There's so much to learn. There's so much to be
excited about.
These missions are really challenging and risky.
They're going to help us conduct new science
cool this Monday at Pittsburgh company,
hoping to make history by successfully landing a privately owned
spacecraft on the moon.
The Peregrine lunar Lander owned by Astrobotics will be attached
to a rocket and launched out of Cape Canaveral.
Is it? It is expected to land on the moon
next month.
Jose Hernandez is a retired NASA astronaut and CEO of
Tierra Luna Engineering,
and he joins me now.
Jose, this is pretty cool.
I love this stuff. This is great.
But why? Why are we going back to the moon
after all these years?
Good morning, Todd. Well, let's remember that it's been over
50 years when man last set foot on the moon.
And in those days, our technology wasn't as developed,
Todd. And so the reasons we went were purely political.
We want to be the first ones there.
Well, now you go forward
more than 50 years, technology has developed.
And so this is the first commercial lunar Lander that's
going to study the environment,
the local environment of the moon,
in preparation for NASA's Artemis program where we're going to
send humans back to the surface of the moon and
probably establish,
establish a lunar base. So that ultimately our end game
is to be able to go to Mars,
send humans to Mars, which is a good 1520 years
away from now.
Man, that's going to be wild.
I just can't believe that in our lifetime we can
potentially see humans going there.
You mentioned we're going to try to study the surface
of the moon.
What specifically are we hoping to learn?
What we're trying to do is study the thermal properties
and hydrogen abundance of of the lunar regolith because we
can probably extract fuel in terms of the hydrogen that
we could extract from that.
We're also want to study the magnetic fields and the
radiation environment.
Everything that's needed to know to establish a long duration
lunar base is basically what we're going to do with
the the, the probe is going to have over 20
experiments,
5 of them NASA direct experiments.
Other ones are private experiments that people are doing.
And and I think it's just exciting that we're going
to learn so much as administrator Bill Nelson alluded to,
we're going to learn a lot from this mission.
And as you just mentioned,
these missions are funded through private Public Partnerships.
Is that the future of space travel,
space exploration, basically everything we do in space?
I believe so, Todd, because I believe
you know we're coming to the point where where it's
it's commercially viable for companies to get into
the space business. And frankly you know every dollar private
industry invest in space explorations,
it's a dollar less that you and I as a
taxpayer have to pay.
So that NASA does that job.
So I'm very ecstatic that we have this public private
partnership
ability to explore space lunar surface and go to Mars
and beyond.
OK, let's touch on the beyond.
After we do all this,
what are you watching for?
What should the American people be watching for that's going
to come next when it comes to space?
Well, I think we have to work on advanced propulsion
systems that will get us to our destination a lot
quicker than
our chemical propulsion systems have right now.
And so once we we and we have a lot
of research in the works for that magnetoplasma propulsion systems
that will cut
a travel from nine months to two to three months.
And so those are the things that we have to
be looking at.
So that I think our next site beyond Mars is
you go to other planets,
maybe not to land but to explore them,
Saturn and Jupiter and Uranus and even Pluto
before we then go beyond our own solar system.
Awesome stuff. Jose Hernandez, thank you so much for joining
us on the program.
It's so great to think about the heavens,
think about stuff that is so much bigger than us
and our capacity to explore it.
I'm looking forward to see what comes next,
Jose. Thanks.