Building a railroad to the moon this week on planetary radio. Radio.

Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Alan Stern is back.

This time the busiest man in space exploration has a new company that wants to take people

to the surface of the moon.

He'll tell us about Golden spike. Sequestration, it's a word and an action

that has begun indiscriminately slashing budgets in Washington, and one of those budgets

is NASA's. Bill Nye will comment.

Later I'll be panning for astronomical gold with Bruce Betts and you might win Bill

Nye's voice on your answering machine. We begin with Emily Lockdewala.

Emily, I hope we can talk about a March 1st entry that you put in the blog and it's another

of these old images that you found from the Galileo Mission. What's this one?

This one is of Gasboro which is pretty cool because it's the very first

asteroid that was flown past close enough for us to take really good pictures of it.

And it turns out to be kind of this angular lumpy shape and probably not what people were

expecting when they thought about pictures of an asteroid.

I'm one of those.

I watched an old episode of Star Trek last night and here were these

nice craggy sharp-edged asteroids I mean what happened they're not they're not

shaping up the way we thought they would be well there's a couple of reasons why asteroids have these rounded shapes.

One of them is because the asteroid belt is full of asteroids and they tend to hit each other a lot.

And so you have what's called, well, one of the things that happens in space weathering is that you have little

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