Show Notes
Launch into Radio Cade’s Space Pod and step inside the future of humanity’s journey into deep space. Our first episode features Mark Sirangelo, who was involved with more than 350 space missions at Sierra Nevada and is the visionary NASA tapped to lead its Moon to Mars Mission Directorate. Mark discusses not just the how of the space exploration renaissance, but the why. Although we need the excitement of discovery to motivate us, much of the current work on space will improve life on earth soon.
TRANSCRIPT:
Intro: 0:01
Inventors and their inventions. Welcome to Radio Cade, a podcast from the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention in Gainesville, Florida. The museum is named after James Robert Cade, who invented Gatorade in 1965. My name is Richard Miles. We'll introduce you to inventors and the things that motivate them, we'll learn about their personal stories, how their inventions work, and how their ideas get from the laboratory to the marketplace.
Richard Miles: 0:39
Astronauts landed on the moon 50 years ago, and we have never stopped looking toward the stars, imagining what the future holds far beyond earth. Launching the Radio Cade's Space Pod, and step inside the future of humanity's journey to deep space, meet the innovators and visionaries who are charting a bold new course to the moon, then to Mars and beyond. Discover the revolutionary technology that will get us there and see how it's already transformed life here on earth. Today. I'm speaking with Mark Sirangelo, who is involved with more than 350 space missions at Sierra Nevada, and is the visionary NASA tapped to lead its moon to Mars mission directorate. Hear Mark on this first episode of our Radio Cade Space Pod, because we're headed back to the moon and this time we plan to stay. Mark , welcome to Radio Cade.
Mark Sirangelo: 1:25
Hi Richard, Good to be here. I'm glad to be able to speak with you on the topic of space and its feature .
Richard Miles: 1:30
So Mark, as you know, this is part of a bigger series that we're doing on space exploration in which we're going to talk, not just about the how of getting on the moon and beyond, but the why . And perhaps few people are better positioned to talk about both the how and the why than you. So to give listeners an idea of what you bring to the table, why don't you start with a brief summary of your career, including the non-space parts, which I found fascinating. So what made Mark Sirangelo?
Mark Sirangelo: 1:56
Thanks Richard, I'm happy to give a little background. I think one of the things I like to talk about when I speak to groups or students is the fact that I didn't have a traditional path to space. I didn't grow up as a space engineers, spend 30 years doing it and wound up coming out the back end. Many of the people today are looking at their lives and careers and deciding what they want to do. My background, although I have a long history in flying, I was flying as a teenager and an active pilot ever since. And the love of space and aviation came from many generations of my family who've been involved with that. I didn't actually start in the space industry. I started as a nature photographer. I'd spend time traveling the world as a mediocre photographer, but when that was good enough to get a lot of work and I think I got more work than most people because I could fly myself around and that was making me cheaper than most other photographers, but I saw a lot of imaging and I also got to see a lot of different cultures and people. And that really started me off on a understanding of the world, understanding of the world we live in and the people in parts of the world that really mattered to how we look at ourselves in many ways. One of the very earliest pitchers out in the space industry that helped change the world was the Apollo eight picture called Earthrise. When the earth was first seen by human, as they came around the backside of the moon. And many people think that moment where you saw the earth hanging, there was the start of what's. Now the ecological movement, the idea of connecting the world to the fact that we live in it and it's a very precious place. And although that was just the photograph that was done on Christmas Eve and that photograph in many ways on the painting in millions of people's rooms and making people understand the world we live in. So the connection is really interesting. I have a interesting background, perhaps I was in the military for awhile . I started up two different companies that were not directly related to the space industry. One was in the events and entertainment business, and another was in computer technology. I also continued to do artistic work and helping to produce Broadway shows and theatrical shows, but in a short version in the beginning of this century, around 2000 number of people, including myself, started looking at the space industry. And ironically enough, I was working in a business that used the NASA technology, or I was able to use a NASA technology to make a difference in the healthcare world and others and NASA recognized that and recognized my work in that area and invited me to come out to their annual event to receive an award. And it was at that event that I started wandering the space industry and the trade show, unbeknownst to me, several other, the key players in the new wave space were also starting up at that particular time. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson and Paul Allen and others. And collectively, we came at this industry and started, what's now known as the commercial space flight industry of which there have been well over a hundred companies now who have tried to rethink the space industry in a different way. I was part of that becoming the CEO of a company called Space Dev in the early two thousands, and continuing on for the next couple of decades and had an amazing space career. And lots of ups and downs have been on hundreds of space missions, or my company has been, and people have worked with me. We've been to seven planets with something that we've built. I got to stand on the mountains in Colorado where I live and watch Mars as something that we had built was about to land on Mars and been involved in going to as close to the sun as possible on a mission. And then on the new horizons mission to Pluto. So for the kid that came out of nowhere with no particular background, it's been a fascinating journey.
Richard Miles: 5:33
So Mark, I got to say probably in the Venn diagram of successful Broadway producers and also part of missions to Mars to space, there's probably only one person right?
Mark Sirangelo: 5:43
There probably is and to take that little bit more seriously, I actually give a talk where I compare Broadway to space, which is probably not something anybody does, but I go through 10 key things in Broadway, i n t he theater business and t he space business. And I show how t hey're a lot more alike than people realize the passion that exists in theater business is very similar to the passion that exists in space business. People do it because they love it. When you start a show at eight o'clock, the curtain goes up, it's not dissimilar t o pushing a button on a rocket launch. You don't get to return it. And there are a lot of connections that I find just playful, but also sort of fun. People have passions in many different ways.
Richard Miles: 6:21
I'll bet. I mean, with all those moving parts, and like you said, on a very tight timeline that, that has to be executed You don't really get a do over or at least not right away.
Mark Sirangelo: 6:29
We have a lot of professionals and artisans that are involved. I actually think of space as art because a large part of what we do in space, particularly in the commercial space industry has never been done. It has to be imagined. It has to be created. It has to be drawn in many ways, literally sometimes drawn and imagined in terms of what it might look like. And that's a very artistic activity, which people don't always attribute to the space industry.
Richard Miles: 6:52
Mark, before we move on to the future, let's just spend a little bit of time talking about where we are right now from listeners who don't necessarily follow the ins and outs and capabilities. They might see an occasional YouTube clip or something like that. What are commercial private efforts in government capable of doing right now, or at least in the next few months? And then let's talk about what we might expect in the next 10 years.
Mark Sirangelo: 7:14
Sure. I think this is, I would say a golden age in many ways of the space industry. There is a whole lot of change going on right now. And if you go back before the new year, 2000 virtually all the space business was conducted by governments, run by NASA, as we know, or the defense department or around the world by governments. Since then there have been hundreds of companies, commercial companies that have taken on many of those parts of it. So for example, recently the astronauts who went to the space station or brought up on a commercially designed commercially built and commercially launched space vehicle built by space X under a program run by NASA called the commercial Crew Program. That program did not make NASA build anything. NASA became, the manager became the overseer, became the certifier, the space X did all the work to make that happen. And I think what we're seeing more and more of the satellites that drive our days, the research that's going on in space is now in some ways, a public private partnership in some ways, completely commercial. And the idea that commercial companies would be building their own spaceships as my former company did and space X and others. It was not really conceivable when I first started building a replacement for the space shuttle, people laughed at me saying, how could you possibly do that with 40 people in a garage in San Diego when there are 18,000 people working on the space shuttle program, but we've seen it is possible to do that. And I think there's a lot of people look at their lives and their careers, the idea of looking at something that seems impossible and making it possible is one of the greatest thrills that you could do in your life I think.
Richard Miles: 8:49
So we're now at the point where it's fairly routine, certainly the launch rockets into space to carry passenger into space, to and from the space station, let's take head on to space skeptics who say like, well, great it was wonderful to have a space program in the middle or the apex of the cold war where we definitely wanted to prove U.S. superiority. Oh , it's in space, but also technologically speaking, militarily speaking, just so you know, when president Kennedy committed the United States go to the moon. I mean, that was part of that national effort. And now you have some people say, well, okay, great, cold war is over. What do we really get out of going to space setting aside, of course, the very powerful, romantic ideas of exploration, which has always motivated humans. So you can't discount that or disregard that, but from a sort of practical, hard nose standpoint, what justifies the money and the time, both by commercial interests in governments into essentially this space Renaissance.
Mark Sirangelo: 9:41
And I think with one of the most interesting and oftentimes misunderstood parts of the space industry and NASA for all its value and all the people who respect it really doesn't get as much credit as I think they should get for the work that's been done in space. And people often think of spaces, the big rockets and the satellites and the moon landing and the Mars landings that we're about to see the next Mars Rover that's kind of my end called perseverance or Percy for short, but people don't really see that in their day to day lives. How much NASA has impacted everything we do. I think I would cause a national craze if I just say, if we told everybody that they no longer could use Google maps or Apple maps, because space is shutting off GPS. Think about just that one thing, how much that has changed the way we live, the way we drive , how much time we're not spending in traffic anymore and how that contributes to a better environment, because we're not wasting gasoline and creating carbon dioxide. And that one thing alone is a derivative of the space program, but there are thousands of examples, many of which are in your daily lives and your daily house in your life, in your personal life and your health, but also in your fun life and the things that we do every day. And to me, that's one of the best examples of why we go to space . Space is certainly about exploration. And many of us who've done it feel that spark or that passion, if you will, going back to the theater comment I made, but it's also a pallet of innovation. It's a pallet of understanding what tomorrow could be. And it drives the change that we see in our society. Unlike anything else, it's not about the hardware. It's about all the medical things that we get. It's about all the things that happened in our day to day lives, all the things that exist in our homes and what we do is we take what's in space and we bring it back and we drive it into our societies. In fact, NASA's chartering, which is different than virtually any other part of the U.S. government. It is chartered by its own definition to take everything it does and send it back to the American people in some way, shape or form. And it has done that marvelously in my view, it has nothing to do directly with necessarily landing on the moon. It's all the things we've learned along the way that makes your life better in my life better. And if we can talk maybe a little bit about some examples of that. I think,
Richard Miles: 11:57
Yeah I was just about to ask, give me some concrete examples of what we have already learned or an expect to learn soon. So the average person go, Oh, I get it. Like GPS is a perfect example of just as a personal side. I mean, we both were in desert storm and I remember the day that the first tank platoon leader got a GPS and it just seemed like this incredible magic, we didn't even understand how it worked , but you could immediately grasp the utility of it. And it was quite something. And as you said, people take that for granted now, but it was quite new,
Mark Sirangelo: 12:26
And we live in such a different time. So let's bring it to where we are today. How many packages do we now all get delivered to our homes? That's all driven by root systems, which are driven by GPS. And the fact that my FedEx package from Amazon shows up here on time is in part because of the space industry and the ability to do it. Well , let's be even more personal. I like talking about the things that we all feel all the time. For example, the technology behind the invisible braces, that many of the young children and even adults now have used, came out of the space program. If you go to the dentist and we all have, and we get this device put in our mouth that keeps our mouth clean and vacuums and wet. The purification that came out of that was NASA technology, heart rate monitors, which have become important from a physical device per physical activity, but also in the medical world, particularly in the area of virus and the amount of oxygen and how your heart's working is our devices that came out of NASA. For those that live a little bit in science fiction, we now have ingestible thermometers looks like a vitamin that you swallow , and it creates an environment where then doctors can tell what's going on inside your body, that's a NASA technology. I have friends who have children who are hard of hearing cochlear implants started in a NASA world. Those people who've ever used a thermometer in the ear, the infrared system for that was used to detect planets. It came from a NASA technology to look at long distance, to look at planets that are outside of our solar system, but even more fun and more practically skin cream file systems inside skin cream that allow for the moisture to stay in your face was a NASA technology, but even more important stuff. One of the things that happens when you go to space, as you lose your bone mass, and you could lose up to five to 10% of your bone mass for being in space. It's a very similar thing to what happens when people age and they start losing their bone mass, osteoporosis it's called. The treatments for that, how that might be able to work were developed on space station for long distance space explorations, but even more fun things increased dry technology, freeze dried foods for example, was something that things that famously came out of the Apollo program. But the idea of how to do dehydration is really important by living in Colorado, everybody's outside all the time. The water filtration bottles that we use was a NASA technology, the filtration system that was inside or device that finds us if we get lost, a lot of people carry devices, whether or not they're on the water in the mountains that you can press an emergency signal gets sent. So stuff like that, it's really pretty interesting to me and people don't think of reading the same way that NASA is that a space program, even those of us who eat meat. Inspections of chicken are now done using something called a hyperspectral thermometer and a visual device, which scans for bacteria and salmonella and things. That was actually a space program device. And it's keeping thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people safe from food poisoning. So those kinds of things, and there are many more examples that I just love to talk about, but it's really pretty fascinating. I have an artificial limb made NASA technology is now driving into artificial limbs as well as prosthesis'. So the ability to move a prosthesis using your brain, the ability to make it feel more comfortable came out of NASA. The toughness of the artificial lens that are being put into people those, the technology that can drive by the NASA. So I know I'm Johnny on here, but you see this kind of thing and people don't live their lives . They don't realize how much NASA and touches your lives every day. Speaking to touching, if you have any faucets in your home that have polished brass finishes or any polished metal finishes, that was a NASA technology. So when you're touching something that clean your hands, you're actually touching the space program every day. So it's a fun thing to do. And NASA has a lot of problems that they have to solve. How do we feed people in space? For example, since they're in zero or limited gravity water, doesn't go down into roots. We've had to figure that out. And that's turned into systems that allow people to grow food in their homes in a very limited environment, which these days is even more important, LED light bulbs in your home. The air purifiers that we use in our home now all derived out of NASA work. If you're sleeping on a Tempurpedic mattress or anything that has temper foam in it, that was a foam that was developed in the NASA world. Things like that you start thinking about, and those are very, very personal things, but even looking into the future and I know we want to talk a little bit about tomorrow. The AI, the artificial intelligence that's going into autonomous vehicles was used initially to drive the rovers around on Mars. And that same technology is now coming down. And in my view, in many people's view in five or ten years, we're going to see many autonomous vehicles out on the road. And it's not that NASA is building those vehicles, but if you have to drive Rover a hundred million miles away on another planet and that's a onetime vehicle, or you can't fix it, you can't go up and do anything about it. That autonomy, that intelligence behind doing that is quite important and NASA's taking that and it's now finding its way into vehicles and the devices that are in our world.
Richard Miles: 17:42
Let's talk about a few things that really continue to catch the popular imagination. One is the , the whole idea of a moon base. We see it in movies. I mean, people think about a moon base. It seems very much science fictiony. And then of course, a mission to Mars or man mission to Mars. And by movies, I mean more than just two or three people staying for a couple of days, but actually similar to international space station or a Antarctica research station where you've got a permanent group more than just a couple of people staying there for extended periods of time. What would it take to get to that? And then again, the question is what would a research station do on the moon? Would most of that research be focused on creating more benefits? Like the ones you listed doing research that would help us understand ourselves on earth or what a good portion of that also be pointed the other direction, going further into space.
Mark Sirangelo: 18:31
It's a great question. And those of us who've been involved in some of this effort get asked for why go back, you've been there. And it's a good question. And particularly in his time of financial stress, it's a question that ought to be asked. Is there value? Is there reality behind it? I think many of us, and this is a personal opinion for me, is that there's no point to go back to the moon unless we go back to stay or to have some longterm kind of presence. And I believe that's what NASA's goal here is eventually to do that. What does that look like? I think it looks more like Antarctica station than it does the space station, meaning that Antarctica in many ways, if you've ever taken a look at it is a super harsh environment. People go there for periods of time, but don't live there forever. Or they go to do research and why go to the probably the most hospitable part of the world go do research. What has happened in the Antarctica is both a historical marker and a precursor to what's going to happen to us elsewhere. And the work that we do, the research that we do allows us to understand what has happened in our world and what might happen in my view, going to the moon is something that will allow us to do multiple things. It will look like eventually if the plants work out, a inhabited station, it doesn't mean that people are going to live there as permanent residents , although maybe someday, a long time from now that might happen. It's more about having a facility that could be made permanent and used as a permanent base, the space station for all that. We have garnered from it since it started operation. Now almost 20 years ago is a temporary facility. It's not going to stay up forever. In fact, it's probably going to stop being operational. Sometime this decade, it's been a marvelous platform, but it's also suffers from a lot of problems. It moves around a lot. It's a machine that has to be taken care of it's in gravity. So every day it drops down a little bit so it has to be made to be permanent. It can house only these six or seven people. And there's many things that are very difficult. And with the space shuttle not flying anymore, we don't have a vehicle that can properly upgrade it or fix it. And there's really not one that's designed to do that, moving to the moon though, and taking that effort and putting it into something that has a permanence to it. The moon is a solid mass. It doesn't move. So whatever you do there, you're not worried about falling out of the sky. You can invest in it because you're going to be there for the long term . If you're doing research about earth, what better place to put the kinds of instruments to observe earth then from a stable platform, that's looking at earth all the time, but it also allows us to learn is it possible for us to live off of earth? Is it possible before we go to Mars, which is anywhere from a nine to twelve month journey to get there in one way, the moon is a few days to get there. So we can learn, much like we learned how to do everything in our lives we don't start by riding a motorcycle. We start by riding a tricycle and we learn, and that's part of what would happen on the moon base or when it's done. But it's a lot more than that. We believe that there are significant minerals that could help the world and society. Many of the things that we use every day are in limited supply. The moon may be able to provide us with some of those activities, but in order to do that, besides the obvious of figuring out how to get there and building some sort of structure for us to live in, you also need to do practical things. Well, how does one survive there? We can very well carry up all the water. For example, that's needed. So NASA and its research, there was a very special mission that mapped all the surface of the moon. In that process of mapping, we found out that there could be significant water on the moon, which we didn't fully appreciate before in the form of ice. So right now, the plans for NASA literally to go to the South pole, the moon, to bring the analogy of Antarctica even further and explore potentially a place called Shackleton's crater and Shackleton is humane. Always wanna explore us of Antarctica. So there's a little poetic justice there, but we're going there because there could be significant water in the form of ice and people think of water and they think of drinking or fluids for humans. And that's true, but water is energy. All the research we're doing on hydrogen vehicles, for example, on having water on moon, if we could find it could power it so we might be able to have the essential elements for life and for research. And the answer is once we get there, we will do the research, whether or not we stay there long term will be determined by how valuable the research is.
Richard Miles: 23:05
And this is also kind of the second part of the question in terms of Mars, make some predictions, Mark, which I know is always a dicey. I'm not going to hold you to these. He's not legally binding, but where do you think we will be saying in 2030, regards to a moon base? And then where do you think we will be with regard to planning for preparing for a mission to Mars?
Mark Sirangelo: 23:26
Obviously much of this relies on people say money, and that's certainly true. I will say, will and there's a interesting saying that's carved into the national archives, goes back to Shakespeare. I believe what is past is prologue. In many cases, if you look back and if you drove back human history 500 years ago, and the people in Europe thinking, should we get on these wooden rickety boats and head out to a place that we think the earth is flat and we're going to fall off of, we have no idea what's out there and we have no idea how to get there, how to get back. For that time, it is not much different. We know a lot more about moon and Mars and those explorers from the 1600's ever knew about finding your way to Plymouth, Massachusetts. And I think that's sometimes lost on people if they did not do that. If they did not start that if society didn't continue to explore earth, we would not be nearly as progressed as we are now. So I think in many ways, this is an extension of what's been going on since there've been humans. Those people that walk from Russia to North America and became the first native Americans, they decided to move and look and explore. And I think that's part of what we're doing. NASA's plans right now, which I think are reasonable, is to have some permanent presence doesn't mean full time, but some ability to have a permanent presence on the moon by the end of the decade by 2030, which means you have transportation, you have the rockets that can take people back and forth, but you also have the supply ships that can go back and forth. The robotic rovers that will be used where humans can't go or don't want to go on the surface, the communication systems that will allow us to have real time communication. We're doing this on a video call, which is enhanced by NASA technology originally. And the idea of being able to talk simultaneously and concurrently to the moon will come back into society in the form of better video calls and better communication. But I think if things go as I think they probably will, we will have that ability to have some longterm presence on the moon. By the end of the decade, the rockets are being built to capsules that will take the people back and forth being built. The science missions have been contracted. The rovers that would be moving people around on the moon are under contract or going to be under contracts . All the elements of the physiology, the medicine food have all been researched is what we did on the space stations . Figure out not that we were going to live on the space station. The point of having the space station was to figure out how we could live in space so that when we wanted to go further, we could understand what that meant. So I think that's a reasonable goal that will in some form likely happen. And it's not just the United States. Other countries are participating or doing your own programs and much like Antarctica , which has dozens of countries involved with it in a peaceful way, that's what we're hoping to see on the moon. From ther I think many of the same technologies that will be demonstrated on the moon are the precursors to what we would need to go to Mars. We have demonstrated that we could go there. We've had now I think, well, over a dozen missions, tomorrow's the us has been very successful in that. I have another one flying there as we speak right now, which will be the most advanced Rover ever built. Certainly in the world or in NASA's history. Not only will we do a lot of research and be able to traverse much of Mars. It has from the first time a helicopter onboard , we have built a small helicopter to be able to do a drone flight over Mars so that we can see a lot more of it than we could see for a rover. We also are taking samples for the first time and bringing them back. So we have shown that we can get there. We can work. We can operate. You don't have humans there. And I think the eternal question that will be asked for the next decade or longer, probably much longer, is do we need humans? And I think that's in many ways, the essential and maybe vital question in all of research, if you could go without a human, should you? It certainly is easier and safer, but is there exploration? And that's, I think the question may be for many of these viewers and listeners to this, when you really come down to it, these are things that are super helpful. We learn a lot makes our world a better place, but at the end of the day, it comes down to a singular question which has been around for thousands of years. Should we go, should we take that step? Why we have a perfectly good village in Spain or in Africa or in South America? Why do we need to go explore? Why did the Polynesians need to go find Hawaii? They were living on a pretty good Island when they left. It is that kind of thing I think. And that's the question of human will. And do we want to go to Mars? Technically, we've been there. We can get there again. It's hard, it's challenging. It costs a lot of money and we have to decide, is it worth it? Do we want to do it as a society? And I don't think it's one country alone. I think in order to do something that big, it needs to be some sort of coalition.
Richard Miles: 28:21
Mark, one final question as a former producer of Broadway plays and large events, you know, you're gonna have a great product, but you've got to sell that product. You got to get people to come in the door. So if you were given the task by NASA or a private company, and what's the 30 second pitch to the American people, why this is important, why they need to buy our product, which is returning to space and doing whatever we need to do, sort of what would that 30 second pitch sound like?
Mark Sirangelo: 28:45
I think the elements of that pitch would be, we are human because we are curious. And that curiosity isn't much about what we do, whether or not it's art, music, science, exploration, and there's nothing that has been more prevalent in American society than the moon landings. It is a seminal moment of now 50 years ago. It's still being talked about as if this happened yesterday and think about how many young people have been inspired, including me and others, to do something different, amazing, challenging to dream off of something that started as a scientific program in a cold war. And I think the 30 second pitch beyond all the things that benefits society is the fact that it is who we are as humans. We want to feel that we can do something great and something big and something special. And it doesn't mean that the person who sees the moon program doesn't go out and find a way to fix a major disease or to figure out how to start a computer or to do things that are in our everyday lives and make ourselves better. I think it is that spark of humanity and that spark of curiosity and that spark of passion. When you see somebody do something great, whether or not it's in the Olympics that makes us want to go out and ride our bike farther, or if it's going to the moon and NASA should, in my view, take advantage of that. And then they have, but they need to do more of it.
Richard Miles: 30:08
Mark, thank you very much for joining me today. I'm convinced by your pitch, I'll buy the product and we're going to go ahead and schedule you for a podcast in 2030, about 10 years from now. And we'll see how much we've come and how much we need to go. Thank you very much. Appreciate your time today on Radio Cade.
Mark Sirangelo: 30:22
Alright, Richard. Thank you very much too. And good luck to you.
Richard Miles: 30:25
In the next episode of our Radio Cade Space Pod here, Tony Gannon , Vice President of Research and Innovation at Space Florida, discuss the tremendous impact of public/private space collaboration.
Outro: 30:36
Radio Cade is produced by the Cade Museum for Creativity and Invention located in Gainesville Florida. Richard Miles is the podcast host and Ellie Thom coordinates inventor interviews. Podcasts are recorded at Heartwood Soundstage and edited and mixed by Bob McPeak . The Radio Cade theme song was produced and performed by Tracy Collins and features violinist, Jacob Lawson.
