He piloted the first space shuttle into orbit 40 years ago, Bob Crippin, this week on Planetary Radio.

Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society with more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

One of those very special conversations this week, Bob Crippin will tell us about sitting next to STS-1 Commander John Young in Columbia

as they counted down to history. It was April 12, 1981, exactly 20 years after Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space.

By the way, happy Uri's night everyone. Bob will also tell us about his other space shuttle missions and the colleagues he flew with, along with much more about a life well-lived and the spaceships he still misses.

Planetary Society Chief Avocat Casey Dreyer will get our shuttle anniversary started in moments with the taste of his fascinating look back at what the shuttle program actually cost.

It may surprise you and surprise this week's What's Up Visit with Bruce Betts becomes a space poetry festival as an unprecedented number of you turned your contest entries into rhymes. It's great fun.

You know what else is going to be fun watching a helicopter take off from the surface of Mars. Ingenuity is now standing on its own four feet in Jezero crater after being dropped from the belly of the Perseverance Rover.

Everything checks out so far with that first flight possibly happening in a few days. The tiny Wurly Bird tops the April 2nd edition of the downlake and is followed by these headlines.

Few earth is safe from asteroid apophis for at least another 100 years. We already knew that it will pass closer than geostationary satellites in 2029.

The concern was about its 2068 pass radar observations have now allowed officials to sound the all clear.

The United Arab Emirates hope spacecraft has achieved its final science orbit around Mars.

The mission will deliver a complete picture of the red planet's climate. These stories and more about that elusive phosphine on Venus if it's really there are waiting for you at planetary dot org slash downlink.

Here's Casey dryer Casey is the planetary society's chief advocate and our senior space policy advisor Casey dryer great timing to join us as part of this celebration of the 40th anniversary of that first space shuttle mission.

You have worked some of your magic once again and it can be seen at planetary dot org tell us about this new page this new research that you posted.

Well, I figured 40th anniversary of the shuttle. I love budget numbers and I love knowing how much it took to make something. So let's combine the two and we have a new data set that we've made available for free to anyone to use very detailed demonstrating the cost of the shuttle to develop it to get it ready for Bob's first.

Flight and then also really which I think is new broken up by major components so how much it costs to figure out how to make the external tank the solid rocket boosters the RS 25 entrance or better itself.

And of course all of the construction of facilities that they had to upgrade around the country to basically shift NASA from its Apollo paradigm into the shuttle paradigm in which it would stay for almost 40 years really from 1972 until

2011 with the last flight of the shuttle. Man, are you correct talking about that infrastructure. I remember the first time I went out to Edwards during the approach and landing test and saw this gigantic structure that had been built just to lift the shuttle onto the back of the 747. This was a real paradigm shift.

It was I mean and it's important to remember how big of a deal this was it was almost a 10 year endeavor right starting in 72 when Nixon approved the program to its first flight in 81.

NASA had to fundamentally restructure itself to deal with a reusable space shuttle to deal with launching and landing frequently in order to process the shuttle to get it ready to take payloads into Earth orbit and to deal with the shuttle after it came back to repurpose it in order to clean it up and get it right.

To launch again all this stuff was new and they kind of took the existing infrastructure they had developed out for Apollo and reconfigured it specifically for the shuttle orbiter and its major components and that just takes money to figure out how to do that and to build it.

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