This Week in Space 160 Transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.

0:00:00 - Tariq Malik
Coming up on this Week. In Space, a Soviet Venus probe is crashing back to Earth. Nasa's Roman Space Telescope is coming together, but is it going to fly? And Charles Slatkin, the primo cheerleader of Robert Goddard, is going to tell us why the father of American rocketry is so important then, now and in the future. So tune in.

0:00:27 - Rod Pyle
This is This Week in Space, episode number 160, recorded on May 9th 2025: The Amazing Dr. Goddard. Hello and welcome to yet another episode of This Week in Space, the Amazing Dr Goddard edition. I'm Rod Pyle, editor-in-chief of Ad Astor magazine. I'm joined, as always, by my fellow non-mathematician, Tariq Malik, who is the editor-in-chief at the one the only the amazing space.com. Hi partner.

0:00:59 - Tariq Malik
I'm doing. Well, how are you doing? Oh wait, you didn't ask me how I'm doing.

0:01:06 - Leo Laporte
I didn't ask how you are, but now that you said it, I'm so glad to hear that well, I'm okay.

0:01:08 - Rod Pyle
I'm okay and I'm going to be more okay in a few minutes when we're joined by Charles Slatkin, that's right, who, uh, this is still really kind of gets me. He bought Robert Goddard's house in Worcester, Massachusetts, because it was otherwise going to probably be torn down or mistreated in some way, and he's preserving it, turning it into a museum, and has sort of just taken on the mission of continuing to kindle the interest in Robert Goddard in the history of rocketry, the father of rocketry in the United States and a larger mission to inspire and support STEM education in the United States, which is always a good thing.

So we're going to be with him in just a few minutes and that's really going to be fun and he's a heck of a guy. Before we start, don't forget, put it in your head to do us a solid make sure to like, subscribe and do the other nice podcast things wherever you happen to listen to this podcast, because we're counting on you to keep the warm electrons flowing your way. And now, a complete contravention of keeping the electrons flowing your way, because this will result in probably a cooler moment. A space joke from Paul Woolley Paul. Yes, rod, probably a cooler moment. A space joke from paul woolley paul. Yeah, yes, rod. What do astronauts do immediately after landing on mars?

0:02:31 - Tariq Malik
uh, I don't know, what do they do? They post a selfie and wait eight minutes for the likes to arrive if they're like me're going to be waiting a long time, so I don't get the whole length.

0:02:47 - Rod Pyle
I mean, my Waterloo is. Even if I do this on Earth, I'll be waiting a long time, but that's ridiculous.

0:02:52 - Tariq Malik
Wait, have we talked about that joke before? You know it felt?

0:02:55 - Rod Pyle
familiar.

0:02:57 - Tariq Malik
Because it would take 16 minutes. Right, it's eight minutes to get there.

0:03:01 - Rod Pyle
No, it's between five-ish and and 23, depending on where mars is in its orbit. Remember the orbits. See, this is why you and I are writers. So so you know, mars and earth are on on similar tracks in the race, but earth catches up and then departs, and mars slings along by so yeah, I guess, is that, is that my seven minutes of terror waiting for the likes to come in from Mars, right Is that?

what that is. No, that's entry time. We're going to have to have a talk and a spanking after this is over. But you know I've heard that some people want to send us to Mars with this joke time and this show, and won't that be disappointing. But you can help Send us your best words for most of different space joke at twist at twittv now, from from the darkness of our space joke to the bright moment of headlines with tarik we're going to talk about today's incoming soviet venus probe.

Wow we're not getting to have if you're going to have a space junk getting ready to re-enter, isn't it comforting to know that it's already been hardened and designed to reenter through Venus's thicker atmosphere?

0:04:13 - Tariq Malik
I want to just pause for a minute and say that I was getting ready to do the bop to the jingle for Headline News and we skipped totally over it. So you know, I thought we were going to go do like the little headline news. It's not too late. Headline news. Oh, I missed it now. All right, all right. Yeah, we're starting off with a bang or a headline news. I did it, I did it. No, we are starting off with a bang or at least a brilliant blaze of glory, because a failed Soviet Venus lander is coming back home. Cosmos 42 is coming back. Actually, as we're recording this, it is like hours away from burning up. We've been following this basically since, I guess, since it became apparent that it was going to reenter around this month. As we're recording it and today is May 9th, and as of right now, as of 3 pm, which is what time it is right now that we're recording this Eastern time, eastern time, yeah, eastern time. The European Space Agency thinks that the Cosmos 42 Venus probe is going to burn up. Uh, I think over the ocean. It looks like it might be over the pacific, off the coast of, no, the indian ocean, off the coast of australia, if I'm looking at this map right, um, very early in the morning on the weekend. So, uh, so it's days are numbered.

This is a spacecraft launched in 1972 by the Soviet Union to land on the surface of Venus. It didn't actually reach Venus, obviously. It suffered an anomaly, got stuck in a very long elliptical orbit and it's been there for like 50 decades. Orbit of Earth. Yeah, yeah, what goes up must come down, and that orbit has decayed around Earth to the point that it is now falling back and reentering.

And what you kind of teed up at the beginning is the fact that, unlike every other spacecraft that has burned up like satellite that has burned up in the atmosphere, this one is actually designed to land. It was designed to land in the thick atmosphere of Venus, which means that there could be a good amount of this, nearly. It's about a half ton, just over a half ton 1,190 pounds, 405 kilograms could survive the reentry itself. So you know, we do want to know where it lands and you know ESA's tracking it Aerospace Corporation is checking it. You can bet that the isa's tracking it aerospace corporation is checking it. You can bet that the uh space command is is uh, tracking it as well, uh, to see where it is and where it might come down that would make a big dent in my roof it would, it would.

It's a plot of six feet under too. I think that the uh, main star in that store, in that that show, was killed by the toilet from mirror because when it, when it read, when it re-entered, I think that's, I think that store and that's that show was killed by the toilet from mirror because when it, when it read, when it re-entered, I think that's, I think that's how that that show opened up, yeah, and then she became like an agent of, of death or whatever that's a whole, brings a whole new meaning to potty training.

0:07:17 - Rod Pyle
All right, uh, moving on, a key portion of nasa's nancy, roman space telescope clears thermal vacuum test. But but will it fly?

0:07:26 - Tariq Malik
That's the question, right? You know we talked a little bit about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope recently because it was on the list of potential cancellations from the skinny budget that the Trump administration recently released. But the hardware, as we said in that episode, is actually built. In fact, it's almost complete, which is what NASA's announcement this week revealed. I mean, basically, the space telescope is the outer barrel and it's deployable aperture cover and the test. They all passed a deploy test in a thermal chamber at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center Goddard.

very ho for our episode today yes, um and and so it really uh sets up the stage for nasa to attach the final uh flight solar array, sun shields and and the outer barrel that they call it to put on top. So they're going to start that final assembly uh in goddard uh this this month.

0:08:22 - Rod Pyle
So yeah, excuse me, I I have to say can you imagine what it's like to be starting final assembly on something that, as far as you could tell, is going to be canceled and probably torn apart and scavenged?

0:08:34 - Tariq Malik
I hope that's not going to be the case, though I find it really difficult to believe that this mission is going to be canceled just because the administration feels like they this. They have tried to do this before. Right, they tried to do it with james webb.

No, james webb is doing groundbreaking in space yeah, they tried to cancel it right, even though it was mostly built because it was so far over budget, and yet it survived. They tried to do it with um, no, no, no, uh, uh, james webb, james webb. They tried to do it with ams as well because it was it was with James Webb.

They tried to do it with AMS as well because it was too expensive and they didn't want to have the extra space shuttle mission to do it, and they were able to get that through and get more support for it and get the mission funded through Congress. I'm sure they're going to find a way to preserve a space telescope that NASA got for free. We talked to John Grunsfeld on a recent episode. You know they got the Optics Assembly for free from the NRO and built a world-class science tool around it. I think they're going to find a way. I think Jared Eisenman is going to get confirmed. Come in and say we need this science.

0:09:40 - Rod Pyle
Well, so does confirmation. Jared Eisenman yeah, well, I hope that works. There's a lot to say about that, but we have to move on, because we have a fascinating Scott Kelly story called Good Nights, and I leave it to you, partner.

0:09:59 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, this one comes from. By the way, the Venus story obviously came from the space.com team that's tracking it. Nancy Grace Roman, that's from NASA. This one is from my friend, Robert Perlman at CollectSpace, who basically found out that astronaut Scott Kelly famous half of the Kelly twin astronauts and the one-year mission astronaut has teamed up with Good Nights, the diaper company, to try to help destigmatize bedwetting.

It's a campaign that launched on National Astronaut Day, which was May 8th, May 7th, May 6th, May 5th, May 5th is what it was, that's right. It's the Alan Shepard launch day and basically it's a campaign with him and like a young child, reminding people that while we all wore diapers when we and it's something that is, you know, it is endorsed by space exploration and whatnot, and so it's a kind of a fun tongue, in cheek way, I think, for astronauts to try to at least give kids something more to identify with and take something that could be embarrassing and say, hey, man, it's happened to astronauts in space. Alan Shepard famously had to use the restroom on his first flight in 1961. And now they all wear diapers in their spacesuits.

0:11:36 - Rod Pyle
Well, I'm embracing an impressive moment of maturity here, because I got nothing more to say about that, except that we'll be back in just a few moments with Charles Slatkin to talk about Dr Robert Goddard. So stay with us and we are back with Charles Slatkin. And Charles, I'm not quite sure how to introduce you because you have a panoply of projects going the Wonder Project, the Goddard Centennial, the museum. How would you like to be introduced? I'll let you do your own today.

0:12:12 - Charles Slatkin
Gee hard. Good question. I love space. Space made me a positive, hopeful person. Been working most recently to try to make sure that my kids and my grandkids and kids everywhere have that same feeling of hopefulness that anything is possible. So basically try to do a number of initiatives that really promote that feeling and the wonder in all of space.

0:12:42 - Rod Pyle
Wow, Tarek, he's a space optimist. What happened to you?

0:12:46 - Tariq Malik
What.

0:12:47 - Rod Pyle
Well, I should have blamed myself, but I don't want to take the spears and arrows all the time.

0:12:51 - Charles Slatkin
So okay, well that's wonderful.

0:12:54 - Rod Pyle
So, Tariq, of course you have a question.

0:12:56 - Tariq Malik
I do. I do, charles. I asked everyone a very similar question and I'm very curious about your own journey too, because you know, rod and I were bit by the space bug when we were little space reporters, way back when and I'm curious, when you know that passion that you just explained about being interested in space, being driven by it, really took hold. Is it something that was kindled when you were young, like a lot of folks like Rod and I, or is it something that you discovered later on, either in university or professional life? Take us through that journey, your journey to space, if you will.

0:13:35 - Charles Slatkin
Very early. I think I'm five years old and my father was telling me about Sputnik, so 1957. And two years later we're watching the wonderful world of Disney and Wernher von Braun is showing his vision of how we're going to get to the moon in 69, sorry, in 10 years, and it seemed, it seemed impossible. And yet 10 years later we landed on the moon. So certainly watching the space race was very inspiring for a young kid, and going to the great World's Fairs. I grew up in Brooklyn, new York, before. It was cool and got to take a bus to the New York World's Fair every weekend and it was a time when the world was really in tough shape.

We were doing duck and cover in elementary school. There were race riots, terrible poverty, our leaders are being assassinated and yet the World's Fair has promoted this vision of a future, you know, enabled by technology, basically colonies on the moon and farms underneath the planets and it really started me on a journey of just feeling like technology and all these brilliant people that enable technology could make the world a better place.

0:14:54 - Rod Pyle
So I just want to touch back and frequent listeners forgive me because I've talked about this before, but I was born in 56. So I saw the Disney stuff, you know, in second or third run. But I recall and have since confirmed there was the animated version and then there was that really fascinating live-action version of, you know, man Conquers Space the live-action version, if you recall, and this was the same one. They ran at Disneyland for the Journey to the Moon ride and this was the same one. They ran at Disneyland for the journey to the moon ride.

I love the fact that you've got, you know, all these military, six military guys or four or whatever it was at the rocket and they're all wearing helmets. Great big video, video, video visors on the top and aerials out the side and all that. And the microphone they pick up is about the the size of a ham hock when they're talking to mission control. But they're coming around the backside of the moon. They're firing flares. Do you remember this? They're firing flares down so they can illuminate the surface and the final flare before they come around the limb of the moon and could see the Earth again to communicate. The flare is flickering out and you see the outlines of a rectilinear wall on the moon. So clearly somebody's been down there building something. And they cut back to the two spacemen and they look at each other and go there's just this kind of silent nod that they come back around the moon. They're like, hey, mission control, nothing to report. That was a brilliant little bit, by I mean only disney, right.

Anyway, yeah, that was an incredible introduction and you and I came around about the same time. And what a time to be alive. Two reasons one we got to see a lot of amazing things happen. But two back before the mid-60s, we really didn't know how awful space was. We, we still thought that a lot of the planets might be kind of earth-like. You know, mars, you might be able to breathe with just an oxygen tank like Robinson Crusoe on Mars, Venus, oh, it's probably hot and swampy, but you can still walk around in your wader boots. And how hard can it be? And then, suddenly, the mid-60s, we start sending out those interplanetary robots and it turns out oh, these places are horrible and it's really hard. And so we've been fighting that battle of reality ever since. Do you remember the shift from the kind solar system to the angry one?

0:17:13 - Charles Slatkin
Not really, that doesn't click.

0:17:17 - Tariq Malik
It's like a pessimistic view of the solar system there Rod. It's like oh, welcome to this big podcast about space. By the way, space is awful.

0:17:26 - Rod Pyle
Okay, whenever you're done. No, I'm just talking about specifically I think it was Mariner 4. That moment, when the first pictures came back, we expected maybe there was this wave of darkening that we thought might be a forest or at least algae or something Ooh, canals would be cool and we got craters and bleakness. Anyway, enough of my darkness let's talk about. Before we get into your ventures, could you give us a primer for people who may not know who Robert Goddard was and why he's so important?

0:17:57 - Charles Slatkin
So Robert Goddard was born in 1882 and fired the world's first liquid propulsion rocket in 1926. Somehow, 43 years later, we walked on the moon, and if that doesn't make you believe that anything's possible, certainly nothing does. And yet his story is full of all these wonderful, interesting connections with Buzz Aldrin, with Carl Sagan, with Charles Lindbergh and Harry Guggenheim. And he was mocked by folks like the New York Times when he wrote his first article, before he even attempted to build a liquid propulsion rocket. The New York Times wrote this scathing article that Dr Goddard, despite his chair of physics, doesn't know the most basic fundamentals of science, that you can't have propulsion in a vacuum. And two days before they landed on the moon they printed this tiny little retraction in the New York Times. Finally, yeah. But what impressed me the most, and one thing I'm trying to share with especially young people these days, is how amazingly persistent he was and how he persevered, despite mostly failing and being mocked by folks like the New York Times. And those characteristics you know, that Yankee ingenuity and that perseverance never, you know, never got to see the moon landing. His wife Esther did, fortunately. Never got to see the moon landing, his wife Esther did, fortunately really are just these wonderful characteristics that I think should so many of our modern Goddards really do demonstrate almost every day.

But he was this fabulous early scientist. He had a vision of going to Mars and beyond when he was 17 years old in a famous cherry tree story. If we have time, we'll talk about that. But what I've learned over the years I'm not really a historian person, I'm more of a futurist is he was incredible visionary.

He was writing about ion propulsion, collecting solar energy in space and beaming it down to Earth to power terrestrial cities, an early prototype of what he called the vacuum train, which is the modern personification of the Hyperloop, and he even predicted the technology that spin launch is using to attempt to get projectiles into low Earth orbit, et cetera. So he was just so far ahead of his time. And yet what I think drives myself and many of my colleagues forward is so many people outside of the aerospace community don't know who he is. And we all know who Thomas Edison and every kid knows who Thomas Edison and Graham Bell is, but we really don't know who this guy, Robert Goddard, is. And I travel the country and ask young people and old people everywhere, and I'm shocked how 95% of the folks don't know the father of modern rocketry.

0:20:55 - Rod Pyle
And I think that may be increasing in the last five or 10 years and, of course, famously also a pioneer of liquid rocket propulsion in the US. We're going to run to a quick break. We'll be right back, so go nowhere. Then it's over to you Tart.

0:21:12 - Tariq Malik
Great. Well, thank you, charles, for that quick primer about Dr Robert Goddard. I should point out, just for folks who aren't aware, it's Robert H Goddard. H is for Hutchings and you mentioned he was born in 1882. He died in 1945, just at the end of World War II, where we saw liquid fuel rockets used as weapons, I guess for the first time, and kick off that space race that came after there. And I'm curious about your journey to. We asked about your journey to space, but your journey to Goddard in particular. Of course that historic launch was in March 16th 1926. We're going to talk a little bit about why that date's important to you in a bit too, out of Auburn, Massachusetts, and it sounds like you had a bit of a gravitation towards him. That seems somewhat natural. Can you kind of give us an idea of how your interest in space led you to Goddard very personally?

0:22:12 - Charles Slatkin
Sure, sure, well, I think I was 11 years old and bought a book personally. Sure, sure, Well, I think I was 11 years old and bought a book Giants of Invention at a local school book fair and there's Robert Goddard featured on the cover and I read a little bit about him, but I really didn't think he was going to be so involved in my life. But accidentally I ended up attending the same university that Goddard went to for his PhD and taught at. So I attended Clark University in 1969 and ultimately was a professor there for a short time before I formed my multimedia production company. But the year I arrived at Clark was the year that Buzz Aldrin came and cut the ribbon at the new library that was dedicated to Robert Goddard, and in the audience was Buzz Aldrin's father, eugene Aldrin Sr, who was a student and a friend of Goddard's, no less. And Buzz goes off to the moon two months later and he takes a miniature version of Goddard's autobiography with him and wants to leave it on the moon and NASA says no, thank you. But he flies back to Worcester when he returns and brings it to Esther Goddard and signs it and she donates it to Clark and we hope to display that in the upcoming centennial? Oh wow.

So what happened with this house, though, which really wasn't part of my radar? I had started a nonprofit a few years ago. I've sort of been known as a wow factor technologist and I worked on some World's Fair projects and some presidential libraries, and I was basically looking to apply my talents to see what I could do to help inspire more kids. I was devastated to learn the United States was 38th in the world in graduating science and engineering majors, and I just felt like we weren't doing enough to really wow kids. You know, kids are naturally curious, but you need that spark to take them to the next level. So I started this nonprofit and along the way I'm really designing what I would consider immersive environments that would wow me as an 11-year-old and hopefully wow young and old.

And I read that Goddard's house was basically on the market and about to be destroyed by a developer. So that kind of got me motivated, very depressed initially, and 50 years before, when actually Goddard's house was on the market again because Esther had died, the house had been willed to Clark University and WPI and, for whatever reason, they basically declined the sale and auctioned off all the contents of the house and sold the house to a neighbor. So it was in private hands until 1980, 1982. I'm sorry, it was sold in 82 and it was private hands until 2021.

So I knew it seemed like this was like third time's a charm and if, if I didn't step in and find a way to buy it, it was going to be destroyed and it would just be such a devastating loss to posterity to not have the father of father of the space age, so to speak, to have his house destroyed by development and building ranch houses on the vacant property. So that's sort of been consuming my life for a while. And after Kitty Hawk I read about their centennial in 2003 and started to do the math about two years ago and realized, oh my God, goddard Centennial is coming up in 2026. And that's sort of been keeping me up at night for the last couple of years in terms of how can we leverage that event for the greater good and especially to inspire this younger generation.

0:25:45 - Rod Pyle
So before we get to that, I'd like to talk about the house a little bit more. So what's the current status? You bought it, I assume, through the nonprofit, and you're restoring part of it a museum, and then the other parts are residents, or how are you working that?

0:26:02 - Charles Slatkin
We actually bought it initially as an individual. I didn't tell my wife for two weeks because it had to happen in 24 hours, oh dear.

I had an astronaut tell me recently I'm the bravest man he knows and I am still married. God bless Marsha. So the house has just been recently just this year moved into the nonprofit and we've restored the first floor and we've been approved for zoning for the city of Worcester as a museum, library and resource center. The second floor we're currently renovating and restoring and our hope is to basically have a science physics student, maybe engineering student, from either Clark or WPI live in the house rent-free, to come up with some sort of a scholarship, call it our Goddard Fellows Program, and basically have them be sort of semi-caretakers for the house, shovel the walks, give tours or visits when I'm not available or my staff isn't available, and we're making some progress. But the house is looking pretty good these days.

0:27:22 - Rod Pyle
I think people are very surprised when they arrive there, how elegant it looks and it's come a long way from the disrepair it had fallen into over the years. And how much of his library or you know, rocket parts, I mean, how much of his stuff do you actually have in the house, did you have?

0:27:33 - Charles Slatkin
anything to draw from. Very little in the house, just his, you know, certainly his notebooks, a few pieces of ephemera. The good news is when the house was sold Esther had spent probably the last 15 years of her life organizing all of his papers and notebooks and ephemera and scientific experimentation gear and making sure it went to the right places. So a lot of it's at Clark University Special Collections, Worcesterester Polytech and the Smithsonian. So they really have protected and preserved a lot of Goddard's archives correctly and we have sort of imitations or digital facsimiles of that.

0:28:18 - Rod Pyle
All right, we're going to go to one more break and we'll be right back, so go nowhere.

0:28:26 - Tariq Malik
Great Charles, you know where we last left off. You were talking about just you know your discovery of, and desire to protect Goddard's house, and I know that you I guess you live in the house as well Is that correct? No, you do not. All right, I was trying to figure out when we were talking about it how old the house might be. And, of course, the big question I always get, I always have for those kinds of things my house is almost a hundred years old, as if there are ghosts in it, and I'm just wondering if? Like what shape? Because you said the house is in good shape. Like what shape is it in now? Like what are your hopes for it? What kind of a house is it? I suppose, to kind of paint a picture to the folks that are listening, Sure, it's a 200-year-old Victorian.

0:29:14 - Charles Slatkin
It'll actually be 200 years old this coming year. Oh, wow, and it's a Victorian. It sits on an acre of land, which is sort of unusual for the neighborhood. It used to be actually certainly a larger property. The bones are pretty good. It's got lead paint on the outside, so we actually just applied for a grant today for lead paint remediation and repainting and we're beginning to get a lot of support in terms of historic preservation. There's some knob and tube wiring on one of the floors, there's little plumbing issues et cetera, but in general the bones are pretty good and we've spent a lot of time in the last couple of years really trying to A make it presentable, but also make it safe and more accessible.

0:30:03 - Tariq Malik
If it's 200 years, like as of next year, right, or this year, that means that you know, because the centennial that we're going to be talking about for Robert Gardner, that it was a hundred years old when he launched the rocket. I mean that is crazy in terms of history for a house, for someone that kind of contributed so much to science there.

0:30:24 - Charles Slatkin
Yeah, it's a multi-generational house. So actually there's a photograph that we can show at some point of young Goddard, like eight years old, sitting on the porch with his mother, grandmother, great mother, grand mother, probably in, uh, 1882, 1892, so yeah, something so early 1890s, etc. So the house has been in the goddard family forever, which is wow, which is great. It would be such a. I'm so, so glad we didn't lose it so.

0:30:51 - Rod Pyle
So when I come to visit uh pertaining to to tarx ghost comment, I want to walk through the threshold and yell you can't make a rocket work in space, because there's nothing to push against. See if I get any feedback.

0:31:06 - Tariq Malik
So you said there is. I wonder if that is that a challenge for the interns? For? The student volunteers no To spend the night in the Goddard house. Oh, there you go, spend the night in the Goddard house.

0:31:14 - Rod Pyle
Oh, there you go. So you said there wasn't a lot in there, which is always frustrating if you're a de facto museum curator. Do you think there's any chance? Are there holdings at the university where he taught or anything else you might get? And second part of that question, do you have any plans to build? Build a reproduction of his uh first rocket out front?

0:31:38 - Charles Slatkin
we, we actually have. We have a reproduction hanging from the ceiling. Um, we have a wonderful gentleman did a, did a full-scale replica of goddard's first rocket. He called all of his rockets now, but this is the original, the original nail, and there's a great, great story behind that at some point. Um, but we actually have. This wonderful gentleman built us a full-scale replica and mostly it's out of metal. He's a metal fabricator. He did use some 3d printing technology, which I'm sure goddard would have endorsed, to do some of the more complicated parts, and he's also the gentleman that's been fabricating all the sculptures for um, the beginning of the national Space Trail Initiative. That's in front of the house at the moment.

0:32:19 - Tariq Malik
You know. I wanted to ask a little bit about that history though, because it is, I mean, it's easy for us to look back I'm wearing a space shuttle shirt right now about taking like liquid fuel rockets for granted. But this model that you had built, you know, for the house, I saw a version of it at the Smithsonian. Actually just last month I took my daughter there to Udvar-Hezi for the first time and there is the life-size, the rocket, and it strikes me how such a primitive thing was so revolutionary at the time and I'm curious what it was about the concept that you've been able to pick up that really got it ahead, like why he would seize on liquid fuel as opposed to, I guess, the solid fuels that were considered at the time, and then just keep looking further ahead.

0:33:16 - Charles Slatkin
Well, he spent years working with solid propellants. Matter of fact, he has a student at Worcester Polytech. He blew up the chem lab To the point they moved him to a standalone magnetics research bunker that had three foot walls so he wouldn't kill anyone. But he tried for years and failed to to really achieve what he was looking to do with conventional solid fuel rockets. So he was really looking for alternatives and at that point he was interested in liquid and hydrogen gas. But it wasn't as easily available in a commercial means. But there was liquid oxygen available through a local supplier. So he basically used a liquid oxygen, sometimes kerosene, sometimes gasoline. When you think about it, his rockets, as primitive as they were, were basically bombs on a stick.

0:34:09 - Tariq Malik
I was just thinking about that. It's so scary.

0:34:13 - Charles Slatkin
And the way his assistants lit it is they had a blowtorch on the end of a stick and they pressurized the liquid oxygen and the gasoline and it ran up the tubes and he kind of stuck it near where they were atomized and ran away. No wonder most of his rockets blew up.

0:34:34 - Rod Pyle
No wonder most of his rockets blew up. Wow, this is like all those old Bugs Bunny cartoons where they have to run out to the bottom of the V2-looking rocket and light a little stick of dynamite there. So when I look at your website, the Wonder Mission seems to be the umbrella for what you're doing. Can you tell us what that is and what it means?

0:34:53 - Charles Slatkin
Sure, I mean, the idea of the Wonder Mission really is to bring the universe to Main Street, to find ways and initiatives that really can inspire people to the awe and wonder of space and really kind of raise the bar in experiences. That's my background is really creating these very high resolution canvases that I found when resolution gets past a certain threshold, that's when seeing becomes believing and the magic happens. So initially it was really started to create some of these things, really the personification of the holodeck or, my friend Frank White's, the overview experience. We're really trying to create a a billion-pixel immersive display that allows people to feel like they're experiencing what the overview effect does and also really display all these images and data we have from the Mars data sets and the Jupiter Juno mission data sets at a scale and a resolution people haven't seen before.

And the Goddard Project is really just kind of a, you know, one of our many initiatives that just seems so appropriate and the Goddard story is so wonderfully inspiring that we'd love it to be kind of embodied into every school kid's vocabulary. You know, george Washington has the cherry tree story. We have this wonderful Goddard cherry tree story where he's inspired, you know, at 17 years old and looks up at Mars and comes down from the tree saying I'm a different boy because I found my purpose in life, which is to find a way to go to mars and beyond well, let's you and I are waiting for each other.

0:36:45 - Tariq Malik
Yeah no, no, well, I just I want to talk about, because you know you mentioned, we're 300 plus days out from from that centennial and I'm curious what you hope people will be able to take away if they're able to come in person or if they follow the Wonder Mission online, or if there's other ways to get involved in both the history and the legacy of this American scientist and what you were hoping, how you hope to get that message out too, I guess in the year to come.

0:37:22 - Charles Slatkin
Sure, so we've been very grassroots. It's just a very small, unfunded group of volunteers et cetera, where we're sometimes called the Paul Revere's of the centennial. We've been running around for the last couple of years at various aerospace conferences, kind of the centennial's coming, the centennial is coming, but if Paul Revere came a thousand days before the British showed up, they'd probably tell him to go away and come back, you know, in a few years, but ideally, you know. We think the space centennial is this incredible opportunity not only to celebrate Goddard's historic legacy opportunity not only to celebrate Goddard's historic legacy but I think, more importantly and especially nowadays where science is under attack almost every day, really trying to leverage the centennial to celebrate what we're calling today's Goddard.

Let's celebrate all our scientists and engineers who are working tirelessly and doing amazing things inventing vaccines in a year or flying helicopters on Mars without atmosphere but we really don't celebrate them. We celebrate our Kardashians and our sports heroes. So we think that the centennial should really celebrate today's Goddards all over the country, that every institution, every aerospace company, schools and universities should use the centennial to celebrate big dreamers. And that's really what Goddard's about just the ability to dream big and envision possibilities that no one else could imagine. And, as importantly, we need to celebrate and elevate our tomorrow's Goddards, these wonderful, brilliant students that we see at the NSS conferences, et cetera, who are doing amazing things, and brilliant, smart, attentive kids who kind of get sidelined as, yeah, they're smart, nerdy kids, et cetera, but we don't celebrate or elevate them. I think the centennial is a great chance to do that.

0:39:13 - Rod Pyle
John, what was that?

0:39:14 - Tariq Malik
What was that?

0:39:16 - Charles Slatkin
Sorry, my alarm sound was that time it wasn't me.

0:39:21 - Rod Pyle
This is our way of celebrating, yeah.

0:39:25 - Tariq Malik
And to further celebrate.

0:39:26 - Rod Pyle
We're going to take a little break and then come back and talk about the National Space Trail. So everybody stand by, awesome. So, charles, can you tell us what is the National Space Trail? That sounds really interesting, sure.

0:39:40 - Charles Slatkin
So years ago I had produced the official video for the Boston Freedom Trail and it was very successful because you could take people efficiently through all the locations of the Freedom Trail and actually go behind the scenes. And as we started to look at all the sites around the Worcester area that were significant to the development of the space age and we started to kind of map them out, we started to come up with this idea of a space trail. Once we kind of started to really ideate on that, we said, well, why stop as a Worcester or regional space trail? Let's have a national space trail that'll start in Worcester, go statewide through all the institutions in Massachusetts that were significant MITs, et cetera and then move around the country to all the sites that were significant not only to the history of space but the continuation of space exploration and also in terms of science and space inspiration. So planetariums and science centers. And we've basically got funding for the first eight or nine here in Worcester. So it'll take you from the Goddard House to Goddard's High School. And Goddard was inspired by these two unbelievable teachers at the Old South High School in Worcester, mass, dr Calvin Andrews and Miss Fields. You know, and really speaks about the power of how much a teacher's influence can have on a young smart kid. And moving on to WPI and Clark University and the launch site, et cetera. But it's Goddard a lot of interest and we came up with kind of an elegant design and elegant sculpture.

And one of the things we're hoping to do is, as we start to finish up the Worcester segment, which will be done in the next three or four months, is to really kind of do a survey and ask people at our various aerospace conferences what sites around the country should be included in a national space trail.

And the hope would be that the these sites would would want to be included, and I'm sure we need to form a larger organization to manage that and organize it et cetera. But we have a simple website that's online right now, just nationalspacetrailorg. That has some simple content that we've, you know, put on there and eventually it's going to grow. But I think hopefully it'll become something much bigger than ourselves and it'll be embraced nationally. But it's a cool thing and everyone that comes to the house the first thing they do is they do a selfie with the Robert Goddard cutout silhouette and the space trip, right well, it's going to be a long walk on that trail from houston through the, the, the desolation of white sands, new mexico to jet propulsion laboratory, but we'll do it yeah are you gonna go?

0:42:35 - Tariq Malik
are you gonna to walk all the way to Florida too?

0:42:37 - Charles Slatkin
on the way back, all the way up to yeah, I mean, it's funny, I, I, I started off with like 50 sites and then very quickly I realized there's probably 150 sites that are really significant places I never knew about. So anyway it's it's. It's a really fun project and it's sort of growing exponentially and getting a lot of buzz, so we're enjoying that.

0:42:58 - Tariq Malik
That sounds exciting. That sounds exciting and something you can you can check off over time. If you're a space buff, you know I'm curious about people who can't get to the house. I had heard or Rod and I had heard that that you're looking at like a virtual museum for Goddard to give people that that option of of learning more about Goddard and his life etc. Even if they're not able to make the trip to the house itself, and can you tell us a little bit about that and what you're hoping people will be able to get out of that experience?

0:43:30 - Charles Slatkin
Right. I think certainly that's the next phase and some of that information will be on the National Space Trail site with links to all the uh supplementary uh rich multimedia that's available for Goddard. Um, there's this incredible uh documentary that George Lucas did in 2007 that I don't think anyone's ever seen, but anyone that that uh we share it with becomes very inspired and it's like I didn't realize how significant Goddard was. Matter of fact, dr Alan Stern, who who Rod introduced me to at NSS last year and I actually had no idea who who Dr Stern was at the time. He and I kept in touch a little bit and I shared that link to the the Lucasfilm documentary and he called me back within weeks and has volunteered to be a guardian angel and spreading the word to aerospace leaderships in terms of the Goddard Centennial and some of our initiatives.

0:44:31 - Tariq Malik
That's how you and I first got in contact. Charles was through Alan. He called me and we talked about it.

0:44:35 - Charles Slatkin
Yeah, I mean, I call and email people all the time Nothing. Alan sends one email and the next thing, you know, you know the head of the Goddard Space Flight Center calls you back. So it's, it's terrific. And you know, I'm, I'm I the Alan Stearns of the world. Those are my rock stars. You know, mick Jagger came to my house.

0:44:52 - Rod Pyle
I'd very polite and interested, but these guys, they're my rocket stars and I really I want kids to feel like all these brilliant engineers and scientists and explorers really should be the heroes we look up to you know it's interesting to be our age and still, at least in my case I wrote a book about 10 years ago about curiosity and I spent the better part of a year shadowing the chief scientist on that mission around a guy named john grotzinger and I I felt like I was about five, sitting at the feet of my really cool uncle who was doing all this amazing stuff. Said uncle worked at lawrence livermore but john was much more interesting and more fun than that said uncle was. But it's. It's weird to be a senior citizen and sort of be fanboying about these guys, but I can't help it. You know they're cool and they have they have very impressive minds can you?

go out to the desert with john tark, and I can only admire. Yes, I went on a. I went out to death valley on a let's talk about the uh geology of mars trip. Uh, mike wall was there, that's right, and mike had to drop back from the group and help me up particularly rough part of climbing because I was about 40 pounds heavier than I am now and chugging along with a very heavy steel tripod and a camera and a backpack and everything else, and it was not fun. The best part, though, was this is this is kind of a charming part about john grotzinger. We'd get to a particular spot and and he'd say now over here, you can see we've got stromatolites in this mat from glacial recession, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Of course, you'd never see that on Mars. Anyway, moving on to the next thing and he did that about three times I'm like oh, why am I here, anyway, sorry.

0:47:02 - Tariq Malik
I had a big diversion for us there, Tariq, I think it's your turn to Goddard's legacy in US space exploration, like in modern day, because we have this Goddard Space Flight Center named after him. They handle lots of really amazing things space telescopes, etc. And I'm wondering, you know, even if the public may not be as aware of his contributions as you know, you're hoping that to educate them on with the centers, if you feel that there is already an appreciation of the impact through that? They named the Greenbelt Goddard Space Flight Center after him, although I know that there's some trepidation I don't know if we want to get into it too much about the discussions on closing NASA centers et cetera, about the discussions on closing NASA centers, et cetera but do you feel that that is like an arrival for Goddard in the industry at least to have a center named after him as an icon in US rocketry history? Or is it still in peril, that legacy?

0:47:53 - Charles Slatkin
I think it's terribly in peril. You know, in our small world of you know like-minded space evangelists who believe in space and love space and see all the potential. His name is fairly common but outside of that there's really no recognition. I travel around the country and ask young people and old people all the time who Robert Goddard is. I see kids wearing NASA T-shirts and even in Worcester, even in Massachusetts, most people are clueless. There's actually a whole montage in the Lucasfilm documentary is who is Robert Goddard? Every kid says and every adult says I don't know, I don't know, I don't know.

So also there's a great, there's a great opportunity in this untold story. And there's this great opportunity in the untold story of Esther Goddard, his wife, who was really significant in his research efforts and photographed and filmed every launch every day. She sewed the parachute, she put out the brush fires when the rockets blew up, she typed up his notes every day because no one else could read them. And when he died she's the one who organized his papers and fought for the rights to his patents that NASA was still using at that time. And in 1960, she won a million dollars as payment for Goddard's rights but also really to promote his legacy. But in general it's a really unknown story and with that is also a great opportunity. It's wonderful when people can discover something they didn't know. Who knew? Who knew that the Webb telescope was constructed at the Goddard Space Flight Center? Robert Goddard.

0:49:33 - Tariq Malik
Yeah, Well, I wanted to ask about that relationship with NASA too. As we mentioned, he died in 45. And of course, NASA comes a bit later, but that's the foundation that a lot of the science was based on. What was that relationship in terms of discovering his work, building off the work, or is it just like that? It was a foundation layer? Or was Esther involved in a lot of the? I don't know if it was licensing or whatnot for that kind of thing, I think.

0:50:04 - Charles Slatkin
I mean that came much later and a lot of the patents were issued, had been filed, but were issued really after his death. So he really kind of fell off the radar. I mean, his last experiments were working with JADO rockets for large seaplanes when it was down in Maryland for a little bit. But there's a big disconnect with how significant Goddard's achievements were, whether in fact the Germans were actually using his patents and his theories to advance their program. But he really fell off and the military really didn't pay much attention to him. That was one of his frustrations.

He went to the military very early in World War II and he was dismissed most of the time as being impractical or having no interest. You know, it's sort of like same way with the wright brothers. It took it took four years after the wright brothers before the french saw what they were up to and kind of popularized it and brought it back to america as heroes. But um it, there's a lot of tragedy with god goddard's story. He wasn't the perfect person, um, he was very secretive, maybe because he was lambasted by places like the New York Times. He didn't share. And yet he was a lovable, likable guy with lots of interest in painting and playing the piano. But in some ways it's a bit of a tragic story, you know, when you think about how amazing he was and what a visionary he was and no one really paid any attention. And he he really fought for funds and acknowledgement for most of his life.

0:51:43 - Tariq Malik
I think there are. There are stories right about Von Braun and others, like reading his research and building off of them. Yeah Well.

0:51:50 - Rod Pyle
Von Braun was just fortunate that he had I mean, besides the history in Germany, good and bad, he had the personality and the good looks to really pull it off, which is something, Tariq, that you and I have to master.

0:52:03 - Tariq Malik
Oh, I beg to differ, my friend.

0:52:05 - Rod Pyle
Yeah, I know. I talked to your mom today too. So, charles, maybe we can close on what your needs are for this project. What are you looking to?

0:52:15 - Charles Slatkin
I mean, I think success for us is to kind of inspire companies, municipalities, schools, science centers around the country to kind of use the centennial, leverage centennial in their own unique and creative ways for their own purposes. You know, we really wanted to be more of a national movement. The beauty of being older these days and being a nonprofit there's not much ego anymore in terms of getting credit or who did what first. But we'd love everyone around the country to find ways to leverage the centennial, and centennial, I think is something that can happen every year really for the greater good. But especially we have to work much harder to inspire our kids. You know we've got a big workforce development problem. I talked with the president of Estes Rocket Company on one of these AIAA calls that Alan helped organize and they're going to build a Goddard rocket in advance of the centennial.

Oh cool, oh nice, but wouldn't it be great to have every school around the country, a rocket club fire off a rocket on March 16th at around 2.30 pm at the same time? But I think there's so many different ways of kind of leveraging the Goddard centennial but also having all these institutions and organizations celebrate their own today's and tomorrow's Goddards. They're all out there and they're doing great stuff and you know we saw like these 300 students at NSS last year, at ISDC. You know, with their poster papers and their research they are tomorrow's Goddards and we really need to find ways to elevate and inspire tens of thousands of more with the wonder and power and possibilities and hope of space.

0:54:06 - Rod Pyle
Well, charles, I want to thank you very much for joining us today for episode 160 of the podcast that we like to call the Amazing Dr Goddard, which website is best for people to keep track of what you're trying to do here?

0:54:20 - Charles Slatkin
I think the wondermissionorg is pretty good we need to update it because we're moving too fast and thenationalspacetrailorg for sure Fabulous. Thank you very much for the opportunity. Spread the word. I think there's so many people that can take advantage of this centennial opportunity. I saw what they did for the Wright Brothers centennial with tens of thousands of people and really inspired a lot of young aviation folks. So hopefully we'll live up to the challenge and do the best we can to get everyone fired up about the centennial.

0:54:54 - Rod Pyle
Great and Tarek, where can we track you playing Rocketeer these days?

0:54:58 - Tariq Malik
Well, you can find me at space.com, as always on the Twitter and the Blue Sky etc. At Tarek J Malik and this weekend I will actually be walking the Freedom Trail, charles, so I'll be thinking of you on a trip to Boston to go to the PAX East Video Game Convention. It's going to be fun and a bun to look at all the space games there.

0:55:17 - Rod Pyle
Awesome, awesome video game convention. It's going to be fun. And a bun to look at all the space games there Awesome. And of course, you can find me at pilebooks.com or at adastramagazine.com, where I tend to hang out. Remember you can always drop us a line at twis@twit.tv. We do answer every email. We love to get your comments, suggestions and ideas, especially when they're positive ones. New episodes of this podcast published every Friday on your favorite podcatcher. So make sure to subscribe like, tell your friends, give us reviews, give us your love. We always need it. And you can head to our website at twit.tv/twis.

Now, don't forget, we and the Twit Network are counting on you to step up and be counted to join Club Twit. It's only $7 a month, and I asked the room what can you get that's more fun than what we just did? For $7 a month, I can't think of anything. Crickets yeah, you can't even get crickets, although I've got a good cricket story to tell one of these days. I did something wicked with crickets once, but it'll help keep us on the air, bringing you great guests and horrid space jokes. So, hey, join the club. And they are now back to also offering annual subscriptions instead of monthly. So you're all set there. So, hey, stick with us, because we love you and we can use your love. You can also follow the Twit Tech Podcast Network. You'd think, on episode 160, I'd get through that TwitTechPodcast Network at Twit, on Twitter and on Facebook, at twit.tv and Instagram. Gentlemen, thank you and Charles, I hope I'll see you at ISTC in about five weeks.

0:56:55 - Charles Slatkin
Will do. Thank you.

0:57:03 - Leo Laporte
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