Phil Metzger '00MS'05PhD is a planetary scientist with nearly 30 years of experience in NASA. He shared the story of participating in the space shuttle mission, his controversial study of whether Pluto is a planet, and the future of space exploration. What is it like.

In episode 14 of Knights Do That, we interviewed Phil Metzger '00MS'05PhD, a planetary scientist and UCF alumnus who has nearly 30 years of experience in NASA. In this episode, Phil shares his story during the space shuttle mission, his controversial study of whether Pluto is a planet, and what the future of space exploration will look like.

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Phil Metzger: The future is amazing. If I can look to the future and tell you what I see is it; I see civilization transcending the earth. So we are no longer just exploring in space. We are actually carrying out economic activities of life outside the earth, which will happen in this century. We are already in the process of starting this process, and it is accelerating. It's really exciting now to be part of achieving this goal. This is a generation of graduates from UCF and other schools who will achieve all of this in their careers. Now, I know that UCF provides more graduates for aerospace engineering than any other university in the United States. So we will continue to attract students to participate. Those aerospace engineering students, business students and all other fields will have a lot of work to do in space.

Alex Cumming: We know very little about space. So that's why today I want to bring you a very interesting and insightful episode, I discussed space exploration with planetary scientist and UCF alumnus Phil Metzger. Phil shared some very incredible stories and experiences from his nearly 30 years of work at NASA, explained his research on why Pluto is indeed a planet, and shared what the future of space exploration will look like.

Let's go directly to the episode.

You are a planetary scientist at the UCF Florida Institute of Space Research. Can you share with us how you got here today?

Fermetzger: Yes. So I started working as an engineer at NASA, participating in the space shuttle program, and then the space station program, responsible for navigation and communication systems. When I work, I really want to go back to school and get a PhD. In physics or a certain field of physics. It turns out that this is planetary science. So when I was working at Kennedy Space Center, I was going to school at UCF. I did this for many years, driving back and forth from the coast to campus, and finally entered a full graduate school, where I stayed on campus for a whole year, and finally graduated. Then co-founded a laboratory in NASA, dedicated to planetary surface technology; mining the moon, asteroids, and Mars; and using the surface of these planets to build things, landing sites and habitats; learning how to use materials on these planets .

In the end, I left NASA and came to UCF as a faculty member. So I am a member of the Florida Institute of Space Research and still doing the same job I did at the end of my career at NASA.

Alex Cumming: Commuting here all the way from the space coast-I mean, students come and go, I assume there to travel, learn and get ideas.

Fermetzger: Yes. I have been driving for years, but I like it. I like to go to school here. Great professors. They are flexible with me to help make it work. Just like some professors will put my paper in a box, I will stop by at night and pick up my paper from the corridor. This situation lasted for many years, until I finally said: "I only need a year off to get my work done."

Alex Cumming: Did you return to UCF because you could get a PhD program? Is it near the space coast?

Fermetzger: Yes. UCF was established near the space coast to support the crew of the space program. My father goes to school at Florida Institute of Technology. I guess this is a family heritage. There is a great planetary science course, a great physics course. It was just solved.

Alex Cumming: When your father worked with Florida Polytechnic University, did he also participate in the work of the Space Coast? Because it was like the main focus of the school at the time, right?

Fermetzger: He is, yes. He participated in the Apollo project. He was a technician, working on ground systems at VAB, then left the launch pad and helped complete the Apollo mission. He has a certificate, he is now dead, but he has a certificate to thank him for his role in Apollo 11. He is very proud of this certificate. So when I grow up, I will participate in the open day activities and watch all the rocket launches. All the children near me are the same. Everyone’s parents work in the space program, or we are in contact. So when we grow up we just assume that we will all work in the space program, because that's what adults do. I originally planned to do other things, but somehow I returned to the space program and returned to the space coast.

Alex Cumming: It’s great to hear that there is such a space education culture there. My mother also went to UCF. She's getting an education, and now I'm in the theater, at least for myself, there is a little disconnect between the UCF generations.

So when you were at NASA, you persuaded them to develop guidelines for the preservation of historical sites on the moon. Can you describe those websites?

Phil Metzger: So on the moon, we have many Apollo landing sites. We also have a surveyor spacecraft that landed on the moon in the 1960s. The Apollo rocket’s booster also has a crash site on the moon. It is actually the asset module, which is part of the lunar module. The spacecraft that brought the crew back to orbit around the moon returned home, and then the spacecraft crashed into the moon. So there are many crash sites, as well as landing sites. These are regarded as the interests of archaeology, anthropology and history. Very unique website. These are the first places where humans explored and walked on another planet. I call the moon a planet, because in planetary science we do this. But that was the first place where humans walked in another world. So, anthropologists told me that these are the most important anthropological sites in our human field-now I believe other anthropologists will disagree.

But I am studying how rocket exhaust blows up the soil so that we can protect the gas station we plan to build on the moon. One day, I received a call from one of the companies, Astrobotic Technologies. They said, "We want to take the lander to visit the Apollo site. How can we land near it without sandblasting?" I realized , Wow, this is a very important question, because they will seriously damage this historical site. But when I referred this question to NASA’s management, they told me, “Don’t touch this because we don’t own the moon. We can’t make rules for the moon. If we try to bring it to the United Nations, we don’t know that the United Nations will Say anything, we don’t want to touch it either. So you can’t try to make rules to protect the Apollo site."

A few years later, I was afraid of this because time was passing and I realized that what we really need is voluntary guidelines. Perhaps this is the best result we can get. However, if we can at least publish voluntary guidelines, then these companies will know how to access these sites without damaging them.

Therefore, through a series of offenses, I attracted the attention of NASA headquarters, and they agreed to do so. So we finally developed these guidelines.

Alex Cumming: Can you emphasize the importance of why we protect these sites?

Phil Metzger: They represent a unique period in world history, which is the Cold War. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were afraid that each other would drop a nuclear bomb. We are afraid of weaponizing space. We want a treaty. We hope to reach some kind of international agreement on how we treat space? But the United States negotiated from a weak position, because the Soviet Union has rockets and can fly spacecraft, but we cannot. So they decided to solve this problem by developing a civilian space program. We will try to defeat the Soviets and prove to them that they need to bargain with us. We will carry out a civilian space program, so it is not a threat, so we will not place weapons in space.

From the perspective of the Cold War, this is everything. It really worked because during the Gemini project, we made so much progress that the Soviets came to the negotiating table and we signed the outer space treaty. So now we have this treaty. We have agreed. We will not weaponize space, but the treaty is a treaty in the 1960s, and space is developing so fast that the treaty does not solve all problems.

Here comes again, how do we deal with the new situation? So can we place explosive zones on the moon? If we do, are we claiming territory because we are not allowed to claim territory? Therefore, many new problems have appeared. But they originally came from the Cold War era that the world feared. Just like every day in my high school, if an airplane flies by and grows up next to the space center, my friends and I think it will drop a nuclear bomb on us, because we all know that when the bomb falls, they will bomb first. Space center.

So I really grew up in a culture that is afraid of expecting a nuclear war at any time. Therefore, the Apollo Project is a unique historical point in history and represents many other things.

Alex Cumming: Wow. That's so interesting. I, personally, I don't know the way we will have to modify these treaties, even if it is only about 60 years, or even now only in such a short period of human history, the speed of development of things has become obsolete.

Fermetzger: Yes. There are many people who want to mine in space. If we want to do things in space beyond the earth, we need to use resources in space. But this caused various problems that were not resolved by the Outer Space Treaty. Therefore, there are a lot of discussions internationally.

How do we deal with outer space treaties? Do we update it? Can we solve it? Can we work within the scope it gives us? This is a hot issue.

Alex Cumming: I think NASA is part of the government, so have you found that you have to contact people working in the government, they may not know the same as the upcoming scientists?

Phil Metzger: The understanding of these issues is surprising. People in the State Department, people in the military, people in NASA, the government knows what is happening in space. I think people have received education in the past ten years.

When I talk to people in any department of the Washington DC government or Congress, they really understand how we will deal with these problems on the moon?

Alex Cumming: Well, now there is a space force, which is a recently added military force. I'm not sure how it is viewed nationwide, but living in an era where you can see the foundations of the military branch based on space exploration, it is very interesting to think about how it developed.

Fermetzger: Yes. The general idea is that we want to make sure that we have a good international policy on space. To help influence international policy, we must be participants. So we need to have a strong space program. We need to exist in space so that we can influence the direction the world chooses.

Alex Cumming: When you see UCF is called Space U and you see all these young people and the football game that just happened, you will see this absolute worship of space and what it means for UCF. Does this make Are you inspired? How will this generation of young people develop space exploration?

Phil Metzger: Exactly. When I go to lectures, I always talk about how we can use space to solve global problems, such as climate change, and how we can really use space to solve problems related to global development and ensure that people all over the world can get from advanced economies. Benefit, while no longer burdening the earth’s environment.

So in order to solve a planetary problem, we must have an outer planetary position. So I will talk about this. After the speech, I am usually surrounded by young people who say they think they must choose between solving world problems or creating cool space robots. Now they realize that they don't have to choose one of them. Both of them are fine. This makes them very excited.

Alex Cumming: I like that. I like this idea. You don't have to choose between the two. I have some friends who are very involved in space and other planetary research, and some friends who are very involved in environmental research. I have witnessed how they tear between the two people I want to develop in the future, but I don't want to leave the planet we own. So know that there is a healthy overlap between them, and they help each other.

Fermetzger: Yes. It is difficult for people to master it. We are talking about how to push industry from the earth into space? This is an extension, because how will you make it on earth? You will drive trucks up and down in space, transporting all the manufactured goods. But we have been studying these concepts for decades, and we really believe that by the end of this century, by the end of this century, we should be able to remove at least half of our industrial footprint from the earth. So even if it is only half, it will be very helpful to our planet. So there are practical strategies. Most people I know in the space program are very supportive of the earth. They really want to use space to benefit the earth. There are a lot of very idealistic people working on space.

Alex Cumming: Do you find that many young people have this kind of idea, they like to mythologize the grand idea of ​​space and space travel, and then when they enter it, they may spend more time on the computer In front of the screen instead of the participation they want?

Phil Metzger: This may be true. So I spent a lot of time writing code. I made the FORTRAN code because I am a veteran, but I spent a lot of time writing code to simulate the physical heat transfer in the lunar soil. The equation for how heat is transmitted through dirt is not so fascinating. But I always think that the reason I tried to simulate heat transmission was because we were trying to extract ice from the lunar soil. Because we want to turn ice into rocket fuel. By making rocket fuel in space, we have changed the economic situation and can now do more things in space than ever before. Therefore, although I am doing this boring task behind the computer screen, this vision has always inspired me, made me work, and excited me.

Alex Cumming: I don't know. You can use ice to make rocket fuel.

Fermetzger: Yes. Well, it just powers up to electrolyze it, and then you decompose it into hydrogen and oxygen. Then you burn hydrogen and oxygen together to gain thrust.

Alex Cumming: In my acting class, they didn't teach me this. I think this is one thing I am missing.

I want to emphasize that the connection between UCF and the aerospace industry is no secret. We know UCF loves space. I like space, just like most UCF students. 29% of Kennedy Space Center employees are UCF alumni, and we have two astronaut alumni. What is your favorite part about the relationship between UCF and space?

Phil Metzger: Oh, it's hard to say just one thing. I think I like the faculty of the planetary science department, which is in the physics department. I like this group of faculty members because they are very creative when dealing with so many different ideas, and they all like space.

Alex Cumming: It's so cool to know that you see these alumni who leave the earth and explore. As someone who doesn’t have such an amazing grasp on the details of the definition of space travel, it’s so cool to know and think when you see some of the richest people in the world. We are talking with Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Type, it seems that space is at the forefront of their minds. What does this make you think?

Fermetzger: Well, I want to be like everyone, they want to look back on their lives and know that they have done some important things, things they can feel good about. I think the reason they are attracted to space is because technology has now reached the point where we can actually do amazing new things in space that we could never do before. They saw this and they thought, well, I can use my resources to make a huge difference in this field. Jeff Bezos wanted to do the lunar industry and put the industry in free space instead of on the planetary bodies around the earth, in order to save the earth and move the industry out of the earth. Elon wants to establish human settlements on Mars and make human civilization a multi-planetary civilization. They are very complementary goals. I am happy that they all have their own ideas, and they are complementary, because by letting more people try different things, I think we are more likely to succeed. Moreover, I am more like a person who saves the earth. So I prefer to invest in industry around the earth rather than settle on Mars. However, they fit very well. The industry needed to support humans living on Mars is the same amount of work required to work on the moon or in free space using primitive weathered layers to extract elements and conduct mining and manufacturing.

And those who want to go back and forth to Mars, they will need to fill up their rockets. They will need rocket fuel, and CisLunar Industries will interact economically with Mars settlements. So I think all of this plays a role in a magnificent overall situation.

Alex Cumming: I am glad to hear you say that. I know that many people in my life have had such problems. Going back to your saying that space travel and saving the earth can coexist, do they have the impression of leaving the earth, leaving the earth to colonize Mars, and letting the earth exist in the moon and the universe? , Let the earth drift with the flow-I am glad to hear that someone is more proficient than me. This is not the idea.

In the years when you worked with NASA, as a student of stars, have you ever thought that personal privatization of space will become a reality in your lifetime?

Phil Metzger: I didn't think of this until sometime in the 1990s. Before that, it was always the government that made the space, because it spent a lot of money. It requires so much technical strength that only large government agencies can participate in the field. We began to notice that things changed in the 1990s when NASA could not develop technologies faster than the commercial market could develop them.

For example, once we sent this heat shield to the Kennedy Space Center, it must have this perfect shape. So NASA developed a laser scanner to measure the shape of the heat shield. But they delivered their laser scanner, and they spent 10 million dollars to develop the laser scanner. This is a super-advanced new technology, but when they used it to measure heat shields, the technicians at the Aerospace Center said: "Why do you use it? We have this which we purchased commercially. It is more accurate and only requires 100,000 dollars." So this is what is happening in the tech world. These one-time applications have been unable to keep up with the technical engine of the commercial market. This has completely changed the space landscape.

So now people are beginning to realize that we can build rockets, and we can do this with very little money. We can actually send people into space. Therefore, the way of entering space is undergoing revolutionary changes, and now people have begun to imagine business models. How can we do this? What can we do in space to sustain this effort so that we can go further and further and truly put industry into space, save the earth, settle on Mars, and do all other great things.

Alex Cumming: Industry and space. This is a sentence that I rarely think of. But then we talked about the issue of owning territory on the moon, so if we commercialize in space, do we have to implement our capitalist economic concepts into the economy of entering space?

Phil Metzger: Well, I don't have any simple answers to this. This is a very good question. There are others who have been doing this. I have friends who are policy figures, as well as lawyers and politicians. Many people are arguing about these issues. It must operate internationally. This will have to involve the United Nations. In some way, we will figure it out as we proceed. But I think we can be optimistic about this. I think space not only has all these challenges that we need to solve, but when we find ways to make space more participatory and inclusive, we will bring all the greater creativity of the world. This is what I think will really push space forward and make it happen in this century, because we make it more inclusive and participatory for everyone.

Alex Cumming: I like the creativity and tolerance of the world, because space is not just the efforts of the United States, Russia, China, and Canada, it is the entire world. This makes me think that in the past century, the person and American myth I want to talk about embodying the concept of space travel may be Kennedy, who gave a great and famous speech star in the decade of the 1960s. You say that it has transformed from a certain sense of government and totality to a certain kind of individual company. I can think of the president, except for the former, who emphasized the importance of space travel and its importance to the future of the United States. Now we are going to these American companies. SpaceX and Amazon are the two companies we have been talking about. They really revive the idea of ​​space travel within reach, and we will do this within our route.

Fermetzger: Yes. Therefore, we must also consider other topics. A robot revolution is underway. So robotics threatens to take everyone’s job, even those in the creative field. What if robots can write or artificial intelligence can write poetry better than humans? when--

Alex Cumming: Then I am unemployed.

Fermetzger: Yes. When will we all be unemployed? But I want to point out that space is infinite. The resources available in our solar system are billions of times more than those on the earth. This provides us with an area that can be expanded so that we can end the zero-sum game that led us to compete for resources on the planet. We can use this automation of robots to gain millions and billions of times the possibilities in the solar system and create a more vibrant civilization. So we will have to face these problems, whether we go to space or not, because of technological changes. But by adding space in the picture, we have opened up more possibilities, and I think we can see that there are many optimistic roads ahead.

Alex Cumming: Considering the robot and our technology, the Mars Rover, we know that technically speaking, if we plan to do this, the American robot has landed and made contact on Mars. Does this make you feel a certain way?

Filmetzger: Well, people joked that we discovered a planet that is completely inhabited by robots, that is Mars, because there are about seven or eight or similar robots traveling and flying around Mars. As far as we know, only robots live there. But yes, this is really cool. Another very cool thing is that it used to spend about $200 billion on one of the flagship missions to another planet. It has reached the point where you can complete it with 100 million dollars, just like the Israeli team almost landed on the moon. They reached a range of approximately one hundred meters before losing control and falling to the last point. But that mission was only $100 million. So the price is so low that we can now see more groups starting to install robots on other planets.

Alex Cumming: I didn't even think about it that way. So I want to enter a controversial topic, because the robot revolution is not controversial. A few years ago, when you insisted through research that Pluto is indeed a planet, you caused a great sensation, and I want to talk about this. Can you tell us what your research is?

Fermetzger: Of course. This is really timely, because about four days ago we had a new paper that was just accepted by the journal, and I think it will be bigger than the last one. So, we spent about five years researching this topic, and we finally published our big paper there. But yes, we start by solving this problem. Like, why isn’t an object not a planet just because it is in a large group of other objects? As they said, "Well, we used to think of asteroids as planets, but then we discovered that they were in groups. Obviously, things in groups cannot be planets. So they are not planets. Now we used to think Pluto is lonely, but now we see it as a group of people. So by analogy with asteroids, Pluto should not be a planet."

This is the argument that people used in 2006. So we thought, let us solve this problem. I mean it’s asking a question, why something shouldn’t be a planet because it’s in a group, but is this really the reason why an asteroid becomes a non-planet? It doesn't make any sense as an argument. Why do scientists use it as an argument? This is just a question begging for debate. So did they really raise a question begging for argument in the mid-1800s as they told us?

We did research, and we found, no, they definitely don't. That is not what happened. In the mid-1800s. They started to discover a lot of asteroids, they realized that they were all in one group, scientists have always called them planets, and we would write textbooks. There are three types of main planets. The main planet is the planet that orbits the sun directly. So they would say that there are three types of main planets. They are terrestrial planets such as Earth, Mars and Venus. There are giant planets, such as Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, and Saturn. But there are also asteroids in the belt between Mars and Jupiter. Therefore, they are listed as one of the three types of planets along with the other two types of planets. This situation continued until the 1950s. In fact, scientists have only recently stopped treating asteroids as planets. So we did research to find out why they no longer call them planets? This has nothing to do with their hordes.

You know, in the 1950s, we knew there were thousands or even millions. They would say that there are hundreds of thousands of planets in this belt, and they are planets. So why do we need to switch? It turns out that Gerard Kuiper wrote some key papers, and he may be the leading planetary scientist at the time. He wrote a series of groundbreaking papers in which he believed that planets were formed by multiple processes. We used to think that they could only be formed by the instability of the disc. The gravitational instability of the gas orbiting the sun in the disc causes it to split into clumps. These small balls then condense into a liquid, and then finally harden into a solid. So they think that all planets are spherical, and they are all formed in this way. But Kuyper believes that it is not possible. Some of them may be formed from bottom-up dust particles, which will gather other suspects and turn into gravel. Gravel gathers other gravels and turns into rocks, and rocks gather other rocks and turn into boulders. In the end you get a planet. So he said that this process will also happen, the formed objects are not round, they are massive. So he proposed because there are two processes. We should say that it is round, just like the earth, it is a planet, because it turns out that planets are like this. It is-all other earth objects, geological objects like the earth are planets. So he said, "Let's say that all circular planets formed by unstable disks or planets, and those formed by bottom-up accretion, are non-planets." Later, we realized that accretion can actually All the way up, it becomes a round body. So now we changed it and said that even though it was formed by accretion, it became large enough to become a circle, and it ended up with the same geology, all these complex geological processes, as objects formed from opposite directions top down. So we have said that the final size is important because it determines whether it is an active geology, an active celestial body, or a dead massive rock, such as an asteroid. So this is what actually happened in literature. But unfortunately, this story has been lost, and this false story has been replaced.

We call it historical existentialism. This is a fallacy of presentism. People look at it from a modern point of view. They assume that people in the past have the same point of view and reinterpret history with untested assumptions. So people would say, well, obviously people in the 1800s would not think of a small mass as a planet, because we knew it was not a planet. Therefore, when there are about 15 of them, they certainly no longer think of them as planets. So they made up this false story about them becoming non-planets in 1800.

Alex Cumming: That is—yes. I like the word lumpy because it is a description of lumpy. Wow. The idea of ​​presentism, I haven't even thought about that and all those different things. Think about the debate in modern times or 15 years ago-

Fermetzger: Yes. Okay, can I tell you about the new paper? Because it gets better

Fermetzger: Okay. So our new paper, our old paper hates asteroids, and our new paper discusses satellites. Now this is the story you keep hearing. This is in every textbook. They would say that before the Copernican revolution, there were seven planets. The sun is a planet. The moon is a planet, and there are five other planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The earth is not a planet, but they always said that during the Copernican Revolution, the sun was no longer a planet and the moon was no longer a planet, because it orbited the earth and the earth became a planet, but this is not the case. OK. There is absolutely no problem in the historical record. What actually happened is that the moon has always been a planet, and all satellites are considered planets. As a planet, it has nothing to do with the orbit of the object. Until the 1920s, everyone talked about giant moons or planets. This may seem like an unimportant little detail, but it is actually very important because we know that planets can change their orbits, such as the capture of Neptune’s largest moon Triton. It is a main planet, just like Pluto, it is captured and becomes a moon. So no matter what orbit they are now, it is a human perspective bias. We are looking at it the way it is now, rather than looking at what these objects are. Unfortunately, to be a planet, you must orbit a star directly. This idea actually comes from astrology in the 1800s. Therefore, we can track how it developed in astrology and how scientists accidentally fell into this belief in the 1920s. Once again, historical presentism has covered history.

So now we are told a false story about how it developed. Therefore, what we are arguing about is the useful concept of planets, that is, the concept that scientists engaged in planetary science actually prefer to make, that any large-scale geologically active celestial body, including satellites like Titan, Triton, or Europa, are all planet. They are secondary planets. They are satellites. They are satellites, but it’s a satellite, it’s a planet that is a satellite of another planet

Alex Cumming: Your work was opposed by the ideas of the 1800s, and how it evolved in history, I can imagine it might be a little frustrating.

Phil Metzger: Well, we had a great time in this area. Just like when I go to the store now, if I see the farmer's yearbook, I'm like, oh, a yearbook, I will take it off the shelf. I will go to the list of planets we will see, because they always have a list of planets. So I have an almanac from the 1700s, and now I have been collecting almanacs. Every time I go to an old bookstore, if they have some old yearbooks, I say, "Oh, I have to get that." It's interesting to see how the planet list in pop culture and astrology differs from scientific concepts. This is the real source of division.

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Why do you think that the idea of ​​whether Pluto is a planet is subject to fierce public debate, even just ordinary individuals? People who may have gone to school 15 years ago will still believe that Pluto is not a planet because they have not yet understood modern science. Why is there such a controversy?

Phil Metzger: Well, I think many people like Pluto. I love Pluto. The biggest irony of Pluto's flyby a few years ago is that Pluto has become so interesting. It may be the second most interesting planet in our entire solar system. Only Earth is more interesting than Pluto. There is so much geology. There are active glaciers on Pluto flowing from the mountainside into the valley. Convection in the eyes causes all these charming patterns of pits and cracks. There are mountains as high as the Rocky Mountains, and these mountains are made of water. That is water as hard as rock. So the water is as hard as granite. Ice is made of nitrogen. There is also organic matter on Pluto. We can see this brown rust or orange substance, it is organic molecules, and life is made up of these substances. There may be a liquid ocean beneath the surface of Pluto, which is still liquid, which is remarkable. So obviously there is more radioactive material in Pluto than we thought, and it stays warm so that the ocean can remain liquid. You can continue to talk about how charming Pluto is.

Therefore, people say that it should not be a planet because it is a group, which is really ironic, but then it turns out that it is the planet with the most planets of all planets. So of course we like that, you know. This is really great. My daughter and I are flying over. Alan Stern, the head of the mission let me in and out of my family, only my daughter can come with me. She is now studying physics. But we were standing there waiting for the first picture of Pluto to come back, and they told us the night before, "Well, the radio signal is now crossing Uranus's orbit. This will be many hours." The next day we came in, "Okay. Well, the radio signal has just passed Mars. So we have about 20 minutes away." Then, "Well, the radio signal has reached half of the earth from Mars, and we are waiting for the radio signal to arrive."

Then it came in and they started to say, "Okay, we have locked the signal. Okay, we have. The symbol is locked on the symbol in the radio wave. Okay, now we have the data lock. We are done. Pseudo-random code deconvolution, we got actual data from it. Now we actually see data from different systems."

They are screaming because it is happening in real time. Then they checked all the spacecraft systems. Everyone is looking at their own data. So the propulsion system looks good. Comps looks good. The gauges look good. Then they finally go to the person responsible for viewing all the data. The man said that we saw all the flags set, telling us that we have the right amount of data we expect. Then everyone broke out and [was] cheering because they had actually captured a full data buffer. Then we came back the next morning and they said, "We are going to publish the picture. This is the picture of us coming back from Pluto."

They put it there, and it was a big and beautiful photo with pink hearts on it. Everyone in the room was crying. There seemed to be hundreds of people in the room, and everyone was crying because it was so beautiful. Nobody knows. In fact, let me tell you this. Alan Stern used to be the director of the UCF Florida Space Institute, and he actually hired me to work here before I was hired. So he came back to visit and we all went out for lunch. I sat in the back seat of the car with him. He said, "Hey, you can't tell anyone, but I want to tell you that we got a photo from the mission." The mission is coming. Pluto is here, not there yet. He showed me the photo, it was a small white sphere with gray stains on it. He was so excited to leave a smudge on it, because it proved that there is some geology on Pluto. Then when we got this photo back, wow, it was beyond our imagination and beyond our hopes. In fact, I had a conversation with a person in charge of NASA’s planetary science project at dinner one night, and he said: “Yes, we are all afraid that it will become a snow and nothing else. White cue ball. After 10 years and all these millions of dollars, we only got a white cue ball." So when we retrieved these photos, it turned out to be so amazing, it was better than we hoped Better.

Alex Cumming: That's great. I know the picture you mentioned. I have seen it as a casual bystander on the Internet, and you are right. This is a sight worth seeing. It is so beautiful. This is a great story. This is so cool.

Does he put it on the phone, or is it like Polaroid, like sliding it to you?

Fermetzger: Yes. He showed me his cell phone. He said, "You know you can't tell anyone this."

Alex Cumming: But what would you say? Would you say there is a small point?

Fermetzger: Yes. I'm a bit at a loss, you know, I thought, "Oh, good. It's smudged on it, not bad."

Alex Cumming: But when you see the actual photo, you are like, "Oh, that white stain is actually—"

Phil Metzger: Yes, this is an amazingly complex geology. This is what we are arguing about, from Galileo. Galileo's way of redefining planets is that they are other earths, and he made this decision based on seeing mountains on the moon. He is the first person we know to point a telescope at the moon, at least the first person to publish it. He said, "Look, it has mountains, which means it has the same geology as the earth. This means it is not made of unchanging ether. It follows the earth, physics, geophysics or geology, so we know There is no separate physics for heaven. Heaven follows the same geophysics as the earth. Therefore, the earth is also in the sky. Therefore, the earth is in motion." If the planet is the same as the earth, and the earth is the same as the planet, then his argument is based on the moon, It is a satellite. But the key argument that pushed the Copernican revolution forward was the planetary nature of the moon, and compare it with the earth.

Therefore, according to Galileo, the essence of planets is complex geology. Now we know that planets are special things in the universe, where complexity emerges naturally, and all the masses in the galaxy account for 0.5% of the energy of the galaxy or the universe. And this 0.5% is half of interstellar meteors and interstellar meteors. And the other half is in the galaxy, right? Most of them are stars and gas clouds. And a small part of that small part are planets. But these planets represent a huge prosperity in the complexity of the entire universe. Because they are a magical and special thing, you put enough mass together, it will hold the heat, melt, and start convection. Then suddenly all these processes happened. You get mountains, you get minerals, you get crystals, you get liquid degassing, and lakes, oceans, rivers, and atmosphere. You get convective cells. You will encounter a storm. You will get jet stream. Then you will have a chemical reaction. And lightning storms. And chemical reprocessing. And complex organic materials. On earth, at least we have life, we have civilization, and we have technology. This happened on the planet.

So this tiny, tiny part of the universe is a huge boom in complexity, which is basically what Galileo saw. When he looked at his telescope. He said: "Wow, the moon is one of the earth." It suddenly occurred to him that all planets are like this. So all planets are called other earths. So we say that this is the nature of planets. It is very important to see this, it requires a taxonomy category. Historically, the word has been planet since Galileo. So we think it should be. Planets are complex other Earths, no matter what orbit they happen to be orbiting during human observation.

Alex Cumming: So this paper, I thank you for sharing all this information with me, it's great. Do you think this is going to disrupt the situation? Will this make some feathers stand up?

Phil Metzger: What we are trying to do is tell planetary scientists not to be intimidated by those who tell you that you can't call Titan a planet. Planetary scientists have always referred to Titan as a planet. We reviewed the literature and discovered that planetary scientists refer to large satellites as planets. Naturally, we call Pluto a planet. We found hundreds of examples, just a rough review of modern literature since 2006, because the IAU voted that Pluto is not a planet.

Furthermore, Titans are not planets, and planetary scientists continue to call them planets. The reason we do this is because it is useful. It is useful to have a category to describe this amazing phenomenon in the universe. So we are doing this. So we wrote this paper to tell planetary scientists not to be ashamed of it. This is actually the historical meaning of the word, and we should call these planets because this is the most useful definition of planets. This is scientifically useful, it is the scientific and historical definition of planets.

Alex Cumming: It brings history into the present and uses the present to reflect on history. It's pretty cool.

Therefore, I want to transition and ask you this question, in your career and all the achievements you have done and achieved, what is your greatest achievement? What are the things that impress you?

Phil Metzger: This is an amazing journey.

Alex Cumming: Don't hold back.

Phil Metzger: Yes, better. Working in space is a great experience. So I have been able to fly with reduced gravity. I have flown 450 parabolas with reduced gravity on the plane, similar to the "vomit comet" in NASA's research flight. So I have to float in a zero-gravity environment, I have to experience the gravity of Mars, the gravity of the moon, and test various technologies.

By the way, UCF students are doing the same. Anyone who wants to do this, all you have to do is to invent a technology that needs to be tested in low gravity, and then submit it to NASA, you can get funding and do it. UCF students are doing this

Alex Cumming: It's that simple?

Fermetzger: Yes. Therefore, Dr. Addie Dove has been leading students on air travel. Dr. Josh Colwell has been doing this. So, it is available. But it was an amazing experience. I had to do some field tests in Hawaii, where we brought a bunch of robots, and then we went to the top of Mauna Kea, which-well, not the top. We went about 8,300 meters and we built a simulated lunar industrial site where robots mine and extract oxygen from volcanic ash and convert it into rocket fuel. Then we launched a rocket with what we took out of the dust. So we call it thrust. It was an amazing experience. Really, that experience changed my view of space, because a native Hawaiian pastor from a native Hawaiian religion appeared and held a ceremony to bless the robot, because without this blessing, we cannot be there because it is considered It is a sacred mountain. This reminds me of the influence of Mauna Kea on ancient Hawaiians. The reason why they were able to cross the Atlantic to find islands was because the volcanoes soaring into the clouds changed the circulation pattern that formed the clouds, and these clouds also triggered rainfall, allowing the life on these islands to grow. That's why they can cross this vast ocean and find this place where they can live. In the same way, we use that volcano to develop robots that traverse the vast ocean of space so that we can go to an island in space and build life on other islands there. I started thinking about this, and I started to realize that we are so high on this volcano that nothing can survive here. Such a high level of liquid water is not enough. But the technology we are doing will make artificial life possible. You know, machine-made other machines can extract the water they need and other elements they need, and let robots make robots, which will make it possible for us to continue into space.

So it was an amazing experience, it really changed my perspective and made me even more excited. Co-founding the swamp factory was an amazing experience. I want to work on the moon. At that time we did not have a job description to do this. So some other friends with me decided we just wanted to make it happen. So we started to match up and start to study what we wanted to do. You know, they call it entrepreneurs. Therefore, the entrepreneur is trying to start a company, and the entrepreneur is trying to start a new enterprise within an existing group. So we are entrepreneurs. We finally convinced NASA to let us find this laboratory. This is a long story, there are many amazing things, there are many friends along the way, and there are many challenges along the way. But we finally entered this large elevated, which is the same elevated they used to train Apollo astronauts. We must build this facility to study robots for mining and manufacturing in space.

So it was a great experience. I must join the space shuttle launch team. It was very scary to me at the time. It was a period of my life, and I was very scared, every time I launched it scared me. I was a little happy when I left it behind, but it's still an experience on a release team, and there is nothing better than this. You wake up in the middle of the night to start work, so you can start at 2 AM on the console, and then stay on the console all night while the countdown is running. There is this kind of electricity in the air. Everyone is nervous, everyone is muttering to himself, talking in a low voice. Then you enter the last moment, the final count, when it rises, it releases a lot of pressure, and there is no problem with the assets, you enter the main engine to cut off. I will never forget those experiences. In the past, I sometimes had to go out to the starter and crawl around on the starter to solve problems during the countdown period. So you can count on the mat at night and all the bright spotlights shine on you. There really is no such thing. Active launchpad during the countdown.

I don't know, if I continue to think, I will come up with more ideas.

Alex Cumming: Do. That is -

Filmetzger: What happened.

Alex Cumming: These are all killer features. You know, some people think of how small we are in the grand plan of the universe when they want to relax or decompress. Does that only make you more stressed? Because you’re like, "Oh, we have to go there. We have to go there. We have to do this. We have to cross that." The pressure and size of sitting there and 10, 9, 8 people insisting on something, someone just in Wait, and then just know that you have to be a part of it and make sure that those people are in the stars while there, and you help them get there.

Fermetzger: Yes. You mentioned that we have two astronauts who are UCF alumni. I know Nicole Stott and she is one of the two alumni. Yes. In that launch team, we know the astronauts. In NASA, it is like a family. This is not just a cliché. Indeed, everyone cares about the crew very much. So know that the people you have met and the people you have worked with are on that huge energy storage machine, and they are just waiting for you. You didn't actually press a button, but waiting for the last computer command to ignite the engine, which is really stressful. You know, we had two accidents during the space shuttle program. We lost the challenger when we launched, and we lost Colombia when we entered. Those were two very difficult times. I am there. They are all very dark and difficult times. In fact, he has left the space shuttle program and went to the space station program. Then after we significantly built the station, I moved to work in a physics laboratory, which was about when we were trying to build a swamp factory.

So when the second accident happened I was in the physics laboratory. This is when I actually met Nicole Stott, because she and I were in a team to analyze the accident video. There are many amateur photographers in the western United States taking videos and photos of the entrance, and they can see a little flash. I think, you know, although this is just a flash, there are many physics principles in it. I think we can get data from it to figure out what happened. Facts have proved that we can do it. Dr. Bob Youngquist of NASA has solved many problems. Therefore, our team was able to show through Bob's work to a large extent that the right wing has been split and the tiles are shattering causing these flashes. We can calculate the speed at which an object rotates as it moves away from the space shuttle. We actually calculated where it landed. We know where it is, but we never found it. I did mathematical calculations and calculated that it did not burn when it entered. So we know that this object is somewhere in the desert. It was a dark time, but Nicole was with us on that team. Each of our teams has an astronaut. So she is an astronaut working with us to help understand these flash events. I used to have to take a break from work and walk down the hallway to cry. I really cried, walking around in the hallway, I will calm down again. I will go back and continue to study this problem, try to do mathematical calculations, calculate what these flashes are, can we figure out why we lost this car? Then worked with Nicole, she was in Houston, and talked to her on the phone.

So it was a difficult time. I was still studying for a PhD at that time. and also.

Alex Cumming: In your work, you must analyze the details of what happened to your colleagues and your colleagues. What a rare experience this is. I think, as you said, it must be difficult to pass.

Phil Metzger: Most of my friends actually went to Texas, walking around in the bushes, looking for debris from the shuttle and collecting it. So I didn't do it because I was in this analysis team, but I think it is more difficult for those who go out.

Alex Cumming: In retrospect, do you think that you can push work through your feelings, knowing to keep going, it will save lives, it will make the future of space travel safer, better, and more--I don’t Will say it is available-but it is easier to understand what went wrong in these events?

Fermetzger: Yes. You must use this experience to look to the future. How will we solve this problem so that it does not happen again? We did learn a lot from that experience. Soon after that, we finally retired the space shuttle. We realize that we can no longer have accidents and that the vehicle is defective. For spacecraft, this is not a great building. But it is an amazing aircraft. This is an amazing show. It is useful to us, but retirement is the right decision. I think in the work that the Constellation Project and SpaceX are doing, in the work that Blue Origin and other companies are doing, we will not return to that architecture because of the inherent weaknesses of this design.

Alex Cumming: Yes. It's nice to know to learn from the past. It sounds like the past always repeats itself, whether it's the 1800s, Copernicus and Galileo, or the experience that happened more than 30 years ago and then.

So I want to get into this question. I assume you will like this question a lot. What is the future of space exploration? What do you see and how does UCF fit into it?

Phil Metzger: The future is amazing. If I can look into the future, tell you what I see is it. I see civilization transcending the earth. So we are no longer just exploring in space, we are actually carrying out economic activities of life outside the earth. This will happen in this century. We are already in the process of starting this process, and it is accelerating. So I really believe that by the end of this century, there will be a lot of economic activities, which are not centered around the earth. It will open up new possibilities.

For example, if our space industry can build anything that we will have by the end of this century, then you can build giant telescopes larger than rocket-launched telescopes, and I believe we're going to do so. We will build spacecraft telescopes, they orbit the sun at the same distance from the earth, but they always orbit the sun. A telescope as large as that would be able to photograph a car driving on another planet a hundred light years away. So let me tell you if there are other civilizations on other stars within a hundred light years, if they are 50 or 100 years earlier than us, they are now looking at us. They might be looking at the light that left the earth a hundred years ago. They saw T-cars driving around. They are calculating. Okay. People on that planet are now flying into space because they have been a hundred years. We are better than us because of the delay of the speed of light. See it in advance.

So we will do this. We will observe the surfaces of other planets in detail around other stars. I think there will be a revolution in the economy, and we will enter a post-scarcity era. When you have a trillion times the resources, and you have all the automated labor to handle the resources you need, there is no reason for us to hold a scarcity mentality. There is no reason to take economic shortcuts in a way that harms the planet. So I think we will solve the environmental problems of our planet. I think this post-scarce economic environment will create opportunities for people to flourish in various fields. If people want to write poems in their entire lives, then this post-scarce civilization has no reason not to support them in writing poems in their entire lives. So I think art and culture will be able to flourish in an unprecedented way. Science will flourish. We will build research stations on every planetary body in our entire solar system and bring people to the entire solar system through the transportation network.

Computers will continue to make great progress, which is unpredictable. What will happen in that direction, but I think it will be an amazing moment. It's really exciting now to be part of achieving this goal. This is a generation of graduates from UCF and other schools. This generation will achieve all this in their careers. So I think now I understand that UCF allows more graduates to enter aerospace engineering than any other university in the United States. So we will continue to attract students into this field. Those aerospace engineering students, business students and all other fields will do a lot of work in space. This will be an exciting time.

Alex Cumming: It sounds like the future is UCF. More important than now, it will become synonymous with space, space exploration, and space U. That's why they call us that way. If you are talking about my own ideas, economics will eventually have to catch up with space travel. It sounds like if we develop into this post-scarcity era, as you said, there may be some changes. Of course, when more robots and job opportunities appear, capitalism may have to make some adjustments there.

Phil Metzger: Well, now I am working on a project. This is an unfunded study. I do it on my own time. I am working hard to study the ecology of the space industry. Industrial ecology, like biological ecology, studies how different participants and different organisms interact in a network of metabolic relationships. So on Earth, you might study how ducks, plankton and fish interact, but in space, space ecology, industrial ecology, we are trying to figure out how to make metal on the moon? Then how do you make plastic on the moon? What do you do first? When you make metal, how many plastic machines can you use soil to make? What are the ways to develop the industry to achieve the goals quickly and economically? So this is an industrial engineering problem and a commercial problem.

So space is not just about rocket science. Space will be about all different fields.

Alex Cumming: Everything you say here, I think it is very important for young people who may have this kind of pessimism about the future. From an economic and environmental point of view, I think it is important for them to hear about the future that space travel will help us cure these diseases that we are very worried about in 2021. But in the future, in the next 30 or 40 years, when people say that it is no return, maybe when we are just beginning to alleviate some of the scarcity we face on earth.

Phil Metzger: Well, we know how to put half of our footprint and industrial footprint into space at the end of this century. We already know that we can do this without any new physics. I mean, we have to do a lot of physics to research and develop technology in the process, but we will not violate physics to do this. Fundamentally speaking, this is an economic problem.

How do we create stepping stones for activity to guide one person to another until we reach that point? But we know we can do it, which is why I am very optimistic about it.

Alex Cumming: So for the next generation, I want to ask, what advice would you give to those who want to do what you do?

Phil Metzger: Well, it’s a bit cliché to say that, but you do need to follow your passion. When we created the swamp factory at the Kennedy Space Center, no one came to us and said, "Hey, we want you to build something and do these technologies." This is our idea, we are the entrepreneurs who make it a reality, so We are keen to do so. We found a way, which is not easy and takes a long time. But we did it as a team. I think one of the clues is to find your passion and then find your team, the people who share this passion. Have good friends and develop true good friends. The network is very important. When a student specifically asks in the aerospace field, how can I develop my career? I told them, well, one of the most important things is to join a student club, such as rocket science or robotics, and join such things as space exploration and development student union. We have a chapter in UCF. Join similar events, meet other people online, then attend meetings and meet workers who have already established their careers.

The network is really important. But with a group of like-minded friends who can share energy with you, you can collaborate creatively. Develop ideas that can be executed together. This is super important. Of course it is education. After working for NASA for several years, I returned to school. I don't know how many years or how long it has been. Then I went back to UCF school and got my master's and doctoral degrees. Because I know I need that kind of education to do what I want to do in my career. So get an education. I also want to say that this is a good person. Many, many people, you have met assholes in their careers, I don't know why people choose to be assholes. I think they think they got something out of it. But according to my experience, be a good person, be a team player, and be a person that others can trust. This always works for me. If you can overcome your personal demons, seek help and strive to be a good person and become a team player, because it does require friends and relationships to succeed in your career

Alex Cumming: It sounds like UCF has so many outstanding people. Good network, excellent professors, clubs.

Phil Metzger: Of course this is good for me. Yes. marvelous

Alex Cumming: For me too. I like here. Finally, I want to ask you, at the personal and professional level, what is one thing you still want to do?

Phil Metzger: Well, I'm not sure if I can tell. I mean, I know but I'm not sure if I can say

Alex Cumming: Just turn on your phone and you can show it to us.

Phil Metzger: Yes, no, I am working on some ideas for space activities, but I have signed some non-disclosure agreements.

Alex Cumming: You have paid a lot, so I don't know what you are keeping.

Fermetzger: Yes. So I can’t really say something about what I’m doing now. At UCF, we work with all aerospace companies, so we work with SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, United Launch Alliance, Boeing, you know, name the company, and we work with it. So we signed a lot of confidentiality agreements. We have developed many technologies. Today I was just asked to sign a new patent for something we invented for space at UCF. So many things we are doing, we will not tell you until the company we work with is ready to make it public. So I really can't answer the last question. I can't tell you what I am doing now, but I am doing something exciting.

Alex Cumming: Wow. I am glad to hear it. It sounds like in your field, there has never been a dull day.

Phil Metzger: Every day is different. We started to deal with all kinds of things. Experiments, analysis of data from the moon, computer simulations, and theories are different every day.

Alex Cumming: I like to listen. So for the audience, if they want to find you, where should they find you?

Phil Metzger: Well, you can find me on Twitter. This is @drphiltill, PHILTIL L. You can also visit the Florida Institute of Space Research website and find the personnel page. I have a page there. This is fsi.ucf.edu. That is the Florida Space Institute. My email address is there, if a student wants to contact me.

Alex Cumming: Well, I want to say thank you very much for coming. I like this conversation, and I am more optimistic about the future of space travel than ever. Thank you very much for joining me, but it is fun.

Hello everyone. thanks for listening. I will meet you in the next episode of Knights Do That, where I will talk with Albert Manero '12 '14MS '16PhD, president and co-founder of Limbitless Solutions, to learn more about what he and his team are doing. Influential work has indeed created affordable and innovative bionic arms for children with physical differences.

Albert Manero: For us, the moment that really excites us is when children realize that they are taking their arms home. There are always such little eyes, they look to their parents to make sure it is real. Then they got this bright smile. When you watch and watch the family interaction, this makes all the rest of the development, business part, and research part worthwhile. This is a rare opportunity to see something from the research laboratory and directly connect with your community. In central Florida, this is a gift. You don’t always get feedback right away. I think for Limbitless, being able to work directly with our community and seeing translation is the most valuable part of the whole plan.

Alex Cumming: If you’re doing something cool, whether it’s in UCF or somewhere we should know on UCF, send us an [email protection], maybe we will See you in a future episode. Go to the knight and recharge.

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