Image: “NASA’s Space Launch System rocket carrying the Orion spacecraft launches on the Artemis I flight test, Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2022, from Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s Artemis I mission is the first integrated flight test of the agency’s deep space exploration systems: the Orion spacecraft, Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, and ground systems. SLS and Orion launched at 1:47 a.m. EST, from Launch Pad 39B at the Kennedy Space Center. Photo Credit: (NASA/Joel Kowsky)” (Source: Wikimedia Commons) 

Our new episode is available from our Podcast host here: https://asabpod.podbean.com/e/episode-66

Transcript

Tessa 0:00
There has only ever been one geologist to the moon.

Charles 0:02
Which is such a shame – it’s-it’s a bunch of rocks up there. Come on.

Charles 0:30
Hello and welcome to Assigned Scientist at Bachelors. I’m Charles and I’m an entomologist.

Tessa 0:35
And I’m Tessa and I’m an astrobiologist.

Charles 0:37
There’s been a big space event.

Tessa 0:39
Yep.

Charles 0:40
Specifically the Artemis II…?

Tessa 0:43
Yes, the Artemis II mission.

Charles 0:44
Well, that’s my first question. Was there an Artemis I?

Tessa 0:47
There was. It did pretty much the same thing, but it was unmanned, and it launched back in 2022, and it was to test out most systems [of the] Orion spacecraft, make sure everything worked before they tried sending people around in it.

Charles 1:00
And the Orion spacecraft is what these astronauts are in right now?

Tessa 1:03
Yes.

Charles 1:03
So the other question is why, and this will be uncharitable, but why? Why bother?

Tessa 1:11
Yeah. No. No. No. That is a perfectly valid question. I mean, because like this was a lunar flyby mission. We’ve done those. We’ve even done them with people in them back in 1968 with Apollo 8 – mostly two reasons. One, honestly, just human interest. People get excited about people going up in space, especially if they’re going far away in space. And I mean, it was the first time we’ve had someone other than, like, a white dude leave Earth orbit. So you know, that’s not nothing.

Charles 1:40
It is interesting that… I think this was reportedly the furthest humans had been from Earth?

Tessa 1:47
Yes, they set a new altitude record from distance to Earth.

Charles 1:51
And you know, we think about the International Space Station, but the International Space Station is actually-it’s not that far away.

Tessa 1:57
No, it’s about 300 kilometers up. If you could drive your car straight up, you could probably get there within a day’s drive. Whereas for Artemis II, their maximum distance was over 250,000 miles, or over 400,000 kilometers, which is a quite a long ways to go.

Charles 2:14
It’s a little bit of a difference between those two numbers. So they set a new record. This is the furthest that people have been away from Earth.

Tessa 2:20
Yep.

Charles 2:20
And so there’s the there’s the human interest component, but is there like… let’s… it’s… I believe in the value of research for the sake of research, but let’s say that I’m a more skeptical person and I’m looking at the NASA budget and I’m going, why are we spending money on… you know what I mean?

Tessa 2:35
So one thing that they were able to do, and this was I think valuable both from a scientific perspective, but also an artistic one, is that it turns out if you want to get images of something, it is really hard to beat a human with a camera. Because, you know, we have sent plenty of probes with cameras, obviously around the moon, but, you know, there’s a light speed delay, six seconds round trip to get from the Earth to the moon and back, so you’re never quite taking pictures in real time. As a result, it can be hard for the imager to make judgment calls about, okay, this is a good photo to take. This is something that is worth taking an image of. But when you have humans up, especially all the crew had actually been trained in photography as part of this mission, you do some really amazing work, and they actually were able to document some craters that hadn’t really been noticed before. You know, there was some actual like science return. Again, you know, if we’d absolutely had to, we probably could have done that with an unmanned probe. But, you know, it is an advantage, it is something humans are very very good at. And there was also a lot of what they did was human physiological experiments, just seeing what it’s like when you have people not only being in zero gravity for long periods of time, but also just being out in deep space, away from the shield of the Earth’s magnetic field, so they’re getting exposed to more radiation. How does being that far away from Earth affects people? Because I mean, yeah, sure, we sent people that far away during the Apollo era, but we weren’t really doing much science with them. It was mostly just getting them there alive and back again.

Charles 4:13
I’ve actually been, just coincidentally, I’ve been listening to Mary Roach’s book, Packing for Mars. Have you ever read that one?

Tessa 4:21
Excellent book.

Charles 4:21
It’s a good time. And one of the things that struck me in particular is that there’s been a real, in my understanding at least, which is very casual, but a huge shift in the kinds of people who become astronauts.

Tessa 4:35
Oh, 100% Yeah.

Charles 4:37
Where during the Apollo era, it was mostly pilots.

Tessa 4:42
Yeah, it was almost all test pilots because the idea being, you know, well, these were deeply experimental spacecraft, and you need someone who like knows how to deal with piloting a vehicle that suddenly starts behaving in a catastrophically wrong manner, for example, and you know are pretty used to it now. Now that you know that we’re not flying by the seat of our pants anymore, you don’t really need that sort of like swaggering, calm and collected, but also very, very self-important fighter pilot, test pilot type anymore. Nowadays, they select for people who do well with teamwork and you know are easy to get along with, which you know I think part of it is also we’ve done a lot more with long-term spaceflight. You know, people regularly go up to the International Space Station for six months to a year. Spacecraft generally aren’t very large, so you have to be a person that it’s easy to get along with if you’re going to be subjecting the people around you to that for six months to a year.

Charles 5:37
Well, and in addition to the personality changes, an increasing representation of people who have a specifically science background.

Tessa 5:45
Yes, that’s the other thing. There has only ever been one geologist to the moon.

Charles 5:49
Which is such a shame- it’s, it’s a bunch of rocks up there.

Tessa 5:53
Yeah, yeah – I mean, this is the perfect place to send geologists. And now this time, you know, we have people who actually – they’re not all necessarily trained as geologists, but they all, almost all of them, do have a science background.

Charles 6:03
That kind of opens up an interesting question of, like, in doing physiological experiments, like, do you have examples of the kinds of experiments that they were doing?

Tessa 6:12
A lot of it was looking at immunoassays to see how their immune system changed under you know deep space conditions, and also just in general, looking at sleep studies and behavioral studies as well, and they were doing that both with actual humans and also with these, for lack of a better term, test dummies that they also brought along that were stuffed with sensors to monitor how much radiation did they absorb and what sort of physiological or even just gravitational stresses were they under?

Charles 6:42
So it sounds like this has been in the works for a while.

Tessa 6:46
Yes.

Charles 6:46
In that they did effectively a test run in 2022.

Tessa 6:50
Oh yeah.

Charles 6:50
And so it must have been planned for years and years and years.

Tessa 6:54
Oh yeah, and in fact, it was delayed quite a bit. The Artemis program officially started in 2017. I don’t remember when Artemis II was supposed to fly, but I know it got delayed multiple times due to problems with the launch rocket. And I was actually a little taken aback when they launched it because I just kind of forgotten that people were still working on it. And then it’s just like, oh, hey, April, we’re launching, and it felt all very sudden. So yeah, no, this has been in the works for almost 10 years.

Charles 7:22
Because 10 years ago was a very different time.

Tessa 7:25
It was, yep.

Charles 7:26
In that we had not yet elected Trump.

Tessa 7:28
Admittedly, he has not tried to destroy the program. I think because he wants the glory attached to it.

Charles 7:35
Because obviously, the Trump administration has been… I think for anybody who is not in academia right now, it would be difficult to conceptualize what an apocalyptic feeling there is.

Tessa 7:47
Yeah, yeah, it’s been bad out there.

Charles 7:49
Nobody’s getting funding for anything. People are losing funding. I imagine anybody who is listening to this podcast is going to understand what we mean when we say that it’s bad. And so it’s it’s interesting that this, which I think from a skeptical viewpoint would feel like a very frivolous thing to do, because that’s the other thing really that Packing for Mars gets at again and again, which is that the single most challenging aspect of space travel is accommodating the human body.

Tessa 8:19
Yeah.

Charles 8:20
And so it’s interesting that this program – it feels incongruous with the broader activities and goals of this administration.

Tessa 8:29
I think the reason it’s basically survived mostly through sheer inertia, because like I said, Artemis I was launched in 2022 during the previous administration, and in the run-up to Artemis II, before Trump even took office a second time, and at a certain point, like it just becomes politically difficult to cancel these things because they’re just so far along. With that said, NASA’s budget definitely is taking a hit. This may have only survived by virtue of most of the money for it having already been spent.

Charles 9:00
What would kind of best case scenario next steps be?

Tessa 9:04
Well, the plan is that for Artemis III, they are going to test out the lunar lander. They’re not going to actually land it. They may not even actually go to the moon for that. They may just do that in Earth orbit.

Charles 9:18
Well, when you say the lander, can you just get more specific about what that looks like? Where are they landing the lander?

Tessa 9:24
Oh, so basically, what they do is that they launch the Orion spacecraft, so the spacecraft that was used for this last mission, along with the lander. The Orion would dock with the lander. The astronauts would go into the lander. They would switch the engines on. They would maneuver it in space. See how it handles. Make sure the life support system is working properly. All that stuff. The idea being that you know if something goes wrong or there’s an unpleasant discovery, you definitely want to do that when you’re close to Earth, as opposed to making that unpleasant discovery when you’re on the moon. And they’re also probably going to be testing out some spacesuits as well.

Charles 9:59
Were there any spacewalks associated with this mission?

Tessa 10:02
No, although they did trial a sort of an emergency scenario in which that there was a breach in the hull and a sudden loss in pressure to make sure that they could get into protective gear quickly enough. Turns out they can, but there weren’t any spacewalks.

Charles 10:17
I’ll tell you this: I don’t like to be on a boat where I can’t see see the shore. Astronauts are built different.

Tessa 10:24
Yeah, no, they are. It is a different mindset. That’s Artemis III. Now, admittedly, we don’t know when that’s going to be happening yet because the lander still hasn’t been built. There are two different companies competing to build it. We don’t know when that’s going to be finished. And then Artemis four is the actual planned like landing? They’re originally aimed for 2028, mostly just because they want it to happen. While this administration is still in the White House, that is almost certainly not going to happen. Like again, we we don’t even have a lander yet, which I’m fine with because you know if it slips to 2029 or later, one of the people who has been rumored to be a strong contender to be the first woman to walk on the moon is Anne McLean, who some of you may remember is publicly out as being a lesbian. She was involved in some pretty nasty divorce drama, and at one point was accused…

Charles 11:15
Oh, she’s that’s… that.

Tessa 11:17
That was, she was the one who was accused of committing crimes from space. They later found out that it that had been completely fabricated. Not surprising, because like NASA, of course, everything has to go through their downlinks, so they would know if she was committing crimes.

Charles 11:29
Yeah.

Tessa 11:29
But yeah, that that’s her. And honestly, I just love the idea of the first woman on the moon being a queer woman who has been involved in a lot of drama. Somehow, that that just warms my heart.

Charles 11:41
You gotta keep up the tradition of a space “firsts” going to lesbians.

Tessa 11:47
Exactly.

Charles 11:47
THAT’s a proud American tradition.

Tessa 11:49
Exactly, exactly. You know, we’re with the stuff that really matters.

Charles 11:53
Just thinking about being on the moon. What a weird experience that would be. Which is not an interesting thing to say, but it’s my real reaction.

Tessa 12:02
I mean, you’re not wrong.

Charles 12:04
It is so wild to think that we, as the song from Even Stevens taught a generation, we went to the moon in 1969. We didn’t understand a lot of stuff in 1969, but we did know how to put humans on the moon, and then even more exceptionally, from where I’m standing, get them back.

Tessa 12:25
Oh yeah, no, that’s really impressive that they did as well. Like even with NASA, they were expecting there was a 50-50 chance they’d lose some of the astronauts. Even with Apollo 13, you know the amount of success that they had is astounding.

Charles 12:38
Here’s a question: Would we care this much about the moon, if it wasn’t just the thing that was closest to us?

Tessa 12:44
Probably not. There are a lot of similar bodies out in the solar system. I mean, Mercury is pretty similar to the moon. Some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn very similar, although in some cases they’re more interesting because they have more like ice water. But yeah, it honestly mostly is just a matter of accessibility.

Charles 13:02
So, do you think that this mission and the general Artemis project? I suppose it’s the answer is probably pretty obviously yes. But is this important in part because it advances the goal of getting humans further and further away from Earth?

Tessa 13:19
Yeah. No, I think that’s definitely part of it. A lot of the selling of Artemis was that if we want to go to Mars or you know to Saturn or anywhere else in the solar system, you gotta figure out how to do that. And the moon – it’s close by, so it’s a pretty good place to test out strategy and equipment and all that stuff.

Charles 13:38
Well, as we record this, they are preparing to land. They’re scheduled to land tomorrow morning, Friday, the 10th of April, off of the coast near San Diego.

Tessa 13:50
Yeah, it’s going to be off San Diego,

Charles 13:52
And they’re going to do a splashdown.

Tessa 13:55
Yep.

Charles 13:56
That’s frightening in itself.

Tessa 13:57
They, they keep on swearing someday they’re going to switch it so they can just like land on solid ground and you know in a much more controlled fashion, but that hasn’t happened yet.

Charles 14:06
I will say another thing that struck me in Packing for Mars was how harrowing re-entry is.

Tessa 14:13
Oh yeah, yeah.

Charles 14:15
It’s like you you experience higher than… it’s like you go from zero g to multiple G’s.

Tessa 14:22
Yeah, because you’re seriously decelerating,

Charles 14:25
And it’s even like… like breathing becomes difficult.

Tessa 14:29
Yeah, because the you know the G forces are pushing down on your chest.

Tessa 14:37
Well, you know they made it back safely, got fished out of the Pacific, did the press junket, and yeah, that that’s generally how these things go.

Charles 14:46
I immediately have one thing that I’ve been thinking about. We talked a little bit before, and I I looked up some preliminary information on Artemis III, this next stage of the ongoing project that’s happening here, of the idea being that humans will be launched up into Earth orbit, and then private companies, they’re going to be testing out lunar landers.

Tessa 15:09
Yeah, which actually it’s not as wild as it sounds. So basically, during the Apollo program, equipment was also largely built by private companies under contract, and that’s basically what this is going to be the reason Artemis Three is is a little weirder than those missions is that we don’t know which private company is actually going to win the contract because originally they gave it to SpaceX who was going to build a massive lander based off of their Starship orbital launcher. However, they haven’t actually gotten that to work yet at all.

Charles 15:42
What a surprise!

Tessa 15:44
Yeah, you know, and it was assuming that they haven’t had it do the Earth launched variant that has not had a fully successful flight yet. They, I mean, they’ve gotten it up into orbit, but it hasn’t still hasn’t accomplished all its goals, and they are nowhere near close to demonstrating fuel transfer, which is really important because this is such a big honkin’ lander. The idea is that they’re going to launch it with a mostly empty fuel tank and then send up other rockets to fuel it up in orbit. Which there are arguments for and against that, but it is something that hasn’t been done on this scale before, and they have not demonstrated the capability to do it yet. Which obviously is a problem since ostensibly this is supposed to be happening in like a year.

Charles 16:22
Yeah. Why… I have a question, specifically about landings. So my understanding is that most manned missions or humans have landed in the ocean in the water.

Tessa 16:36
Yes.

Charles 16:37
Because obviously water is a lot more forgiving of a surface to land on than just a hard Earth, but we’ve been able to land on the moon. So my question is, why? Why?

Tessa 16:51
Oh, the moon doesn’t have an atmosphere, which greatly simplifies landing.

Charles 16:54
Okay.

Tessa 16:55
With Earth’s atmosphere, you have to deal with aerodynamics and heat of reentry. I will note that the Russians actually do land their capsules on land. Usually, I think somewhere in like Kazakhstan, they have little soft landing jets that fire right before it touches down. I think the U.S. just got into the habit of having them land in water during the Apollo era because it was just the simplest way to do it, and they just kind of kept at that, even though we we could probably like actually land land it much more similar to how you land on the moon with it being a soft controlled landing.

Charles 17:30
I mean, I guess the United States has access to more “won’t kill you”-temperature water.

Tessa 17:38
That’s the major part of it, and also a lot of our launch sites, for safety reasons, are on the coast.

Charles 17:43
Why would that be a safety concern?

Tessa 17:45
Oh, well, because if your rocket blows up, the pieces won’t fall on anything inhabited. They’ll just fall on the ocean.

Charles 17:50
Oh, although you could say that the ocean is inhabited.

Tessa 17:53
I mean, yeah, yeah, it still wouldn’t be great, but you know, you’re less likely, for example, to start a raging wildfire or something like that.

Charles 18:01
Here’s another thing: How far away are we from the like Star Trek future of having shuttles that can dock at a space station and then land on a planet and then come back up?

Tessa 18:14
Oh, that is-I mean-that has always been the long-term goal, both for the moon and for Earth. It’s just those are fairly complicated to build, less so with the moon, and most importantly in all, they can be expensive to build, which is basically the reason why it hasn’t been done yet. The eventual hope for like whatever lunar landing system ends up winning, because it’s either going to be SpaceX, which, like I said, is seriously buying schedule, or Blue Origin has also put in a bid, and they actually have an uncrewed version that they might actually be landing in the next six months, so they’re probably further ahead. But either way, both of those are designed to be fully reusable from the moon to lunar orbit, and they just hang out there, presumably between missions, and then you know, ship would from Earth would come and dock, and you know, astronauts would refuel it and take it back down to the lunar surface.

Tessa 19:01
For Earth to orbit, that is actually what the space shuttle was supposed to be originally. But in order to give that level of reusability, it is super technically challenging. It’s doable, but it’s super technically challenging, and it’s very very expensive. And NASA did not have the budget for it, so they kind of compromised on a lot of things, and that gave us the space shuttle that we actually had, but yeah, there is a concept for that called single stage to orbit, and it is again something a lot of people are working towards. It’s just very hard to do because you need a lot of energy to get anything into orbit. Which means if you want to take anything with you, any sort of cargo during your launch, you have to make your spacecraft as light as possible with staging, the reason they do it is because it’s a way to get around that. Because basically, you are throwing away parts of your ship as you get higher up in the atmosphere and closer to orbit. That cuts your mass, which in turn you require much less fuel to get into orbit. So basically, it’s a cheat and. Like I said, there there are ways you can do it where you actually have sort of the Star Trek shuttle. It’s just it’s much harder to do technically. But yeah, people are working towards it.

Charles 20:07
And yet it looks so easy on Star Trek, is the only thing.

Tessa 20:11
Yeah, well, I mean they do have a couple 100 years head start on us.

Charles 20:15
That’s true. I’ll tell you this in confidence, except it won’t be in confidence because I, I, I probably will leave it in the episode, but I think watching ’90s era Star Trek so impressed on my mind that… intellectually, I know that it’s just – it’s not the future, it’s just fiction. But some part of my brain registers it as reality, kind of, of like…

Tessa 20:42
Yeah, no, I get that.

Charles 20:43
Well, no wonder things are all profanity redacted right now. That’s… we’re in the really bad period of human history in Star Trek.

Tessa 20:52
It does kind of line up, you know. I can see why you would feel that way.

Charles 20:56
Although I remember there was a line in TNG of Data saying the the Irish reunification of whatever year…

Tessa 21:04
2024, yep.

Charles 21:05
And that, yeah, and that didn’t happen so…

Tessa 21:07
Yeah.

Charles 21:08
Maybe it is just fiction after all… so is it it basically if we had the resources and the the total consuming drive of the Apollo era…?

Tessa 21:20
Yeah the resources and the motivation-we could totally do something closer to a shuttle than what we do now.

Charles 21:25
Okay, I finished Packing for Mars several weeks ago, and one of the things that occurred to me – I think-an understated part of the Apollo era, like the real Cold War era 60s of everybody throwing everything at this idea of spaceflight…

Tessa 21:43
Yeah, no, like NASA was getting like an appreciable chunk, like I think maybe 5% of the entire U.S. budget at that point.

Charles 21:50
Not only the resources that they had available to them, but also the lower threshold of acceptable risk.

Tessa 21:59
Yes, that too. I mean, when the astronauts went to the moon, internally, NASA gave them about 50-50 chance of getting back.

Charles 22:06
Right.

Tessa 22:06
And I mean, the astronauts knew that and accepted it, but it is… we got very lucky that no one died during the missions. They lost people during Apollo One due to a fire that broke out in a capsule during a training session on the ground.

Charles 22:20
Yeah.

Tessa 22:20
And, you know, they we almost lost Apollo 13, but you know we got very lucky otherwise.

Charles 22:26
It it is wild to think about the last time humans went around slash to the moon was 54 years ago.

Tessa 22:37
Yes.

Charles 22:37
So my question is, what’s that about?

Tessa 22:40
Mostly just because going to the moon is expensive and complicated, and as a result, there really hasn’t been much motive to do it. NASA has plans to go back to the moon since Apollo ended. It’s just none of them ever got funded.

Charles 22:52
Artemis III – can you just remind us all what the next stages are in in the ongoing Artemis project?

Tessa 23:00
Yeah, there’s going to be Artemis III, which, like I said, is going to be a test in Earth orbit of a lunar lander, one that’ll either be built by SpaceX or, more likely at this point, Blue Origin. That is pretty much just going to be a shakedown cruise, make sure everything’s working. We did something similar during the Apollo era for Apollo Nine. Same idea; they just flew the lunar lander into orbit and had it dock with the crew module and tried everything out. Artemis Four is going to be the one where they actually land people on the moon, which will happen at some point, probably not till 2029 at the very earliest. It will be a little different from what we did from Apollo because the orbiter or the the spacecraft and the lunar lander will be in a much different orbital configuration than the Apollo missions, which means they have a larger percentage of the moon’s surface that they could feasibly land on. I don’t know if they’re going to take advantage of that during that mission because it’s the first mission, but it is something they’re probably going to do. And then there’s one more mission, Artemis Five, which is going to be another landing mission that’ll happen at some point in the 2030s. They are hoping to package a lunar rover with that one and see more of the moon that way.

Charles 24:17
Are there any people in like the space community who are… I don’t know if angry is the… but maybe frustrated that this is the thing that resources are going to?

Tessa 24:28
Oh yeah, no 100% there’s always been tension both for robotic missions and also there’s a contingent for crewed spaceflight that just think the moon is a dead end and want to go straight for Mars. Again this is nothing new. This has been a debate that’s been going on since we had a space agency.

Charles 24:46
So previously, I asked if the moon weren’t so close to us, would we really be as interested in it? And you said probably not. So follow up question: If Mars weren’t so close to us, would we be as interested in going to Mars? Does Mars have more rewarding scientific, etc. opportunities than the Moon, or is it just that’s the planet we want to go to because the other next closest planet to us is Venus, and it would kill us dead?

Tessa 25:15
A little bit of column A, a little bit of Column B. Mars seems to have been more Earth-like in its recent past, compared to Venus, Mars may have had liquid water relatively more recently, and then more importantly, there is still evidence that liquid water had flowed there with all the erosion channels and canyons and stuff that you can see. There could have been life on Mars at some point, or theoretically could still be microbial life on Mars, depending on who you talk to.

Charles 25:39
So whoever goes to Mars first has got to know there’s a pretty there’s a pretty good chance that I die in space, and it it feels like in the post-Apollo era there are many more restrictions on putting humans up into space based on this much higher level threshold of safety that we’ve established. Do you think, and this is purely there’s absolutely no way that anybody can know this except the exact people who are working on this, but given that whoever ends up going to Mars first has got to be thinking there’s a really good chance that I’m going to die in space. Actually, do you think that will be upfront in public presentations of information. What I’m asking is, are are they going to say these people know that they’re probably going to die, or do you think there will be more like public hedging around it?

Tessa 26:33
You know, that is tough to say. I know during the Apollo era, like they used very flowery language for it, but NASA did acknowledge that what these people were doing was dangerous, so we might see some of that. You know, I don’t think they’ll be like very blunt about it, but it’ll be you know, oh, this is very brave what they’re doing and testing the limits of human experience and all that sort of stuff. I’m sure internally they’ll be entirely clear about it because they were for Apollo. But yeah, you know it’ll be remains to be seen.

Charles 27:03
They’re… they’d never get me on a spaceship. I’ll tell you that much. Me, in space? Absolutely no way. I love terrestrial invertebrates, and I am a terrestrial vertebrate. If you were given the opportunity to go to Mars, but they’re like, you’re probably gonna die up there. What would you do?

Tessa 27:23
You know, I don’t know. I guess it would depend on where I am in my life and if I feel like I’m okay taking that risk or not.

Charles 27:29
If they say there’s a 50-50 chance you’ll die, how does that affect the math?

Tessa 27:33
You know, it it would probably come down to again where my life is at that point and to what degree I managed to convince myself that oh sure it’s a 50-50 chance, but I’m built different.

Charles 27:45
Okay. [laughs] See, this is the reason that they’re never going to get me in space is that I fundamentally cannot believe I’m built different. If it’s,there’s a 5% chance something really bad might happen, I’m like, I am definitely absolutely going to die. So they’ll never get me on space. They’d never get me on a cruise either, because… that one’s just because I don’t want to get norovirus.

Tessa 28:09
I mean, that is a good reason to avoid cruises.

Charles 28:11
They’ll never get me on the open ocean. They’ve actually released new information on the Artemis III mission, and particularly, they have released information about the crew. So, Tessa, could you get the public up to speed?

Tessa 28:28
I mean, the major thing is that the Artemis III crew is all dudes, which people have mixed feelings about for obvious reasons. My personal feeling on it is, I’m okay with it because I hate to say it, this is a mission no one’s going to remember. No one remembers Apollo Nine, and no one remembers Apollo 10. Yeah, so I’d rather us save women. I’d rather front load them on the actual mission that’s going to go to the moon because that’s the one people are going to pay attention to and remember.

Charles 28:54
I mean, the other thing… [I] did also see several people comment that it is all dudes, but it’s not all white dudes.

Tessa 29:01
That is true. That is, we, there has been improvement in that respect.

Charles 29:05
I guess the the more interesting thing to get into is when I was reading slash listening to the audio book of Packing for Mars, one thing that stuck out to me as feeling unfair but kind of inevitable was this idea that when you’re putting together crews to go up into space, a lot of what it comes down to is not merit, but rather how well you get along with the other people who have already been chosen to go on missions. I’ll say this as somebody who has never been very good with people, for one thing, my immediate knee-jerk reaction was, “Well, that kind of sucks.” And then, additionally, I think in the context that I saw it in Packing for Mars, it was about international cooperation and the potential for cultural differences to preclude certain people who were very highly qualified, otherwise extremely good matches for missions, from ever actually going up into space.

Tessa 30:07
I think… I mean, there is… obviously there are political and geopolitical aspects to it, especially on international missions. And I don’t envy whoever has to balance that in mission planning if they’re doing an international mission. I do think the, you know, selection for people who get along well… that actually does make a bit of sense to me in that especially with longer duration missions because I mean the thing about a space mission is that if you get into an argument with one of your crewmates you can’t necessarily just you know walk outside to cool off I mean, you can spacewalk, but that’s an endeavor in its own right.

Charles 30:43
That’s not really. I mean, it’s not diffusing the situation really to go into it an extremely…

Tessa 30:49
Exactly, exactly

Charles 30:50
dangerous and high stress situation.

Tessa 30:51
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I think that’s one of the reasons why they tend to fall on the side of prioritizing interpersonal compatibility over necessarily qualifications. Admittedly, another part of it is that when it comes to being qualified for missions, in a lot of cases, that NASA is going in – well, actually, all space programs that have crewed spaceflight are going in – on the assumption that they’re going to have to train you anyways, because it’s not like you can go to school for how to walk on the moon and do geology on the moon. Space is such a different environment, and the job requirements for mission to mission are so specialized, it shouldn’t be assumed there’s going to be a fair amount of training involved, which is why to become an astronaut, one of the basic criteria is to have a PhD. But it doesn’t necessarily have to be in any particular topic other than vaguely adjacent sciences, because what they’re really interested in is can you learn and process large amounts of information out of you know and very technical information you know there isn’t a PhD in being an astronaut they’re going to have to train you how to do all that stuff all the stuff you need to do anyways do I think sometimes they probably over prioritize that factor yeah could very well be, but I can see at least where the initial drive for that approach came.

Charles 32:05
Yeah, I guess it’s like it is so important that people can get along with each other on space missions because you’re just literally right on top of each other.

Tessa 32:16
Exactly.

Charles 32:17
It’s maybe the place where space is most at a premium.

Tessa 32:20
Ironically, yes.

Charles 32:22
Yeah. [laughs] The other thing that stuck out to me in Packing for Mars, which again I’ve already mentioned in the other recordings for this, it was a really engaging book. Shout out Mary Roach.

Tessa 32:32
It’s a great book. Highly recommended.

Charles 32:33
One thing that came up where the simulated missions of of people pretending to be on missions, but they’re on Earth. Of one story of like, I don’t, I don’t want to misrepresent it because I don’t remember all the very specific details. But it was like cross cultural expectations of gendered behavior and intergender relationships, and I guess it made me think about just the fact that there are so few space missions and that there’s so little, like there are so few options in terms of places you can go if you want to go into space, it creates this situation where over the years the programs have been quite conservative in the sense of having like a strong company culture or boys’ club atmosphere, just because the generation time between like different missions or different groups of people coming into those companies…

Tessa 33:38
Yeah, there is definitely like an old boys club thing that has been a problem for a while that NASA is slowly shaking out of its system.

Charles 33:44
Right. I guess it’s like… the reason that we use fruit flies in genetics is a variety of reasons, but one of them is that they have a very short generation time where you can induce a mutation and then get generation after generation after generation in a very short period of time, and it feels like with things like space travel, because there are so few individual missions into space, there’s actually not a lot of opportunities for those kinds of changes to arise and then become established.

Tessa 34:22
Exactly. Yeah, I think that’s fair to say.

Charles 34:24
It’s like some industries are fruit flies, and NASA is like a giant tortoise.

Tessa 34:29
Yep, I think that I think that is a very good way to think about it. And in particular, because there are so few missions, and because each mission is both very high cost and potentially in a very dangerous and risky environment, that further emphasizes a slowness to change.

Charles 34:45
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of another of my great life passions, which is musical theater. It’s so… obviously Broadway has a reputation for being very gay because it is, and because the people who have created Broadway have always involved a lot of gay people, but Broadway and musical theater in general is, in fact, quite a conservative medium because it is so expensive to mount a new production, and the likelihood that you will make back your money is so minuscule that it really disincentivizes risk taking, and I wonder, since you’re the space freak on this podcast, would you say that space stuff is often in that same kind of problem?

Tessa 35:33
Oh, 100% It’s the exact sort of same dynamics.

Charles 35:36
It is. I mean, it is very expensive.

Tessa 35:40
For example, even in non-crewed missions, there is usually a huge emphasis on using as much hardware that has flown on previous missions, or at least of the same class as hardware that has flown on previous missions. Specifically for that reason, because it’s like, well, we know it worked in a previous mission, so it’ll probably work this time, which means it’s like less likely to, you know, fail in some new and unfortunate, exciting way.

Charles 36:03
This may be impossible to answer, but do you foresee in… let’s say we have average lifespans and we don’t get killed in the water wars, do you foresee in like in the span of our lifespan getting to a place where missions, crewed or uncrewed, are commonplace enough that there is not the same pressure to absolutely minimize risk, and more strange or creative or out there things could be tried?

Tessa 36:38
I think we will get there with uncrewed or robotic missions. In a way, we’ve kind of already gotten there for Earth orbiting satellites. I mean, people have literally built them out of smartphones, or you know, had college students build them. So we we are kind of getting there with Earth orbiting satellites. We will probably get there with robotics in our lifetime. Certainly, crewed missions. It’s a little harder to say, since obviously, you know, it’s not just a machine you’re dealing with, its people’s lives.

Charles 37:03
Yeah. Counterpoint. Maybe we’ll get to such a place of absolute nightmare deregulated capitalism that the horrible tech oligarchs can have no barriers in the way of them treating people that they don’t care about like the objects that they perceive them as.

Tessa 37:25
Yeah, I mean that is unfortunately a possibility.

Charles 37:28
I guess the other question is, are you excited about these missions?

Tessa 37:31
I mean, with Artemis III, yeah, sure, it’ll be cool. With that said, this is mostly going to be like a purely technology demonstrator mission, which again is interesting, but as a scientist, it’s not necessarily what I’m focused on. I think once we get to the point of actually sending people, or even just sending probes to the places that are interesting, even if it’s just the moon, that is when I’m going to be really excited because you know then we might actually we could get real data back.

Charles 37:56
And I think I saw Artemis IV is supposed to be the first on the southern pole of the moon.?

Tessa 38:03
Yep, it’s a place we’ve never been before. So yeah, it will be new ground.

Charles 38:06
Is there anything… and no offense to the moon, but is is there a reason that that area of the moon is particularly interesting, or is it just well, we haven’t been there?

Tessa 38:17
Partially, a lot of it is older terrain compared to the northern hemisphere.

Charles 38:20
How do you mean?

Tessa 38:21
So basically, you know, all the black splotches on the moon-they’re lava flows that were induced by meteorite impacts. More the southern hemisphere of the moon, though, hasn’t had those lava flows, and so like the surface rock there is very old. It hasn’t been covered up by new lava or new material.

Charles 38:43
I have just thought of a new episode-ending question for us. If you had, let’s say, a magical genie wish, but it was extremely constrained, we’re it’s we’re we’re positing some magical contrivance here, where you could either have easy space flight. Let’s say Star Trek, Deep Space Nine era ease of getting to different planets, or time travel. Which would you choose as new technological tools available to scientists?

Tessa 39:20
That is really tough, actually, because they could both be very useful. I’m gonna give the slightest of advantages to the Star Trek level space travel, just because you know there is more space than there is time. At least that we can make use of, I think. But it would be a tough decision, because like I could also see a lot of utility for time travel as well.

Charles 39:43
Yeah, and see, this is why the podcast works because I would say time travel because I’m primarily interested in the evolution of life on Earth.

Tessa 39:50
Right. Yeah. No, and that’s exactly the sort of thing where I think it could be really useful

Charles 39:53
Between the two of us with our two genie wishes, we’ll get both.

Tessa 39:56
Yeah. Exactly. There we go. Problem solved.

Charles 39:57
Problem solved. So Tessa, where can people find you if they want to find more of you or your work?

Tessa 40:06
They can find me at my website tessafisher.com or on Bluesky, tessafisher dot b sky dot social.

Charles 40:13
I am on Bluesky at chwallace dot blue sky dot social. You can find the podcast at our website asabpodcast.com or on blue sky at asapod. You can also email us at asabpod@gmail.com or contact us through the orum on our website. If you are a trans person in science and you would like to be a guest on the show, you can fill out our interest form, which is available on the website, or you can contact us through those means, and our theme music is by Nicole Petkovich.

Tessa 40:44
And until next time, keep on science-ing.