What if the Soviet Union had won the space race this week on planetary radio?

Welcome, I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the Human Adventure

across our solar system and beyond. An alternate history this week as we

welcome back distinguished space historian

and policy expert John Logston for an utterly fascinating conversation.

It's T-minous a few days till Osiris Rex rockets away to asteroid Bennu.

Senior editor Emily Lochuwala will give us a status update.

And as I speak, it's T-minus 364 days till the Great North American Total Solar Eclipse.

Bill Nye prepares for that occasion and more in his segment.

Down the line we'll visit once again with Bruce Betts for a night sky preview

and yet another space trivia contest. Emily we are creeping up on the next big launch to

someplace else in our solar system.

That's right, we're talking about Osiris Rex,

NASA's first asteroid sample return mission.

It's also going to be NASA's first planetary launch since MAVEN in 2013 and it'll be the last

NASA planetary launch until Insight in 2018. So it's a big five-year gap or filling with this

one mission and let's all hope it goes well.

You bet and it will be what a couple of years before it reaches the asteroid.

Yeah this is a leisurely mission because although the asteroid is relatively close to Earth it's not easy to rendezvous with an object

that doesn't have very much mass.

When you have a planet like Mars, you can kind of do this direct to Mars trajectory, use the

planet's gravity to grab you into orbit but you've got to kind of creep up on it when

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