Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. My guest is Emily Carney. She's a journalist, a former nuclear technician for the Navy, a co-host of the Space and Things podcast and founder of the Space Hipsters space flight group. She's with me today because she's also the author with Bruce McCandless of a new book titled, “"Star Bound: A Beginner's Guide to the American Space Program, from Goddard's Rockets to Goldilocks Planets and Everything in Between". Emily, welcome to the program and congratulations on the new book.
Emily Carney: Thank you, I'm really happy to be here. Thank you so much.
GR: Well, we're glad to have you. So let me just start with a really basic question about the public really, and that is, in your opinion, what is the biggest misconception that people have about either space or space exploration?
EC: I think the biggest misconception, and we'll probably get back to this later in the interview as well, but I think the biggest misconception about space flight is that it doesn't really have any worth for Earth, because when people think about space flight, they always think about, oh, it's stuff that's happening up there, what's it doing for us down here? And it's done an incredible amount for our day to day lives. But it's also, you know, there is a potential in the future to have an off planet civilization. And it's teaching us how to do that as well. I tend to think very long term. So I think that's why, you know, space is worthwhile. And I think that's a big misconception, you know, when you ask just regular people about space, well, what is it doing for me down here? It's actually doing a lot in your day to day life down to the medicines you might take. So I think, in some of the technologies we have, I mean, heck, we have a little microprocessor right here, you know, at our fingertips and a lot of that is from space flight technology. And but when you talk to people, you got to make it more than just spin offs you've got to, you know, and my thing is, in the future, you know, it may be useful to have off planet habitation, you know, and most people don't want it. Most people (say) like, that's crazy. But I'm like I'm talking about a hundred, two hundred years from now. So I really think those are the things that make spaceflight worth it. And also just having something to be wondrous about. That's the thing, that's what got me into spaceflight was just the sheer like, wow, you know, the amazement in it, you know, and the fact that, you know, you could take people from 0 to 17,500 miles per hour in like, less than 10 minutes and put them in orbit, to me, that's always, you want to say the word miracle comes up. It's not a miracle. It's a lot of hard work, but it just seems miraculous.
GR: Right, yeah, I do want to get on to a couple of those topics. So you've already anticipated that, we'll come back to a couple of them. But let me ask you this as sort of a starting point. In thinking about the history of the story of humans in space, what do you think, if there is one, is the single most important inflection point in that story? You know, where does the thing really turn?
EC: I think the inflection point really, this is my opinion, some other space historians may not agree with me, and that's fine. My personal inflection point would probably be around 1966 because that was the point where we had the, it's been called the space race between the Soviet Union's and the US, and that was really the point where things started. And granted I'm not you know, trying to strike out some of the bad things that NASA went through shortly after that. But I think that was the point where we really started to turn a corner and hold our own and we're really it seemed like, wow, we might make it to the moon, you know, because we had the Gemini program, it was demonstrating a lot of the concepts, the United States needed to ace before we got to the moon, you know, pretty effectively, you know, Apollo was being developed. Granted, it had some serious issues at the time, you know, and it really seemed, you know, and at that time, the Soviet Union, they weren't really doing anything. They kind of went quiet for a little bit. So that to me really seems like the turning point in the story, like, wow, we might actually make this goal that, you know, Kennedy set for us. So, yeah, a lot of people would say the moon landing and stuff like that or something else, and that's fine. But that's just my opinion. If you want to take it back, even earlier of, okay this is where things begin to pivot a little bit in our direction, like, wow, it looks like we might actually make it. So that's my opinion.
GR: Well, yeah, it's interesting that you mention that because I did want to ask you a couple of questions about the Apollo program and also the more general effort to go to the moon. I've read a fair number of analyzes of the Kennedy administration and it's clear from those that both Kennedy and his closest advisors were extremely pragmatic and even somewhat cautious in a lot of ways, despite the afterglow that we have about his administration. I was wondering, where did Kennedy get the idea of dedicating us to putting a man on the moon by 1970? That was a bold claim when he made it.
EC: That's a great question. I honestly wondered that in a lot of ways myself I that's a really great question. I'm not sure if I can even answer that. I think Kennedy was just, he was trying to motivate our country to a certain goal, you know, to motivate us to a means to an end. That speech at Rice University in many ways was a surprise to people at NASA because I listen to the speech, Alan Shepard just got back from space in May 1961, right? First American in space, you know, the Soviets did beat us to the punch a bit but, you know, Freedom 7 was a much needed success for us because we'd had a lot of public failures and we'd only had 15 minutes roughly in space, maybe, you know, if you want to stretch it out maybe 18 minutes. That speech that Kennedy gave, and like you said, Kennedy I think had a lot of mixed feelings towards spaceflight. If you look at a lot of his private papers and some of his private communications he didn't always come across as like, pro space, you know? But I just, I think he wanted to give us a sort of a bold motivation, you know, for the country, you know, technologically. A lot of people at NASA at the time were like, what? Like, we've got to do what? Because, you know, any effort to go to the moon, it required obviously propulsion, which we did not have at the time. We didn't have the Saturn 5 in 1961. It involved hardware which had not yet been invented. It required just a lot of things that we just didn't have yet. So I think, you know, Kennedy just wanted to give the country something bold to strive toward, you know, and sort of a, I guess a shared experience. And when he died, you know, when he was unfortunately assassinated in December 1963, I think it became even more important to people at NASA to fulfill that wish because it was something that okay, this is, it became more poignant I guess. I'm probably skipping a lot of historical documents, I'm not sure what was the actual pivot in his mind for it, but I think it came as a surprise to a lot of people, especially at NASA, because they're like, we just finished a 15 minute long flight. We haven't even flown in Earth orbit yet and you want us to go to the moon.
GR: Yeah, it does seem to be a juxtaposition with some of his other caution and public policy errors. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm speaking with space journalist Emily Carney, coauthor with Bruce McCandless of a new book titled, “Star Bound”. Well, I want to fast forward now to more of the present. And it strikes me as I read in the last few years that most of the space related press has seemed to focus on the privately funded or non-governmental space efforts. So first question is, how significant have those efforts been for space exploration and for keeping the space related efforts going? Is the private sector now terribly important to that?
EC: Absolutely. We've seen in the last decade or so ,you know, we've got companies like Blue Origin sending private citizens to space. We have obviously SpaceX has really kind of monopolized the satellite market, the small sat market. They're developing Starship for deep space exploration. They also have the Falcon Heavy as well. You know, there's obviously, you know, Virgin Galactic, things of that nature as well. Really, over a decade ago, NASA entered into a commercial crew partnership with a few vendors such as Boeing, I won't get into Starliner too much, and SpaceX to send cargo and crew to the International Space Station. And really, since that point, SpaceX has proved themselves as a company to be very capable in meeting a lot of the goals for cargo putting crew up there since 2020. We've had a ton of crew sent to the ISS using the Crew Dragon. So yeah, commercial space flight in the last decade or so has just you know exploded, it's just gotten huge. When people think about space flight in the future they're probably going to associate this era with commercial spaceflight I think because you know, and that's not a slight to NASA at all. You know, NASA has been working for a very long time to develop the space launch system and to develop infrastructure for Orion. And granted, they've worked with some contractors for that. But in the meantime, the bulk of human spaceflight has been carried out by, you know, SpaceX. So, yeah, absolutely this is sort of the era for commercial space flight for private and public partnerships and also just for private space flight. We've seen Inspiration4 send up four private astronauts, Polaris Dawn sent up four private astronauts, and they accomplished an EVA, the first private spacecraft EVA, which is a huge deal.
GR: Just translate EVA for our listeners.
EC: Oh, okay. A spacewalk, extravehicular activity, basically a spacewalk. Granted, it wasn't a very ambitious spacewalk. All they did was go out of the spacecraft and stand up and test the suit. It wasn't like they were doing very complex tasks. That's still a huge deal because you've got to start somewhere. And that means in the future, you know, regular astronauts will have the capability to maybe fix infrastructure in space, you know, and yeah, so this is definitely the era of those kind of things.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Emily Carney, the journalist and former nuclear technician is the coauthor with Bruce McCandless of a new book titled, “"Star Bound: A Beginner's Guide to the American Space Program, from Goddard's Rockets to Goldilocks Planets and Everything in Between" and we've been discussing her book. So you mentioned this at the outset, Emily, and I wanted to come back to it because I think it is such an important question. I'm going to give it some personal context, if I could, but it goes back to the question of the expense of space exploration and space research versus tangible rewards. And I remember as a boy, I watched Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk on the moon on real time. And it was an amazing experience for me. But recently I watched a movie about Neil Armstrong called, “First Man”, and I was surprised watching the movie to learn that there was a lot of political controversy at the time about spending that amount of money on going to the moon. And I suppose I get that in one way. But, you know, the entire world was mesmerized. You mentioned sort of the wonder of all of this, and I can remember that. I mean, if I put it this way, this is not an exaggeration. If I'm if I'm on my deathbed and I'm still of coherent mind and somebody asked me, what were the biggest things that you saw in your lifetime? The first thing coming out of my mouth is going to be I watched man walk on the moon. And so I guess what this all leads to is what do you say to people when they question the value of a dedicated space program in those kind of financial terms?
EC: That's a really great question. I did love in, “First Man” how they sort of juxtaposed the Apollo 11 the moon landing with, you know, some of the social concerns of the time, especially some of the cultural concerns that were going on at the time. You know, you had race issues, there were riots, people were protesting a lot of unseemly things that were happening with the government, etc. Fast forward to now, we have a lot of the same things that are still happening. I won't try to get too political here, but let's look at right now in this time in history, you know, we've got a new administration about to come in. You know, we have a lot of the same social problems and issues that we had during the late 1960’s. Unfortunately, they're still around. And, you know, and in the last few weeks, I've seen a lot of posts on the internet, you know, and on various social media, like, you know, why do we need, you know, space flight? Why do we need space flight? What we need, you know, we need women's rights, we need health care. And I completely agree with that. I think we do need, you know, we do need to pay attention to what's going on here as well. I do think, though, I think spaceflight is 100% worth it. The reasons why is I do think advances in space flight, especially pulled the public and cultural advances like for example, Artemis II to is supposed to send the first African-American, the first woman and the first Canadian around the moon. Granted, that's not an American accomplishment, but that still means something. You know, that's been a long time coming. When we think of people going to the moon culturally, what do we think of? We think of people like Neil Armstrong. I love Neil Armstrong, but he was the sort of the arch-typical white male middle class test pilot, you know? In the late 60's, we didn't have women going to the moon, we didn't have African-Americans, we didn't have people from other nations allowed to go to the the moon. Now we're going to see that for the first time. That's just, to me that has a lot of cultural importance. Many people probably don't agree with me, they're probably like, what big deal is this? To me, that is a huge deal. I do believe representation in our society is extremely important. For me, it was extremely important growing up. This is probably a very long, convoluted answer, but when I was growing up, the first women astronauts were coming up at NASA, you know, such as Judy Resnik and Sally Ride, Rhea Seddon, Anna Fisher, etc. etc. And seeing those women in space literature just killing it, you know, just doing incredible work in spaceflight, that to me was like, whoa, that somebody like me could do that someday, you know? And that really, I don't think if I hadn't, I think if I hadn't seen that, I wouldn't have gotten into this industry, I really believe that. Because I wasn't, you know, as much as I admire the male Apollo astronauts, and I've been fortunate to become friendly with some of them, there wouldn't have been that representation for somebody like me where I could see myself doing something like that, you know? Whereas with women it was like, wow, okay, I have a place in this industry. So I think representation is important. I'm sure a lot of people, again, will disagree with what I say, but I stand by what I say. I think that's very important for just our culture and in the world as a whole. I do think it has financed like I said, I think it has very useful spin-offs technologically as well. And I think it's important because one day, maybe not in the next few years, but maybe 100, 200 years from now, we may need to maintain an off planet presence.
GR: Yeah, I want to come back to that. But you mentioned you mentioned the climate today and I did want to ask you a question about that. Former president and now president-elect Trump as I recall, he started the Space Force, the sixth branch of the Armed Forces. It received some criticism, even some ridicule at the time. What impact has it had so far?
EC: Well, the Space Force has had, I believe it's from it was derived from the Air Force that already existed at the time. I do believe it's had, I know a few people who are in the Space Force the Space Force runs a lot of the, what used to be Air Force bases, but a lot of the space infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg. I'm former military, at the time, you know, the idea of a Space Force was really met with ridicule and their uniforms got made fun of. And so I personally don't, as ex-military, I would never make fun of that personally. I think that's for me, that's verboten. I think the Space Force does have a positive impact every day because they maintain a lot of day to day space operations such as, you know, Cape Canaveral, Vandenberg and things like that. So that's really what I think about it. As ex-military, I'm really loathe to poo poo on any other military branch unless it's Army-Navy game day.
GR: (laughter) Yeah, I've heard I've heard a few of those from other folks.
EC: (laughter) Unless certain days, on certain states of the year, we're not friends. But the rest of the year, we're okay, we're fine.
GR: Yeah, that's right. If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is the journalist Emily Carney, whose new book is titled, “Star Bound”. So I want to come back to something that you mentioned earlier and you've talked about a couple of times, habitation in space. I get the sense from what you're saying then that's probably the distant frontier in space exploration, space research. But I was also wondering, this is a very abstract question, but do you think there is some kind of limit on what humans can achieve in and through space maybe like a space ceiling, if that makes sense, that you as someone who thinks in very long terms, would identify?
EC: That's an amazing question. I've thought about that a lot myself. Again, most people would probably not agree with my answer. I don't think there is a ceiling. I think it's going to take a lot of time to reach certain milestones. I think permanent space habitation, that's something that you know, that's an idea that's been around for a very long time. Space settlements were something that were first discussed, gosh, in the 1970's, late 60's. You know, there were a lot of visionary thinkers who discussed those back in the day and that idea is very still much bandied about. I think those are very, on a smaller scale I think those are very possible, they could definitely happen. We do have the technology for those kinds of things in the future. A lot of people want to talk about Mars, they want to go to Mars. And I have mixed feelings about Mars. I think going to Mars for long term trips, I think it's possible. There are a lot of variables that need to be worked out for human survivability. You know, obviously we can't breathe the atmosphere on Mars, landing is very difficult on Mars, it's not like landing on the moon or on Earth. There is a radiation issue on Mars, you know, and yeah, it would suck to go to Mars and then you come back and you get cancer. You know, nobody wants that, nobody wants that kind of experience. You know, and, you know, people generally don't want to see astronauts go through that, you know? And so that's kind of, you know, a safety mitigation issue there. I think those things are, I do think Mars as a goal is possible in the future. I just think there are a ton of issues that need to be sort of at least looked into before we attempt something like that. And there are a lot of thinkers who would disagree with me just because they're like, oh, yeah, we could do it, we could do it now, just send up some terraforming stuff, make some you know, they think it's going to be like, “The Martian”, and that's an awesome idea. I love, “The Martian”, I love Andy Weir. I think that's a cool idea, and I love the idea of exploring deep space like that. But, you know, like I said, as somebody who worked in the nuclear navy, I have some basic knowledge of what radiation does to people. And my concern is, you know, we don't want to see people get nuked to death on another planet. You know, you just don't want to see that. So those are things that, and shielding can be very heavy. The shielding we use on Earth for like reactor plants is like lead, basically. You can't take that into space. That's very heavy, it's not really a good space material.
GR: Okay, well, I wanted to leave, we've got about 3 minutes or so and I wanted to have some fun at the end with you with some quirky questions. So for each of these, you got about a minute or so to explain your answer if you want, but it's kind of like a lightning round, if you will. The first one is, because you have so much experience with this, the first one is what's your favorite movie or TV show that features space?
EC: “For All Mankind” on Apple TV.
GR: And what is so special about that, quickly?
EC: It just feels, it is far-fetched, but it feels when you're watching it, it feels so real in the moment, like you can actually feel like it's really, it's, you can feel like it's really happening, like it's incredible. I just love it. My favorite season, I think, was season, was it season two? It was when they were in the 1980's, not the happiest season, but definitely I was like, wow, this show is incredible. You feel like you're just in, your present there in the moment, I love it. for mankind.
GR: I haven't seen that one. I'll have to check it out, yeah, okay. So my next one is, what about a favorite novel that is about space or features space in some way?
EC: Oh, wow. I read so much nonfiction about space, it's hard to talk about fictional books. There was a book, God, this is a kind of a trashy one, “The Cape” by Martin Caidin. Martin Caidin wrote a lot of space books, he was kind of a big personality in Cape Canaveral, but he wrote a book called, “The Cape”, and it's sort of about sabotage at Cape Kennedy. And it's just it's kind of trashy in some parts, but I love it. If you want to sort of get a sense of what 1960's, early 1970's Cape Canaveral, Cape Kennedy was like, just read that book. It's a really cool time capsule. I love that era. So it's a neat book. There's a few other books like by James Michener, “Space”. I'll admit I haven't gone through the whole book, but I liked it. I liked what I read. So those are probably my top two fictional ones.
GR: Interesting, okay. And then last is, and this one may be the toughest one for you. We've got about a minute left. What about a song that's about space or space travel? What's your favorite song in this regard?
EC: Moon Age Daydream by David Bowie. Most people are like oh, Space Oddity. I'm like, no. Moon Age Daydream is the song for me, that song is my favorite, I love it that song is incredible. And it's also used in, “For All Mankind” to great effect in the first season so I love it. That's my favorite space song.
GR: You've made two sales with me here today, in addition to your book, which I already have, and that is checking out that, “For All Mankind” and now I got to check out that new Bowie song because I was sure that you were going to say either Space Oddity or Rocket Man, so you surprised me there. That was fantastic. Well, that was Emily Carney and again, her new book is titled, "Star Bound: A Beginner's Guide to the American Space Program, from Goddard's Rockets to Goldilocks Planets and Everything in Between". It's a great story and it's about something terribly important in our history. So, Emily, thanks so much for taking the time to talk with me.
EC: Thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk to you. Have a great day, thank you so much.
GR: Yeah, it's a pleasure talking to you. You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
