If you’re fascinated by the idea of humans traveling through space and curious about how that all works, you’ve come to the right place.

“Houston We Have a Podcast” is the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center from Houston, Texas, home for NASA’s astronauts and Mission Control Center. Listen to the brightest minds of America’s space agency – astronauts, engineers, scientists and program leaders – discuss exciting topics in engineering, science and technology, sharing their personal stories and expertise on every aspect of human spaceflight. Learn more about how the work being done will help send humans forward to the Moon and on to Mars in the Artemis program.

On Episode 113, science journalist and Apollo historian Andrew Chaikin discusses why the Moon is a desirable object for exploration and makes the case for applying the lessons of the Apollo lunar program to NASA’s Artemis Program. This episode was recorded on August 21st, 2019.

Transcript

Pat Ryan (Host): Houston, we have a podcast. Welcome to the official podcast of the NASA Johnson Space Center. This is Episode 113, “Lessons of Apollo”. I’m Pat Ryan. On this podcast, we talk with scientists, engineers, astronauts and other folks to get the story about what’s going on in America’s space exploration program, especially with the Artemis Program. And our renewed effort to return American astronauts to the Moon. The Apollo Program started in the 1960’s with a very specific goal and a deadline. Putting astronauts on the Moon and returning them to Earth before the end of that decade. Well, likewise NASA’s Artemis Program today is working to return astronauts to the Moon by 2024, to explore with new technologies and systems. And to collaborate with commercial and international partners to establish a sustainable presence there that will prepare us to go on to Mars. We’re talking about Artemis a lot on the podcast, including today’s conversation with a man who knows a lot about the Moon as a destination and about the history of exploration efforts to get there. Science journalist and Apollo historian, Andrew Chaikin. His 1994 book, A Man on the Moon, detailed all of the Apollo missions. And it was the basis for the 1998 Emmy winning, HBO miniseries, From the Earth to the Moon. Chaikin started his career as an intern at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory during the NASA Viking Program that sent two probes to Mars. And he’s worked as a journalist in books, magazines and all manner of publications for some 40 years. And Chaikin was here in Houston recently as a visiting instructor in the JSC Academy of Engineering. He was here to give a presentation about using the lessons of Apollo to be successful in our effort to return to the moon. And I got a chance to go into that with him, as well as talk about his career path. The reasons the Moon is a desirable object of exploration. And get his thoughts about the Artemis Program efforts to return American astronauts to the Moon in just a few years. And it wasn’t hard to get him to open up. Okay then. Here we go.

[ Music ]

Host: You are of an age to remember Apollo 11, as am I. Was that key for you? Or was there something else that got you interested originally in human spaceflight and putting people on other heavenly bodies?

Andrew Chaikin: Well, my interest goes back to a much earlier time. I mean, I was 13 at the time of Apollo 11. But I can remember being five years old and just being absolutely mesmerized with my childhood astronomy books. And the pictures in those books, which, you know, this is 1961. You know, hardly anybody had even been in space. But they had predictions, they had forecasts, they had beautiful illustrations of people on the Moon. People on, you know, one of the moons of Mars. People floating, you know, in a spaceship beyond Jupiter. All of those things were part of my landscape, my, my, my mental imaginary landscape when I was five years old. And I was completely just absolutely consumed with other worlds and the idea of visiting them.

Host: A lot of people got excited about going to space from the Apollo Program.

Andrew Chaikin: Yes.

Host: But unlike many of those people, you stuck with the science thing.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah.

Host: Fill us in on your background and how your career became what it became.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, you know, I’m probably like, you know, the mass major fraction of everybody here, in that I wanted to be an astronaut.

Host: Sure.

Andrew Chaikin: That was my dream. I realized, though, that because — of my less than perfect medical history, that was never going to happen. But the other thing that grabbed me was the geology of the Moon, the geology of Mars. That was something I picked up in high school. Watching the Apollo missions. The scientists who were being interviewed for the coverage of the moonwalks. And so, when I went to college, I studied geology. And. But I had another kind of identity crisis at that point because I realized as much as I love the subject, I realized that I didn’t want to be a scientist. So, I actually had a couple years after graduating from Brown University. And, you know, that was a fabulous experience because I had taken part in the first Mars landing as an intern. And, you know, my professors had helped train the Apollo astronauts. And so, I was really.

Host: And you still didn’t want to be a scientist? (Laughter)

Andrew Chaikin: Well, I realized.

Host: That’s hard to put together.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, because I have always had this sort of right brain, left brain kind of coexistence thing going on in my head. And I was, as I mentioned, the thing that drew me in was the pictures.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: The thing that drew me in was the imagination. And I loved the science. But I just realized that that wasn’t what I wanted to do day to day. And it was only a couple years after college that I kind of backed my way into journalism and writing about space at a magazine called Sky and Telescope, which is the bible, a monthly bible for amateur astronomers. And I had been a subscriber. Once I started that, and I found myself interviewing people like Gene Kranz, people like shuttle astronauts, getting the inside experience of spaceflight. That really turned me on. And it’s just been a perfect fit for me.

Host: You’ve spent the years since then. Well, as we said before, you spent a big chunk of that time focused on the Moon, right?

Andrew Chaikin: Well, and on Apollo. Because what happened was, I started, I started writing about space in 1980. And around about 1984, I thought, you know, I really want to take the next step and write a book. And it did not take very long before I realized that the book I wanted to write was about Apollo. And my mom, who was actually a very gifted writer and has published some very well-regarded short stories. She suggested, why don’t you focus on the astronauts and their experience. And so, that became the starting point for me to spend eight years writing and researching A Man on the Moon. And talking to 23 of the 24 lunar astronauts in great depth. And telling the story of the missions through the eyes of the astronauts. But I should say that to do that, if you want to get into the head of an astronaut on the Moon, particularly the later missions, you’ve got to bring in the science. Because that’s what they were there to do. So, you know, two years after Neil and Buzz walked around for a couple of hours on the moon and they never went more than a couple of hundred feet away from the limb. You know, Dave Scott and Jim Irwin were living on the Moon for three full days. They had a battery power rover to go miles across the surface. They went hundreds of feet up the side of a lunar mountain where they found rocks that dated back to the origin of the Moon itself, four and a half billion years ago. And they were lunar field geologists. So, I had to bring in my knowledge of lunar geology. Some of the first people I interviewed for that book were lunar geologists. I had to learn the engineering along the way because I don’t have any formal engineering training. But was able to get, you know, my sea legs there. And then, I would say, what I brought to bear on with Man on the Moon was a sensitivity to the human experience. And a sense of how to put myself in their place from what they were telling me in these interviews that I could then be a storyteller. And make that experience come alive on the page.

Host: You. Undoubtedly, you would agree that the reason people get more excited about lunar exploration with astronauts, as opposed to unmanned probes, is the manned part. It’s..

Andrew Chaikin: Exactly.

Host: It puts everybody else in that spot.

Andrew Chaikin: You know, what the perfect example of that is, you know, Apollo eight was the first human beings, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, Bill Anders, they were the first human beings to leave the Earth and visit another world. They didn’t land, of course. They circled the Moon. But they were the first to experience the sight of the lunar far side with human eyes. They were the first to see the Earth from lunar distance. The famous Earth rise picture that Bill Anders took become a touchstone for the, for the latter half of the 20th century. But three years before, two years before that, Lunar Orbiter, one of the lunar orbiter probes had circled the Moon and taken an Earth rise picture. And at the time, it was a big deal. It was a headline. But nothing compares to the sounds of a human voice coming to us from a place where no one has ever been. And nothing compares to having those people come back and tell us in their own words what that was like.

Host: What is was like.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: You can’t do that with a robot. Neil Armstrong once said, a robot, a human can be amused and amazed and a robot can do neither. So. You know, there. We have this innate desire in us. We all start out as explorers, right? When we’re learning to crawl, and we crawl from one room into another, that’s our moonwalk.

Host: But we’re exploring our environment.

Andrew Chaikin: We’re exploring. We are driven to do that. It’s in our DNA. And so, we want to go. We want to be. We want to have the experience of seeing what no one’s ever seen. Of knowing what no one’s ever known. And I personally have been driven by that feeling since I was five years old. And I still have that inside me. That I want to go into space. And then, come back and tell about it. I don’t know if I’ll ever get that chance. But that is what has driven me my whole life.

Host: The big word around NASA these days now is the Moon. The word is, the word is Artemis. It’s a program to return American Astronauts to the moon to stay. And in a way that’s going to support a future mission to send astronauts onto Mars.

Andrew Chaikin: Right.

Host: So, as a science journalist, and a historian, who spent a big chunk of your career on the Apollo Program and on the science of the Moon, what’s your reaction to this new/revived direction for human space exploration?

Andrew Chaikin: Well, I mean, I’m thrilled that we are putting our sights on the moon because we spent a long, long time, decades when the Moon was not cool, when it was sort of been there, done that.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: I used to say that the Moon was the Rodney Dangerfield of the Solar System [laughter]. Because it just didn’t get the respect it deserved.

Host: The respect

Andrew Chaikin: The Moon is a spectacular place. I mean, geologically, it is the gateway to the early history of the Solar System. There is no other world in our Solar System that preserves as clearly and as cleanly the very early history of the Solar System, as the Moon. And that’s because it has no plate tectonics to wipe out, you know, geologic features. There’s no wind. There’s no water. There’s no rain. That. The Moon is like, I always say that going to the Moon is like.

Host: It’s like flypaper. Things they got there, stuck there.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, it’s — the witness plate, if you think of it that way. The way they talk about in a scientific experiment.

Host: Yes.

Andrew Chaikin: So, I always say that going to the Moon is like being led into the rare book room of the Cosmic Library. And getting to page through the very first chapter of Solar System history. It’s a spectacular place. And then, you add to that, the human experience. I mean, the astronauts talk about it in terms of breathtaking beauty. These are not guys who are given to hyperbole when it comes to things like that.

Host: Not known as poets.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, some of them have a touch of the poet. Mike Collins in particular.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: But, you know, I’ve heard snatches of poetry from many of the guys. But they talk about the moon as a spectacularly beautiful place. And then, the Moon is also the only place in the Solar System where you can stand on another world and see the Earth as a planet. When we go to Mars, the Earth is going to be a bright star. It’s going to be a star like point of light in the evening or morning sky.

Host: You’ll have to squint to see that it’s blue.

Andrew Chaikin: Right. And we’re not going to have that experience that we get on the moon. So, all those reasons, I’m thrilled that we’ve set our sights back on the Moon. However, as a, in my, in my latest incarnation as a teacher of principle success in spaceflight, I must say that as hard as the technical stuff is, as hard as the rocket science is. And we all know how hard it is. We must pay attention to the human piece of the system if we want to succeed. And we must learn the lessons that Apollo has given us.

Host: I have written down a question addressed along those lines. But I’ll ask it right now. Are presumably. Well, before I ask that question. Apollo succeeded. Apollo got to the Moon. It has lessons to teach us. But it got to the moon and we did what we set out to do. And then, we stopped going.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah.

Host: Why did Apollo end so soon?

Andrew Chaikin: To understand the answer to that, you have to recognize why Apollo happened to begin with. You know, it didn’t happen because President Kennedy woke up one morning and said, by God, we’re a nation of explorers and the moon is out there waiting for us. And let’s go. No, he didn’t do that at all. What happened was he woke up one morning in April of 1961 and his advisors informed him that Yuri Gagarin had just become the first man in space.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: And this was less than four years after the, we as a nation had been embarrassed by Sputnik. And chagrined. And, you know, upstaged by a country that we thought of as a kind of a backward agrarian nation, which was now a technological superpower. Well, it happened again with Gagarin. And Kennedy was determined to show the world the strength of our free society. And to wage a battle in the Cold War, not with bombs and rock, and missiles. But with exploration and technological achievement. And Apollo was a proxy for a shooting war, as part of the Cold War struggle for hearts and minds. So, once we got to the Moon, once we beat the Soviets to the Moon, the impetus for spending on that level. You know, at its peak, Apollo was consuming over four percent of the national budget.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: That was in 1966. And that even before we got to the Moon, the budget started declining very steeply. It’s ironic to realize that even a year after Apollo 11, the summer of 1970, NASA was staring at a survival situation. All of the ambitious plans that people had offered to, the White House and to Congress, had been pretty much smacked down. And the only survivor of all those ambitious plans was the reusable space shuttle. But that had to be done on a very stringent budget. And that, you know, we can talk about the shuttle if you want.

Host: And it didn’t have [multiple speakers].

Andrew Chaikin: It wasn’t like Apollo.

Host: It didn’t have that geopolitical let’s beat the Russians thing about it.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, some of that did survive. And, and ironically, you know, the shuttle, had an effect on the Soviet Union that, you know, it was maybe even a small ingredient in the Soviet Union eventually collapsing because, you know, the Soviets were fighting a protracted war in Afghanistan, which was straining their budget. And they were also trying to react to President Reagan’s Star Wars pledge. You know, after Apollo, when the President said we were going to do something in space, you know, people took him seriously.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: Right? Because we had done that. I think of it as Babe Ruth’s called shot. You know, Kennedy gets up there and says we’re going to put people on the moon by the end of the decade. Well, by God, we did it. Well, so the Soviets thought that our shuttle was an offensive weapon.

Host: Oh, okay.

Andrew Chaikin: They actually thought that it could be a threat to them. And so, that was, as I understand it, one of the impetus behind them developing their own shuttle. But, you know, they only flew the thing once unmanned. And it was only a couple years later, a few years later that the Soviet Union collapsed.

Host: And I only said that in the sense that while the space shuttle survived, it didn’t have that, that same impetus that Kennedy gave to the Apollo Program.

Andrew Chaikin: Yes, that’s right.

Host: And it didn’t have that kind of excitement. So, the Apollo Program ended because we did what we set out to do?

Andrew Chaikin: We did what we set out to do. But I want to just make an important note here because it’s very easy in hindsight to look back and say, oh it was inevitable once Kennedy got up before Congress that we were going to get to the Moon. We were going to do exactly the way it played out. Well, the interesting thing is that people, even a couple years after Kennedy’s speech, people were already starting to say, well, wait a minute, what’s the big hurry? Why are we spending this phenomenal amount of money? Kennedy was worried about the cost. And he actually went to the UN as part of a speech to the UN in the fall of 1963 just a couple of months before he was killed. And said, why don’t we go to the Moon together with the Soviets? And Nikita Khrushchev’s son, Sergei Khrushchev, who teaches at my alma matter, Brown University. Has said that Khrushchev was actually sort of kind of maybe open to that idea. Now, whether he would have been able to carry that out or not. I mean, he was deposed. He was overthrown in the fall of 64. But it was really Kennedy’s assassination, as much as anything else, that kind of put Apollo in a, in a kind of a.

Host: Hollowed.

Andrew Chaikin: Hollowed, yes. And unassailable position.

Host: We have to do this for our dead president.

Andrew Chaikin: But public opinion was divided, you know. And, and. So, let’s go back to Artemis. Okay. We’re going to go back to the Moon. Does that mean that we’re going to recreate Apollo? No, it does not. We’ll never be able to go back to that. We’ll never be able to. You know, NASA will never again enjoy the kind of resources that we had during Apollo. We’ll never have a space program that is so high on the list of national priorities again for the reasons that it was. So, we can’t go back to the proxy for, you know, Apollo funded like a war. And carried out like a war with the same sense of national mission. What we can do is replicate the culture, the success culture of Apollo. And that’s what my focus has been for the last many years at the request of NASA. And particularly, here at JSC, Lisa Moore, who’s a fabulous person and systems engineer. And she is the creator of the JSC Engineering Academy. She is the reason that I got into teaching this material.

Host: And let’s spend a minute talking about that. You’re in Houston now. And the chance that we get to talk to you because you’re here teaching seminars. Give me, give me the thumbnail sketch of why I should sign up.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I teach a course called Principles of Success in Spaceflight. And it’s, it’s an all-day course. It’s a single day. And what I do is I show people that, you know, you guys are engineers. My audience is always NASA engineers. And I say to them, look, you know, I’m not an engineer, right? I mean, I’m not coming to you here because of my great background in engineering. I have no formal training as an engineer. What I can tell you, though, as a historian, is that the history is telling us something crucial. And that is that we have to pay attention to the human piece of the system if we want to succeed. We have to learn what Apollo showed us. We have to examine the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions that we bring to the work. So, what I do is I go back to Apollo and I say, okay, what were the behaviors that got us to the Moon? What were the attitudes, beliefs and assumptions? At the same time, as we all know, Apollo suffered a terrible tragedy with the launchpad fire in 1967 that killed the first Apollo crew inside their spacecraft. So, I look at that tragedy from a human behavior point of view. Not in a sense of looking for villains. I’m not looking for, you know, to say, so and so is incompetent or, you know, you know, a bad person or anything like that. No. It’s a cautionary tale that says, you can be the smartest person that ever walked in the door. And you can still be tripped up by these patterns of behavior. Many of which are hardwired into us. Then, I say, okay, the fire happened. How did they get out of it? You know, it was, it was, when the fire happened it was January of 67. They did a massive redesign of the spacecraft. They were back flying in October of 68 with humans. And my God, it was, you know, only less than a year later that we were on the Moon.

Host: On the Moon.

Andrew Chaikin: October 68 to July of 69. How the heck did we do that?

Host: Well, we went from the fire to landing on the Moon in two and a half years.

Andrew Chaikin: Exactly. And so, I look at the human behaviors that the people running the program at that point brought to the problem. And I look at the culture. I look at the success culture. You know, let me give a shout out to one of the giants of Apollo, who we just lost, Chris Kraft. Chris was –the reason I call him one of the giants of Apollo is that he forged the success culture of mission control. He was one of the most inspiring leaders. The people under him talk about him, you know, as if they had all been in a war together. And he was the battlefield commander.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: And the General, actually. Even above the battlefield commanders. And, you know, Chris was molded in turn by Bob Gilruth. And the culture that Gilruth and Kraft created was based on several things. First of all, physics doesn’t lie. [Laughter]. You cannot avoid the realities of nature and physics. Your engineering has to be reality based. Okay. So, you kind of have to check your ego at the door, right? There was a lot of egos, very strong personalities.

Host: Sure.

Andrew Chaikin: They would have knockdown, drag out arguments about engineering. Everybody knew it wasn’t personal. And in the end, the culture was that the best solution won. Okay. So, that’s number one. It was a very flat organization. It was not hierarchical. If you had an input to make, nobody looked at your badge to see what your GS level was before they decided if you could speak up. Now, they might not listen to you. But at least you got a chance to make your input.

Host: Or agree with you.

Andrew Chaikin: Exactly. They might not agree with you is what I should say. Yes, thank you. But one of the most important things about the success culture that Gilruth and Kraft and others established was trust. Gerry Griffin, who started out as a flight controller and became a flight director. And then, later [multiple speakers]. Yes, JSC Center Director in the early 80’s. Recently said to me that in his mind one of the reasons Apollo succeeded was the level of trust that existed in the organization, both upwards and downwards. And he said, the thing about Apollo is that we made decisions at the lowest level possible, rather than the highest. So, think about what that means. The guys down in the trenches are closest to the realities of the hardware, the behaviors of the system. They know things that the people at the top don’t know.

Host: Because they’re not there.

Andrew Chaikin: Exactly. And so, since Apollo, the tendency has been to push decisions higher and higher. And by the way, NASA’s not the only organization that’s [multiple speakers]. Right. This is human beings. This is the stuff that translates to any field of human endeavor. But think about that. The people who are in Mission Control, you know what their average age was?

Host: They were in their 20’s.

Andrew Chaikin: Mid 20’s.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: You know, when the computer alarms came up during the Apollo 11 landing. And all eyes were on Steve Bales. Well, Steve Bales was 26, for God’s sake.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: But he had a guy in the backroom named Jack Garman, who was 24. And Garman was the one who said, it’s okay, we can keep going. Right. So, these guys were handed the keys to a moon mission. And they had phenomenal responsibility. And they all. They’re still in awe of it. They’re still in awe of the leadership. The trust that the leadership placed in them. So, we have to look at that and take note of that. And look at our culture today and say, how can we create a success culture in Artemis? And that’s, you know, there’s a lot more obviously. I have a seven-hour class. You know, some of it is, for example, systems thinking. You’ve got to look at the whole system. You can’t afford to just focus on the piece that you know the best. Some of it is the critical importance of test. Now, testing is expensive. And we never will go back to the kind of budgets we had in Apollo where you could, you know. I mean, if you had an engineering showstopper in Apollo, which they did many times. Sometimes they had parallel development efforts. The lunar module ascent engine is an example.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: We can’t do that today. And, you know, if you as a manager know that there are ten different tests that you should do to do it right. But you only have money for five. You’ve got a triage. And you know that if you get away, if you’re successful with five, next time they’re going to say to you, well, you could probably get away with three.

Host: You don’t need to.

Host: Yeah. So, we’ve got to go in with our eyes open. And we’ve got to empower people to stand up and pull the rope on the train if they feel that we’re heading for the edge of the cliff. We have to have a culture, in which dissenting opinions can be heard without fear of recrimination.

Host: I remember hearing that a lot around here after the loss of Columbia. And the efforts that were made to try to figure out what happened and how do we change it. Same thing may have happened after Challenger. I wasn’t here then.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah.

Host: But does that strike a chord?

Andrew Chaikin: Absolutely. What happens when you have an accident is you have a shift in awareness. We basically, we humans are unfortunately very limited in our wiring in our ability to consciously take in data and information. We only are.

Host: I thought it was just me. [Laughter].

Andrew Chaikin: And, you know, that’s why, you know, the idea of texting and driving is a complete myth. You cannot. We do not parallel process. I don’t care what anybody says. We don’t multitask.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: We just serial process. And we’re not doing either task as well as we would if we would only focus on one thing. Well, when you have an accident, you have a shift in awareness. And you say, oh my God, how could’ve we have been so stupid as to do X Y Z? And so, you can see clearly in a way that you couldn’t before. You make changes to avoid a repetition of what just happened to you. But the problem is that we go back to our old patterns. And we’re just wired up to do that. So, one of the things that I say is we have to consciously talk about it. I teach. When I teach, I talk about something I call the reality distortion field. And I kind of coined that phrase. But then, I discovered that it had been used in one other context. You know what that context is?

Host: No.

Andrew Chaikin: You probably. Oh no. It’s been used to describe Steve Jobs. [Laughter]. As a person.

Host: Okay.

Andrew Chaikin: That he was a walking reality distortion field, right. But in my application, what I mean is that when an organization is under pressure. Whether it’s schedule pressure, cost pressure or political pressure. And we know that in spaceflight we have all [multiple speakers]. Right. That skews our perception. And it skews our perception of risk. And we can be heading to the edge of the cliff and not realize it. And it has nothing to do with intelligence. In Apollo, very smart people were affected by the reality distortion field of scheduled pressure, particularly in the case of Kennedy’s deadline. And so, they talked themselves into a belief system that said, well we’ve been using pure oxygen at high pressure on the pad for Mercury and Gemini. We’ve never had a problem. We’ll be okay in Apollo. Well, Apollo was a different ballgame than Mercury and Gemini. It was a spacecraft that was so big that people during assembly and checkout technicians were moving around inside of it. And they had exposed wires in the cockpit, which you did not have access to in Mercury and Gemini. And so, that and a number of other factors meant that. And the proliferation of flammable materials, like Velcro and so forth. And, you know, it was a time bomb waiting to go off. But very smart people. George Miller, the head of Human Spaceflight, told Congress after that fire, you know, we felt that the success we had with oxygen in Mercury and Gemini meant that we, that the risk of fire was low. That’s a remarkable thing to read for a person of his intelligence. And he was not the only one who said that and felt that. So, we have to talk about things like the reality distortion field. We have to make that part of our success practice to say, hey guys, let’s just stop for a second. Are we, are we lying to ourselves right now? We have to really be open to that, you know. It’s a very unforgiving business. I think of it as a high wire walk. And when you’re on a high wire, you can’t lie to yourself about whether you’re on top of it. And have done all the prep that you need to do. You just can’t.

Host: We were talking about Apollo and how it succeeded in its goal, the goal that was set by President Kennedy. And then, it stopped. And there have been a couple of other administration driven efforts to, let’s go back to the Moon and let’s go back to, let’s go to Mars in the past that never got any traction. In terms of Artemis, this is not the first time that we’ve started talking like this again. What do you see this time that’s different that might make this successful where the other’s weren’t?

Andrew Chaikin: To be candid, I have to say that at this early stage, I don’t know what I see that makes it different.

Host: It is pretty new.

Andrew Chaikin: It’s new. And it’s not complete. It’s not funded at the level it will need to be funded to be successful. We don’t have the hardware yet. You know, part of the problem in the past is the political cycle that every incoming into administration seems to think they should reorient NASA to their own liking. And I think part of the problem is. You know, let’s talk about the two Moon, Mars initiatives that were created in the past by Presidents HW.

Host: Presidents Bush.

Andrew Chaikin: And George W. Bush. Yes, exactly. Father and son. So, for a long-time people. I can’t tell you how many times I would hear people in the space community say, you know, if we just had a President that would get up and give us a direction and give us something inspiring to do, everything would be great. And we’d just march off and do it.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, guess what? We had that twice. And it didn’t work. And I think part of the problem is we have yet to develop a spaceflight system that is sustainable economically. I don’t mean turn a profit the way that people had envisioned for the shuttle, which turned out to be undoable with the system we had. I’m talking about figuring out how to do spaceflight in a way that doesn’t break the bank.

Host: Okay.

Andrew Chaikin: And figuring out how to do spaceflight in a way that NASA can live within its means. Now, that’s very hard today. Not because we don’t have creative people attacking a problem. We do. But NASA has so much on its plate. Think about all the things NASA has on its plate. Keeping the aging ISS going, right? Commercial crew, right? That’s like the wild west of spaceflight.

Host: Right now, right.

Andrew Chaikin: Because of the proprietary information and the challenges that presents in making engineering decisions and all that. You’ve got SLS Orion that’s a huge drain on the budget. Both of those. And, you know, they added Gateway to that.

Host: And you’re only referring to things that are in the human spaceflight part of NASA’s portfolio. NASA’s got things going on in a lot of other areas too.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah, although, the human spaceflight part of the pie is the biggest piece of the pie.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: By far. Right. I mean, you know, I’m. Listen, don’t touch my planetary program. [Laughter]. You know, I’m a staunch defender of the planetary program.

Host: And certainly, I didn’t mean to.

Andrew Chaikin: I’m just saying.

Host: That there are a lot of. There are a lot of programs going on right now.

Andrew Chaikin: Right.

Host: And you were saying that NASA is having difficulty trying to find a way that, to do what it wants to do within its means, is that it?

Andrew Chaikin: Well, I’m saying that adding Artemis to that load, to that list of ongoing, you know, budgetary drains and workforce drains. That is a challenge. You know, you can’t. Don’t imagine for a minute that just because we went to the Moon 50 years ago that we’ve, that it’s going to be a turnkey operation to go back. Let me tell you a quick little story.

Host: Sure.

Andrew Chaikin: That Max Faget told me.

Host: Okay.

Andrew Chaikin: Max Faget, of course, as you know, was the chief designer of the Mercury Spacecraft and the, which also was the basis for the Gemini Spacecraft. And then, he was the chief designer behind the Apollo Command Module. Max told me that one day in the 1970’s, he and Bob Gilruth were walking along the beach at Galveston. And there was a beautiful Moon up in the sky. And they just stopped for a few minutes to stand on the beach and look up at the Moon. And Max said that Bob Gilruth turned to him and said, you know, Max, someday people are going to try to go back to the moon. And they’re going to find out how hard it really is. And at the time Max told me that story, which was early in the 2000’s, you know, just not long before he passed away. I didn’t really appreciate the meaning of that story. But I think I do now. I think it means that there’s so much stuff that you can’t write down. There’s so much stuff that you can’t put in an experienced report. We have an enormous amount of documentation about how we did Apollo. But ultimately, there are going to be problems that we have to solve that, you know, nobody found a way to put down on paper. You can’t put it all down on paper. Every new generation has to struggle with the unpredictability and the unknowns of spaceflight in their own way. So, Artemis is going to take an enormous amount of money, an enormous amount of effort. There are going to be bumps in the road. There are going to be times when you have technical showstoppers that you really aren’t sure how you’re going to solve them. But Apollo shows us that when we devote the proper level of resources, when we practice the kinds of systems thinking, testing discipline, all of those things, what if thinking that I talk about, we can solve those problems. We can do it. But I’m, at this point, going back to your question. I have not yet seen the conditions in existence that would lead me to think that this ones going to be successful where the other ones weren’t. We’re just not. I don’t think we’re there yet.

Host: And I think that in. We haven’t even heard the word Artemis for more than a few months.

Andrew Chaikin: Right.

Host: We’re early on in the process.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah.

Host: There’s — a good chance that we’re going to take the lessons learned in Apollo that you’ve talked about and be able to know technically how to do things.

Andrew Chaikin: Yes and no. Every time you create a new system, that system presents its own challenges. You know, you can’t. It’s like the old joke about the farmer’s ax. You know, oh, this ax has been in my family for generations and it’s the same ax that my great, great, great grandfather used. Of course, the handle, we had to replace the handle a couple of times. And that’s a new ax head. But other than that.

Host: It’s the same ax.

Andrew Chaikin: You know, this very rarely do you, can you get away with using the word heritage. People love heritage because it, gives them the comfort level. You know, well, I hate to be the bearer of bad news. But, you know, if this business is so unforgiving. And there’s so many unintended consequences that can bite you that you’ve really got to go in and do the due diligence, do the painstaking attention to detail, do the testing, you know, that will really show that your system behaves the way you expect it to behave. And if it doesn’t, what do you do about it?

Host: One of the things that is different that Artemis intends to do differently is to put astronauts on the Moon to stay there. Not just to go and visit and return to Earth.

Andrew Chaikin: Or what Buzz Aldrin used to call flags and footprints.

Host: Flags and footprints, right.

Andrew Chaikin: In kind of dismissive way. Yeah.

Host: Is being sustainable on the moon comparable to what it would take to being sustainable on Mars?

Andrew Chaikin: In some ways it is. I have a friend, who’s a science fiction author. And he had a beautiful phrase that he told me years ago. He said, the Moon is our outward-bound school for learning how to live off planet. So, if you go to the Moon, you’re living in a vacuum. Okay, check. That’s good. You’re outside the Earth’s magnetic field. So, you’re living in the radiation environment that you would face on Mars. Okay, good, check. You have a pervasive dust environment, which as we know from the Apollo missions was a tremendous nuisance and ultimately would have been a threat to the functioning of suits and hatch seals and zippers and rotating components. Anything that’s got to move, you know. I mean, John Young said to me, when people go back to the Moon, the thing they better worry about is the dust. Okay. So, in many ways, the Moon is going to be a fabulous proving ground, learning, learning experience for us to live off planet. However, it’s nothing like going to Mars. First and foremost, if you have a problem on the moon, you can get home in three days. But if you have a problem on the way to Mars, you have got to tough it out until you can go around Mars and come home. And then, once you’re on the surface of Mars, you know, you are so far away from Earth that your radio signals take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes one way.

Host: One way.

Andrew Chaikin: So, you say, Houston, we have a problem. Great. You have time to go watch an episode of Big Bang Theory before you get an answer. You’re going to have to cut the cord with Mission Control. You’re not going to be able to get spare parts from Earth. On the Moon, that’d be pretty easy. Not so on a Mars mission. One of my mentors in this work on success in spaceflight, Jim Van Laak, who was here.

Host: He was here. I knew Jim.

Andrew Chaikin: You knew Jim. And then, has been at Langley. He said to me that one of the things he tells the public when he gives a talk on going to Mars is, he says, if you’re on the way to Mars and the potty breaks, everybody dies. And he says, it’s a great laugh line because everybody thinks you’re making a bathroom joke. Well, no. The point is that you can’t bring enough water and food with you for a three-year trip, round trip to Mars. You’ve got to recycle. You’ve got to have closed loop life support. And the toilet is a key part of that. So, that’s what he means.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: I think of Mars as the Mount Everest of space exploration. It’s going to stretch us in ways that even going to the moon does not. So, we’re not ready to go. I don’t. You know, Robert Zubrin and I went to the same high school. I didn’t know him.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: He was a few years ahead of me. And, you know, he’s been a tremendously motivating figure. But I don’t care what, what Bob Zubrin says. We ain’t ready to go to Mars yet. And going to the Moon, that’s another reason why I’m very happy that we’ve set our sights on the Moon as a way of getting up the learning curve.

Host: Of getting ready.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah, absolutely. Just like, look when Kennedy got up and said, we’re going to go the Moon. You know, how much spaceflight time we had under our belts?

Host: None.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, 15 minutes.

Host: 15 minutes, yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah. And only five minutes above the atmosphere.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: On Alan Shepard’s suborbital flight. So, we. Shepard went up to 115 miles. And then, came back down. Kennedy was saying, within eight years, eight and a half years, we’re going to go a quarter of a million miles out in space to another world and come back. And all of the challenges that that entailed. Well, Bob Gilruth did a very smart thing. He said, we can’t just go from Mercury to Apollo. We’ve got to have a training ground in there. So, he pushed for the creation of the Gemini Program. Gemini became our training ground for Apollo. We learned how to do space rendezvous, which was critical. We learned how to do space walks. We learned that we could do long duration flight. Nobody knew if humans could survive long enough to go to the Moon and back.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: We learned how to do controlled reentry, which was essential at lunar velocity for coming back safely. So, we need to have the same mindset for Mars. And the Moon has got to be, as my friends have said, an outward-bound school for helping us get there.

Host: What are a couple of the– You’ve talked about dust being a big problem. What are a couple of the largest things that the Moon has to teach us, so that we can be successful at Mars?

Andrew Chaikin: Well, the dust is a big piece of it. Radiation is a big piece of it. You know, if you have a solar storm, you better make sure that your astronauts are safely protected from that. Because those solar storm particles will go right through, you know, the hull of a vehicle and through a spacesuit and through you. And they can kill you. Cosmic rays are a lower level hazard. But they are, they are one that increases your lifetime risk of cancer. Of course, you assume that risk as part of the risk of exploration. But solar flares in particular. And not many people know this. But between the Apollo 16 mission in April of 72 and Apollo 17, the last landing in December of 72. In August of that year, there was one of, if not the biggest solar flare event ever recorded. And if there had been astronauts on the Moon at that time, we probably would have lost an Apollo crew. So, we’ve got to learn how to mitigate the radiation hazard. People envision putting a half module on the surface and then covering it with a layer of rock and dust. And that that would provide the necessary shielding. You know, we’ve got to figure out. You know that on the ISS one of the main activities is exercise because zero-G, microgravity takes a tremendous toll on the muscles and bones. We lose calcium.

Host: Absolutely.

Andrew Chaikin: We have muscle atrophy. Well, what about 1/6th G? Is living in 1/6th G going to be as much of a problem for crew health, as microgravity is? We don’t know. We have no idea. Mars is 38 percent.

Host: We can theorize, but we don’t know.

Andrew Chaikin: Yeah. Right. So, we’ve got to learn how to, how to mitigate the health risks. We’ve got to learn how to have hardware that we can keep functioning without spare parts. You know, people say, oh, well, we’ll 3D print spare parts out of moon dust or whatever. Well, can we really do that? I don’t know. We’ve got to go there and try to find out.

Host: We have to be able to. You talked about our inability to bring all the supplies we need to Mars. But we need to find supplies on the Moon too.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, in situ resource utilization is a big piece of the thinking. And again, Bob Zubrin is one of the people who kind of woke people up to this. Especially on Mars. Ice. Subsurface ice is much more pervasive on Mars than it is on the Moon. You can go to the poles of the moon and get bunch of ice. But on Mars, wide swaths of the planet have subsurface ice that’s probably going to be relatively easy to get to. Not that it’ll be easy to extract. I mean, at Martian temperatures ice is going to be pretty tough stuff. But if you can get to it, then you have not only water. You have hydrogen, which you can combine from, with carbon from the Martian atmosphere. The Martian atmosphere is very, very thin. But it’s made of CO2. And you can create methane.

Host: Fuel.

Andrew Chaikin: And that’s what’s driven the thinking. Right. And that’s what’s driven the thinking about using methane powered vehicles to go to Mars. You have oxygen for breathing. You have a lot of good stuff. That doesn’t mean Mars is going to be hospitable in any way. It makes Antarctica look like a vacation spot. But at least you have resources. Now, I’ll give you..

Host: You can’t grow food in the Martian dust.

Andrew Chaikin: Well, who knows?

Host: Probably.

Andrew Chaikin: I love the Martian as a movie. But I got to say, the scenes where Matt Damon is tromping around in Martian dust without any protection for his respiratory system, I’m thinking, okay, we already know that Martian dust contains perchlorate. Perchlorate is a thyroid toxin. It competes with iodine. We don’t know if you can safely expose humans to Martian dust for sustained periods or even short periods. Never mind growing your food in it.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: We have a lot to learn. We have a lot to learn. And that’s great. I love that we have challenges to solve. So does everybody here at NASA. That’s what makes them get up in the morning. But let’s, let’s recognize the enormity of the challenge. And bring everything to bear that we can. Not just the engineering smarts. But the lessons that we learned on the human piece of the system from Apollo.

Host: Should we be bringing the commercial world into the effort too? Should going to the Moon and Mars just be the job of NASA or other national space agencies?

Andrew Chaikin: I have felt for a long time. I’ve agreed with people who have said, you know, let the commercial folks figure out how to do things routinely, how to reinvent spaceflight systems that can give us routine access to low Earth orbit, for example. That’s great. And that’s what Blue Origin is trying to do. And SpaceX is trying to do. And they have had the kind of, you know, Silicon Valley startup culture mentality. And they’ve been able to start with a blank sheet of paper and say, okay, how can we optimize for, you know, sustaining [multiple speakers].

Host: This is the way we’ve always done it mentality.

Andrew Chaikin: They’re unburdened by that. And they’re also unburdened by what I call the pork barrel space program syndrome, which we’ve seen again and again. You know, after the shuttle was going to be retired, Congress says, okay, NASA, build whatever vehicle you want, as long as you use shuttle hardware and shuttle workforce. [Laughter]. You know, not exactly giving the engineers the freedom to create, to be creative in the way that they might like. So, that’s a, that’s unfortunately been the case ever since Apollo. We’ve been living in that world ever since even before we stopped going to the Moon. I’d love to see what the commercial guys come up with for designs for a lunar lander, let’s say. I’d love to see what they come up with in launch vehicles. I mean, I have a lot of friends at Marshall, I don’t want to get them mad at me. But there’s a lot of creativity going on there. Let’s see what they bring to the table. And let’s use the solutions that work the best. You know, let’s take a page from Apollo’s book. When John Houbolt first proposed lunar orbit rendezvous, as a way of getting to the Moon, you know, at that time the conventional wisdom was. And this was driven largely by guys like Von Braun, who said, we’re going to have big rocket, Saturn five rocket, but we’re going to have to launch two of them because one of them is going to have to refuel the other in low Earth orbit before we can go out to the moon. So, we would’ve needed two Saturn fives to do every landing. Houbolt had heard about this other brazen unorthodox idea that said, no, no, no, you’re not going to put a 65-foot-tall vehicle down on the lunar surface. That is just nuts. Let’s use a second vehicle that’s specialized just for the landing. And the fuel savings alone mean that we can do the mission with one Saturn five. Well, you know, when he got up and tried to pitch that to Gilruth and his people, Max Faget stood up and said, your figures lie. [Laughter]. Max was not a shrinking violet.

Host: No.

Andrew Chaikin: But, you know, it. Houbolt had to kind of go outside his chain of command. He wrote a letter to Bob Seamans, who was the associate administrator. Seamans was a very broad open minded technical guy. And he said, you know what? We need to look at this. And even Von Braun eventually came around and said, if we really want to get to the Moon by the end of the decade, this is the way to go, LOR. So, we need to have that same culture today, in which the best idea, out of the box ideas can win if they’re the best idea. Doesn’t mean that every out of the box idea is the one you choose. Most of them you don’t.

Host: Or that they’re any good.

Andrew Chaikin: Exactly.

Host: But listen.

Andrew Chaikin: But every once in a while, the out of the box idea is the one that saves your program.

Host: What do you think about the news of, it suggested that there should be a competition with a prize to be paid among commercial companies to develop as, you know, some component or other of a system that will take us back to the Moon?

Andrew Chaikin: Well, in that. So, I think the prize model was an interesting model for inspiring private organizations to develop new technology. And that was behind the Google Lunar X prize, which was about a robotic landing. In this case, I’m not sure we need to go to the prize model. Because we already have, at least so far, a national commitment to go back to the Moon.

Host: Right.

Andrew Chaikin: So, we don’t have to motivate people with prizes. What we have to do is create a culture, an engineering culture that breaks down stovepipes, that breaks down barriers to innovation and communication. And that’s, to me, is more important than the motivation factor. People are already motivated. I don’t think you need to give them a prize.

Host: Gut check time. What’s your feeling? When, when will the next astronauts step on the Moon?

Andrew Chaikin: I’ve learned to not answer those questions. [Laughter]. Because I’m always wrong. And I just.

Host: You might be right.

Andrew Chaikin: I’m so aware of how many unknowns are out there waiting for us. I would say this, if Artemis is funded in the way it needs to be, I think there is a good chance we could be back on the Moon within 10 years. I don’t think it’s going to be five. But I would be more comfortable saying within 10. And I think that’s fine. I think that would be great. I’ll be 73. I’ll be glued to the TV like I was 50 years ago.

Host: And we’ll presumably be using the lessons of Apollo to do it.

Andrew Chaikin: I hope so.

Host: Yeah.

Andrew Chaikin: I’m trying to be out there arguing for that. I must say, though, that, you know, culture comes from the top. And so far, at least, I have not had the opportunity to brief the NASA leadership with my, my work. And I hope I have that chance sometime in the future.

Host: Andrew Chaikin, thank you very much for the conversation. It’s been great.

Andrew Chaikin: I really enjoyed it. Thank you.

[ Music ]

Host: Andrew Chaikin is what I call an easy interview. And what I mean by that has nothing to do with the difficulty of booking him as a guest or arranging the studio time. I mean, you don’t have to work too hard to get him to open up on the topic. And when he gets going on something, he’s passionate about, it’s hard not to learn something. Interesting conversation. Meanwhile, if you want to get more into the details of what NASA has on the drawing boards for the Artemis program right now, go to NASA.gov/Artemis. Or check out NASA.gov and follow the links to Moon to Mars and Humans in Space. I’ll remind you that you can go online to keep up with all things NASA at NASA.gov. It would also be a good idea for you to follow us on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. You will thank me. When you go to those sites, use the hashtag #askNASA to submit a question or suggest a topic for us. Just make sure to indicate that it’s for Houston, we have a Podcast. You can find the full catalogue of all of our episodes by going to NASA.gov/podcasts, scrolling to our name. You can also find all the other exciting NASA podcasts right there at the same spot where you can find us. NASA.gov/podcasts. Very convenient. This episode was recorded on August 21st, 2019. Thanks to Greg Wiseman, Alex Perryman, Gary Jordan, Norah Moran and Belinda Pulido for their help with the production. To Gordon Andrews for his help in arranging the guest. And to Andrew Chaikin for a very interesting talk on one of our favorite subjects. We’ll be back next week.