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Superstars of Astronomy of 24 RustySchweickart, astronaut and planetary defense expert

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Dave Eicher: Welcome to the Superstars of Astronomy podcast from Astronomy

magazine. I’m Dave Eicher, editor-in-chief of Astronomy. Each month, I will share the thoughts and research of the world’s greatest astronomers, astrophysicists, cosmologists and planetary scientists with you in these hour-long chats. Superstars of Astronomy is brought to you by Celestron. From your first telescope to precision observatory-grade instruments, Celestron has the perfect telescope to suit your experience level and budget. Find out more at www.celestron.com.

I’m very excited to have an amazing guest for our sixth show,

Rusty Schweickart. Rusty is very well known to all of you as lunar module pilot for Apollo 9 during which he logged 241 hours in space in March 1969. This was the third man flight of the Apollo series and the first man flight of the lunar module. He transmitted the first live pictures from space. Rusty also served as backup commander for the first Skylab mission in 1973.

Following the loss of the spacecraft’s thermal shield, he developed

hardware and procedures that transformed Skylab from an imminent disaster to a highly successful mission. Rusty has served as an executive and science advisor in a number of capacities. He served as commissioner of energy for the state of California under Governor Jerry Brown as well as the governor’s science advisor. He is found and past president of the Association of Space Explorers.

He has been an executive in the area of satellite and

telecommunications technology. And Rusty has also taken a leading role in the issue of planetary defense. He has served as chairman of the B612 Foundation, the nonprofit private foundation behind the proposed Sentinel mission, a spacecraft that will map near earth’s asteroids. He’s the most active member of the expert panel for the Asteroid Day movement. So without further ado, Rusty, thank you so much for joining us today.

Rusty Schweickart: You’re welcome, Dave. Dave Eicher: It’s a pleasure to have you with us and let’s jump right in, if we

could talk about your early days. How did you get interested in becoming both a fighter pilot and also with such a strong interest in science?

Rusty Schweickart: Well when I was a little kid, I lived on a farm in New Jersey and

we lived, oh, I don’t know, 20 miles or so from naval air station



Lakehurst, and this was during the Second World War. And I would, as a young boy, I would, you know, lay out on the grass or be getting hay in from the fields, and over my head almost every day were navy fighter planes, you know, jousting with one another, dog fighting. And so I took a natural interest in fighter planes and airplanes in general. And I also had an uncle who would ask me just about every day or every day he saw me, which was once a week, you know, what do I want to be when I grew up, and the two things I wanted to be were a fighter pilot and a cowboy.

Dave Eicher: [Laughs] That’s a pretty good combination there for a little kid. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah, a little kid, you know, what are you gonna do? So, you

know, and I’ve ridden horses, but I was never great at that, but I was the world’s best fighter pilot after I got into the Air Force and learned how to fly. So, you know, when you’re a fighter pilot, the natural thing is to go higher and faster and ultimately that takes you to space. So that’s the short story.

Dave Eicher: Fantastic. And so you went to MIT and studied a lot at MIT. And

how were those years where you in developing your interests? Rusty Schweickart: Well I started at MIT actually in chemical engineering because I

had a Chemcraft chemistry set, you know, and I used to set fire to the — you know, to my little laboratory in the attic every once in a while, so I thought I was gonna be a chemical engineer. But as soon as I got into MIT and started taking chemistry, I realized that that was not for me. And so I shifted over actually toward the end of my first year I shifted into aeronautical engineering, which was obviously a love — with my love of aviation and airplanes. So I graduated MIT in Core 16, aeronautical engineering, and went right into the Air Force. I was in ROTC. In fact, I led the ROTC unit there my senior year and then went right into pilot school, pilot training, in the Air Force when I graduated in 1956.

Dave Eicher: Fantastic. And that led you to lean eventually toward NASA and

toward the astronaut program as well. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. It was when I was in the Air Force. I mean I can still

remember that I was at Williams Air Force Base playing pool one night when I heard on the radio that the first Sputnik had been launched, and shortly after that, still in the Air Force, I can remember the Original Seven being identified as U.S.’s first astronauts. And of course I watched every mission I could or tracked every mission I could in terms of our unsuccessful Vanguard program. [laughs] Trying to catch up with the Soviet



Union getting into space. And then, of course, finally got it done with Redstone. Yeah, it was interesting times back when I was in my formative years. You know, all of this was happening, so pretty exciting.

Dave Eicher: Magic and unique times, and let’s hope that we have some times

like that again when we’re so focused on exploration and adventure and outpost to the stars. It’s a shame that the overall psychology of the country and the world is so different now.

Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. Well, you know, it’s always good to be good at something,

but timing is something often out of your control, and if you happen to be around at the same time or you create the right time [laughs], you know, the special time, that often helps.

Dave Eicher: Absolutely, absolutely. And what was your first inkling of — how

did it occur to you that you might get involved with the space program?

Rusty Schweickart: Well, I mean, again, as I say, you know, being a fighter pilot and

you want to go higher and faster, so space was naturally interesting to me. Also, astronomy for that matter. I didn’t mention that. But I’d always been interested in the stars and the cosmos from the time I was a little bitty kid. You know, being born and raised on a farm, you know, weren’t too many bright city lights around, and so I really was privileged to have a nice, clear view of the sky most nights.

And so I — those interests, when I was in the Air Force and got

out of the Air Force, I was nevertheless interested in the dawning, not just Space Age, but also human space flight at the same time. And so it was a pretty natural evolution interest of mine. And I tracked — you know, when I was doing graduate work at MIT, Alan Shepard flew and, you know, that was right after Yuri Gagarin and that was sort of the big race. And of course I felt very much a part of it even though at the time I wasn’t directly involved, but I certainly was emotionally and mentally involved.

And then as I was working toward the end of my graduate school,

the question was, how could I become qualified to become an astronaut? I mean it was not even a question whether I wanted to be; it was really how could I qualify. And up until that time, the first two groups of astronauts, you had to be a test pilot. And so as I was finishing my graduate school at MIT, I was thinking how in the world am I gonna get to become a qualified test pilot, because I



was a civilian. I’d already been in the military — in the Air Force and out of it twice as a fighter pilot.

Because I was recalled when I was in the — flying the

International Guard in Massachusetts as I was finishing up my graduate work at MIT after my first four years in the Air Force. And then our guard unit got activated when Khrushchev put up the Berlin Wall, and so I went in the second time on active duty. So I’d already been in the Air Force and out of it twice, but I wasn’t a test pilot. But then happily, on the third selection of astronauts, NASA was a little more interested in education, and so they had a secondary possibility where instead of being a test pilot you could have 1,000 hours of high-performance jet experience and an advanced degree in science or engineering. And so suddenly I qualified on the alternative route.

Dave Eicher: And this was obviously a huge moment in your life, and so you

became one of 14 new astronauts named in late 1963 as the third group.

Rusty Schweickart: Right, right. And that saved me from a decision; was I gonna go

for my Ph.D. or not? [Laughter] Dave Eicher: Well I think you had a little bit more of an exciting outcome than

ordinary folks getting their Ph.D. at the time. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. Well probably a little less tension and more excitement. [Laughter] Dave Eicher: Yes. So then you had a transition toward Apollo 9. And tell the

listeners, if you would, how your entrance into the program, how you got going. What was that experience like? It must have been electrifying all the time to be in the program, and then how you moved eventually then toward your assignment to Apollo 9.

Rusty Schweickart: Well it certainly was exciting times, there’s no question about that

because, you know, we were essentially in a race, given John F. Kennedy’s declaration that we’re gonna go to the Moon and send a man to the Moon and bring him back before the end of the decade. And that was all happening just as I was transitioning from MIT to NASA. And so that was a heck of a challenge coming, you know, directly out of the mouth of the president and a rather glamorous president at that. Certainly a bold and courageous one in terms of



making that kind of a commitment. And that was something which every one of us identified with regardless of our political orientation or anything else.

I mean everybody immediately identified with that, and that

became, you know, the rationale, the challenge, which led us to, you know, working six, seven days a week, 8, 12, 18, 24 hours a day for that matter, from time to time. You know, it was just a personal commitment on everybody’s part. So I got in, and because — partly because of my, you know, background and my educational experience at MIT, we all picked up a kind of secondary assignment as we were going through training in the astronaut office. And one of the first assignments that I had was overseeing some of the first scientific experiments that we were doing in the human space flight or in the manned space program at that time.

So those were the first scientific experiments that we flew on

Gemini, and I became kind of the keeper or the interface between the Gemini crew and the scientists in the scientific community who were sponsoring these experiments. And that was a very interesting kind of liaison job. Then as we got toward the end of the Gemini program, a few of the guys from our group had flown, but about half of us had not, and so we were the first that were chosen during the Apollo — the early Apollo missions. And I started out — our crew, which was — we were selected as a crew, James McDivitt, Dave Scott, and myself — Jim from the second group of astronauts and Dave and I from the third group

And we were picked for the second Apollo mission, but we were going to be — you know, at that time, the second Apollo mission was going to have the first lunar module. Well, that was the whole time and it gets a little confusing, so I don’t want to bore everybody with it, but everybody would recall that there was a fire on the launch pad and Gus Grissom and his crew, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, were burned to death in that terrible accident. We were actually their backup crew up until about a month before that event or a couple months before that event.

We had stepped out of that cycle and we were then, at the time of

that accident, the prime crew on what was going to be the first flight of the lunar module. It was Lunar Module 2. But the whole thing got all in a jumble after that accident because it took us about a year to recover and redesign the spacecraft and the missions got all mixed up again. And it turned out that Frank Borman and his crew, Bill Andrews and Jim Lovell, ended up flying the second



flight in Apollo because the lunar module was not ready at that time, our lunar module.

We were going to be the first crew to fly that, but it wasn’t ready.

So we watched Frank and his crew go off around the moon in Christmas of 1962 and wonderful flight. No lunar module on it, but he took the command module out to the moon and flew around it, and then our crew picked up the next mission on Apollo 9 in March of 1969, so got the privilege of being the first guy to flew the lunar module.

Dave Eicher: And what was that like — I understand this is question that

everyone has asked you ever since, I’m sure a million times. But, you know, what was the sense of being on that flight and experiencing that physically and psychologically? It must have been beyond what you even had anticipated.

Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. You know, interestingly, Dave, you know, I look back on it

— quite a few years ago now, [laughs] 48 years or something like that coming up — but you know, I look back on it, it’s pretty hard to remember exactly what you were feeling. But I don’t recall any real sense of being particularly excited about it. You know, you work with it every day, everything around you that’s happening is exciting. There’s all sorts of stuff going on.

And, you know, mostly what you’re doing is getting ready for the

mission and, you know, you’re working your butt off and in the simulators all the time and, you know, launch simulators and rendezvous simulators, and all these things. You’re flying all around the country testing the actual spacecraft. You know, we spent a lot of time both up on Long Island at Grumman Plant where they were manufacturing and testing the lunar module, and then all the way across the country to Downey, California, where they were building and testing the command module.

And we would — you know, we were very much involved in the

beginning and actually some of the design work, especially the crew interface design stuff as well as testing the actual spacecraft as they came down the manufacturing line and the subsystems and systems were tested. So we were, you know, busy as one-arm paperhangers, flying back and forth across the country in our T38s from one coast to the other. And you know, so with all of that the mission itself was sort of the end goal, but it seemed like you were never gonna get there.

[Laughter]



[laughing] I mean, you know, the biggest impression you had was,

you know, as you came up to flight was, you know, well what’s gonna happen that’s gonna postpone it next, you know?

[Laughter] Dave Eicher: And it’s kind of like you’re so focused on the details that you don’t

have the emotional energy to sort of soak it in a general sense. Rusty Schweickart: That’s right. I mean, really. Dave Eicher: Yeah, yeah. Rusty Schweickart: You know, it wasn’t unusual — people find this hard to believe,

but it’s really true. It was not unusual on the launch pad, you know, to be laying there in your space suit — you have to get into the spacecraft, back in the Apollo days anyway — you got in the spacecraft, you know, hours before liftoff. Probably something like four hours — I don’t remember exactly, but I would guess something like four hours before liftoff. You’re part of the countdown, you’re throwing the switches, you’re reading the dials, blah, blah, blah. But, you know, there are times when you’re literally laying there on your back, you know, just waiting for the next thing to happen, whatever it was. And you know, we — it’s a very pleasant environment and we’d drift off to sleep.

Dave Eicher: So the Gordon Cooper scene in The Right Stuff is not necessarily

an exaggeration where he … Rusty Schweickart: No, no, no. I — we would regularly fall to sleep, you know, fall

asleep. Of course, you know, you would be testing these spacecraft — not so much in the lunar module cuz you had to stand up, so we didn’t [laughs] fall asleep standing up. But in the command module, you know, when we were testing that out at the North American Rockwell Plant at Downey, we would be lying there on our backs in the spacecraft, you know, during some kind of a systems test, and often you would have holds that would go from anywhere from five minutes to, you know, an hour. And you would just drift off because [laughs], you know, it was 3:00 in the morning, you know? What the heck.

Dave Eicher: Sure, sure. Rusty Schweickart: So then when you get in the real spacecraft and you’re laying there

early in the morning waiting to take off and you didn’t get that



much sleep anyway, you know, you’d drift off to sleep. It’s a very nice environment. [laughs]

Dave Eicher: Excellent. That’s great, great. But when it did launch, it really

shook, I imagine. Rusty Schweickart: Well, yeah. But, you know, different people remember it different

ways. Certainly, on the ground, you know, as you got to zero in the countdown, actually just a couple of seconds before, they would light the, you know, engines. But at liftoff, you know, you don’t — in Apollo you really didn’t leap off the ground. Your thrust was barely greater than your weight, and so you sort of eased off the ground.

But you could certainly hear and feel the vibration and the rumble,

and kind of — you know, the first few seconds after liftoff, you’re going very upwards, straight up very slowly, and you can feel the engines back there at the end of the stack gimbaling to essentially balance, you know? You keep it going — you know, it’s like holding a broom on your palm of you hand, you know, balancing a broom straight up. And you move your hand around. Well that’s what the engines are doing, they’re kind of moving around, and you could feel that.

It’s a very solid kind of feeling. It was — on top of that, of course,

there’s some vibration and noise as well, but I don’t remember it being terribly strong or violent vibration. Now with the space shuttle, that was quite a different thing because there you had solid rocket motors, you know, off to the side in addition to the main engines on the back of the shuttle itself. And those solid rockets do generate a lot of vibration.

So with the guys who flew the space shuttle, the launch was more

violent in the sense of vibration and probably a bit noisier and, you know, just a bit rougher during the first-stage launch, and they certainly got off the ground a lot faster because the thrust to weight ratio was higher. But for Apollo it was — once you got 10 seconds off the ground, which is about the time you cleared the top of the tower, you know, the sound dropped away because the sound you’re hearing is not coming up through the stack itself. The sound is the engine exhaust bounce — noise bouncing off the ground and coming back up to the spacecraft from the outside. And so as soon as you got up above the tower, you know, the sound would drop off very, very rapidly to the point where, I don’t know, 20 or so seconds into the fight I don’t remember hearing anything at all.



Dave Eicher: How amazing. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah, it’s really quiet. Now of course the acceleration is gradually

building up, so you know, you’re aware of that, but the sound was — and vibration of course would drop right to zero. Liquid inches were pretty — they’re pretty smooth. So solids are a lot more shaky.

Dave Eicher: And what were the greatest moments of memory throughout the

rest of the mission that stuck with you? Rusty Schweickart: Well, I mean, the highlight of the mission without any question for

me was the EVA day when we went out — when I went outside the spacecraft. It was the first time that we had flown the new Apollo suit. The old — we had a lot of problems with the suits during the Gemini era. They were really not very mobile. The joints were — they weren’t built well for bending your elbows and your knees and rotating your shoulders and that kind of thing.

And the Apollo suit was a completely different design, and so I

was testing that for the first time. And it was also the first time that we had flown the portable life support system, which would allow my buddies to run around, you know, on subsequent missions on the Moon. You know, we couldn’t have an umbilical dragging across the lunar surface to, you know, keep you alive, so you had to have a backpack. And I got to test that backpack as well as the new suit, going out of the lunar module. And there’s no question that that was a highlight of the mission for me, personally.

Dave Eicher: And what was that like? It must have been visually overwhelming

and sort of an alien experience, seeing what you saw during that exercise.

Rusty Schweickart: Well it was certainly very impressive. I mean, there’s a big

contrast between being inside the spacecraft and especially now with the space shuttle. I mean with the space station, the guys and gals up in the space station, I mean they’re really inside a structure looking out through windows. And even in something like the lunar module, you know, you’re looking out at the world and space and, you know, Sun, Moon, whatever, through windows and you’re inside looking out. But when you’re outside in a spacesuit, you’re really outside, and because the helmet on Apollo was really just a bubble, I mean it was a Lexan bubble, and there were no real boundaries to it.



The edge of the thermal helmet, the covering helmet that went over it to protect you from the Sun, stopped back past your visual field. And so when you were in that Apollo suit EVA, there was no window frame. There were no boundaries around what your view was. You were out there.

Dave Eicher: A huge field of view. You felt like you were right out in the

universe there. Rusty Schweickart: Absolutely. You felt like you were out there naked because when

you’re just floating — you know, unless you’re moving — if you’re moving, then you’re moving the suit. You’re bending the suit around and you’re doing some work, but if you’re just floating there, just hanging on, you know, with your fingers, your fingertips, and just floating and looking around, you’re not even aware of touching the inside of the spacesuit because you’re floating inside it like a pea in a pod. And the backpack was very, very quiet.

It didn’t make any real noise. You couldn’t hear the fans or the

pumps or anything like that. And the radio, when nobody was talking, was completely off. It was a voice-operated relay and so the radio was literally off when nobody was talking. And the result was there was just no sound whatsoever, and you’re floating in weightlessness with nothing blocking your vision out there in space. And I mean it was a spectacular experience.

And of course a visual experience, what you’re seeing is not just

the spacecraft that you’re on which are, you know, pretty interesting and exciting, but the Earth down below and it’s beautiful, largely blue and white, but you see a few other colors. But the iridescent blue band, the horizon, you know, which is compressed into this very, very narrow, very bright blue band. And then above it, just the blackest black in the world. I mean just totally black. No stars in it, I might add, Mr. Astronomer. [laughs]

Dave Eicher: No stars because you were not — Rusty Schweickart: No stars because your pupils are — Dave Eicher: Attenuation and your — Rusty Schweickart: Yeah, your pupils are closed way down because it’s pretty bright

out there, the Sun bouncing off the spacecraft, and for that matter, off the Earth. And so the stars are there, but your pupils are pretty small, and they’re not taking in that kind of dim light.



Dave Eicher: You’re not seeing them. Now did you have a feeling of the sense

of looking at Earth, of the fragility, of the vulnerability, of this planet out in what you saw a little bit better than we do walking around on the surface as a planet —

Rusty Schweickart: Oh, yeah. Dave Eicher: — out in naked space, if you will there. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah, yeah. I mean you’re very — you become very aware — not

as aware probably as the guys that went out to the Moon. You know, then you’re looking back and you can cover the earth with your thumb. But nevertheless, flying around it, you know, you got the curved horizon, you’re flying around. Every hour and a half you’re going around this whole planet. It gets pretty small and in a way almost better than the guys that went out to the Moon.

You really see places that you know. You’ve been there on the

ground. You know, there goes Paris, and oh yeah, there’s Japan, and you know, here’s the West Coast of the U.S. coming up and – you know, and so you’re seeing these things and you realize that you’re going around in an hour and a half. I mean you don’t feel like you’re going fast because everything is happening slow, but you know, an hour and a half is about — you know, from that altitude it’s about the same speed that the Earth goes by when you’re flying in an airplane at 35,000 feet or so.

And so the speed, the relative speed, with which things seem to be

going by you is about the same as people flying in an airliner. It’s actually — it actually doesn’t feel like you’re going any faster than that. But the scale is so different that obviously you’re making to all the way around the planet in 90 minutes. So you become quite aware of the fact that this is indeed a small planet in very, very black space. You know, it’s the sole place of life and that really penetrates your space suit and everything else. [laughs]

Dave Eicher: That’s amazing. And you have that first critical step, which those

of us who have never been to space have never had, of the first important step outward in the whole cosmic distance scale of understanding how large things are in our solar system.

Rusty Schweickart: And that was something that really came through to me during my

EVA. You know, when I was outside there for 47 minutes, you know, Dave’s camera — he was photographing me for documentary purposes cuz I was traversing from one spacecraft



externally to the other one, and the camera failed and so, you know, McDivitt told me to stay where I was and I immediately gave him a “yes, sir.” And I just let go with one hand and I just sort of turned around and looked at the world and space and I just took that five minutes that — Dave never did get the camera fixed — but nevertheless, I took that five minutes and I was just a human being, not an astronaut.

And I — you know, and that became a real high point for the

mission because, you know, the obligation came through to me very clear. You know, here I am, you know, a lucky, absolutely pure lucky human being on this frontier as humanity is beginning to move out into space. And, you know, it immediately made clear the obligation that I had to bring that experience back to people on the ground. But humanity is moving out into space and, you know, we’re at the beginning of that, but this — it’s a very historical moment in time.

Dave Eicher: Absolutely. Amazing. And then, of course, from Apollo you got

involved in Skylab as well. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. That was a — that was interesting. I got sick in space. I, you

know, barfed and all that a couple of times, which now is not unusual, that happens — about 40 percent of people who fly in space get sick, but we — at that time, we didn’t know very much about it at all, and so I had volunteered after Apollo, after my Apollo 9 mission, to become, you know, NASA’s human guinea pig [laughs] to try and understand — it was the worst decision of my life to do that.

[Laughter] But nevertheless, I sort of stepped out of the rotation because we

really didn’t know whether people were going to end up not being able to function when they got to the Moon.

Dave Eicher: Right. Rusty Schweickart: And that could be out and out dangerous. Dave Eicher: Oh, yeah. Rusty Schweickart: I mean, you know, you could really be a threat to the rest of your

crew, or the whole crew could be a threat. But at any rate, so what that did was sort of set me outside the Apollo sequence, and then by the time I got done all that research work, I cycled back in as



one of the first Skylab crews. And that was, you know, exciting, interesting in its own way, our first space station, in a sense. So I became the commander of the first Skylab mission.

Dave Eicher: And was that a sort of a similar experience to Apollo in the sense

of going up and doing the mission or how did that differ from your experience with Apollo 9?

Rusty Schweickart: Well a lot of the training is the same. I mean, you know, you’re

dealing with becoming familiar with the electronic systems and the environmental control system, you know, so there’s a lot of, you know, systems work that you’re doing. The launch is very much the same sort of thing. You got a different destination mainly, and of course, being now a laboratory up there, now you got a lot of scientific experiments that you’re learning.

And so a lot of your training is not, you know, running around on

the Moon, trying to figure out whether you’re looking at volcanoes or impact craters, but you’re now, you know, doing all sorts of experiments; medical experiments, and you’re doing — we had the big Apollo telescope mount on the Skylab, which was the first really big gang of solar telescopes, ganged together, pointing directly at the Sun. You know, staring at the Sun 24 hours a day — well, on the sunlight side of the Earth. So we did a lot of training and coursework.

I mean academic work really to understand solar flares, what we

knew about solar flares at the time and being able to try and catch the precursors so that you could get the right instruments cranked up and pointed in the right place at the right time to catch the onset of a solar flare, which at that time we really hadn’t even been able to get. So there was a lot of that kind of stuff, and, you know, that in itself was very interesting. Perhaps not as exciting as running around on the surface of the Moon, but you know, Skylab was pretty dramatic in its own way.

Dave Eicher: Scientifically very important and with respect to, say, the solar

physics, understanding the very — the core seeds of what we now know about space weather and so on.

Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. It was before I think anybody had put those

two words together. [laughs] Dave Eicher: Yeah, yeah.



Rusty Schweickart: But, you know, shortly thereafter we became quite aware of the fact that the Sun is not just giving us, you know, some heat and light. [laughs]

Dave Eicher: Yeah. Rusty Schweickart: It — we’re in the middle of a bunch of different streams and fields

and they affect the planet here and life on earth a little more than we understood back then.

Dave Eicher: And continuously, yes indeed. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. Dave Eicher: And then what led you to — I want to make sure we have enough

time to talk about asteroids and such — what led you to basically get into commercial life, get into California politics and being the CEO of some companies and leaving the astronaut program?

Rusty Schweickart: Well after I had finished my work in the astronaut office, the

Skylab missions had completed and, you know, the question was, was I gonna stay around for the space shuttle? And I could have done that, but it was — we were going to be going about six years without flying anything, and, you know, I was a little more ambitious than that, and I wanted to understand a little more about how you managed people and programs and how you, you know, planned budgets and how you testified before Congress and all of that. So I went to NASA Headquarters to take up, you know, an executive position there in what used to be called the Applications Programs, things like Landsat and things of that kind.

And, you know, I did all those things. I managed an office and,

you know, made up budgets and, you know, I was a bureaucrat in NASA Headquarters and learned how you run a program and how you manage and design a program and not just execute it. And interestingly, that became interesting to me. I loved operations and being, you know, at the pointy end of the pencil [laughs], as it were. But, you know, the guiding hand on the pencil is, you know, another matter.

Dave Eicher: Yes. Rusty Schweickart: And I got quite interested in what we were doing and how we

decided how we were going to do things and what we would do in the future and not just executing what other people had decided we should be doing. And so that got to be pretty interesting to me. But



about that time, I frankly had been having some differences of opinion, let me say, with the then NASA administrator, so in the process of my work, I was operating — I was kind of a liaison between NASA’s technology and the outside world. And part of the outside world that was interested in space technology was California.

And Stewart Brand, who, you know, was the author of The Whole

Earth Catalogue and all of that — Stewart and I got to be talking buddies and then he brought me out to California to give a lecture in Jerry Brown’s governor’s office one time. And Jerry and I got to be friends, and he said, “Why don’t you come out here? We’re really interested in space technology, and we’d like to use it in government, but we don’t know much about it. Why don’t we work together on that?”

And that sounded pretty interesting to me. So I came out and

became the governor’s science advisor for science and technology, and then took over the Energy Commission during the energy crisis and, yeah, that was sort of my introduction to state government. And from there I went — after a few years, I finished my work with the Energy Commission and got interested also in commercial work. And the Soviet Union had just collapsed at that time, and I had formed the Association of Space Explorers with some of my astronaut friends. It’s too much to talk about, Dave. [laughs]

Dave Eicher: That’s a good problem to have, a very good problem. Rusty Schweickart: It is a big problem. [Laughter] At any rate, you know, the short of it is that I got very — I started

the Association of Space Explorers and so I got into the non, you know, the whole nonprofit sector, and started that international organization and got that going just as I was finishing my work in California government. And then with the Soviet Union, you know, moving into the commercial world, I got together with a bunch of the former Soviet space people, and we started up a commercial — or tried to start up — a commercial space venture. And that got me into the commercial world of space activity. And I sort of stayed there for six or seven, eight years or so with different startups, unfortunately, none of which was really successful. [laughs] So I never became a Silicone Valley mogul, unfortunately. [laughs]



Dave Eicher: But you’ve done so many things in so many areas. It’s an

incredible experience, your career, you know? Rusty Schweickart: Well I’ve never gone in a straight line. I don’t think I ever got

fired. It was a willful crooked line, but … [Laughter] But you know, not going in a straight line has always been one of

my characteristics, I guess. Dave Eicher: And you were also involved in the U.S. Antarctic Program. Rusty Schweickart: Oh, yeah, yeah. That was — yeah, that was a separate kind of

thing, but that was a lot of fun. Very interesting. I went back — I left California at one point, went back to Washington D.C., actually to be with my now wife [laughs], but at that point my lady friend, and so I wanted to get a job while I was there, you know, living with her.

And went back into federal government, and Eric Bloch, who was

at that time the director of the National Science Foundation, looked at me and said, “Aha, an astronaut who wants a job. I’ve got a responsibility called the U.S. Antarctic Program, the National Science Foundation being responsible for all U.S. Antarctic operations. And you know, my friend, the NASA administrator, has just gotten fried with the – after the Columbia accident” – or the Challenger I guess it was, excuse me, not Columbia, Challenger. “And boy, I’ve got a dangerous operation on my hands down in Antarctica. People get killed there every year and, you know, I’m lucky that a lot more people haven’t gotten killed. I better get a safety survey done.”

And so he hired me to do a safety survey of all Antarctic

operations, all U.S. Antarctic operations. And so I had the opportunity to spend, you know, many days down on the ice, both going down through South American and going down through Christchurch, New Zealand, and that was pretty interesting. Antarctica is a very, very interesting piece of the world, frankly. It’s fascinating.

Dave Eicher: Yeah. I’ve never been there, but I’ve had many friends who have

gone in search of meteorites, which of course …



Rusty Schweickart: Well you gotta go down there, Dave. There’s all kinds of astronomy going on. [laughs] It’s a unique place for astronomy.

Dave Eicher: Yeah, yeah. And if you find meteorites, you can willfully — you

can be a good soldier and hand them to the NSF. Rusty Schweickart: Yeah. If you see a rock laying on top of the ice down there, it came

from space because it certainly [laughs] — there aren’t any rocks in the ice.

Dave Eicher: Well that must have been a great adventure, too. And then tell us

how did you turn toward your really incredible work and reputation with planetary defense, the B612 Foundation, and so on. That’s a major chapter of your life as well.

Rusty Schweickart: Yeah, that’s a big chapter. And in many ways — my wife hates me

to say this — but in many ways [laughs] I think it’s probably the most important, you know, ultimately the most important chapter of my life because, you know, we’re dealing here with an issue here in trying to protect the Earth from asteroid impact, which, you know, can literally protect life on the planet from extinction at some point in the future. And it would — you know, that threat is — has been there in the past and wiped out the dinosaurs and many other species in the past, and we’re in the same situation right now until we get that system developed.

But to answer your question, the way in which it happened was

that NASA started the Astrobiology Program in the mid-’90s, and that was pretty fascinating because finally NASA was taking all of these questions that everybody has as a kid — you know, where did life come from, how did it start, what’s my purpose, what are, you know, is there life elsewhere, blah, blah, blah — you just add up all those questions about life and you say that’s a program. It’s not a discipline because it brings in many, many, many different disciplines together but into the big questions that we all ask. You know, where did life get started? How did it get started? Does it exist elsewhere? Will we take it elsewhere? You know, what are the limits to life?

So those questions were all very interesting to me, and so I got

fascinated with the Astrobiology Program. And you don’t spend 10 minutes in astrobiology before, you know, you realize that life on Earth, while we don’t know how it started, one thing we do know is that it was dramatically shaped by impact of asteroids and comets over the history of the planet. And so I got interested in some of the impact issues, and you look at that for seriously for



just a couple of minutes and suddenly you realize the unbelievable, the incredible energy that’s released and the impact that it — no pun intended [laughs] — the impact that it has on the terrestrial environment when you have, you know, a big object that hits the Earth. I mean the amount of energy is incredible.

The thing that got me, it was a lecture by Professor Norm Sleep of

Stanford University one night at the California Academy of Sciences in the Morrison Planetarium, and Norm was talking about the energy release in the — what we now know as the Chicxulub impact, you know, that wiped out the dinosaurs. And he listed all of the tremendous effects. I mean the seismic effect and the tsunami and the effect on the atmosphere and bolides flying — I mean, you know, gigatons of dust and rocks and stuff flying all around the Earth and reentering, setting things afire, all that.

But the thing that really got me was when he said the sky ended up

so hot because of all these gigatons of rock flying down through the atmosphere and lighting up the sky, you know, the sky full of meteoroids continuously, the temperatures got so hot that 1 meter of seawater boiled off all around the planet. And when you think about 1 meter of water, 3 feet of water, on the ocean boiling off all around the planet, I mean that is a huge amount of energy if you’ve ever done thermodynamics. [laughs]

Dave Eicher: It’s really incredible. It’s really almost unbelievable. Rusty Schweickart: I know. Dave Eicher: And the fact that we’re now cognizant of this doesn’t mean that the

impacts will suddenly stop. Rusty Schweickart: [Laughs] Indeed. The impact stopped because we have a short

lifespan. [laughs] Dave Eicher: Right, right. Rusty Schweickart: I mean we’re in a continuous flow, basically. I mean, you know,

there was back, you know, 4 million years ago, the Late Heavy Bombardment and things of that kind when the intensity, you know, goes up and down from time to time, but essentially, we’re in a steady state flow and the problem is that the objects which are large enough to, you know, really get our attention, only occur once every hundred years or so or several hundred years. And the result of that is, you know, that our — we can live our whole



lifetimes, and people do live their whole lifetimes, without ever being aware that the Earth gets hit by an asteroid.

But, you know, we are still gonna be hit, you know, at essentially

the same rate that the Earth has been hit for the last 4 million years, and yet what we know now is that we can see these things out in space, we can plot their orbits, we can predict when they’re going to hit or when they may hit, and we can track them. We can also deflect them when we have enough warning, and we can cause them not to hit the Earth ever again. Now that’s amazing. I mean when you think about something that shaped life on Earth, something not insignificant, something that could shape life on Earth, and now that we’re a successful life-form and we want to keep going, we can stop that physical process.

With our space technology, we can quite literally adjust the solar

system itself to enhance the survival of life on Earth in the future. That’s an amazing thing that we can do. And, you know, when you realize what the consequence of an impact is and you know that you can prevent it if you do the right amount of work and the right things, it’s pretty hard not to dedicate yourself to that, and that’s the trap I found myself in.

Dave Eicher: Absolutely. And this led you to found the B612 Foundation. Rusty Schweickart: Right, right. We — a bunch of us, Ed Lou and an astrophysicist

named Piet Hut from Princeton — got together and were talking about it and said, why don’t we do something about it, and Ed and I and a number of other people had talked a couple of years earlier that if anybody decided to try to do something, that we’d let one another know. And so Ed got about 25 of us together back in 2001 in a combined, you know, eyeball-to-eyeball and face-to-face and virtual meeting, and we — the 25 of us — said, number one, can anything be done about this? Clearly, we were finding more and more asteroids, and yet nobody was doing anything about what do you do when one shows up with our address on it?

And so we decided, you know, we couldn’t let that continue to

happen, but the question was, could anything, in fact, be done about it? And after a couple of days of batting things around, it became obvious that, yeah, we were right there with — the technology was a point where something could be done about it. So then the next question was, what can we do about it? Literally, how can we bring something about? And so we realized we had to form some kind of an organization to do it, and we weren’t gonna get the government to just pick it up and do it. So we formed a



501(c)(3), you know, a nonprofit corporation. We named it after the Little Prince’s home asteroid, B612. Cute of us, we thought. [laughs]

Dave Eicher: Very, very. [Laughter] Rusty Schweickart: Of course, everybody thought it was some kind of a vitamin or

something, but… [Laughter] But at any rate, we formed the organization, and we have been ever

since in one way or another developing deflection capability and techniques and understanding and publishing and writing about and educating people about the dynamics of the orbital dynamics and deflection dynamics, and then more recently as the NASA Discovery Program began to slow down, given reaching the limit of the telescopes that have been around, we decided to take the next big step, which was really to find the 99 percent of objects out there that we still haven’t found that if they hit the Earth could do real damage.

Dave Eicher: And tell us a bit about the Sentinel mission, the proposed Sentinel

mission. Rusty Schweickart: Well, you know what, a number of organizations, you know, many

of them — originally a study done by NASA back in 2002/2003. The National Academy did a big program looking at what ought to be done. Astronaut Tom Jones and I ran a special taskforce for the NASA Advisory Council, looking at what needed to be done and what NASA ought to do. And everybody concluded that in terms of really having a functional, really effective early warning program so that we had enough time to deflect things, we had to really up the capability of finding the asteroids that are out there.

All of them down to the size that can make it through the

atmosphere and do harm. And that’s basically 20 meters to 40 meters. I mean you’re in that — 20- to 40-meter-diameter asteroids and above is about what you’re talking about there.

Dave Eicher: Yeah. Rusty Schweickart: But there are ten million of those guys out there, and we found,

you know, 12,000. [laughs] So there’s a big difference between



12,000 and 10 million. And so the way in which we — everybody realized that the way in which you really need to find these, the most efficient and most rapid way, is to get a space telescope out above the atmosphere so you’re not limited by looking in only the visual part of the spectrum. Get out there where you can have an infrared telescope.

And, of course, these asteroids are about like pieces of charcoal in

terms of their color, so they get very hot, but they’re not very bright. I mean, you know, in terms of optical, they’re pretty damn dim, but in terms of infrared, they’re very bright because they’re dark and they get hot from the Sun in space. And that makes them great targets for an infrared space telescope. And everyone realized that, but NASA’s never really gotten around to doing that.

More recently, there is a program being proposed out of JPL called

NEOCam, and that is an infrared space telescope. It’s a little different from Sentinel, and it wasn’t really on the drawing boards as we started Sentinel. And Sentinel is a different type of telescope. NEOCam, the current scientific telescope which is competing for money from the Discovery Program inside NASA with 28 other scientific experiments or missions, by the way, that would be located at the Lagrangian point number one, or what’s called L1, which is about a million miles toward the Sun from the Earth, and looking back at toward the Earth and off to the sides.

But it would basically go around with the Earth, sort of stationary,

at a point, at a fixed point, between the Sun and the Earth, about a million miles closer to the Sun than the Earth. And it goes — moves around the Sun with the Earth. That’s a great telescope and it will — it does look in the infrared, and it will find things that you don’t find from the ground, so it’s a great telescope. The Sentinel telescope, on the other hand, has the feature that its orbit is — it’s placed in an orbit around the Sun between Venus and Earth.

So it actually circles the Sun like a planet between Venus and

Earth, and it is always looking away from the Sun, but it’s not locked to the Earth. In other words, it moves around the Sun faster than the Earth, and it’s always looking outward, away from the Sun, looking at the Earth’s orbit as it goes around the Sun and looking at all the asteroids across the Earth’s orbit, all the way around the orbit. And because it’s not locked to the Earth but is asynchronous with the Earth, it will pick up many more of these objects than a similar telescope, NEOCam, which is locked to the



Earth. And there’s another important telescope in all this mix now, which again, was not funded at the time we started Sentinel.

And that’s an Eearth-based telescope called the Large Synoptic

Space Telescope, which is LSST, and that’s gonna be put in Chile. And it’s going to be a very large telescope, 8.4 meters in diameter, and it’s a survey telescope. It’s got a very wide field of view. And it’s going to be sampling the sky many, many, many times a night. I mean it’s a very — it’s a fast telescope, it goes very deep, and it’s gonna do a great job, but in the visual.

So the combination of LSST plus either NEOCam or Sentinel can

give us 100 times the discovery rate of what we have now with the existing NASA telescopes that are looking for asteroids. And that’s what’s so exciting about, you know, Sentinel or NEOCam, for that matter. But that’s what exciting coming up in the future, and that’s why we started, as you know, Dave, da, da, da, da, da, da, Asteroid Day.

Dave Eicher: [Laughs] We only have a couple minutes left, but let’s talk about

Asteroid Day and how you got involved with it and everything that Grig is doing and, yes, we’re going to celebrate on June 30 the first Asteroid Day.

Rusty Schweickart: Right. The anniversary of the great Tunguska impact in Siberia.

The last, you know, significant city-killer size asteroid that hit the earth. Luckily, it only wiped out 800 square miles of Siberian forest; knocked it flat, set it afire, but if it had been a city that it came in over, it would wipe out the entire city, basically, kill everybody in the city. So I mean that’s a big event.

Happens about once every 500 years, and it’s gonna happen, you

know, again unless we prevent it. And that’s what we’re after. That was about a 40-meter-diameter asteroid. And, you know, that’s what we’re after. We know only about 1 percent of those asteroids that are out there are 40-meter asteroids, and we need to find the other 99 percent. And so what we wanted to do and what a lot of people realized — I was off in China at the time when you and Grig Richters and Mark Boslough and Bryan May and a few other people like Stephen Hawking — realized that, you know, let’s up the game here.

We can make a big difference if we get the right telescopes out

there. We can develop — we can get a full inventory of these rocks that can really, you know, destroy life. So let’s get with it. And I was off in China at the time, and I came back from three weeks in



China to hear this great idea of Asteroid Day being batted around. And so I kind of joined — jumped into the fray and joined the crowd, late as usual. But here we are, headed for Asteroid Day.

And what’s important about it is that while LSST, that we just

talked about, is now being built — the money has been allocated for that and that is being built — there is not yet money allocated for its mate, its space mate, an infrared space telescope, whether that’s NEOCam or Sentinel. There’s no money that’s yet been allocated and fixed in place to get those two partner telescopes, the infrared telescopes, going to work with LSST to get this job done. And that’s why we came up with Asteroid Day and what we call the 100x Declaration, which says, hey, we need to our game by a factor of 100. We need to increase the discovery rate of these asteroids by a factor of 100, which we can do if we get this combination of LSST and an infrared space telescope.

And we got 100 dignitaries, scientists, astronomers,

astrophysicists, a few politicians, entertainers, astronauts, etc. We got 100 people to sign the initial declaration to come up, to develop and sign the initial declaration. And on Asteroid Day, June 30, 2015, that will become an opportunity for the general public to join us in signing — we want to get 1 million signatures on that declaration as a petition to governments around the world, but in particular the U.S. government, to say, hey, OK, we got LSST, but let’s fund an infrared space telescope so that we can up our game by a factor of 100 and prevent the destruction of life on Earth at some point in the future. And that, in my sense, is a great legacy for all of us living at this time to ensure that future generations continue here on the surface of our planet.

Dave Eicher: Fantastic. Well it could not have been said any better. And so pay

attention to June 30 and the publicity that’s coming up about it. You can learn more about how to get involved to raise awareness about NEO research at asteroidday.org.

Rusty Schweickart: Right. Dave Eicher: And so we hope everyone will go there and get involved with

Asteroid Day. And I hate to say it, because this has been absolutely fantastic, Rusty, but we’ve run out of time.

[Laughter] Rusty Schweickart: We made it without my battery running out, huh? Great.



Dave Eicher: [Laughs] Great, great. But thank you so much for joining me and then for telling all the listeners about your fantastic career and life and interests, and you really have a unique and amazing position in the world of space exploration, of astronomy, of planetary defense, of everything. It’s really incredible, your story, and it’s an honor to know you.

[End of Audio]

Dave Eicher: Welcome to the Superstars of Astronomy ...

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