A Big Falcon Rocket 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.

Join me later at the headquarters of SpaceX to sit inside a mock-up of that ambitious company's crew dragon capsule, the one it hopes will carry astronauts

to the International Space Station early next year.

We'll also hear from Gwen Shotwell, the president and chief operating officer of

SpaceX. First though, we'll enjoy an extended visit with the Planetary Society's

digital editor, Jason Davis. He'll tell us about the BFR, that huge new rocket SpaceX

has begun building. But Jason has also written about the latest great success of the

Hayabusa II mission. His September 22nd blog post at planetary.org

celebrates the success of the first two of three Minerva Rovers that Hayabusa has dropped onto asteroid Ryugu and it includes the images they have captured.

Jason, welcome back to the show.

I want to start with that conversation about

Hayabusa 2 because you did write about it in that blog post of just a few days

ago as we speak. It would appear that Hayabusa too is as trouble-free as its older sister, the original Hayabusa,

was fraught with difficulties, though ultimately successful.

It's surprising how well things have gone and you know that's probably a testament to the Japanese spacecraft team that is

tried to learn from all the lessons of everything that went wrong with the first mission.

And yeah, so far it seems like everything is going pretty according to plan.

They arrived at the asteroid and have been doing surveys of it, started with these probes, and so far things are going pretty well.

I'm following along of course not just through your coverage at planetary.org,

but by our colleague Emily Loch Duwala, who has been writing extensively as

Hayabusa too has sort of gingerly approached this big rock and then backed off and then approached

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