Transcript

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Fraser Cain [00:01:49 ] Astronomy Cast. Episode 711 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts. Welcome to Astronomy Cast for weekly facts. Space journey to the cosmos, where we help you understand not only what we know about how we know what we know. I’m Fraser Cain I’m the publisher of university. With me, as always, is Doctor Pamela Gay, a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the director of Cosmic Quest. Hey, Pam, how are you doing? 

Pamela Gay [00:02:12 ] I am doing well. I have lost custody of my bicycle to two cardinals who are turning it into a nest. That sounds great. I meant to move it or put a webcam up one or the other earlier than this. And now I’m trying to figure out. Can I still mount a Nest Cam, or is it too late when they have the nest? 

Fraser Cain [00:02:32 ] Oh, interesting I wonder. Yeah, yeah, I, I can’t wait to do that. I’m. My big plan this year is to, is to put in a pile of of nesting boxes. And I would love to sneak little cameras into them and, and watch see which ones get adopted. I’ve got a bunch of swallow nest boxes in front of my house and so I can watch the swallows. They keep the every year they come and they check them out and they find them lacking. And so I haven’t gotten swallows to commit to our nesting boxes yet, but I’m really looking forward to that day. And then, yeah, I’ll put some cameras in there and and watch them come and go. Be so cool. And bat boxes and bug boxes. I’ve got I got big plans. 

Pamela Gay [00:03:13 ] Apparently all I needed was a mountain bike. 

Fraser Cain [00:03:16 ] Yeah. NASA works on many missions using tried and true technology, but they also invest in creative ideas that could drive the future of space exploration. It’s called NASA’s Innovative Advanced Concepts, or Niac. And today we’re going to get into it. All right. So Niac where does this come from? 

Pamela Gay [00:03:37 ] I well, it stands for NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts. And and the idea started out back in 1998 where they made the decision that they wanted to fund independently. So all the funding went through universities, Space Research Alliance, USRA and and so they wanted an independent means of funding. Amazingly futuristic might be considered, two futuristic projects that would look decades into the future. And imagine what do we develop today to get to that future we want tomorrow. So from 1998 until 2007, USA managed this program for NASA. There there was projects ranging from, 100,000 up to half a million. They gave away 27.3 million to 42 projects over those years. But then in 2007, the project was canceled. So for a couple of years, there was nothing, but there was clamoring to continue that. We need to keep dreaming big ideas. We need to keep having things that are over and above. And Congress actually, in this case, requested a review be done independent of NASA, which means by the National Research Council. To see what can we do, what should we do? And and so the National Research Council, National Academy of Sciences did a review of is something like Niac necessary? And the answer was yes. But this time they funded it and reviewed it in-house. So since 2011, the Niac program has been funding phase one and phase two proposals. Phase one is just $175,000. These are not huge grants. But they’re there to provide the seed funding to first figure out. So what would it take to make my insane idea completely rational and then to work and seeing what can be tested? One of my favorites of the recent ones is just the idea of we need more massive mirrors in space. We need ways to do giant telescopes. And and there are two different proposals that I’ve really liked that really capture this thinking outside of the box idea. One of them is to blow up giant balloons that have part of the inside of the balloon, aluminum sized to create reflecting surfaces that can be shrunk down. Really tiny, blown up, really big. In space. It’s a lot easier than trying to fold up a mirror like they did, which would be awesome. And the other is they’re looking to make gallium liquid mirrors in space. This is the fluid telescopes concept. So they are essentially saying, what technology do we need to do and how do we get there? Now, the wildest ideas from NASA aren’t necessarily coming from the Niac, but the wildest ideas that will actually get funded and progress and get trialed and tested and put into orbit are often coming from Niac. 

Fraser Cain [00:07:14 ] Yeah, and we’re now deeply in my knowledge base at this point. I’ve personally interviewed most of the people behind most of the Niac projects over the last couple of years. It’s weird to me at Universe Today, it is Christmas. It is the Super Bowl. It is the biggest event of the year when the new Niac awards are announced. We fall on it like hungry animals and divvy it up, and for the next couple of days, are reporting on each one of the individual projects and do a full story on each one of them, because they’re such cool ideas. Yeah. And there and nobody else does, because I guess they’re not in these big press releases, you know? I guess it takes more journalism, which is tough for for some organizations out there who have laid off their entire space science journalism teams. And this this gap, I think, is really important because on the one hand, we live in this world where ancient technologies are are still the method that you’ve got. We know chemical propulsion works, and so we know stage rockets work. And so you just end up with evolution on existing well known methodologies coal gas thrusters, various propellant systems that work in space. And we don’t see a lot a ton of evolution or really revolution in these ideas. And yet other ideas have been proposed. I think my sort of classic example, this is the ion engine, which has been around for decades. But it wasn’t until, I think Deep Space one that an iron Angel was finally actually tested on an actual mission, and it performed amazingly. And then from there we see them on the Dawn mission, and we see them on on all the star links, and there’s tons and tons of missions that have now had an ion engine attached. Now that it becomes this well known, tried and trusted technology. And so you always have this chasm where you go. What about light sails? What about tethers? What about electromagnetic shielding? What about fusion drive? So there’s all these ideas, but no one is willing to take a chance on that technology. They go with the tried and true. And NASA, as really part of its role, has said, okay, let’s not just give this lip service like have have people in NASA write papers and present it, but never put any funding behind it. Let’s put some actual serious funding behind this in in tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars to take the idea, but actually sit down, bring in additional consultants, bring in experts, double check your math, make sure that everything you’ve done is is correct and right, and there’s some there there that is worthy of doing to the next step. And because it has this phased approach, phase one is really just take your crazy idea and try to disprove it, just to find out whether or not your idea is right. Figure out which versions of it are the best ideas. Throw out those others and come up with a final proposal. Phase two takes it to the next level and says, okay, now what would it be that make this feasible? And and phase three, which very few projects be, can all the way to phase three, is take this idea as complete as possible so that it could be ready for actual development later on. And when I talk to people, you know, we call this graduating debt that you’ve graduated from the Nayak Project. You’ve taken this as far as you can. A fraction of what gets spent on large missions gets put in in your in your work, and yet you have something that someone could then pick up later on and go, okay, let’s actually try and test this out. I, I think it’s endlessly fascinating. I love the ideas. Each one strikes my imagination when I sort of consider the implications. And I’m so grateful that this exists within within NASA. So panel after my monologue, how do you feel? 

Pamela Gay [00:11:20 ] So the thing that gets me about this is there is no narrow little box that your proposal has to sit within for Niac, other than looking far into the future, it isn’t only funding propulsion ideas, it isn’t only funding observing ideas. One of the ones that like triggered me to go down the rabbit hole is they recently funded a project to look at hibernation. For the pote