The Wonderful: A new documentary about the International Space Station – The Planetary Society

Mat Kaplan:

The wonderful stories from the international space station. This week on Planetary Radio. Welcome. I'm Mat Kaplan of The Planetary Society, with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond. There have been several documentaries about life aboard the ISS, but none I know of that have provided the deeply personal experiences and reflections you'll find in The Wonderful.

Mat Kaplan:

The films director, Clare Lewins and one of its stars, Astronaut Cady Coleman, will join us for a wonderful conversation. We'll also who hear from science communicator Jatan Mehta for the first time. Jatan is a contributing editor at The Planetary Society. He is prepared a guide to south Korea's first deep space mission. A lunar orbiter called KPLO that launches in less than a year. We'll talk with Jatan at his home in Mumbai India. There's another fun visit ahead with the society's chief scientist. I hope you'll stay for what's up with Bruce Betts.

Mat Kaplan:

Once again, the biggest space story came too late for the September 17 edition of our free weekly newsletter, The Downlink, the inspiration for crew rode their dragon capsule to a safe splash down in the Atlantic Ocean on Saturday, September 18th. You'll hear Cady Coleman welcome these new space travelers to a club that is finally becoming a little less exclusive.

Mat Kaplan:

As of last week, we were up to 4,516 confirmed exoplanets. NASA's test mission continues to rack up discoveries. The team behind the dedicated planet finder has created a sweeping montage of the Southern sky that includes 208 of its individual images. You'll find it at planetary.org/downlake.

Mat Kaplan:

You can also read about the astronaut and cosmonaut whose stays aboard the ISS have just been extended. They've given their rides home to the Russian movie director and actor who will soon be shooting aboard the station. And NASA has awarded new lunar lander development contracts to five companies. They include some of the competitors for the big human landing system contract that went to SpaceX.

Mat Kaplan:

Here's my recent conversation with Jatan Metha. Jatan welcome to Planetary Radio for the first of all I hope will be many conversations about contributions you are making to The Planetary Society's website and other content. Again, welcome.

Jatan Mehta:

Thank you so much for having me on Mat. I'm very happy.

Mat Kaplan:

Tell us about KPLO.

Jatan Mehta:

Yes. KPLO is South Korea's first moon mission. They are beginning their planetary exploration as a country, just like India forayed into plant exploration with Chandrayaan-1. And it's a lunar orbiter, which will give us great new views of our moon using its many incredible instruments. One of which is NASA's ShadowCam instrument, which is an ultra sensitive camera.

Jatan Mehta:

In addition to the mission itself, KPLO also represents many other things such as kickstarting, a great collaboration with NASA as part of the larger astomatous program. KPLO is multifaceted in that way in terms of what it means for South Korea.

Mat Kaplan:

I want to talk a little bit more about ShadowCam, judging from the piece that you wrote for us that people can find at planet.org, of course, it's a mission page, so you can search for KPLO in our search engine on the society website. This looks like a camera that is going to be capable of doing things that have never been done above the moon before.

Jatan Mehta:

That's correct. The team behind ShadowCam is essentially much of the same people that were on LRO's Narrow Angle Camera, which is known to have excellent resolution and has provided us with incredible use of the moon. The difference here is ShadowCam is going to be at least 200 times more sensitive than LRO's NAC, so that makes a huge difference.

Jatan Mehta:

LRO never had a problem with the resolution, but if it wanted to image permanently shadow regions, which it did by the way, but when it wanted to do that, the sensitivity was lacking. Therefore the images wouldn't be look great and you couldn't plan proving or landing missions based on that.

Jatan Mehta:

However, with ShadowCam, since you have at least 200 times the sensitivity, you will be able to see permanently shadow regions almost as if they are sun lit. It also has a very great resolution of about 1.7 meters per pixel at its best, which is pretty great and that's about the size of a typical robotic lander in terms of its diameter. Which means that if you want to plan landing missions and surface missions inside permanently shadow regions, which is where we believe scientists think that where the water is, and-

Mat Kaplan:

Yes.

Jatan Mehta:

... other such resources are. If you want to plan missions there which are meticulous in their nature, then ShadowCam is how it'll be enabled.

Mat Kaplan:

You also write about south Korea's fairly ambitious plans for the future. Tell us about those.

Jatan Mehta:

South Korea has so far made public the idea of having another lunar orbiter being launched soon after the first one, and after that they want to do something far more ambitious which is to have a fully indigenously built robotic lunar lander. Which is again, very similar to what Chandrayaan-2 attempted. The idea is South Korea will have a robotic lunar lander and a rover, and they will be launched on top of an indigenous rocket.

Jatan Mehta:

This is again, very similar to Israel's model where Chandrayaan-2, the obitor and the land stack was launched on GSLV Mark III, which was again an indigenously built rocket. The idea is South Korea wants to be self-sufficient in terms of its Lunar exploration plans. At the same time, since they have a great partnership with NASA or KPLO, which isn't just restricted to ShadowCam, NASA is providing support in terms of mission planning, mission design communications via ground stations when the mission is on.

Jatan Mehta:

There are nine scientists from NASA who joined the KPLO science team in March so as to enhance the mission's output. This sort of a great synergy between NASA and South Korea is really nice to hear about. They want to double down on this because about in May or June around that time, South Korea also signed up to be part of Artemis Accords, which is basically what NASA calls a set of cooperative tools for enhanced Lunar exploration wherein each country that participates and signs Artemis Accords can help each other out and share scientific data, have opportunities for payloads, whenever a mission from any of the countries go, and so on.

Mat Kaplan:

It's great to see the Artemis Accords becoming a truly international effort to eventually as NASA likes to say, put that first woman and next man back on the moon and have a permanent presence there. When can we expect to see the launch of KPLO on a Falcon 9 rocket and reach the moon?

Jatan Mehta:

They are targeting August, 2022 at the earliest for the launch on a Falcon 9, and they are going to take a ballistic trajectory to the moon, which basically means that regardless of any smaller launch delays in terms of let's say a few weeks or a month, it will still reach the moon around the same time as intended in December, 2022.

Mat Kaplan:

Can't wait. Very exciting stuff. Thank you for bringing us this overview. Of course, there are additional details in the mission or on the mission page that Jatan has prepared for us, planetary.org. Jatan again, thank you very much for giving us this little preview of the KPLO mission.

Jatan Mehta:

Thank you so much for having me here. I was glad to do that. Especially because the KPLO reminds me a lot of Chandrayaan-1. I was just 14 when Chandrayaan-1 launched and that thing really inspired me. I hope south Korean students and kids will get inspired just the same.

Mat Kaplan:

And of course we at The Planetary Society, applaud all nations that set out across the silver system to join this grand effort of exploration. Jatan Metha is a contributing editor for The Planetary Society. You can find his independent blog at blog.jatan.space. It includes his really excellent moon Monday weekly updates about all things lunar.

Mat Kaplan:

Jatan was also a science officer for the team in this moon mission effort. He tweets from at uncertain cork. The Wonderful: Stories from the Space Station is available in theaters and everywhere on demand right now. I wish I'd seen it on a really big screen at a dark room with a lot of other space fans. It's not just the beautiful footage and music that make this a great film. It's really much more what the stars bring to the production. Those stars are an international of astronauts and cosmonauts that we spend intimate moments with on the ground and high overhead.

Mat Kaplan:

You'll hear director Clare Lewins, Astronaut Cady Coleman and me talk about many of them, like Bill Shepherd, the man who turned on the lights in the ISS, and Ron Garan who flew on expedition 27, 28, Cady, and wrote the orbital perspective when he returned to earth. There are also some who bid farewell to these space travelers and watched them pass overhead. They include Cady's artist husband, Josh. Clare, Cady and I gathered online a few days ago.

Mat Kaplan:

Clare Lewins, Cady Coleman, welcome and thank you for joining us on planetary radio. It is a pleasure to have you in front of our microphones, but it was also such a pleasure to see this terrific film. Congratulations to both of you on that, and especially to you, Clare, the director of the film. It is quite an accomplishment.

Clare Lewins:

Well, thank you very much, Matthew, and thank you very much to your audience for supporting our film .

Mat Kaplan:

Well, I hope they will because it definitely deserves to be seen and I think that our audience in particular, a whole bunch of space geeks out there are going to love seeing this film. I'm going to start with something that is unrelated. Well, it is related to the film but it's not addressed in the film. Cady, I didn't get to watch your live Netflix coverage last night as we speak of the inspiration for launch, because I was co-hosting a launch party for the Explore Mars nonprofit, a sister group to The Planetary Society. I hope you had as much fun as we did.

Cady Coleman:

It was amazing. Basically being one of the people that gets to bring this launch to everybody really meant a lot to me. But just the fact that that then let me be at the launch and see it. And they like to go to the SpaceX feed when it's actually the launch, which allows us to turn around and actually be present, which was really important to me because there is... Leaving the planet is really, really, really hard.

Cady Coleman:

I think when it happens, there's just something inside where you just realize that everything has to go right and you just so much want it to go. I watched them until they were just a little star and it just meant the world to me to be there.

Mat Kaplan:

I'm not a bit surprised. That's what I expected to hear. Clare, I bet you're not surprised either. There are so many deeply memorable and personal moments in this film that you've created. Did you go into this project expecting that, the level of personal emotion that is in almost every moment of the film?

Clare Lewins:

Well, when actually the producer, George Chignell first came to me with the idea of doing a film at the space station, I said, "No, this isn't for me. I know nothing about science." As a little girl, I lay on the grass with my friends looking up at the stars. I never once second dreamt of actually leaving at earth. That's completely mad. You think of the lovely space and universe to actually leave home and leave the planet.

Clare Lewins:

So I said, "No, this isn't for me." And then I started looking into it. Then the thing that struck me first, and I don't know where I was before not knowing this, but while the 7.5 billion of us are going about everyday lives, there's six people off the planet in this outpost in space. And you're thinking, that is just extraordinary.

Clare Lewins:

Then so I started thinking about it and I was thinking, yes, it is this amazing scientific endeavor and collaboration and just feet of engineering. But that's not what interested me. It's not the 450 tons of spaceship. It's the human stories. Because for every person that goes up there, there's a whole chain of people that get them up there. Astronaut, who's inspired by Garan or John Glenn or the cosmonauts, so I thought for me, it's really the human stories. And all this played out against this vast, amazing black drop of the universe. That's what interested me.

Mat Kaplan:

I totally agree, and I think you did communicate that very well. We talk about the science and technology on this show all the time now and then we get to talk about the intersection with art as well. And I hope that that will come up today. But it's those personal stories which are so very affecting. I counted 10 locations listed in the credits. One of them I'm curious about is there's a closing scene of a father and daughter launching a model rocket. Where did that take place?

Clare Lewins:

Well, Bill Shepherd rings me every other day to ask me where that is. And I said, if I tell him, I'd have to kill him. And if you do like question and answers, so I say, and he says, "Is that place dry? And I said, "It can be." At the end of it I just said, "It's Mars, Bill. Just get it. It's Mars." I'm afraid I can't reveal my sources.

Cady Coleman:

Clare, if I ask you, are you going to give the same answer?

Clare Lewins:

Of course.

Cady Coleman:

Just checking.

Mat Kaplan:

Try again when we're not recording, Cady, and then-

Clare Lewins:

Try again after I've had a glass of wine.

Mat Kaplan:

There's $10 in it for you, Cady, if you'll call me after Clare gives it away.

Cady Coleman:

She's quiet but firm. She gets her answers.

Mat Kaplan:

Also speaking very loudly in the film, well, maybe that's the wrong way to put it, but it is a wonderful presence in the film. Is the music, the soundtrack that you used under the voices of these wonderful people, like Cady, you want to say something about that?

Clare Lewins:

Well, as much as I'm not known for science, music is really important in the films I make because what I was trying to do, once I established that I wanted to make this film about human connection, then I thought the sounds of earth are really important. Each is actually introduced by a sound. With Peggy Whitson, it's a science of a little fly going around the farm. With Tim Peake, it's a sound of the ocean where he grew up. With Cady's story, it's a sound of fire from Josh's kiln.

Clare Lewins:

It's that, don't make it sound like a band from the '70s, but it is earth, wind and fire. Those visceral elemental elements. As part of that, I thought music is so important, and so I worked with this fantastic composer called Ben Foster. It was just a real privilege to work with him. We used as the almost theme, a [inaudible 00:16:08] hymn to a Cherry Boom, and that is this Russian choir, this amazing almost Anthem piece of music. That's what we use in Cady's section when she's in Russia and she takes off. That was the holding theme and we just, Ben just composed into that. But the music is really important.

Mat Kaplan:

It works perfectly. Speaking of music, Cady, I have to mention, I'm a big fan of the Chieftains and Ian Anderson and Jethro Toll, and I always get a kick. I watched it again last night, of your flute floating into the frame before you joined Ian Anderson for that wonderful duet that the two of you did.

Cady Coleman:

I'm very proud of that, actually. First of all, I love that it's this collaboration between two people. I didn't know Ian Anderson. I did not meet him until I got home. I think that I tell people in terms of being on a team and really being your best self, you have to be brave and you have to be open. I think I had to be brave to ask him, not necessarily, would you like me to bring your flute to space, but is there something we could do together that would really share this experience? And he came up with that.

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The Wonderful: A new documentary about the International Space Station - The Planetary Society