In episode 14 of Knights Do That, we speak with Phil Metzger ā00MSā05PhD, a planetary scientist and UCF alum with nearly 30 years of experience at NASA. During this episode, Phil shares stories from his time working on the space shuttle missions, his controversial research on whether Pluto is a planet or not, and what the future of space exploration will look like.
Produced by UCF, the podcast highlights students, faculty, staff, administrators and alumni who do incredible things on campus, in the community and around the globe.
Transcript
Phil Metzger: The future is amazing. If I could look into the future and tell you what I see this is it; I see civilization reaching beyond planet Earth. So weāre no longer just doing exploration in space. Weāre actually doing the economic activities of life beyond planet Earth, and thatās going to happen in this century. Weāre already in the process of starting that and itās accelerating. Itās really exciting to be a part of making that happen right now. This is the generation of graduates from UCF, and from other schools, this is the generation that is going to make all that happen during their careers. Right now, I understand UCF puts more graduates into aerospace engineering than any other university in the United States. So weāre going to continue pumping students into this, and those aerospace engineering students and business students and every other field is going to have a lot to work on in space.
Alex Cumming: Thereās just so much we donāt know about space. So thatās why today Iām bringing you a very interesting and insightful episode where I discussed space exploration with planetary scientist and UCF alum Phil Metzger. Phil share some really incredible stories and experiences from his nearly 30 years of work at NASA explains his research as to why Pluto is indeed a planet, and shares what the future of space exploration will look like.
Letās launch right into the episode.
Youāre a planetary scientist with the Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp Space Institute at UCF. Can you share with us how you got into that position that youāre in today?
Phil Metzger: Yeah. So I started as an engineer at NASA and worked on the Space Shuttle Program and then later the Space Station Program working on the navigation and the communication systems. And while I was working I really wanted to go back to school and get a Ph.D. in physics or in some field of physics. It turned out to be planetary science. So I was going to school at UCF while I was working at the Kennedy Space Center. I did that for many years, driving back and forth from the coast to the campus and finally got into a full year of graduate school where I was on campus for a full year and eventually graduated. Then co-founded a lab at NASA to work on planetary surface technologies; mining the moon, and asteroids, and Mars; and using the surfaces of those planets to build things, landing pads, and habitats; learning how to work with the materials on those planets.
Eventually I left NASA to come and be faculty here at UCF. So Iām part of the Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp Space Institute, still doing the same sort of work I was doing at NASA towards the end of that career.
Alex Cumming: To commute from all the way from the Space Coast to here ā I mean, there is such a great back and forth of students, I assume traveling out there and learning and getting ideas.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. It was a lot of driving for some years, but I loved it. I loved going to school here. Great professors. They were flexible with me to help make it work. Like some of the professors would put my papers in a box and I would drop by in the evening and pick up my papers out of the hallway. That went on for years before I finally said, āIāve just got to take a year off of work and finish.ā
Alex Cumming: Were you drawn back to UCF because of the programs available to get your Ph.D. and its proximity to the Space Coast?
Phil Metzger: Yeah. UCF was founded to be near the Space Coast to support the workers in the Space Program. My father went to the school when it was Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp Technological University. It was a family heritage, I guess. There was a great planetary science program here, great physics program. And it just worked out.
Alex Cumming: At the time when your father and the Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp Technological University, was he also involved in aspects of working on the Space Coast as well? Because thatās like the primary focus of what the school was back then, correct?
Phil Metzger: He was, yeah. He worked on the Apollo Program. He was a technician and worked on the ground systems in the VAB and then out of the launchpads and helped to do the Apollo Missions. Heās got a certificate, heās deceased now, but he had a certificate that thanked him for his role in Apollo 11. He was so proud of that certificate. So I grew up going to open house events and watching all the rocket launches. All the kids in my neighborhood were the same. Everybodyās parents worked on the Space Program, or we had connections. And so we all grew up just assuming we would all work in the Space Program because thatās what grownups do. I was originally going to do other things, but somehow I made my way back to the Space Program and came back to the Space Coast.
Alex Cumming: Thatās awesome to hear that there was such a culture of space education going on there. My mom also went to UCF. She was in education and now Iām in theater, little bit of a disconnect there between the generational UCF for myself at least.
So while you were at NASA, you convinced them to develop guidelines for protecting the historic sites on the moon. Can you describe those sites?
Phil Metzger: So on the moon, weāve got a number of Apollo landing sites. Weāve also got surveyor spacecraft that we landed on the moon during the 1960s. There are also crash sites on the moon where the boosters from the Apollo rockets have crashed, actually the asset module, which is part of the lunar module. Those brought the crews back up to the spacecraft in orbit around the moon to come back home and then those spacecraft crashed into the moon. So there were a number of crash sites, as well as the landing sites. And these are all deemed archeological, anthropological, historical interest. Very unique sites. These are the first places where humanity has explored and walked on another planet. And I am calling the moon a planet because in planetary science, we do that. But that is the first place for humans walked on another world. So, anthropologists have told me that these are the most important anthropological sites in our human sphere ā now Iām sure other anthropologists will disagree with that.
But I was working on how rocket exhaust blows soil so we could protect the gas stations that we plan to build on the moon. And one day, I got a call from one of the companies, Astrobotic Technologies, and they said, āWe want to go visit the Apollo site with our lander, how can we land near it without sandblasting it?ā And I realized, wow, that is a really important question because they are going to seriously damaged this historic site. But when I took the issue up to my management at NASA, they told me, āDonāt touch this because we donāt own the moon. We canāt write rules for the moon. If we try to take it to the United Nations, we donāt know what the UN will say, and we donāt want to touch it. So you are not allowed to try to create rules to protect the Apollo sites.ā
So a couple of years later, I was freaking out over this because the clock was ticking and I realized what we really need is voluntary guidelines. Maybe thatās the best we can get for now. But if we can at least publish voluntary guidelines, then these companies will know how to visit the sites without damaging them.
And so through a series of offense, I was able to get NASA headquartersā attention and they agreed to do it. So we eventually developed these guidelines.
Alex Cumming: Can you emphasize the importance of why we should protect these sites?
Phil Metzger: They represent a unique period in the history of the world, it was the Cold War. The United States and the Soviet Union were terrified that each other was going to drop nuclear bombs. And we were afraid of weaponizing space. We wanted there to be treaties. We wanted there to be some sort of international agreements on how do we treat space? But the United States was negotiating from position of weakness because the Soviets had rockets and could fly spacecraft and we couldnāt. And so they decided the way to address this was by having a civilian space program and weāre going to try to beat the Soviets to prove to them that they need to bargain with us. And weāre going to do a civilian space program so itās non-threatening, so weāre not going to be putting weapons in space.
And that was what it was all about from the Cold War perspective. And it really worked because during the Gemini Program we had made so much progress that the Soviets came to the bargaining table and we got the Outer Space Treaty signed. So now weāve got this treaty. Weāve agreed. Weāre not going to weaponize space, but the treaty was a 1960s treaty and space has advanced so much farther that the treaty doesnāt address all the issues.
And now itās coming up again, how are we going to handle the new situation? So can we put blast zones on the moon? If we do that, are we claiming territory because weāre not allowed to claim territory? So thereās a whole lot of new issues coming up. But they originally came out of that Cold War era where the world was terrified. Like every day when I was in high school, if an airplane flew over, growing up next to the space center, my friends and I thought it was going to drop nuclear bombs on us because we all knew that as soon as the bombs fell, they were going to bomb the space center first.
And so I really grew up in that culture of fear expecting nuclear war at any time. And so the Apollo program is a unique historical point in history representing that among many other things.
Alex Cumming: Wow. Thatās so interesting. I, personally, I had no idea about the way that weāre going to have to rework these treaties that even though itās only been 60-something years or even now just in that short period of human history have become antiquated by how fast things move.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. There are a lot of people that want to mine in space. If weāre going to do things in space beyond planet Earth, we need to use the resources that are in space. But that raises all kinds of questions that the Outer Space Treaty doesnāt address. So, thereās a lot of discussion internationally right now.
What do we do with the Outer Space Treaty? Do we update it? Can we work around it? Can we work within what it gives us? Itās a hot issue.
Alex Cumming: I imagine, NASA is under the branch of the government, so do you find that you have to reach out to people who work in the government who probably donāt have as well of an understanding as the scientists coming up?
Phil Metzger: Thereās a surprising amount of understanding about these issues. People in the state department, people in the military, people in NASA, the government is quite aware that things are happening in space. And I think people have become educated over the last decade.
When I talked to people from Washington D.C., who are in any branch of the government or in Congress, they really understand these issues about what are we going to do with the moon?
Alex Cumming: Well, thereās the Space Force now, which is a recent military addition. Iām not certain exactly how itās perceived nationwide, but to live in a time where you can see the groundwork of a branch of the military based around space exploration, itās so interesting to think about and how that develops.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. Well the general idea is we want to make sure that we have good international policy about space. And in order to help affect international policy, we have to be a player. So we need to have a strong space program. We need to be present in space so that we can affect the direction the world chooses to go.
Alex Cumming: When you see UCF being referred to as Space U and you see that all these young people and the football game that just happened, you see this absolute just adoration of space and what it means to UCF, does that get you inspired for this upcoming generation of young people and how theyāre going to develop space exploration?
Phil Metzger: It absolutely does. When I go speaking I always talk about how we can use space to solve global problems, like climate change, and how we can actually use space to solve problems about global development and making sure people all over the world have the benefit of developed economies, while at the same time not burdening the planetās environment anymore.
So in order to solve a planetary problem, we have to have a position of being extraplanetary. And so Iāll go and talk about this. And after the talk, Iāll typically get surrounded by young people who say they thought they had to choose between solving the worldās problems or doing cool space robots. And now they realize they donāt have to choose one or the other. They can do both. And that gets them really excited.
Alex Cumming: I love that. I love that idea. You donāt have to pick between the either. I have friends who are very involved in the study of space and other planets, and I have friends who were very involved in the study of the environment. And firsthand Iāve seen how they kind of get torn between the two of I want to develop the future, but I donāt want to leave behind the planet that we have. So to know that thereās a healthy overlap that they help one another.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. Itās a stretch for people to grasp it. Weāre talking about how do we put industry off the planet into space? And it is a stretch because how are you going to do manufacturing in the Earth? Youāre going to have trucks driving up and down to space bringing all the manufactured goods. But weāve been working on these concepts for decades and we really believe that by the end of the century, we should be able to put at least a half of our industrial footprint off the planet by the end of the century.And so even if itās only a half, thatās going to be really helpful to our planet. So there are actual strategies and most of the people I know in the Space Program are really pro-Earth and they really want to use space to benefit the planet. Thereās a lot of very idealistic people doing space.
Alex Cumming: Do you find that a lot of young people have this, they like mythologize this grand idea of space and space travel, and then when they get into it theyāre maybe spending more time behind a computer screen than theyād like to get involved with?
Phil Metzger: Thatās probably true. So I spent a lot of time writing code. I do FORTRAN code cause Iām an old timer, but I spent a lot of time writing code to model the physics heat transfer in the lunar soil. And itās not really that glamorous to write equations of how heat spreads out through dirt. But I always have it in my mind that the reason Iām trying to model how propagates heat is because weāre trying to extract ice from the lunar soil. Because weāre going to turn the ice into rocket fuel. And by making rocket fuel in space, weāve changed the economics so that it now becomes possible to do much more in space than we could ever do before. So although Iām behind a computer screen doing this boring task, that vision has always motivating me and keeping me working and keeping me excited.
Alex Cumming: I had no idea. You could make rocket fuel from ice.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. Well itās just add electricity to electrolyze it and you split it into hydrogen and oxygen. And then you burn the hydrogen and the oxygen together to get thrust.
Alex Cumming: In my acting classes, they didnāt teach me that. And I think thatās the one thing Iām missing.
I want to emphasize that UCFās tie to the space industry is no secret. We know UCF loves space. I love space as most all UCF student. Twenty-nine percent of Kennedy Space Center employees are UCF alumni, and we have two alumni who are astronauts. Whatās your favorite part about UCFās relation to space?
Phil Metzger: Oh, itās hard to just say one thing. I think I love the faculty in the planetary science department, itās in the physics department. I love that group of faculty because theyāre so creative working on so many diverse ideas and they all love space.
Alex Cumming: Itās just so cool to know that you see these alumni who have left the planet and explored. As somebody who doesnāt have this incredible grasp on the defining details of space travel, itās just so cool to know and to think about when you see some of the richest people in the world, weāre talking to Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk types, and it seems that at the forefront of their mind is space. What does that make you think?
Phil Metzger: Well I think like everybody, they want to look back on their lives and know that theyāve done something important, something they can feel good about. And the reason I think they have gravitated towards space is because technology has now reached the point that we can actually do amazing new things in space that we could never do before. And they see that and they think, well, I can use my resources to make a big difference in that field. Jeff Bezos wants to do lunar industry and put industry in free space, you know, not on a planetary body around the Earth, in order to save the Earth, to move industry off the planet. Elon wants to put human settlements on Mars to make human civilization multiplanetary. Theyāre very complimentary objectives. And Iām glad that they both have their own idea of what to do and that they are complimentary because by having more people trying different things, I think weāre more likely to have success. And also, Iām more of a save the Earth kind of person. And so Iām more into put industry around the Earth rather than settling Mars so much. However, they dovetail so nicely. The industry that you need to support humans living on Mars, itās 95% the same that youāre going to need to work on the moon or in free space working with raw regolith to extract elements and do the mining and manufacturing.
And then also people who want to go back and forth to Mars, theyāre going to need to fill up their rockets. Theyāre going to need rocket fuel, and CisLunar Industries will economically interact with Martian settlement. So I think it all works together in a grand big picture.
Alex Cumming: Iām glad to hear that coming from yourself. I know a lot of people in my life have had this sort of question of, going back to you saying that space travel and saving the Earth can co-exist, is that theyāre under this impression that theyāre leaving Earth, leaving Earth to go to colonize Mars, leaving Earth to exist on the moon and in the cosmos, leaving the Earth in its wake ā which itās good to hear from somebody whoās far more versed in it than I am thatās not the idea.
In your time and all those years you worked at NASA and as a student studying the stars, did you ever think that the individual privatization of space would be a reality in your lifetime?
Phil Metzger: It was not something that ever crossed my mind until somewhere in the 1990s. Before then it was always the government who did space because it took so much money. It took so much technological prowess that only large government agencies could participate in that field. We started to notice things had changed around in the ā90s when NASA could no longer develop the technologies faster than the commercial market was developing them.
Like, for example, one time we had this heat shield delivered to the Kennedy Space Center and it had to have this perfect shape. So NASA developed a laser scanner to measure the shape of that heat shield. But they delivered their laser scanner, it costs them $10 million to develop the laser scanner. It was super advanced new high-tech, but when they went to measure the heat shield with it the technicians at the space center said, āWhy are you using that? Weāve got this one that we bought commercially, which is far more accurate, and it only costs $100,000.ā So thatās the kind of thing thatās been going on in the world of tech. These single use applications can no longer keep up with the technology engine of the commercial market. And that has been revolutionizing the landscape of space.
So now people have started to realize we can build rockets and we can do it with not that much funding. And we can actually put people in space. So access to space is being revolutionized, and now people have started to envision business models. How can we make this self-sustaining? What are things we can do in space to sustain this effort so that then we can go farther and farther and actually put industry in space and save the Earth and settle Mars and do all the other great things.
Alex Cumming: Industry and space. That is a phrase that seldom has crossed my mind. But then we spoke about claiming territory on the moon so if we are commercializing in space are we going to have to implement our capitalist economic ideas into the economy that goes into space?
Phil Metzger: Well I donāt have any easy answers for this. This is a great question. And there are people working this all the time. I have friends who are policy people and people that are attorneys, politicians. There are a lot of people arguing about these issues. Itās going to have to be worked internationally. Itās going to have to involve the United Nations. And in some way or another weāre going to figure it out as we go along. But I think we can be optimistic about it. I think that space not only has all these challenges that we need to solve, but as we find ways for making space more participatory and more inclusive, then weāre bringing in all the greater creativity of our whole globe. And that is what I think is really going to drive space forward make it happen in this century, as we make it more inclusive and more participatory for everybody.
Alex Cumming: I liked that the creativity and inclusivity of the world because space is not just American, Russian, Chinese, Canadian endeavor, itās the world. And it makes me think that in the past centaury Iād say probably the man and the American mythos that sort of embodied the idea of space travel is probably JFK with his great, famous speeches about within the decade of the ā60s to travel to the stars. And you said that itās gone from sort of the government and the overarching to sort of the individual company. And there hasnāt been a president I can think, maybe except for the previous one, who has placed such an emphasis on the importance of space travel and how for the American future it is a great piece of it. And now weāre going to these American companies, SpaceX and Amazon are the two that weāve been talking about, that are really reinvigorating the idea that space travel is within our reach and we are going to do it within our lines.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. So there are other themes that we have to consider too. Thereās a robot revolution going on. So robotics are threatening to take everybodyās jobs away, even people in creative fields. What if robots can write or AI can write poetry better than humans? At what point ā
Alex Cumming: Then Iām out of a job.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. At what point are we all going to be put out of a job? But I like to point out that space is limitless. Thereās literally billions of times more resources accessible in our solar system than there are on the Earth. And this provides a sphere for us to expand into so that we can end the zero-sum game that causes us to fight over resources here on the Earth. And we can leverage this automation of robotics to access those millions and billions of times greater possibilities in the solar system and create a much more vibrant civilization. So weāre going to have to face these issues, whether we go to space or not, because of the changes of technology. But by adding space into the picture, weāve opened up the possibilities so much more greatly that I think we can see a lot of optimistic roads ahead.
Alex Cumming: Thinking about robots and our technology, the Mars rover, we know that technically, if weāre going to, an American robot has touched down and has already made contact on Mars. Does that make you feel some kind of way?
Phil Metzger: Well, people joke around and they say weāve discovered a planet thatās entirely inhabited by robots and thatās Mars because thereās like seven or eight or something robots driving around and flying around Mars right now. Only robots live there as far as we know. But yeah, itās really cool. Another thing thatās really cool is that it used to cost something like $200 billion to do one of these flagship missions to another planet. And itās getting to the point where you can do it for a $100 million, like the group in Israel almost landed on the moon. They got within like a hundred meters of the surface before they lost control and fell the last bit. But that mission was only a $100 million. So the prices coming so low that weāre able to see more groups starting to put robots on other planets now.
Alex Cumming: I hadnāt even thought about it that way. So I want to move into a controversial topic because the robot revolution isnāt controversial. You made quite the waves a couple of years ago when you insisted through your research that Pluto is indeed a planet and I want talk about that. Can you give us an insight onto what your research was for that?
Phil Metzger: Sure. And this is really timely because we have a new paper that just got accepted at the journal about four days ago and itās going to be even, I think, bigger than the last one. So, weāve we spent about five years researching this topic and we finally put our big paper out there. But yeah, we started out by addressing this issue. Like, why would an object not be a planet simply because it is in a swarm of other objects? Like they say, āWell, we used to think the asteroids were planets, but then we discovered they are in a swarm. And obviously things in a swarm canāt be a planet. So therefore they arenāt planets. And now we used to think Pluto was alone, but now we see itās in a swarm. And so by analogy to the asteroids, therefore Pluto should not be a planet.ā
That was the argument people were using back in 2006. And so we thought, well letās address that. I mean itās begging the question, why should something not be a planet because itās in a swarm, but is it really true that that was why asteroids became non-planets? It doesnāt make any sense as an argument. Why would scientists use that as an argument? Itās just a question begging argument. So did they really make a question begging argument in the mid-1800s as they tell us they did?
We did the research and we found out, no, they absolutely did not. Thatās not what happened. In the mid-1800s. They started to discover lots of asteroids and they realized theyāre all in a swarm and scientists kept calling them planets and we would write textbooks. There are three types of primary planets. A primary planet is a planet that orbits the sun directly. So they would say there are three types of primary planets. Theyāre the terrestrial planets, like the Earth and Mars and Venus. There are the giant planets, like Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune, Saturn. But thereās also the small planets which exist in a band between Mars and Jupiter. So they were listed as one of the three types of planets along with the other two types. And this continued all the way into the 1950s. It was actually relatively recent that scientists stopped considering asteroids to be planets. So we did research to find out then why did they stop calling them planets? It had nothing to do with them being in a swarm.
You know, in the 1950s, we knew there were thousands and probably millions. And they would say there are hundreds of thousands of planets in this band and theyāre planets. So why then did we make the switch? And it turns out that there were some key papers written by Gerard Kuiper, he was possibly the leading planetary scientist of his day. And he wrote a series of seminal papers where he argued that planets conformed by multiple processes. We used to think they could only form by disc instability, where the gas thatās orbiting the sun in a disc has gravitational instability causing it to break up into clumps and these little round balls of gas then condense into liquid and then eventually they harden into solid. And so they thought all planets are spherical and they all formed this way. But Kuyper argued no, some of them could form from the bottom up from dust specks and dust specks collect other suspects and become gravel. And the gravel collects other gravel and becomes a rock and rocks collect other rocks and becomes a boulder. And eventually youāve got a planet. And so he said that process also takes place and the objects that are formed are not round, theyāre lumpy. And so he proposed that because there are two processes.We should say that the round ones that are, like the Earth, planets because originally that was what a planet was. It was ā and all the objects that are other Earths, geological bodies like the Earth are the planets. So he said, āLetās say all the round ones that formed by disc instability or the planets, the ones that formed by accretion from the bottom up, are non-planets.ā Well later, we realized that accretion can actually go all the way up to become a round body. And so now weāve changed it and said even if itās formed by accretion but it got large enough to become round, it ends up having the same geology, all of these complex geological process, as the objects that formed the other way from the top down. So weāve said itās the end size that matters because that determines if itās a living active geologically, active body versus a dead lumpy rock, like an asteroid. So that was what actually happened in the literature. But unfortunately the story has been lost and this false story has taken its place.
We call this historic presentism. Itās the presentism fallacy where people take a modern perspective and they assume that people in the past had the same view and they reinterpret history with that untested assumption. So people would say, well, obviously people in the 1800s wouldnāt think a small lumpy object is a planet because we know thatās not a planet. So they must have stopped considering them planets back when they were like about 15 of them. And so they created this false story about them becoming non-planets in the 1800.
Alex Cumming: Thatās ā yeah. I like the term lumpy, for the lumpy description of it. Wow. The idea of presentism, I didnāt even thought about that and all those different things. To think that arguments from modern day or 15-something years ago ā
Phil Metzger: Yeah. Well, can I tell you about the new paper? Because it gets even better
Alex Cumming: Fire away.
Phil Metzger: Okay. So our new paper, our old paper disgust asteroids, our new paper discusses moons. Now hereās the story that you get told all the time. This is in every textbook. They will say before the Copernican revolution, there were seven planets. The sun was a planet. The moon was a planet and there were five other planets, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The Earth was not a planet, but they will always say at the Copernican revolution the sun stopped being a planet, the moon stopped being a planet because it orbits the Earth and the Earth became a planet, but thatās not what happened. Okay. Thereās absolutely no question in the historical records. What actually happened was the moon stayed a planet and all moons were considered planets, and being a planet had nothing to do with what an object orbits. And so all the way until the 1920s, everybody said large moons or planets. And that may seem like an unimportant little detail, but itās actually very important because we know that planets can change orbits, like Triton the largest moon of Neptune was captured. It was a primary planet, like Pluto, and it got captured and became a satellite. So whatever orbit theyāre in right now is a human perspective bias. Weāre looking at it the way it is right now, rather than looking at fundamentally what these objects are. But unfortunately this idea that to be a planet you have to orbit a star directly, it actually came from astrology in the 1800s. And so we were able to track how it developed in astrology and then how scientists accidentally fell into that belief in the 1920s. And then again, historical presentism has covered over the history.
And so now weāre told a false story about how it developed. So what weāre arguing is that the useful concept of a planet, the one that scientists doing planetary science actually prefer doing, considers that any large geologically active body, including moons like Titan or Triton or Europa, these are planets. Theyāre secondary planets. Theyāre satellites. They are satellites, but itās a satellite thatās large as a planet that is satellite of another planet
Alex Cumming: Your work is being argued against by ideas from the 1800s and just how that evolved over history, I can imagine thatās probably a little frustrating.
Phil Metzger: Well, weāve had a lot of fun with this. Like nowadays when I go to the store, if I see the Farmerās Almanac, Iām like, oh, an almanac, and Iāll grab it off the shelf. And Iāll go to the list of planets that weāll see, because they always have a list of planets. And so Iāve got almanacs from the 1700s and Iāve been collecting almanacs now. Every time I go to a used bookstore, if theyāve got some old almanacs, Iām like,ā”Oh, Iāve got to get that.ā Itās interesting to see how the list of planets in popular culture and astrology differed from the scientific concept. And thatās where the split really came from.
Alex Cumming: Wow.
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Why do you think that the idea of Pluto being a planet or not is so hotly contested with the public, even just general individuals? People who maybe went to school 15-something years ago, theyāll still believe that Plutoās not a planet because they havenāt been updated on modern science. Why is it so controversial?
Phil Metzger: Well I think a lot of people just love Pluto. I love Pluto. The big irony of the flyby of Pluto a few years ago was that Pluto turned out to be so darn interesting. Itās probably the second most interesting planet in our whole solar system. Only the Earth is more interesting than Pluto. Thereās just so much geology. Thereās active glaciers flowing down mountain sides into the valleys on Pluto. There is convection in the eyes causing all these fascinating patterns of pits and cracks. Thereās mountains as tall as the Rocky Mountains, and these mountains are made out of water. Itās water thatās as hard as rock. So water is hard as granite. The ice is made out of nitrogen. Thereās also organic material on Pluto. We can see this brown rust or orange colored material, which is organic molecules, the stuff that life is made out of. Thereās probably a liquid ocean under the surface of Pluto, which is still liquid, which is remarkable. So apparently thereās more radioactive material in Pluto than we thought, keeping it warm so that the ocean can stay liquid. And you could go on and on about how fascinating Pluto is.
So itās really ironic that people were saying it shouldnāt be a planet because itās in a swarm, but then it turns out itās the most planetey planet of all the planets. So of course we love that, you know. That was just too good to be true. And I was at the flyby with my daughter. Alan Stern, the head of the mission asked me to come up and out of my family only my daughter could come with me. Sheās 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, āOK, the radio signal is now crossing the orbit of Uranus and itās going to be so many hours.ā And the next day we come in, āOK, the radio signal just past Mars. So weāre like 20 minutes away.ā And then, āOK, the radio signal is halfway to the Earth from Mars and weāre waiting for the radio signal to arrive.ā
And then it came in and they started saying, āOK, weāve got signal locked. OK, weāve got. symbol locked on the symbols in that radio wave. OK, now weāve got data lock. Weāve done the pseudorandom code deconvolution and weāre getting actual data out of it. And now weāre actually seeing the data from the different systems.ā
They were calling this out as it was happening in real time. And then they went through all the spacecraft systems. Everybodyās looking at their own data. So the propulsion system looks good. Comps looks good. Instrumentation looks good. And then they finally go to the person whoās in charge of looking at all the data. And that person says we see all the flags are set that tells us we have the proper amount of data that we expected. And then everybody just erupted and [was] cheering because theyāve actually captured a full buffer of data. Then the next morning we came back, and they said, āWeāre going to reveal the picture. This is the picture we got back from Pluto.”ā
And they put it up there and it was that big, beautiful picture with the pink heart on it. And everybody was crying in the room. It was like a couple of hundred people in the room and everybody was just crying because it was so beautiful. Nobody had any idea. In fact, let me tell you this. Alan Stern used to be the director of the Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp Space Institute here at UCF and before I was hired, he actually hired me to come work here. And so he was coming back visiting and we all went out to lunch and I was in the back seat of the car with him and he said, āHey, you canāt tell anybody this, but Iām going to show you we got a picture back from the mission.ā The mission was almost to Pluto, it wasnāt quite there yet. And he showed me the picture and it was a little white sphere with a gray smudge on it. And he was so excited that there was a smudge on it because it proved that there was some geology on Pluto. And so then when we got this picture back and itās, whoa, this is more than we could have ever imagined, more than we could have hoped for. In fact, I talked to one of the heads of the Planetary Science Program at NASA at dinner one night and he said, āYeah, we were all terrified that it was going to be a white cue ball of just snow and nothing else. And after 10 years and all these millions and millions of dollars, we just get a white cue ball.ā So when we got those pictures back and it turned out to be so amazing, it was better than we could have hoped for.
Alex Cumming: Thatās outstanding. I know exactly the photo youāre talking about. Iāve seen it as a casual spectator on the internet and youāre right it is. Itās such a sight to behold. It is so beautiful. Thatās an awesome story. Thatās so cool.
Did he have it like on his phone or did he have like, like what, like a Polaroid, just kind of like slid it over to you?
Phil Metzger: Yeah. He showed me on his phone. He goes, āYou know you canāt tell anybody this.ā
Alex Cumming: But what would you say? Would you say thereās a little dot?
Phil Metzger: Yeah. I was a little underwhelmed, you know, Iām like, āOh, nice. Itās got a smudge on it, nice.ā
Alex Cumming: But then when you saw the actual photo, you were like, āOh, that white smudge is actually āā
Phil Metzger: Yeah, itās amazing complex geology. And thatās what weāre arguing, is from Galileo. The way that Galileo redefined planets was that they are other Earths and he made that decision based on seeing mountains on the moon. He was the first person that we know to point a telescope to the moon, at least the first to publish it. And he said, āLook, itās got mountains and that means itās got geology like the Earth. That means itās not made out of unchanging ether. It follows Earth, physics, geophysics, or geology and because of that we know that thereās not a separate physics for the heavens. The heavens follow the same Earthly physics that the Earth follows. And therefore, the Earth is in the heavens too. And therefore, the Earth moves.ā If the planets are the same as the Earth and the Earth is the same as the planets, he made this argument based on the moon, which is a satellite. But the key argument that pushed the Copernican revolution forward was the planethood of the moon, comparing it to the Earth.
So the essence of planethood, according to Galileo, was complex geology. And now we know that planets are the special things in the cosmos where complexity naturally emerges all the mass in the galaxy comprises something like 0.5% of the energy of the galaxy or of the cosmos. And that 0.5% is half of that is in the interstellar meteor, intergalactic meteor. And the other half is in the galaxy, right? Of that, most of it is stars and gas clouds. And a tiny, tiny fraction of that tiny fraction is planets. But those planets represent the great flourishing of complexity throughout the cosmos. And because they are just this amazing, special thing where you put enough mass together, it retains heat, it melts, it begins convecting. And then suddenly all these processes occur. You get mountains, you get minerals, you get crystals, you get fluids outgassing, yet lakes and oceans and rivers and atmospheres. You get convection cells. And you get storms. And you get jet streams. And then you have chemistry happening. And lightening storms. And chemical reprocessing. And complex organic material. And here on Earth, at least weāve got life and weāve got civilizations and weāve got technology. And this happens on planets.
So this tiny, tiny little fraction of the cosmos is the great flourishing of complexity and thatās essentially what Galileo saw. When he looked in his telescope. He said, āWhoa, the moon is one of these Earth.ā And he leapt to the idea that thatās what all the planets are. And so all the planets became known as other Earths. And so weāre saying thatās the essence of what a planet is. Itās so important to see this, that it needs a taxonomical category. And historically, since Galileo, that term has always been planet. So weāre arguing that thatās what it should be. Planets are complex other Earths, regardless what they happen to be orbiting right now during human observation.
Alex Cumming: So this paper, all this information that I thank you for sharing with me, itās awesome. You think that this is going to stir the waters? This is going to get some feathers ruffled?
Phil Metzger: What weāre trying to do is tell planetary scientists donāt be cowed by people telling you that you canāt call Titan a planet. Planetary scientists call Titan a planet all the time. We review the literature and we found out planetary scientists call large moons planets. Naturally we call Pluto a planet. We found hundreds of examples, just in a cursory review of the modern literature since 2006, since the IAU voted to say Plutoās not a planet.
And to say, Titan is not a planet, planetary scientists are continuing to call them planets. And the reason we do that is because itās useful. Itās useful to have a category to describe this amazing phenomenon in the cosmos. And so weāre doing it. And so we wrote the paper to tell planetary scientists donāt feel ashamed of that. This is actually the historic meaning of the word, and we should call these planets because thatās the most useful definition of a planet. Itās the scientifically useful and itās the scientific, historical definition of a planet.
Alex Cumming: Itās bringing history into the present and using the present to reflect on history. How cool.
So with that, I want to transition and ask you this, in the wealth of your career and all that youāve done and accomplished, what are some of your greatest accomplishments? What are the things that stick out to you?
Phil Metzger: Itās been an amazing ride.
Alex Cumming: Donāt hold back.
Phil Metzger: It was, it was better. It was a great experience working in space. So Iāve, been able to fly in reduce gravity. Iāve flown 450 parabolas of reduced gravity on airplanes, similar to the “Vomit Comet” on NASA research flights. So Iāve got to float around in zero G and Iāve got to experience Martian gravity, lunar gravity, testing various technologies.
And by the way, students here at UCF are doing that too. And anybody who wants to do that, all you got to do is invent a technology that needs to be tested in low gravity and then propose it to NASA and you can get funding and go do it too. And students here at UCF are doing that
Alex Cumming: Itās that easy?
Phil Metzger: Yeah. So Dr. Addie Dove has been leading trips in airplanes with students. Dr. Josh Colwell has been doing it. So, this is available. But thatās been an amazing experience. I got to do some field tests in Hawaii where we took a bunch of robots and we went to the top of Mauna Kea, which ā well, not quite the top. We went to about 8,300 meters and we set up a simulated lunar industrial site where robots were mining and extracting oxygen out of the volcanic dust and turning it into rocket fuel. And then we fired a rocket using that stuff that we got out of dust. So we called it dust to thrust. That was an amazing experience. And really that experience is what changed my ideas about space because a native Hawaiian priest from the native Hawaiian religion came up and did a ceremony to bless the robots because we werenāt allowed to be there without that blessing because it was considered a holy mountain. And that got me thinking about the way that Mauna Kea played a role to ancient Hawaiians. The reason they, the people, were able to cross the Atlantic and find islands was because the volcanoes stuck up high and changed the circulation patterns that made clouds and those clouds also caused rain and it allowed things to grow on those islands. And so they were able to cross this vast ocean and find this place where they could live. And in the same way, we were using that volcano to develop robots, to cross that vast ocean of space so that we could go to an island up there in space and put life on those other islands up there. And I got to thinking about that and I started realizing you know, weāre so high up on this volcano that nothing up here much can live. Thereās not enough liquid water at this high. But weāre doing the technology that will enable artificial life, you know, machines that build other machines to be able to extract the water they need and the other elements they need and have robots build robots, which will make it possible for us to go onward into space.
So that was an amazing experience, which really changed my views and got me even more excited. Co-founding the Swamp Works was an amazing experience. I wanted to work on the moon and stuff. And we didnāt have a job description at that time to do that. And so some other friends with me decided we were just going to make it happen. And so we, started pulling strings and just started working on the stuff we wanted to do. You know, they call it being an intrepreneur. So an entrepreneur tries to start a company, but an intrepreneur tries to start a new enterprise within an existing group. So we were intrepreneurs. And we finally convinced NASA to let us found this lab. It was a long story, and a lot of amazing things, a lot of friends along the way, and a lot of challenges along. But we ended up getting into this large high bay, which was the same high bay where they trained the Apollo astronauts. And we got to establish this facility, working on robots to do mining and manufacturing in space.
So that was a great experience. I got to be on the Shuttle Launch Team. At the time that was pretty scary for me. It was a period in my life where I had a lot of fear and I was terrified every launch. And I was kind of glad when I left that behind, but still the experience of being on a launch team, thereās nothing like it. You wake up at like midnight to go into work, so you can be on the console starting at 2 a.m. And then youāre on the console through the night as the countdown is proceeding. And thereās this electricity in the air. Everybodyās tense, everybodyās murmuring and talking in quiet tones. And then you get down to that final moment, the final count, and itās so much release of stress when it goes up in the, and thereās no problem on the asset and you get to main engine cutoff. Those experiences Iāll never forget. I used to also have to go out to the launchpad sometimes and crawl around on the launchpad to solve problems during the countdown. And so youāre out there on the count on the pad at night with all the bright spotlights on you. Thereās really nothing like that. Being on an active launchpad during the countdown.
I donāt know, if I keep thinking Iāll come up with more ideas.
Alex Cumming: Do. Thatās ā
Phil Metzger: Things that happened.
Alex Cumming: Those are all so killer. You know, some people when they want to, I guess relax or de-stress, they think about how small we are in the grand scheme of the cosmos. Does that just get you more stressed? Because youāre like, āOh, we got to go there. Weāve got to go there. We got to do this. We got to cross that.ā The stress and the magnitude of sitting there and the 10, 9, 8 holding onto something, someone just waiting, and then just knowing that you got to be a part of that and to make sure that those individuals, when theyāre up there in the stars, that you help get them up there.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. You mentioned we have two astronauts that are alumni of UCF and I know Nicole Stott, sheās one of the two alumni. Yeah. And the thing about being on that launch team is that we know the astronauts. In NASA, itās like a family. Itās not just a cliche statement. Itās really true that everybody really deeply cares about the crew. And so knowing that people youāve met, people youāve worked with are onboard that gigantic stored energy machine and theyāre just waiting for you. You donāt actually push a button, but waiting for that final computer command to ignite the engines, it is really stressful. And you know, we had two accidents during the Shuttle Program. We lost the Challenger on launch and we lost the Columbia on entry. Those were two terribly difficult times. I was there for both of those. And they were both really dark difficult times. In fact, had left the Shuttle Program and went to the Space Station Program. And then after we had gotten the station significantly built, I moved to working in a physics lab and this was around the time that we were trying to found the Swamp Works.
And so I was in the physics lab when the second accident happened. This is when I really met Nicole Stott because she and I were on a team together to analyze the videos of the accident. There were a lot of amateur photographers in the west part of the United States taking videos and photographs of the entry and they can see little flashes of light. And I thought, you know what, even though itās just a flash of light, thereās a lot of physics in that. I think we can get data from that to figure out what happened. And it turns out we were able to. A lot of this was solved by Dr. Bob Youngquist of NASA. So our team was able to show largely through Bobās work that the right wing had ripped apart and the tiles were shredding causing these flashes. And we were able to calculate the speed that the object was rotating as it was falling away from the shuttle. And we actually calculated where it landed. We know where it is, but weāve never recovered it. And I did the math to calculate that it didnāt burn up on entry. So we know where this object is out in the desert somewhere. That was a dark time, but Nicole was on that team with us. We had an astronaut on every team. And so she was the astronaut working with us, helping to understand these flash events that occurred. I used to occasionally have to take a break from that work and just walk the hallways and cry. I was literally crying, walking up and down the hallways and I would get composure again. And I would go back to working on this, trying to do the math, to calculate what were these flashes of light and can we figure out why we lost this vehicle? And then working with Nicole, she was at Houston, working on the phone with her.
So that was a hard time. That was at the time I was still working on my Ph.D. too.
Alex Cumming: What a rare experience in your line of work to have to analyze the details that went into what happened to your coworkers and your cohort. I imagine that must have been, as you said, very difficult to go through.
Phil Metzger: Most of my friends actually went to Texas and were walking around through the brush, looking for pieces of the shuttle and collecting it. So I didnāt do that because I was on this analytical team, but I think it was even harder for the ones who went out there.
Alex Cumming: In retrospect, do you think that the work to power through what you were feeling, knowing that going forward, this will save lives and that this will make the future of space travel safer and better and more ā Iām not going to say available ā but easier to understand what went wrong in those events?
Phil Metzger: Yeah. Youāve got to use an experience like that to look forward to the future. How are we going to solve this so it doesnāt happen again? And we did learn a lot from that experience. We eventually retired the space shuttle shortly after that. We realized we couldnāt have another accident and the vehicle, it was flawed. It wasnāt a great architecture for a spacecraft. But it was an amazing flying machine. It was an amazing program. It served us well but it was the right decision to retire it. And I think in the Constellation Program and the work that SpaceX is doing, the work that Blue Origin and other companies are doing, weāre not going to go back to that kind of an architecture because the inherent weakness in that design.
Alex Cumming: Yeah. And itās good to know going forward to learn from the past. It sounds like the past just keeps coming back and whether itās the 1800s and Copernicus and Galileo or 30-some-odd years ago and the experiences that happened then.
So I want to move into this question, which I assume youāll like quite a bit, what is the future of space exploration? What do you see and how does UCF fit into that?
Phil Metzger: The future is amazing. If I could look into the future tell you what I see this is it. I see civilization reaching beyond planet Earth. So weāre no longer just doing exploration in space, weāre actually doing the economic activities of life beyond planet Earth. And thatās going to happen in this century. Weāre already in the process of starting that and itās accelerating. So I really believe by the end of the century, thereās going to be a lot of economic activity, which is not geocentric. Itās going to be opening up new possibilities.
For example, if we had industry in space that could build anything, which we will have by the end of the century, then you could build giant telescopes that are larger than what you can launch on a rocket, and Iām sure weāre going to do this. Weāre going to build spacecraft telescopes that are in orbit around the sun as the same distance of the Earth, but all the way around the sun. And a telescope that large will be capable of photographing an automobile driving on another planet a hundred light years away. So let me just tell you if there are any other civilizations out there on other stars within a hundred light years and if theyāre just 50 years ahead of us or a hundred years ahead of us, they are looking at us right now. They may be looking at the light that left the Earth a hundred years ago and theyāre seeing Model T cars driving around and theyāre calculating, okay the people in that planet are just about now flying into space because they are a hundred years ahead of what weāre looking at because of the speed of light delay.
So weāre going to be doing that. Weāre going to be looking at the surfaces of other planets in detail, around other stars. I think thereās going to be a revolution in economics where weāre going to bring in an age of post-scarcity. When you have a trillion times greater resources and you have all the automated labor to work with that resources that you need, then thereās no reason for us to have a scarcity mindset anymore. Thereās no reason to cut corners in the economics in ways that hurt the planet anymore. So I think weāll be solving the problems with our planetās environment. I think this post-scarcity economic milieu is going to open up the opportunity for people to flourish in all areas. If people want to spend their life writing poetry, then thereās no reason why this post-scarcity civilization canāt support them to just do poetry their whole life. So I think the arts and culture will be able to flourish like never before. The sciences are going to flourish. Weāre going to have research stations on every planetary body in our entire solar system with a transportation network, taking people all around throughout the solar system.
Computers are going to continue to make great advances and itās impossible to predict. Whatās going to happen in that direction, but I think itās going to be an amazing time. Itās really exciting to be a part of making that happen right now. This is the generation of graduates from UCF and from other schools. This is the generation that is going to make all that happen during their careers. So I think right now I understand UCF puts more graduates into aerospace engineering than any other university in the United States. So weāre going to continue pumping students into this and those aerospace engineering students and business students and every other field is going to have a lot to work on inspace. Itāll be an exciting time.
Alex Cumming: It sounds like the future is that UCF, more so than it already is, itās going to be synonymous with space, space exploration, Space U, thatās why they call us that. And if what youāre saying, just my own thinking there, economics are eventually going to have to catch up with space travel. It sounds like if we develop into this post-scarcity era, as you said, there might be some changes, when of course more robots and job availability, capitalism might have to make some adjustments there.
Phil Metzger: Well, right now Iām working on a project. Itās unfunded research. Iām doing in my own time. Iām trying to work on industrial ecology for space. Industrial ecology, just like biological ecology is the study of how different actors, different organisms if you wish, interact in a network of metabolic relationships. So here on the Earth, you might study how the ducks and the plankton and the fish all interact, but in space, space ecology, industrial ecology, weāre trying to figure out how do you make metal on the moon? And then how do you make plastic on the moon? And which do you do first and how much of the machines that make plastic can you make out of the soil when youāve made the metal? And what is the path to develop that industry to get there quickly and economically right now? So thatās an industrial engineering problem and a business problem.
So space isnāt just about rocket science space is going to be about all the different fields.
Alex Cumming: Everything that youāve said here, I think itās so important for young people who may hold this pessimism for the future. From an economic standpoint and a environmental standpoint, I think itās important that they hear that the future, that space travel, will help us itāll cure these ailments that we are so worried about here in 2021. But in the future, in the next 30, 40 years, when people say that thatās the point of no return that maybe when weāre just getting started in relieving some of the scarcity that we face here on Earth.
Phil Metzger: Well, we do you know how to put probably half of our footprint and industrial footprint into space by the end of the century. We already know that we can do this and it isnāt going require any new physics. I mean, we have to do a lot of physics to study, to develop the technology along the way, but weāre not going to be violating physics to do this. Itās fundamentally an economic problem.
How do we create steppingstones of activities that lead one to another until we get to that point? But we know we can do it and thatās why Iām very optimistic about it.
Alex Cumming: So for the future generation, I want to ask, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to do what you do?
Phil Metzger: Well, so itās a little bit trite to say this, but you really do need to follow your passions. When we created the Swamp Works at the Kennedy Space Center, nobody came to us and said, āHey, we want you to establish a thing, to do these kinds of technologies.ā It was our idea and we were intrepreneurs making it happen, so it was our passion to do that. And we found a way and it was not easy and it took a long time. But we made it happen as a team. I think thatās one of the clues is find your passion and then find your team, people who share that passion. Have good friends, develop really good friends. Networking is super important. When students ask specifically in the aerospace field, how can I advance my career? I tell them, well, one of the most important things is go join a student club, something like rocketry or robotics or something, join something like the Students for the Exploration and Development of Space. We have a chapter here at UCF. Join something like that and network get to know other people and then go to the conferences and get to know workers who are already established in their careers.
Networking is really important. But having a team of friends who are like-minded, who can share the energy with you and you can creatively work together. Developing the ideas that you can execute together. Thatās super important. Of course, the education. I went back to school after Iād been working for NASA for like, I donāt know how many years, long time. And then I went back to school at UCF and I got a masterās and a Ph.D. Because I knew that I needed that education to be able to do the things that I wanted to do in my career. So get the education. And also I want to say this to be a good person. A lot, a lot of people, you run into jerks in their career and I donāt know why people choose to be jerks. I think they think that theyāre getting something out of it. But in my experience, be a good person, be a team player, be somebody that other people can trust. Thatās always worked out for me. If you can overcome your personal demons, get help and try to be a good person and be a team player because it really requires friends and relationships to have success in your career
Alex Cumming: It sounds like UCF has all that good people. Good networking, great professors, clubs.
Phil Metzger: Itās certainly been good for me. Yes. Itās been great
Alex Cumming: For me too. I love it here. And Iāll conclude, I want to ask you, whatās one thing that youāre still hoping to do on a personal level and a professional level?
Phil Metzger: Well, Iām not sure I can tell. I mean, I know but Iām not sure Iām allowed to say
Alex Cumming: Just go on your phone, you can show us any of that.
Phil Metzger: Yeah, no, Iām working on some ideas for a space activities, but I have signed some non-disclosure agreements.
Alex Cumming: Youāve given a lot away already, so I donāt know what youāre holding back with.
Phil Metzger: Yeah. So I canāt really say what some of the things Iām working on right now. Here at UCF, we work with all the space companies and so we work with SpaceX, Blue Origin, Virgin Galactic, United Launch Alliance, Boeing you know, name the company, we work with it. And so we sign a lot of non-disclosure agreements. We develop a lot of technology. I just got asked to sign a new patent today for something we invented here at UCF for space. So a lot of what weāre doing, weāre not going to tell you about until after the company weāre working with is ready to make it public. So really canāt answer that last question. I canāt tell you what Iām doing right now, but there is something exciting that Iām working on.
Alex Cumming: Wow. Iām so excited to hear it. It sounds like in your field, thereās never a dull day.
Phil Metzger: Every day is different. Such a wide variety of things that we get to work on. Experiments, analyzing data from the moon, computer simulations, theories, every day is different.
Alex Cumming: I love to hear it. So for the audience, if they wanted to find you, where should they look?
Phil Metzger: Well, you can find me on Twitter. Iām @drphiltill, P H I L T I L L. You can also go to the Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp Space Institute website and find the personnel page. And I have a page there. So thatās fsi.ucf.edu. Thatās Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp Space Institute. And my email address is there, if any students want to contact me.
Alex Cumming: Well, I want to say thank you so, so much for coming on. I love this conversation and Iām more optimistic about the future in space travel than ever before. So thank you so much for joining me, but itās been fun.
Hey everybody. Thanks for listening. Iāll see you on the next episode of Knights Do That, where Iāll be speaking with the president and co-founder of Limbitless Solutions, Albert Manero ā12 ā14MS ā16PhD to learn more about the impactful work he and his team does to create affordable and innovative bionic arms for kids with limb differences.
Albert Manero: For us, the moment that we get really excited by is when the child realizes that theyāre taking the arm home. And thereās always this like little look where they look to their parents to make sure itās real. And then they get this beaming smile. And when you watch that and you watch the family interactions, that makes all the rest of the development and the business part and the research part all worth it. And it is a rare opportunity to be able to see something from a research lab, directly connect with your community. In here in Central Ģš¹ĻŹÓʵapp, thatās a gift. You donāt always get that immediate feedback. And I think that for Limbitless being able to work directly with our community and see that translation has been the most rewarding part of a whole program.
Alex Cumming: If youāre doing something cool, whether thatās at UCF or somewhere you took UCF that we should know about, send us an email@socialmediaatucf.edu, and maybe weāll see you on an episode in the future. Go Knights and Charge On.