Exploring the Future of Space: Dr. Dan Britt on NASA Missions, Lunar Landings & Asteroid Mining

Susan Wise: Welcome to STARS Launch Pod: Space Technology and Research Sciences, brought to you by StarSciences.org, where we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. I’m your host, Susan Wise, and it’s an honor to have with us on the podcast today Dr. Dan Britt, Professor of Planetary Sciences at UCF.

Hi, and welcome to the podcast.

Dan Britt: Well, thanks for having me.

Susan Wise: I understand you’ve had a role in several NASA missions, so I’d like to dive into that. I’d like to know what your focus is at UCF and what you’re doing to further the space industry.

Dan Britt: Well, that’s a pretty broad question. As for NASA missions, I’ve been lucky to be on four of them: Mars Pathfinder; Deep Space One, which went to a comet; New Horizons, which flew by Pluto and then on to a Kuiper Belt object; and now I’m on the Lucy mission, which is going to five Trojan asteroids in the orbit of Jupiter. So it’s been a huge honor to be able to participate in that. That was really my career goal—to be on a NASA mission—and now I’ve been on four.

Susan Wise: Wow—that’s exciting.

Dan Britt: Yeah.

Susan Wise: You should be. What’s your main focus on these missions?

Dan Britt: My main focus is the surfaces of airless bodies. Part of the issue is that we live in the most unusual place in the solar system. No place else has liquid water and oxygen. We’re used to an environment that doesn’t exist anywhere else. Quite often, scientists and engineers assume that because things work a certain way here, they should work the same way elsewhere. The problem is, those are truly alien environments. You have to get over the fact that what you grew up with and experienced is not what’s going to happen elsewhere—and that’s hard for a lot of people.

Susan Wise: Yeah, especially if we eventually want to live there someday.

Dan Britt: We live in this oxygen-poisoned, water-saturated environment, and that’s not going to happen on the Moon or Mars.

Susan Wise: So we’re looking for ways to adjust and adapt in some way?

Dan Britt: Exactly. What I try to do is get people to test in more realistic environments. For instance, my focus right now is the lunar surface and trying to simulate the regolith you find there.

Susan Wise: How do you see our future with that? I know there are plans to establish a presence on the Moon, and we’re heading back.

Dan Britt: I don’t think this is an especially tough problem—you just have to be realistic. One conceptual issue is that if you look at most artist conceptions of the lunar surface—from NASA, ESA, or private companies—they’re completely unrealistic. They show billiard-table-flat surfaces with firm landing areas, but the actual surface is saturated with craters and covered in dust. You’re going to land in a dust cloud. Some private landers that have failed blame the dust—but the dust has been there for four billion years. It shouldn’t be a surprise. We’ve been there before.

If you read the accounts of Apollo astronauts who landed in that dust, it’s terrifying. Blaming the dust is like blaming a thunderstorm for happening in the afternoon—I’m in Florida; it happens every summer day.

Susan Wise: Right—but isn’t that something you can adapt to, like waiting for it to settle? You have to account for that, right?

Dan Britt: Yes, but remember, when you’re landing, you’re not just floating—you’re expending fuel. You need control authority, meaning precise control of your spacecraft. That’s not impossible, but it requires proper engineering and planning. When people cut corners and fail to adapt to the environment, they fail—sometimes catastrophically.

Susan Wise: What has been one of your biggest “aha” moments on your journey?

Dan Britt: I’ve had a few, but one key realization is that there are fairly simple measurements and studies that still haven’t been done. When you’re coming out of graduate school, you think everything’s already been discovered. But once you gain experience, you realize that’s not true at all—there’s a lot left to do.

For example, to understand asteroids, you really need to study meteorites thoroughly. That hadn’t been done from the perspective I approached. The same goes for the Moon’s surface—some work was done during Apollo, but much remains unexplored.

Susan Wise: When you’re studying meteorites and their composition, what kinds of things can you learn? How does that help you?

Dan Britt: I was studying the density and porosity of meteorites, which relates to how asteroids are structured. A graduate student once asked me if these measurements were just like stamp collecting—what would we discover? I told him I didn’t know, but I guaranteed he’d discover something that would upset people who thought they understood the topic. And he did—twice. He revealed realities people hadn’t fully understood.

Susan Wise: What kind of challenges do you face, and how do you overcome them?

Dan Britt: The biggest challenge is people deluding themselves—ignoring reality and assuming serious problems will go away because they’re inconvenient. You see this a lot in landing system design. The failure rate for small U.S. landers is about 50%, which should tell you something—but the message hasn’t fully gotten through.

Susan Wise: So there’s room for growth in engineering?

Dan Britt: Definitely. Even during Apollo, half the landings had issues with leveling. One came very close to tipping over. That’s a serious problem that’s often ignored.

Susan Wise: Is that something AI could help with?

Dan Britt: Short answer: no. Long answer: absolutely not. AI needs good information. If you’re landing in a dust cloud, you have poor or no information. AI can’t fix that. You need systems that allow you to land with certainty.

We’ve dealt with similar problems before—helicopter pilots in Iraq and Afghanistan have landed in dusty conditions for decades. There are solutions.

Susan Wise: Do we eventually need to build landing pads?

Dan Britt: That’s probably the long-term solution, but before that, we need to learn how to deal with dust. It creates clouds of opaque, charged particles—you won’t see through them with optical systems, radar, or lidar.

Susan Wise: My instinct says, “Can’t we just hose it down first?”

Dan Britt: That’s the “water-saturated Earth mindset” talking. No—we’re landing in dust. During Apollo, we relied on highly trained test pilots—and even then, half had problems. We were also very lucky. But we can’t rely on luck. We need better technology and preparation.

Susan Wise: Do you have any advice for our listeners?

Dan Britt: Space science is fascinating and fun. I changed careers because I thought it would be interesting—and I was right.

Susan Wise: What did you start out in?

Dan Britt: I studied economics, worked in administration at Boeing, then got bored. In my thirties, I went back to school and earned a PhD in geology. You don’t have to be the smartest person in the world to contribute—you just need to be capable and willing to try.

If you want security and always want to be right, choose another field. You’ll be wrong often, and funding—mostly from the federal government—can change quickly.

Susan Wise: Space exploration is becoming more accessible to the public and private sector—that’s exciting.

Dan Britt: It is. SpaceX has revolutionized access to space. The challenge is that many new participants lack experience, which creates a need for education.

Susan Wise: What are your thoughts on Artemis?

Dan Britt: It’s been a long time since we’ve been to the Moon. Artemis aims for sustained exploration rather than brief visits. There’s huge potential, but also a long list of unknowns—and addressing those will be difficult.

Susan Wise: Before we wrap up, do you have a passion project you’d like to share?

Dan Britt: One of my current passion projects is encouraging space agencies and companies to create more realistic visualizations of the Moon. Too often, they present misleading images that don’t reflect actual conditions.

More broadly, I’m passionate about understanding how to operate on moons and asteroids. Eventually, we may extract resources from them. It’s challenging, but not impossible—we could see asteroid mining within the next 10 years.

Susan Wise: Speaking of asteroids—there’s one named after you, right?

Dan Britt: Yes, though it’s quite far away.

Susan Wise: Do you ever check on it?

Dan Britt: Occasionally. I was lucky to have one named after me.

Susan Wise: How did that happen?

Dan Britt: In astronomy and meteorite studies, pay is low and recognition is limited—so one perk is having something named after you while you’re still alive.

Susan Wise: Can we see it?

Dan Britt: Yes, with a large telescope—about a one-meter telescope will do.

Susan Wise: What does it look like?

Dan Britt: Fairly nondescript. It’s about 30 kilometers across—a mountain floating in space.

Susan Wise: That’s still pretty amazing. What are you working on at UCF?

Dan Britt: We’ve built facilities to test regolith simulants—materials that mimic the lunar surface, especially near the South Pole. We host the NASA Lunabotics Competition, where university teams build rovers to operate in that terrain.

We also work with private companies and NASA to test hardware and study how systems perform when landing on regolith. The goal is simple: the more realistic your testing, the less likely you are to fail.

Susan Wise: I’m glad we have professors like you leading and teaching students. The future looks exciting.

Dan Britt: It has been exciting, and there’s still a lot to do. For those entering the field—don’t be discouraged. There are many unknowns, and solving them only leads to more questions.

Susan Wise: Dr. Dan Britt, Professor of Planetary Sciences at UCF, thank you so much for joining us. We loved hearing your story and are excited about what’s ahead.

Dan Britt: Thank you—I’m looking forward to the future.

Susan Wise: Be sure to join us as we connect, collaborate, and accelerate. If you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review and subscribe. Until next time, keep looking up. Thank you, Dr. Britt.