A brief visit with Stephen Hawking this week on planetary Radio. Radio. Hi everyone, welcome to Public Radio's travel show that takes you to the final

frontier.

I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society. He is probably the most famous

living scientist on Earth. The author of a brief history of time received The Cosmos

Award last week and we have exclusive excerpts of his remarks.

We've also got an extended visit with Emily Lochuwala coming up.

She'll report to us about her visit to the biggest ever Lunar and Planetary Science Conference.

Bruce Betts will share an interesting explanation of how the planet Uranus got its name

and he'll help me give away another planetary radio t-shirt.

Let's get underway as we open a line to Nye Labs for this week's commentary by Bill.

Hey Bill Nye, the planetary guy here, Vice President of the the planetary society and this week I am

excited because NASA is going to reconstitute the Institute for Advanced

Concepts the IAC.

This is something they discontinued back in 2007 for budget cutting, but now we're going to put

it back in place and something they're going to work on is an old planetary society idea and

that's balloons in space.

So people would live in very, very large inflatable structures.

And by the way, this goes back to the invention of geodesic domes with Buckminster Fuller, the famous

architect.

These structures would be so low mass they would literally float on the

Earth's atmosphere and that is an economical way to explore low Earth orbit

without having to really get in orbit, without having to have that enormous

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