Halloween Fun with plutonium this week on planetary radio. Welcome to the Travel Show that takes you to the Final Frontier.

I'm at Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

Plutonium, or one variety of it that can't be used for atom bombs,

is making a comeback.

Casey Dreyer will tell us why that's a very good thing for planetary science.

Bill Nye gives us his take on gravity, the movie, not the force of nature, and Bruce Betts

joins me for a spooky edition of What's up. We begin with senior editor Emily

lock the walla. Emily would seem to be an appropriate time to talk about the

space race if there is one but not the space race that all of us used to know and love

between the US and the USR.

No, it's this time that there seems to be something of a space race heating up in Asia, although officials in various Asian countries

deny the fact that it's a race, but I think there's certainly a race for status going on.

Start us with this piece that you wrote on the 28th, the day that we're speaking about it,

about the progress China's making toward its lunar soft lander.

That's right, China's planning to launch a very large soft lander that carries a opportunity-sized rover on its back.

That launch is going to take place in December.

Just today, or yesterday they shipped the rocket to the launch site. It should arrive in a couple of days and they'll

start stacking that and get it ready to accept the spacecraft. And they've also announced that they're

making progress in the selection of the name of the rover, which they're doing through a public contest.

And there's a list on the blog of ten possible names that they're choosing from for the rover,

including one that was a white rabbit that was a companion to the goddess Changa when she went to the moon in the first place.

So I think that seems like a very likely possibility, but there are nine other good choices and anybody, including

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