This program is sponsored by the Covley Foundation based in Los Angeles, California.

The Covley Foundation is dedicated to advancing science for the benefit of humanity.

I'm Alan Alder, and this is Clear In vivid conversations about connecting and communicating.

On the first settlement on a planet circling another star, when the historians there are

writing the books of their history of how that came to be.

My work on solar sales or other things that I've worked on in my professional career

be at least a footnote in that history book.

I won't see it in my lifetime, but I'm hoping one of my descendants will look back and say,

yeah, that was my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandfather.

That's Les Johnson.

He's the author of the book The Traveler's Guide to the Stars.

He's also a NASA engineer who just a few weeks ago was holding his breath as NASA's giant

new moon rocket was launched into space.

That's because the rocket wasn't just carrying the Orion capsule set to circle the moon.

Hitching a ride on the rocket was Les Johnson's shoebox-sized spacecraft that was rigged

to spread its Gossamer-thin wings and fly to an asteroid.

This hopes his little spacecraft is one small step toward a gigantic spaceship powered

by solar sales that will one day take humans to the stars.

But we began our conversation with the more modest mission of the tiny spacecraft called

NEA Scout.

I ask him what NEA Scout is short for.

Near Earth asteroid Scout, we are a mission to go do some science at one of these asteroids

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