite a few, is a
place that you might have extant Martian life.
Not likely to be other than bacteria or
something like it, but--
CHRIS DIBONA: I'll take what I can get.
S. PETE WORDEN: You never know.
But you've never been in a Martian cave before.
And if you have a robot that you want to send some place--
say if I want a robot to open that door.
That's 15, 20 variables.
That's pretty straightforward.
But if I want a robot to open every door at Google, that's
hundreds of variables.
So I can't solve that problem.
CHRIS DIBONA: We call them Nooglers.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's right.
CHRIS DIBONA: Interns.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's why you have a card, because
you don't have to--
even a simple robot can use a card.
But the idea is it's probably--
a human brain handles thousands of variables.
We'd like to put some of that capability in that robot to go
to a place that you wouldn't send humans.
And potentially, if you can get a quantum computing device
that will operate at the temperatures and compactly
enough, that may be the key to us really exploring places
like Mars, other places in the solar system.
So we're quite excited about the autonomy part of it and
that robots are going to increasingly do more and more.
Now, we still think they're going to have a lot of
interface with humans.
The robot's going to go hand in claw with humans when we
expand into the solar system.
But this is really where I think the future is.
CHRIS DIBONA: Have we ignored the gas giants too much?
S. PETE WORDEN: That's an interesting question.
CHRIS DIBONA: You like landing on things, it seems.
There's not much to land on.
S. PETE WORDEN: No, you can float around in the
atmosphere, though.
You might have noticed we had an airship
for a while at Ames.
It's gone now.
It's floating in Jupiter.
But atmospheres are very interesting.
And there is some tenuous information that suggests you
could have life in Venusian atmosphere, for example, and
ideas that you could have interesting chemistry and life
in perhaps gas giant atmospheres.
Very speculative, but we've got to get in there.
And--
CHRIS DIBONA: They're a little toxic.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, yeah, that's so.
But there's not very many place that aren't toxic, yes.
So the idea of using actually balloons and airships in some
of these atmospheres is an interesting one.
And the chemistry is pretty exciting.
So that's an area that's a lot of interest in.
But there's so many cool places in the
solar system to go.
My favorite is Titan.
There's lakes on Titan.
CHRIS DIBONA: Methane lakes, right?
S. PETE WORDEN: Methane or ethane, depending on your
preference.
CHRIS DIBONA: I think Pete was telling me about basically the
concept of water ice being so hard, so frozen, that it
appears to be the land mass for the methane lakes.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, the rocks on Titan are probably
ice, water ice.
But there's rain that appears.
It's ethane or methane rain.
CHRIS DIBONA: No smoking.
S. PETE WORDEN: What?
CHRIS DIBONA: No smoking.
S. PETE WORDEN: No.
Well, there's no oxygen, as far as we know,
so maybe it's fine.
CHRIS DIBONA: You can try.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah.
Although the temperature is kind of chilly.
But you do have liquids, and there's complicated
hydrocarbons.
That's one of the more interesting places in the
solar system to look for life.
And it may be very strange life.
And to really understand what's the range.
But there are organisms on Earth that are methanogenic
that have various interesting chemistry.
There are strange chemistry going on on Titan that could
be explained by some methanogenic life.
So it's a good place to look, but it's got lakes and
mountains and rain and so on.
So kind of a whole ecosystem.
And in fact, there was a proposal that NASA I think is
still considering to actually send a boat to land on one of
these lakes.
CHRIS DIBONA: Yeah, you had a simulation of sorts
on how to do this.
S. PETE WORDEN: And that's pretty cool.
Now being an Air Force guy, that's really a Navy job.
But I think--
CHRIS DIBONA: Mr. Bolden now.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, he's a Marine.
It's a Department of the Navy job.
But the number of places to look for life, even in the
solar system, we've just begun to look.
Mars is an obvious choice.
There's clearly water processes going
underneath the surface.
You actually see with some of the data we have that in
spring, you see water flowing out from some of the glaciers.
I've mentioned the Venusian atmosphere.
In fact, we don't even know if there's life in the upper
Earth's atmosphere.
It's very hard to sample.
There's a moon of Jupiter, Europa, that's a giant ocean.
CHRIS DIBONA: That's my favorite.
That's because I read too much science fiction.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's right.
Well, there's an ice crust.
You've got to get through the ice somehow.
CHRIS DIBONA: We have Minnesotans you can--
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, they were thinking about putting a
nuclear thing that melts through.
CHRIS DIBONA: Sure.
S. PETE WORDEN: But I kind of like--
CHRIS DIBONA: That's completely reasonable.
S. PETE WORDEN: You have to remember, I'm an
Air Force guy again.
I like the idea of taking an asteroid and running it into
it and blowing a hole in it.
And then you can go.
CHRIS DIBONA: And it's more organic.
It's not really a nuclear thing at that point.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yes, it's more sure.
And then the water's right there, and then--
CHRIS DIBONA: Hey, you might get a cool splash.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's right, yes.
But seriously, impacts are something--
CHRIS DIBONA: We learned a lot from the Jupiter impacts of
the Shoemaker-Levy.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, and Ames's mission a few years
ago, the Lunar Crater
Observing and Sensing Satellite.
We ran the upper stage of the booster into the lunar poles
and were able to prove that there was large amounts of ice
and other volatiles so that if you wanted to potentially have
a long term outpost on the moon, that the resources are
there to support it.
CHRIS DIBONA: As you get further out from the sun, of
course, solar starts breaking down.
It's not a great source of power.
Are we moving back to RTGs?
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, power obviously in the outer solar
system is an issue.
There's a couple different approaches to it.
One is that you just make things very small and
efficient and get them out there quickly.
And I think the technology using so-called CubeSats, that
are sort of 10 centimeters on a side or maybe three of them
together or six of them, is getting to the point that we
could actually send a mission and we think use electric
propulsion and get out to the outer solar
system fairly quickly.
So you've got enough power without having to use nuclear.
But when you have bigger things, they only feasible
power source in the outer solar system is nuclear.
And so it's been quite an issue.
The standard power sources are the radioactive decay systems.
They use plutonium.
And in addition to being highly radioactive, it's just
toxic in its own right.
So it's something that has to be handled very carefully, and
there's always concerns about the launch.
But we've developed the protocols to do that.
But during the Cold War, we made a lot of--
CHRIS DIBONA: Allowances.
S. PETE WORDEN: No, we made a lot of nuclear devices.
So one of the side products of this was a lot of the isotopes
of plutonium we could use for this.
But one of the unfortunate things about the end of the
Cold War from some people's perspective is that we don't
have those byproducts anymore.
So one of the things facing NASA and the Department of
Energy is to restart the ability to produce that.
CHRIS DIBONA: Well, it's not just those, but we've had some
real problems sourcing medical radioisotopes as well.
S. PETE WORDEN: And I think this is a broader social and
societal challenge is that nuclear things
are scary to people.
And that was one of the bad side
effects of nuclear weapons.
So I think it's clearly something we have to identify.
One of the ways to get highly efficient propulsion for
humans is to use a nuclear thermal rocket, where you use
a reactor to heat a propellant, and you can get
two or three times the thrust efficiency that you get out of
a chemical rocket.
Or use a nuclear reactor in the outer solar system.
We have a lot of electric power to
use an electric thruster.
So those are challenges.
And right now, they're pretty expensive.
And it's an area that I think eventually, we will see
nuclear power being key to a lot of activities
in the solar system.
But fortunately, as long as you're in the inner solar
system, the efficiency of a solar system per unit weight
is actually more than a nuclear system.
So we think out to Mars, we can use
solar electric systems.
And in fact, NASA's newest initiative is going to use
solar electric power to actually
go move around asteroids.
And I think it's an incredibly cool thing.
And everybody says, well, why aren't we going back to the
moon or on to Mars?
Well, we are going to Mars.
But in the meantime, rearranging the inner solar
system is kind of a neat thing.
And asteroids are threats.
But solar electric power seems to be sufficient
to do a lot of that.
So it's kind of a neat area.
CHRIS DIBONA: If you can just tell me briefly what you think
of the iodine plasma propulsion systems proposed
out of University of Michigan.
We've talked a bit about it, but let's talk as if we hadn't
[INAUDIBLE].
S. PETE WORDEN: One of the important points is how do you
get a CubeSat-- and I'll get to that in a second--
how do you get a CubeSat out--
we have a lot of CubeSats, these little things in low
Earth orbit.
And they're doing pretty neat stuff.
But how do you get them out in the solar system?
You can use a chemical rocket, but then the chemical rocket
is a lot bigger than them.
Or you can use electric propulsion, which is very
efficient, but the trouble is that it's slow.
So there are some ideas, and one of the really cool ones
was to use iodine and to heat it directly using an electric
system in a CubeSat that looks like we can get a CubeSat
propulsion system that could get us out even to the outer
parts of the solar system in short order.
There's a group at the University of Michigan.
There's a professor, Ben Longmier,
who's working on that.
And we're pretty excited about it because it used to take
hundreds of millions or billions to get anywhere
outside Earth orbit.
But if you could have a CubeSat that weighs 10 or 15
kilograms and get it to the outer solar system in a year
or so, the CubeSat may cost $1 million or $2 million, that is
a revolutionary change that says now the whole solar
system is easily and cheaply accessible to scientists.
So we're very excited about it.
It's ready for proof of concept, we think.
And it really is the key to interplanetary
CubeSats, we think.
CHRIS DIBONA: Go ahead.
AUDIENCE: So a long time ago, Ames worked on something
called the Ames hard suit.
And I thought it was pretty cool.
I guess it was killed for various reasons.
Will we ever see anything like that in the future?
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, one of the critical issues now is
where do we go with humans.
And Ames is still heavily involved in human factors, and
we have some work on suits.
Some of those concepts continue to be developed by
NASA, mostly at the Johnson Space Center.
And I believe most of the technology in that one is now
being pursued at the Johnson Space Center.
However, for the next--
probably until the 2030s, most of NASA's work in deep space
will be with asteroids, maybe the moons of Mars.
In which case, the current suits are probably sufficient.
But I think that these ideas like that, when we do operate
on a planetary surface in about 15 years, are going to
be critical to it.
So the work continues.
Our folks are involved in it.
But it's not something that is aggressively being pursued.
AUDIENCE: Most of what you're doing is more interesting than
99% of TV, except when you watch it live on NASA TV,
which is as boring as possible.
So what do you do to make all the exciting things you're
doing more of a spectator sport to really
get America's attention?
S. PETE WORDEN: That's a very good question.
And basically, you folks at Google do a lot to help us
with that by allowing people to have virtual presence and
doing things like Google Hangouts.
That really gives folks the opportunity to be there and be
involved in it.
In fact, this week, we developed something called a
space shop, which is kind of a 3D printer, additive, laser
manufacturing thing.
There's a Google Hangout on Friday, and there's about a
million young people we expect to-- they're kind of Google
Hangout campers.
And so I think that the important point is to use this
new technology to let people ride along with us, things
like Google Glass.
And so it's just making use of that technology.
Of course, there's always a lot of controversy.
I learned the hard way to be careful
about things like Twitter.
Well, I will tell you.
As you can tell, I was an Air Force officer.
But when we did LCROSS, when we launched it, I was using
Twitter pretty regularly.
And I had a few thousand followers.
It was pretty good for a scientist.
So I went to the final readiness review, the launch
readiness review at Kennedy Space Center.
And this was the first time I got to sit at the adult table,
which there's like 300 or 400 people in the room, and
there's this big wooden table, and the actual people that
have primary to say, go.
And so they launch vehicles, go.
Range, go, weather, so on and so forth.
And the primary payload was the Goddard Space Flight
Center, go.
And so I had the secondary.
And they said Ames.
And I said, Ames Research Center is go for the first
precision bombing run on the moon.
And--
[LAUGHTER]
S. PETE WORDEN: So I got that reaction, and so I said, well,
that's pretty cool.
I'll put it on Twitter.
That was a big mistake, really big mistake.
People put two and two together to get 86.
And they said, you know, he used to be an Air Force
general and was involved with some other lunar mission that
had rumors that it had found aliens.
And some of the astronauts found aliens or said they
found aliens.
And so they figured out, aha, this is a secret CIA plot.
There's an alien base on the moon, and NASA has been
enlisted by the CIA to bomb it.
And so it was--
and I told the scientists when they complained, ah, nobody'll
pay any attention to that.
CHRIS DIBONA: Nobody's going to pay attention to this.
S. PETE WORDEN: Of, course the next call I got was from the
administrators that several congressmen are quite upset
and want to have a hearing about the--
by the way, LCROSS hit within 100 meters of its aim point.
The aliens are gone.
Everything's fine.
AUDIENCE: Awesome.
I was going to add, the only thing missing is the drama.
It would have been worth taxpayer dollars, in my
opinion, to have sent cameras in advance to be on the ground
watching you hopefully hit the ground.
We should double the budget of any mission to include
multiple HD live streams to add some drama to it.
S. PETE WORDEN: I love the idea of doubling our budget.
But it's--
[LAUGHTER]
CHRIS DIBONA: TV studios on the moon.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's right.
I think it's a good point.
We--
CHRIS DIBONA: It's a point.
S. PETE WORDEN: Why don't you send somebody with Google
Glass there to--
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So I'm curious about what you think the role of private
versus NASA will be in human space exploration.
I know companies like Interplanetary Resources were
founded to send probes to go out and collect resources.
And it seems like the solar system is opening up to
private industry.
But do you ever think there'll be a motive for private
companies to take over the human exploration part or if
that'll always be NASA's domain?
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, I'm interested that here at Google
you ask me that.
On your website about five years ago, there was an
advertisement for some company called Virgle that was
recruiting people to go to settle Mars.
Now it turned out it was April 1, but it had a message from
Larry and Sergey.
It had another one from Richard Branson.
It was kind of a cool thing.
I'm not sure they were joking, either, but that's--
but that really leads to the point.
CHRIS DIBONA: Might have been a couple of years off.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, it might have been.
But that NASA's job is to develop technology, to be the
explorers and to go out and find out what's there.
But I think actually, if we're talking about people
eventually living and settling on Mars and other places,
that's almost undoubtedly going to
be the private sector.
And the cost of doing that is beginning to go down.
In fact, just yesterday, there was a team meeting at Ames.
There's a private endeavor called Inspiration Mars, which
is Dennis Tito, who is himself fairly wealthy, has set up
this program to send two people to fly by Mars.
About every 13, 15 years, there's an alignment of the
planets that you can do what's called a free return
trajectory.
So you can send a capsule, and it doesn't need any
propulsion.
It'll kind of boomerang back to the Earth.
And in 2018 is the next one.
And so he's trying to do that.
NASA is working with them to help them.
They have agreements with three or
four of the NASA centers.
And I think there's a good chance that they'll do that.
Now, they're not landing on Mars.
But the era when the private sector can begin to do these
kinds of things is upon us, and they are doing it.
Their view is they want to send one male, one female,
maybe a husband and wife, to fly by Mars.
I'll probably get in trouble for this, but I have to tell a
little story my wife said on that.
She says, oh, I can see it now.
They're gone 501 days, which is how long it takes.
They'll open the capsule.
The wife will get out, dazed and confused, and not remember
anything, and the husband will be dead by mysterious
circumstances.
But--
CHRIS DIBONA: Martians.
S. PETE WORDEN: But seriously, I think that we're seeing more
and more interest in the private sector.
The private sector can go to the space station now.
You can get a ticket.
There are people talking about flybys around the moon.
So I think a lot of folks in this room will have an
opportunity in your lifetime to consider private
expeditions, maybe even settlement to missions to
places like Mars and lunar poles and maybe other--
asteroids.
AUDIENCE: Before we can go out into the solar system or even
extra-solar, we still have to get out of this blasted
gravity well.
And over the years, we've heard a variety of different
techniques, some alternative techniques.
And I was just curious to get your opinion or NASA's
opinions, if those are any different, on things like the
railgun for inanimate stuff, space tethers for elevators
for animate stuff, and of the Skylon engine, a fairly recent
suggestion, a version of things that have been tried
before, but that idea that a space plane can actually take
off and land like normal but get us into orbit.
Are any of these viable?
S. PETE WORDEN: I think a lot of these ideas are viable.
A lot of it had to wait for technology to catch up.
I personally, in my career, was involved in the DCX Delta
Clipper program, which the idea was to build a single
stage to orbit.
It probably was premature.
But I now see that SpaceX is actually doing it, although so
far they've just duplicated what we did 20 years ago.
I want to add that 20th anniversary of that flight is
next month.
So things like the Skylon engine is an area that NASA's
discussed with--
there's a British company doing that, very exciting.
So some of these technologies look really interesting.
One that we're working at Ames is microwave thermal rockets
that, rather than carrying both an oxidizer and a fuel,
you just carry a propellant.
You beam the energy, using microwaves.
That heats the propellant, and it gives you, say, three times
the efficiency of a conventional rocket engine.
We have some funding from the Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency.
We're going to be testing that here in the next year.
We're testing it in the US.
Well, we've tested it indoors here, but it
doesn't go very far--
fortunately.
But we'll be testing that in Southern California and
eventually in New Mexico, with the Air Force support.
So a lot of these things look very promising.
Transportation is hard.
And the other side of this is, can we just do conventional
rockets more efficiently?
And we're seeing the private sector make great progress in
that, and not just one company.
Everybody talks about SpaceX, which is a spectacular
success, but there are others doing the same thing.
So I think the same time we're trying to make conventional
propulsion cheaper, some of these other things that are
coming along--
so the next 20 years are going to be very exciting in
propulsion.
I think you'll see some real breakthroughs.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
So Dr. Worden, you talked about making a space race for
speed to get people excited about space.
And I was wondering how you balance this kind of
competition to get people excited with collaboration, in
that there's a lot of redundancies in technology
being developed by various private sector and government.
And I know, Mr. DiBona, you're very involved with open
source, so I was wondering if I could get your take on the
balance between collaboration and competition.
S. PETE WORDEN: Why don't I let Chris answer that first?
CHRIS DIBONA: So one of the things that I've tried to
encourage when I've had the chance, with the federal
government here in the United States as well as foreign
governments, is that when they approach contracting
procurement, that they ensure that knowledge is shared.
Now the Defense Department has had some good luck with this,
especially around stealth and the rest, basically forcing
Northrop and Lockheed to give each other each other's
secrets, as it were.
But we seem to have moved away from that in a way, which has
been too bad.
I would really value your thoughts on that.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, NASA and its predecessor agency, the
National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics, were really based
on free and open exchange of information and publishing.
I think an unfortunate trend has been to put a lot of
restrictions.
And some of them are legitimate.
There's legitimate concerns about sensitive technologies.
But I'm always a great advocate of openness, openness
in information.
So you want to let people that want to do cool things have
access to all the information, as much as you can.
I think that--
I spent much of my career as a Cold Warrior on the US side.
And I think the reason the US prevailed in that was because
we had an open society with open exchange of information.
So that it makes possible the collaboration.
And I think internationally, that's even more so.
On the other hand, people are motivated by competition.
So when you go see a sports game, nobody's very interested
in both sides helping to get the football in the end zone.
Oh no, you run it in.
No, please.
The score is 8,000.
So I think that we're humans, and there's
a competitive spirit.
So the key is balancing these two things.
And capitalism is a pretty good system to do that, as
long as it's not unconstrained.
And I think that it's NASA's job as a government agency to
make sure the information is there for everybody to use,
but within our own efforts, to kind of make sure that the
competition doesn't become destructive.
I mean, there's always--
one of the big challenges of NASA is that we compete for
especially smaller science missions.
There's an announcement of opportunity, and OK, we want
to mention to study
astrophysics, and people compete.
And NASA centers are parts of that.
I mentioned JPL and Goddard and other places.
We compete with them.
Sometimes we team with them.
But I think that's good, as long as the competition is for
a specific item, and it's not sort of like I'm going to
compete to the death with those folks.
And we have a big challenge now within NASA is, what part
of our capability we preserve for competition that might
actually be duplicative across centers?
So I think there's a balance there, and we do
pretty well at it.
But I think in a societal sense, I'm really with the
idea of open source, open information.
Everybody should have access to the same information so
that they can compete effectively
against each other.
And a good competitor is one that you want to
team with next time.
I always find that if we're in a competition at Ames, and one
of the other centers is on the winning team, and I'm on the
losing team, I'm the first one to want to go down there and
say to the director there, can I buy you a drink?
Maybe we can work with you next time.
CHRIS DIBONA: Maybe you need some help over there.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on where NASA is going with
heavy boost, large launchers.
S. PETE WORDEN: I think there's really the question,
and this is one we don't have a good answer for.
Is it better to have--
well, if you want to send a human expedition to Mars,
that's going to be something.
CHRIS DIBONA: Say you want to send a human to Mars.
S. PETE WORDEN: That's to land on Mars and come back.
That's an important point.
That--
CHRIS DIBONA: 30,000 people volunteering to go one-way.
S. PETE WORDEN: People are going to go one-way to Mars to
settle it at some point.
But you need something that's big, probably like at least
the size of the International Space Station.
So is it more cost effective to launch a lot of things and
put it together in space or to have a single big booster?
Historically, it's the bigger booster is cheaper.
So if I have a booster that's twice as big, the per-kilogram
cost is lower than using smaller ones.
We don't know if that's always going to stay that way.
So what NASA's doing in our internal efforts is we have
the space launch system.
We are aiming at something eventually over 100 tons.
In fact, Congress says they want 120 metric tons.
Our first versions will have less than that.
So we're doing that.
The private sector is also looking at
larger and larger systems.
SpaceX has the Falcon Heavy, which I
think is 60 or 70 tons.
They also have something that I think is called
the BFR, the Big--
I was told that stands for Big Falcon--
CHRIS DIBONA: Fantastic--
S. PETE WORDEN: --Rocket.
Big Falcon Rocket.
So that remains to be seen.
At the same time, there may be ideas that if you build a lot
of them, small ones will be more efficient.
So I don't have the answer.
But right now, I'd probably bet on the BFR.
AUDIENCE: Could you walk us through the day
of a NASA Ames director?
How do you divide your time, and what are you most excited
or worried about?
CHRIS DIBONA: Do you like bacon for breakfast?
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, I live on Moffett Field, so I get an
extra 45 minutes sleep over everybody else, so that's
always good.
But NASA has 10 centers, and our headquarters is in
Washington, DC, which is where I want it.
That's one of the coolest things about Ames is we're the
farthest away from the headquarters.
CHRIS DIBONA: Visit the dish and [INAUDIBLE].
S. PETE WORDEN: But that means that they are at work at 5:00
AM my time.
And so usually the first hour or two is spent in
interactions with headquarters, discussions with
one of the leaders about why did you do that.
But seriously, we're a big agency.
We have to deal a lot with--
I sort of mentioned, we have 550 board members or so, the
members of the House and Senate.
So there's a lot of interactions that one does
there and answering questions.
And I know it's hard for anybody to understand this,
but they don't all agree sometimes.
And it's sort of very strange.
But I mean, there's a lot of interactions there.
Frankly, I have 2,500 people working for me, and they're
all very creative, so that means sometimes there are
issues that need to be worked with.
And I tell people I have 2,500 children, and I'm one of them.
So it's--
trying to figure out how we maximize the
opportunities there.
But I usually spend a few hours a day just interacting
with the really cool stuff that's going on.
Tomorrow, for example, all day long is the mission readiness
review for LADEE, which is our next lunar mission, launched
on September 6.
And so that's a really fun day.
Now, it's fun unless somebody says, excuse me, there's a
major problem in the propulsion system.
And then you kind of, oh, my god, what do we do with that.
So we spend a fair bit of time with that.
The other thing is, particularly this time of
year, we have 800, 900 students at Ames.
We have a bunch of folks right here.
And I really enjoy interacting with the
students, and I think it's--
so we try to spend a fair bit of time.
I spend a lot of time discussing people's future,
discussing what's my favorite wine.
But--
CHRIS DIBONA: What is your favorite wine?
S. PETE WORDEN: Whatever somebody else is buying.
But every day is different.
But I gotta tell you, working for NASA, and I hope this is
true for everybody, is you really want to get up in the
morning and go in and work because it's fun.
We're doing cool stuff.
I used to spend a lot of time on airlines.
And--
CHRIS DIBONA: Aeronautics.
S. PETE WORDEN: Yeah, that's right.
Well, one of the advantages.
one of the actual positive things about sequestration, is
that we've really cut travel.
And we've started to use a lot more virtual presence.
For example, this morning, this week, the week of the
20th of July is a significant date for
NASA, the Apollo landing.
And so we always have the Lunar Science Forum.
And so we'd typically have 500, 600, 700 people at Ames.
And this year, we decided to save money.
We're going to do it virtually.
So I spent the first hour this morning on the
virtual global meetings.
First time we've done that.
And so that's kind of the wave of the future, again.
You mentioned, how do you do things.
So every day is different.
CHRIS DIBONA: Sort of like turning your own in-person
manned flight into a robotic mission.
S. PETE WORDEN: Exactly.
CHRIS DIBONA: Where you just send a
little box with packets.
S. PETE WORDEN: It's important, though.
Of course, you have to remember that you're actually
here, being broadcast.
Because there were a couple incidents where we had NASA
employees that were in their kitchens.
CHRIS DIBONA: As long as they're in their kitchens and
not their bathrooms.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, you could sometimes hear whoosh in
the background.
So there are downsides to virtual presence, too.
AUDIENCE: Where do you see Silicon Valley and NASA Ames
with the privatization of space?
S. PETE WORDEN: Well, it's clear to me that privatization
of space is happening, as I mentioned earlier, and that
Silicon Valley is powering that.
I'm really proud that NASA has a center in Silicon Valley,
and I think it's really leading a lot of that.
It's not the only place, but I can't imagine a more exciting
place to be in the world than Silicon Valley for anything.
And space is no different from that.
The sort of spirit of entrepreneurship, you feel it
here at Google.
You feel it any place in the valley or in San Francisco.
And it's going to get us to the stars.
And it really is that public-private partnership.
We're really proud of working with not just Google but our
other partners here in Silicon Valley.
And this is the future.
You never know--
what was it Yogi Berra says, the thing about the future is
you never know about it or something?
And it's where things are going to go.
But we're seeing a lot of the private sector space efforts
really have their origin here in Silicon Valley.
Elon Musk was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and a lot of the
other companies, I know of at least a dozen space startups
here that are doing really well and privatizing things.
So I think there'll be a Silicon Valley
on Mars soon someday.
That'll be where they'll build the interstellar starship.
CHRIS DIBONA: Thanks a lot for coming over and being here.
S. PETE WORDEN: Well thank you.
[APPLAUSE]