This thing bugs me every day.
Look at this, a coat rack.
Puts a dent in the coat...
then you go to hang it here... What are these?
Just swinging.
Whoever designed this is no friend of this show.
Now, I heard that many of you...
think that space exploration is a waste of time.
Well, that's fine for you.
But if you're gonna go that route, I gotta take back everything
that you owe to space exploration. We'll start right here.
Baby food.
I hope you don't have any newborns.
Because NASA helped develop a nutrient-enhanced baby food
which was based on astronaut food for long-duration space flight.
No more Air Jordans.
The sole was developed with padding for astronaut helmets.
See? Works great.
Oh, yeah. Memory foam. Mattresses.
Not happening.
And this. Ah, yes.
The selfie camera.
I hate to bother you. I'm so sorry to bother you.
But you wouldn't have these. It wouldn't exist.
Because NASA helped develop the image sensor
which is used in this these digital cameras.
Unless you want me to just... break off the camera...
we've gotta get rid of the whole phone.
This brings me no joy.
Actually, maybe a little bit of joy.
And you wouldn't have alloys.
For sporting equipment. Not happening.
Nor would you have sunglasses.
What would life be like?
And Tang.
Ah, yes, Tang.
The nectar of the gods.
It has nothing to do with space exploration.
It was not developed for NASA. Just sort of an urban myth.
But I do love it.
I would start the show right now...
but I don't even know where I am.
Because I threw away my phone,
which has its space-based global positioning system.
I'm lost!
Welcome.
Welcome to the show.
I'm Bill Nye and I'm here to... Dare I say it?
...Save the world.
When I was in third grade... I mean,
when I was in third grade...
Mrs. Cochran told us... She was the teacher.
Told us there are more stars in the sky than grains of sand on a beach.
I remember thinking...
"That's... That's wild."
Mrs. Cochran...
"are you high?"
And I don't think she was high. At least not that time.
Although there is a great deal of sand on a beach...
If you look this way... all the way to the horizon, there is sand.
That way, there is sand. Look behind you, there's more sand.
Shuffle your feet, there's sand. Tide goes out, there's sand.
But it turns out there are ten times as many stars in the cosmos...
as there are grains of sand on the Earth.
That is... Yes. That is a lot of stars, people.
Even on a small day.
That's... a huge number of stars.
Like, you're just this speck.
Just a speck.
I'm just like the grains of sand on a beach.
I'm just this speck.
And the Earth...
really, in the cosmic scheme of things, is another speck
which is orbiting the sun, which is a completely unremarkable star.
I'm a speck on a speck with a bunch of other specks...
orbiting a speck...
with billions of specks in the middle of specklessness!
I suck.
I am nothing.
But with your brain, which is just this big,
you can imagine all of this.
You can know your place in space, your place in the cosmos.
And with this insight we can, I dare say...
change the world.
Now, people say, "Space exploration's too expensive."
We've got too many things to do on Earth, too much going on.
We've got... We've gotta pay teachers' salaries,
provide clean water, renewable electricity,
"and access to the Internet to everyone in the world." That's true.
Then other people say we've gotta build baseball stadiums. Yes.
Especially.
But you can't... You can't do one or the other.
It's not an either-or decision. You've gotta do everything all at once.
And so people say,
"What does NASA spend on space exploration?"
People say, "Ten percent of the U.S. federal budget."
Ten percent.
No, no, my friends.
Let's say this bowl represents the U.S. national budget.
Just one of these happy squishy balls...
one half of one percent of the federal budget
is what the United States, which has the largest space agency,
spends on space.
I love you, man.
But that is extraordinary. We get so much for it.
And the United States, as you know,
is not the only nation with a space program.
Nations... all around the world have space programs.
Dozens of them.
Because they know the great value it brings to their society.
They get more educated scientists and engineers.
They have more technicians.
They have this tremendous national pride.
And working together with the space agencies around the world,
we learn more about the cosmos and our place within it.
It's really an amazing thing that humankind does.
What an extraordinary use of our intellect and treasure.
And so now I'd like to take you to another country,
out of the United States, on the other side of the world,
and have our extraordinary correspondent, Emily Calandrelli,
show you what another nation is doing in space.
Oh, wait, wait.
Yeah.
We choose to go to the moon and do the other things.
Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.
John F. Kennedy's siren call
signaled the beginning of a golden era for the space program
in the United States.
Today, another country is on the rise as a space power.
Nobody's been to the moon in a while, so we had to get something custom-built.
So, this is what we have. This is designed to go on top of a rocket.
India's national space agency, ISRO,
is already one of the largest in the world.
Here in the private sector,
a team of young engineers is also excelling.
Right now they're trying to do something very rare.
Land a spacecraft on the surface of the moon.
The average age here would probably be 24, maybe 25.
- That is so young. - Yes.
It reminds me of the Apollo Program. During the Apollo days,
the average age of the employee at NASA was 27 years old.
It's amazing.
Only three entities in history,
the United States, the Soviet Union and Russia,
have accomplished
what these young engineers are trying to do.
Soft-land on the surface of the moon.
If they succeed,
they'll win a $20 million prize
when their lander sends back images from the surface.
There is no private entity which has ever landed on the moon.
This is something different, and this is challenging.
That is all this generation wants.
I think the technology we build, it can help people.
Something very nice.
I cannot wait to actually see one of the Earth shots
that our lander takes on the way to the moon. Very exciting.
If you walk around our team,
you meet what I'd call as the new millennials.
They're no longer bound by what is thought possible
or what is the norm.
You just pick something, you say, "I'm gonna solve this."
As something that was conceived and built entirely out of India,
I think that is very liberating for a large set of people
to say, "No problem is too big."
Wow.
Nicely done. Blow it up.
- That was cool. - Yeah, that was amazing.
So... Just a couple things.
First of all, he referred to "these guys."
- Yeah. - But there were a lot of women, right?
There were.
There were so many more women there than I expected.
Because when you have an engineering-run program,
there is not typically too many women involved,
- but here they had a ton. - Hey, just a second.
- You're mechanical aerospace, yeah? - I am, yeah.
- Yeah. Blow it up, mechie. - Yeah.
Now, just a... You went to MIT or something?
- Yeah. Mm-hm. - Yeah. Back east someplace?
Yeah. Uh...
Really cool. There were a lot of women working on this extraordinary mission.
Yeah. I was so impressed with them. They know what they're doing.
I mean, they're, essentially, one of the top three frontrunners
in the entire competition.
But the thing that's important to realize
is that this isn't just a technology challenge,
it's also a financial one.
'Cause going to the moon is very expensive.
How much money have they raised? How much do they need?
They've raised a few million dollars,
- but it takes tens of million dollars... - Yeah.
- To get to the moon. - Now, let's talk technical for a second.
Mm-hmm.
What rocket are they going on?
So, they're going on India's PSLV rocket.
- It's their government's rocket. - Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle.
Launch Vehicle.
- How romantic. - Oh, yeah. So cute.
And ISRO is Indian Space Research Organization.
- It's like NASA in India. - Yeah.
So, it's privately funded.
It's part of the requirements of the competition,
that it has to be mostly privately funded.
'Cause, like I said, all of the entities that have soft-landed on the moon,
they're these large government programs with very large government budgets.
There's never been a private company to soft-land on the moon.
- They wanna be the first. - That's just cool.
- So cool. I got to go there. Awesome. - Yeah, yeah. Did you have fun?
I had so much fun. I mean, I got to go to the other end of the world
to talk about going to the moon with a bunch of awesome engineers
and eat a lot of naan. So, yeah.
Cool. Thank you very much. Emily Calandrelli.
Whoa, nice.
So, Emily was in India
where a private organization is building a spacecraft
to go to the moon.
This is extraordinary. This never used to happen.
Exploring the moon was for big governments.
For NASA, the Soviet Union space agency, or now the Chinese space agency.
But things are changing.
And here to discuss...
the private exploration of space with government exploration of space,
we have an expert panel.
Dr. George Whitesides from Virgin Galactic.
Chris Lewicki from Planetary Resources.
And Dr. Michelle Thaller from NASA itself.
Welcome, welcome, welcome.
It's good to see you.
Thanks for taking the time. Thanks for taking the time.
We're living at an extraordinary time.
- Absolutely. - Where space exploration's being done
by governments and it's being done by you guys.
So... George, let's start with you.
You wanna sell tickets.
Yeah. We've sold about 700.
So, your company is Virgin Galactic, right?
Yeah, yeah. Richard Branson's space company.
- Oh, that one? Yeah. - Yeah.
And, uh, you are planning to fly when?
Uh, when we're ready, you know.
It's... It's something that's never been done before, right?
We're trying to open space up to you and to you and to you.
- By the way, yeah, I'm... - And all you.
I mean, that's what we wanna do. Who wants to go to space?
And it's hard. And we've gotta do it right.
So, we'll fly when we're ready. But soon.
- Soon. - Yeah.
Well, in space exploration, "soon" is...
less than ten years, I guess.
- Yeah. - Yeah.
- And... - Way sooner than that.
Way soon. Now, if I were gonna by a ticket...
- what would it set me back? - Well, for you, Bill...
No, our prices are $250,000.
A quarter million... and we fly in space.
Yeah, what I like to say is right now NASA's buying tickets from the Russians
for about, I don't know, what, $80 million each?
So, $250,000,
it's a lot of money, obviously, but we're gonna bring that cost down over time.
- Now, you had some trouble. - Yeah, yeah.
We had... We had a test flight accident, and...
You know, space is... Space is hard.
And it's not easy to open up the space frontier, right?
We live in a world where we see this science fiction all over the planet, but...
And you sort of think that starships are cruising all over the place.
But we live in one of the most exciting moments in human history
when we're actually opening up the space frontier for the first time.
And that opening is hard. It's really hard.
And sometimes you have challenges,
but you've gotta just keep plugging away and...
It really matters. It's gonna be really important to the future of the world.
Very cool. Now, Chris...
you're trying to make money in space, too, right?
We're trying to expand the economy into space
so that we have more reasons to send more people. And...
Now, for those of you, I just... Some disclosure.
Dr. Whitesides and I go back a few years.
We've met many times at space conferences.
And, Chris, you used to run the Mars rovers, right?
I did. I worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory
and had the privilege of working with a great team of people
on Spirit, Opportunity and the Mars Phoenix lander.
And Phoenix lander.
Now you're off on a private company. What are you doing exactly?
We are doing... Essentially, we'd like more passengers,
less luggage,
and a place to refuel when you're out in space.
A place to refuel.
So, do they have... gas stations, petrol stations in space?
They have all the makings
- of fuel in space. - They do, do they?
Near-Earth asteroids is what we're interested in.
Objects left over from the formation of the solar system
that have just been floating out there for billions of years.
And we've learned in only the last 20 years
that all the things that we need to live and survive and build things,
and even to fuel a spacecraft are out there on these objects.
So, how would this work?
I'm flying in my rocket ship...
uh, yours, yours, NASA's,
and I come up to an asteroid and I say, "Greetings, CP99Q,"
or whatever the heck.
And then what happens there?
Well, on a carbonaceous asteroid,
which is something that's actually a lot like a comet,
there is a lot of water and volatiles.
- Things like oxygen, hydrogen... - Comet tails have water?
Comet tails have water. The sun is heating them up
and baking off that material and... That's why you see a comet in the sky.
In a lot of ways, asteroids have the same material.
We can recover that material.
We can maybe bake it off, we can extract it.
And you can have hydrogen and oxygen,
the same two elements that powered every space shuttle flight in history.
- Dr. Thaller, uh... - Yes.
You have asteroid missions.
I was at Cape Canaveral for the launch of OSIRIS-REx.
- I was standing right next to you. - Yeah. And you're still talking to me.
Surprising. So... that acronym is...
- A lot going on in that acronym. - I made the principal investigator
apologize to me for that acronym.
- Yeah. I can say it if you want. - Optical...
- It's the Origins - Origins.
Spectral Interpretation Security Regolith Explorer.
- Yeah. OSIRIS-REx. - OSIRIS-REx.
Now, you guys are exploring an asteroid.
Are you gonna work with Chris?
Well, right now these are sort of parallel ventures.
I mean, so, the science of determining what an asteroid is made of...
For example, he's talking about things like water on asteroids.
How do we know there's water on asteroids?
- Because of NASA. - Exactly.
A number of missions including the Dawn Mission,
which was around Ceres right now,
showed there was even a cryovolcano...
- Ceres is an asteroid? - Ceres is the largest of the asteroids.
It's actually about 600 miles across.
Turns out that there's so much water and ice, possibly, under the surface,
there's an ice volcano on the thing.
So, we're determining what these asteroids are made of.
And we're also working with people...
I mean, everything they discover about an asteroid, we can use.
Chris, we have met a few times, the last time was in Seattle.
- Good time for you. - You're always walking around...
- You have meteorites with you? - I do.
- What...? What you got? - What am I packing?
- Yeah. - Got a few things.
I always bring with me something that really is both beautiful
and kind of interesting, is an iron meteorite.
- This is called a... - It's...
- It's pretty heavy. - Dense.
Get Dr. Whitesides to have a look.
And what's interesting about this is, not only is it beautiful,
but it's an object that originated in space.
This one landed in Europe.
And because of the pattern that's on it,
this is called Widmanstätten pattern.
- Oh, yeah. - Named after a proud German
a century ago.
But as this cooled in space, you actually get this pattern.
There's no up or down.
It goes every which way, and it forms this beautiful pattern.
- This is why... - The grains grow real long.
Grow real long, real slow.
This actually took millions of years to cool down.
And it's how you know that this is not of this Earth.
That is fantastic.
What are you all gonna do
to keep us from getting hit with one of these?
Even a small one would be very troublesome, yes?
It's one of the things the OSIRIS-REx mission
is actually working on now.
I mean, one of the letters in the acronym is for "security."
If you like to worry about things,
- this is a good one. - It is. Absolutely.
How many cross the Earth's orbit?
Probably a few crossing the Earth's orbit right around now.
So, we need a space program just for that.
Absolutely.
So, you wanna go and mine asteroids, you wanna get people in space...
- you're doing science of asteroids. - Absolutely.
Are you kids gonna work together or what's going on...?
Are you in competition?
- Actually, I would say we already are. - Yeah.
What we're doing today would not be possible
without 50 years of space exploration. And with cheap access to space now,
these are things that we can go from a government activity
and kind of work in parallel for a while.
And as we've done with just about every industry on Earth,
we figure out how to scale it, amplify it and turn it into a marketplace.
Yeah. We're really excited about that.
We've got... People think of our spaceship as sort of like for humans...
to have fun, and they will, they'll have an amazing, amazing time,
but also it'd be a great platform for experiments and for technologists
to get something up into zero gravity and to have something they'll learn,
look out the window, see the moon, stars or other things like that.
And to be able to do it dramatically cheaper
than they could with other ways. We're excited about it as a science platform.
So, you guys, who's better? Private or public?
Who's...? Is the public inefficient? Government's inefficient?
Teamwork... Teamwork, buddy.
We need them together in low Earth orbit.
I wanna get astronauts back up to the space station
from American soil, you know.
Dr. Thaller, Dr. Whitesides, Mr. Lewicki.
You guys are gonna change the world.
Thank you. Let's go out and save it.
Let's save the world with space.
People still have a lot of questions about space exploration.
To help answer some of those is our good friend whom we like to call...
the mean astronaut.
Okay, stupid.
Stupid.
"What would you tell a child who wants to grow up to be just like you?"
Well... I would say lower your sights a little bit, kid.
You're never gonna achieve this level.
"How did you say goodbye to your kids before you left for space?"
I don't know, I haven't met them yet.
Pass.
"What do you like best about space?"
You know, I think it's the fresh air.
"Do your business cards say, 'astronaut'?"
No. They say, "massage therapist with special skills."
"How do you pee in space?"
Wow. This one's all the way from Argentina.
"Why did you want to be an astronaut?" Let's see.
I wanted to get as far away from kids like you.
This is one is from... All the way from China.
Hey, stop hacking and give us our money back.
"Does seeing Earth from a distance make you contemplate how small we are?"
Kind of. But let me show you something else
that'll make you feel small.
That's Joel McHale. Brilliant.
Before we move on...
I... I just need a minute.
Tell them how you really feel, Bill.
Yes, we all wanna go to Mars.
We just wanna send people to Mars because people explore much, much faster
than our finest robots.
But when we get to Mars...
we're not gonna build a colony
any more than we got a colony in Antarctica.
'Cause just like Antarctica, on Mars it is crazy cold.
Okay, like... there is no food,
there's hardly any water, and you can't breathe.
That third one, the breathing thing,
when you open the cabin door, you're gonna notice that right away.
So... we wanna go to Mars to explore to make discoveries
that'll change the course of human history. Yes.
But all things in moderation.
We can orbit it in 2033,
we could land there a few years later, maybe in 2028.
Who knows what would happen?
The people who are alive today would experience something
humankind has never experienced. So... let's go to Mars.
Thank you. Sorry about that.
We're talking about space... so, let's do something fun.
Come on.
Come on out here.
Space is fun.
It's inspiring.
It brings out the best in us.
We've been talking all night about the value of space exploration.
But there's another thing to remember:
Space is just cool.
We ride freaking rockets and bounce around in low gravity.
So, to help demonstrate how cool space is...
everyone, give it up for Roman.
Whoo! Whoo!
Roman... I came out here, I couldn't help but notice
- you set up a basketball court. - Yes, I did, Bill.
- This is your court? - This is my court.
And, uh, what are you doing here?
I wanna play one-on-one against you.
- One-on-one against me? - One-on-one against you.
- Right here on your court? - Right here on my court.
Well... the crowd seems into it.
- Do you...? You like basketball? - Yeah.
- You're a good player, you dribble? - Yes.
- Have a favorite team? - Yeah.
My favorite team is the Los Angeles Clippers.
The Clippers.
Los Angeles. For those of you watching in Papua New Guinea,
we are in Los Angeles.
So, he's a Clippers fan, so...
So, we're just... We're just gonna check it in, we're gonna play.
So, you think you can dunk on me?
I think I can dunk on you.
You know, I think may... I think maybe you can dunk on me.
So, I tell you what...
I was afraid this would happen.
So, I invited a friend of mine. Ladies and gentlemen,
NBA's superstar, Diamond Stone from the Los Angeles Clippers.
- Hey, man, thanks for coming. - No problem.
Have you heard this kid, Roman?
- I haven't. Wow. - He's just like trash-talking.
He's like this... He's dribbling with both hands and swaggering...
And he says he's gonna dunk on me.
And I kind of sized him up, and I thought I don't wanna take that chance.
That's why I asked you to come down.
Now, you think you're gonna dunk on him?
Not really.
- That's a good answer. - 'Cause he... 'Cause he's tall,
- and you've seen him play. - Yes.
- Yeah. First year with the Clippers? - Yes, sir.
Yeah. You having fun?
- Yes, I am. - Yeah. Right on.
All right. This is a space show, it's all about space,
I got an idea for you.
We here are on Earth... you're a basketball player from the Earth.
Yes.
A lot of the audience is from the Earth, many of the viewers are Earthlings.
But what we'll do...
we're gonna have Roman play as a moon person.
He is gonna be in lunar gravity.
Right here.
One-eighty-first of the Earth's mass, one-sixth of the gravity.
And then he is gonna dunk on you
- in Earth gravity. - Try dunking on me.
That's how we're gonna roll. He's gonna try.
This is how it's gonna go.
You two are gonna go out... You're gonna play one-on-one.
- Okay. - You gotta check it in.
All right.
See, I bounced it like, you know... I'm cool.
Okay.
All right. Wait, wait, you guys. Shake hands.
A good game here.
Okay, you're gonna check it in. Here we go.
Remember, kids, space is freaking cool.
Thanks to my guests, Chris, Michelle and George.
Now, go out there and save the world!