On today's episode, we are getting into the latest space news, including leaked
renderings of an updated starship Moonlander. A new launch window has opened at Starbase,
and researchers are developing a real life tractor beam to help eliminate space junk.
This is the Space Race. On November, two images of what appeared
to be an updated design of the SpaceX Human Landing System Moonlander starship variant We're
posted on x dot com by user David Willis, claiming to be new renders
of the vehicle from SpaceX. Willis posted two images that show the HLS in
orbit of Earth and parked on the lunar surface. But other than his claims,
there's really nothing to say that these images are from SpaceX at all.
In fact, when asked for his source, Willis literally just said trust me,
all right. Memes aside, it's pretty clear we can't trust that these
images are genuine. But it has been over a year and a half since
we've seen any renders of the starship Lander, So on the off chance these
images carry any weight, let's just quickly go over them here. First off,
the images are fairly good looking, but that's not too difficult to do.
These days. The most credible thing for these images is the nose cone,
which shows just the slightest hint of a dragon capsule like docking port.
This hasn't really been a point of contention in the community. It makes a
good deal of sense that the modified crewed versions of the Starship would make use
of a similar connection point as the company's only other crew vehicle. A careful
look at the flanks of the rocket shows a new design for the landing thrusters,
changing them into individual vented pods along the side rather than the open RCS
style ports from the original renders. This is also actually in line with some
of the only sightings of HLS hardware we've seen from Starbase back in August,
as SpaceX maneuvered around their crude proto type nose cone. Again, nothing concrete,
it's just interesting that this is lining up a little bit. The strange
bits start to stand out with the deployable solar panels from the render. These
flexible panels would be stored in the wall of the fuselage and deployed once in
orbit, and would likely be retractable, but it doesn't seem like a method
SpaceX would use if they could avoid it. There are a lot of points
of failure with this sort of system, and the second render shows it deployed
while the HLS is landed and in the Moon's gravity. There would likely be
even more problems with retracting and deploying the system. It just doesn't seem right.
Following onto that, the legs on this render look thinner and spindly,
the opposite of what SpaceX would probably redesign them to be. That's got to
be a mistake at best, and a clear sign of a hoax at worst.
Overall, there isn't much radically different with these renders from the last ones,
but too many things stood out as strange design choices for us not to
mention a total lack of verified source, we're gonna have to say that these
aren't genuine. Wherever Willis got them from, it likely wasn't SpaceX, though
we'd be happy to be proven wrong. The Starship saga continues this week,
with the FAA completing its safety review, the Fish and Wildlife Service scrambling to
complete their site analysis of the Bokachka coast, and SpaceX booking some very specific
outside help and giving us a potential timeline for their next Starship test launch starting
with the FAA. On October thirty first, the administration, which has been
in charge of recertifying the massive Starship super heavy rocket for flight operations, announced
that they had officially completed their safety review. You could all be forgiven for
wondering how yet another review was going on after all that other work previously mack
In early September, the FAA closed their mishap investigation, which involved auditing the
SpaceX account of their April twentieth test flight, which exploded after a four minute
burn. That in investigation involved a more direct probe of the vehicle and available
evidence as to what had gone wrong. The safety review has an altogether different
focus, that being the danger to property and the local population. The FAA
also clarified that this review looks over the applicants organization safety protocols and the flight
safety features they employ. And since SpaceX has been working so closely with the
FAA this whole time, this part of their review was extremely easy and quick
to complete. But this review was definitely not the major barrier to the next
Starship flight. That dubious honour goes to the investigation currently being conducted by the
FISH and Wildlife Service, and it's all because of that cool new water w
system that SpaceX designed to make sure Starship doesn't blow another hole in the starbased
concrete. The FWS has a very strict mission statement, which revolves around ensuring
that the local environment isn't adversely affected by whatever new activity is applying for an
operating license. They are usually called on to test the area around drilling operations,
but rocketry is also something they cover, as many rockets tend to use
toxic fuels, shed harmful debris, and produce noise and vibration at levels harmful
to most wildlife. That's said, those concerns have already been dealt with for
Starship, but their new deluge system has not. Over the last couple of
months, SpaceX has designed and built a slick flame diverter system that pumps thousands
of gallons of water through a steel plate directly under the engines of their super
heavy booster, cooling the plate and absorbing both the engine blast and the noise
it produces. From early testing, it definitely looks like it will work as
intended, but that's just the problem. Water is fairly absorbent when it comes
to chemicals, so the fuel, hydraulic oils and what little debris could be
produced during a launch could be a problem for the local coastline as thousands of
gallons of potentially contaminated water gets dumped from the w system. However, the
past week or two have been marked with congressional hearings about the need to cut
through this additional red tape caused by the licensing procedures being beholden to several different
authorities instead of a single, unified one, and all this talk seems to
have lit a fire under the FWS teams at Bocachica with a window of possibly
one hundred and thirty five days of testing. The FAA and FWS have both
stated that this stage of the investigation shouldn't take long at all, and maybe
that's why SpaceX is back to booking possible launch times. Back in October,
when it looked like things might be wrapping up, SpaceX issued a notice to
mariners that included a small stretch of days that didn't end up getting used for
obvious reasons. These notices are put out to warn any boats and ships to
keep clear of the launch trajectory of a rocket just in case, and it's
a good indication of a serious possibility for a launch, except when they have
to reschedule. Recently, another notice to mariners went out warning local water traffic
that a launch could take place from Bocachica, Texas no earlier than November sixth.
That's a good sign, but as we've seen, it's hardly solid.
Luckily, we have something way more concrete. It looks like a WB fifty
seven plane has been booked for work from November third to tenth. These planes
are converted bombers which NASA and other US agencies now use for high altitude photography.
One of these planes took part in the April twentieth launch of Starship and
is the source of some of those closer videos we've seen from that event and
might be what this booking is for. So while this is also something that
could be rescheduled, it's a much more difficult thing to have an expensive research
aircraft waiting to fly if you're not going to use it, and likely expensive
to book if you miss that launch date, which makes this a pretty confident
move by SpaceX considering there's still an active investigation going on involving processing samples of
the Bocachica soil, But as usual, it's likely the folks at SpaceX are
working very closely with the Fish and Wildlife Services and the FAA, so they
could very well know something we don't hear. It seems pretty far fetched that
a starship launch is in the cards so early this month, but if SpaceX
is booking planes, then it's got to be close to go time. This
new space race has a huge problem, and it's been growing with every launch
and even with every attempt to mitigate or solve it. Space junk is building
up in Earth's orbit and finding a good way to clean it all up is
proving very difficult. But with a new space race comes new technology which opens
the door to solutions straight out of science fiction, and for researchers at the
University of Colorado, Boulder, one of these sci fi tropes seems to actually
be within reach. We are talking about a real life tractor beam. That's
right, a staple of space based fiction from Star Trek to Star Wars,
the ability to use an energy based beam to hold and attract a distant target
might soon be a reality thanks to a research team led by Professor Hans Petter
Shaub. Unlike the many strange versions of fictional tractor beams from sci fi.
Shob's team is using the physics of electrostatic charge to manipulate objects in a zero
G environment. The current design is centered around a spacecraft armed with an electron
gun, which would fire a stream of negative particles at the target, be
it a piece of debris or an old satellite. The target would then become
negatively charged and be attracted to the nearest positively charged object, which in this
case would be the towing spacecraft, and could then be maneuvered wherever an operator
would like, albeit slowly. And this isn't just theoretical either. The team
at UC Boulder have been testing and iterating their design for over a decade now,
with fairly strong results. The university is home to a metallic vacuum chamber
called the Electrostatic Charging Laboratory for Interactions between Plasma and Spacecraft or Eclipse, which
allows them to test the effects of their electrostatic tractor on a smaller scale.
The biggest benefit to using an electrostatic tractor is it doesn't require contact between the
operation's vehicle and its target, substantially lowering the possibility of creating more debris which
is the biggest concern during orbital cleanup. Orbital cleanup is becoming a well studied
field these days, with several companies turning their hands to making a new type
of vehicle. Magnetic grapplers, harpoons, and robotic arms are all being tested
in orbit right now, but all of them involve direct contact with their target,
whether its debris from past launches or old satellites. Space trash can range
from the size of a basketball all the way up to the size of a
school bus, and all of them moving at their own speeds and rotating in
odd ways. Trying to hit something like that with a harpoon or grapple,
or even just matching its speed to attempt to grab with robotic arms, are
all extremely dangerous to both objects and will almost certainly lead to more debris,
something that the electrostatic tractor method wouldn't have to deal with. But that doesn't
mean there aren't problems with the tractor, of course. The first is that
this method is very slow. Moving a single satellite sized target into a different
orbit would take more than a month. These speeds mean that without a huge
fleet of orbital tugs armed with these electrostatic devices, there's no way this method
could keep up with the current pace of launches, which brings us to the
second big problem funding. As a university team, it's safe to say that
CHOBS researchers just don't have the sort of capital to make a full sized vehicle
armed with a very expensive electron gun. So if this tractor idea is going
to get used at a level where it can be effective, the technology would
almost certainly have to be picked up by a commercial provider. Currently, the
team is looking at finishing their small scale tests in UC Boulder's Eclipse machine,
and then they plan on finding someone to fund their first mission. But considering
the safety of their method alone, it might not take much longer to convince
a larger company to help them out.