Building spaceships at SpaceX, this week on planetary radio. Planetary Radio. Welcome to Public Radio's Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Did you catch our Planrad live show last spring?

One of our guests was Jeff Rakecky, the director of Structural Engineering at SpaceX.

This time, we are Jeff's guest at the California plant that

built both the Falcon 9 rocket and the Dragon spacecraft that recently made

commercial space history.

Join us on the factory floor in a couple of minutes.

Bill Nye wants to know if his Flash Gordon-style single-stage-to-orbit spaceship

might someday be built in the United Kingdom.

And Bruce Betch will share his view of the current night sky

just before he conjures up another random space bag.

He'll also help me give away a planetary radio t-shirt in our latest space trivia

contest. As always we'll first visit with Emily Lachtoala, the Planetary

Society's Science and Technology Coordinator, and the editor of its blog that you can find at planetary.org.

Emily, we're going to check in with a couple of old friends this week, beginning with

Akatsky and there was some interesting and positive news.

I wouldn't exactly call it news but it pre-figures the kind of creativity that

Jacks is going to be coming up with as they try to figure out what to do with their Akatsky spacecraft, which of course was supposed to go into Venus orbit, but failed to enter orbit because of a possible serious problem with its main engine. They still have a very capable spacecraft that's in orbit

near Venus's orbit and they've got about six years until the spacecraft gets back around to

Venus. In the meantime it seems like they're considering actually trying to do flybys of a couple of asteroids.

Now, it can be kind of hard to do asteroid flybys with in-flight spacecraft because usually there's not a lot of maneuvering fuel to spare,

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