On today's episode, we are getting into the latest space news, including NASA's
Psyche asteroid probe finally launches with the help of Falcon Heavy. SpaceX defends their
Starlink constellation in the face of a new FAA report, and Spin Launch gets
a wealthy new partner. This is the space race. On a saugy Friday
morning, NASA's Psyche Asteroid Survey mission finally got underway, lifting off from Pad
thirty nine A on a Falcon Heavy rocket. The October thirteenth launch went off
without a hitch after more than a year of delays, forcing the one point
two billion dollar probe to wait for the start of its journey to a metal
rich body in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter over two point two billion
miles away. Psyche is named after sixteen Psyche, the asteroid it will be
studying, discovered in eighteen fifty two. Sixteen Psyche is the biggest known metal
rich asteroid in the system, of which we only know nine. This big
metal object is one hundred and seventy three miles by one hundred and forty four
miles, roughly potato shaped, and orbits so far from us that scientists can
only make it out as a small pinprick of light, so they aren't even
sure of its composition. They know it has high metal content, of course,
but are unsure about the other parts of its makeup, which could be
rock or sulfur or anything really, and it's this mystery that the Psyche probe
was made to unravel. The six thousand pound probe is going to take six
years to reach its destination, using Hall effect electric thrusters to slowly but steadily
accelerate halfway there before decelerating. This system uses power from the probe's two to
five panel solar wings to ionize the atoms of its xenon fuel in a very
efficient reaction. Once in orbit around the large asteroid, the Psyche probe will
use two multi spectral cameras, a pair of magnetometers, and both a gamma
ray and neutron mass spectrometer to check for the chemical composition up close. It's
also equipped with a radio expair that will attempt to measure the asteroid's gravitational field.
That's a lot of equipment, especially for a mission that had been delayed
so long. Sixteen. Psyche had been chosen as a mission target for the
Discovery program back in twenty seventeen, this being the same program that produced the
Pathfinder and Insite Marslander missions. Originally targeting a twenty twenty three launch, the
date was moved to twenty twenty two to match a more efficient trajectory, but
then along came COVID and messed everything up, forcing the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to
push the launch date back to twenty twenty three again. An independent investigation of
JPL and the delays to Psyche found that a lack of staffing was primarily responsible,
which yeah, COVID had been keeping people out of the lab for most
of twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, so no surprise there. And then
just when they were preparing for an October fifth launch, the team found an
issue with the engines and the whole thing was forced to delay one more wins
until Psyche finally got its date with a Falcon Heavy on the thirteenth. And
that sort of effort, price, and scale of mission tips us off that
Psyche is a little more important than it looks on the surface, and that's
because sixteen Psyche represents a unique opportunity to see what the inside of our own
planet could look like. Metal rich bodies like this asteroid are relatively rare at
this size. Again, we only know of nine in the whole system so
far, and scientists at NASA believe there are two possibilities for how it formed.
One sixteen Psyche was the core of a protoplanet, a molten ball of
rock that got smashed out of its planet during the formation of our Solar system.
Or two, it's an unmelted bit of metal that was part of the
original material drifting around our star when everything was forming. Either way, we
get a good chance to see what the core of our own planet looks like,
position, gravity, magnetic fields, and maybe even how it formed.
And it doesn't hurt that the Psyche probe will be helping NASA test the current
strength of our deep space laser communications grid, a system that we are currently
building out and will be extremely important for our operations around Mars and beyond in
the next couple of decades. Unfortunately, any dreams of mining this asteroid are
not realistic. While the amount of metal sixteen Psyche contains makes it worth somewhere
in the ten quintillion dollar range, that's only a raw estimation that looks fun
in video titles and headlines. Truthfully, we don't have any technology that could
safely bring sixteen Psyche close enough for mining to be feasible, and the amount
of metal it has would flood markets, making it relatively worthless, So we'll
just have to keep it in mind if we're ever in need of raw materials
for space manufacturing when we have that technology. For now, the real value
of this asteroid is in what it can tell us about our own planet and
planets like Mars. These sort of surveys help with everything from material sciences to
asteroid defense, just like the Osiris REX mission, which recently returned a capsule
full of regolith from Benu, a much more common type of asteroid, while
the main vehicle went on to study the potentially dangerous asteroid apifice. In that
case, the samples returned could help us with strategies for dealing with those sort
of objects if they are ever projected to hit Earth, but also find out
about how more organic materials made it into Earth's composition in the first place.
Sometimes it's enough just to be curious about something. After all, there's a
lot we still don't understand about our universe. On October fifth, the Federal
Aviation Administration posted a report on the risks associated with the re entry of low
Earth orbit satellite constellations, and in a rare move, SpaceX has already fired
back. Back in twenty twenty, the FAA was ordered by Congress to hire
an inn dependent body to report on the potential risks of all these new satellite
constellations popping up, of which SpaceX's Starlink was and still is the most prominent.
But while the report suggests that by twenty thirty five, we should expect
debris from deorbiting constellations to injure or kill one person every two years, SpaceX
says that the report's authors, a company called the Aerospace Corp, used outdated
information and guesswork. First off, reports like these are almost always guesswork based
on available statistics, so that part isn't what's wrong with the report. Aerospace
Corp was asked to calculate risk based on available data, and they did that,
finding that on average, the space industry hasn't quite met the required ninety
percent success rate for disposal of debris after emission, which primarily includes debris from
launching rockets, and to be fair to Aerospace Corp. Knowing that SpaceX has
permission to grow their Starlink constellation to twelve thousand satellites and wants to continue growing
to over forty thousand low Earth orbit units, their right in thinking that math
equates to a significant risk from just SpaceX alone, never mind other constellations like
Amazon's Project Kuyper. But here is where the SpaceX rebuttal raises some really good
points. First off, SpaceX principal engineer David Goldstein, who wrote the company's
reply, says that the original analysis makes the assumption that SpaceX has the same
aftermission disposal rates as the rest of the industry, when it is in fact
one of the industry's leaders in that regard, performing at a ninety nine percent
disposal success rate post missions, mostly due to the reusability of company vehicles like
the Falcon nine. But second, and most importantly, SpaceX designed their Starlink
units to fully demise, as Goldstein puts it, meaning their components and structure
are so delicate that nothing survives the heat of the re entry process, and
this has been proven as over three hundred and fifty Starlink satellites have reportedly de
orbited to date, and no news of debris has cropped up. And this
is where the report really falls flat. The analysis done by the Aerospace Corp
Uses a twenty three year old study from NASA about debris survival rates of old
iridium communications satellites, which are so far removed from the way that modern satellites
are made that this data couldn't accurately predict danger statistics for any current constellations.
Now this isn't to say that Aerospace Corp Is the only one at fault here.
Yes, they used bad data and they never bothered to reach out to
companies like SpaceX to get updated models for re entry, something that SpaceX would
likely have complied with seeing as how Aerospace Corp Was working for the FAA at
the time. The real issue is that the FAA accepted the report and published
it without double checking. And look, government agencies tend to be underfunded and
understaffed, but this is the FAA's whole job. They published a report that
did it take into account data newer than two decades old, that didn't consider
constellations from foreign governments like China's upcoming Guang Network, and didn't consider recent changes
to FCC filings assuming over fifty four thousand licensed Starlink satellites as opposed to the
current number, which is about seventy five hundred or so. The report itself
also seems to have focused on the growth of the SpaceX system sidelining other constellations
like Amazon's Project Kuiper, which I mean, we make jokes about Amazon not
being any competition, but we're not a regulatory body. The biggest issue with
this flop is that this sort of report is actually needed. SpaceX has a
great record, but even they lose track of a fairing or have an uncontrolled
re entry of a rocket, and they're far from the only ones operating right
now. Consider what the space race will look like by twenty thirty five.
Regulations need to be made, but this report is just a waste of resources.
The FAA will need to find a more trustworthy independent body and star Earlier
this month, space technology start up Spin Launch, makers of the world's first
kinetic orbital launch system, announced that they had formed a partnership with Japan's Sumitomo
Corporation. The Japanese investment firm has agreed to take on not just its usual
investment type role, but they also want to represent spin Launch into all of
its hardware within Japan's borders, with the stated goal being to foster sustainable space
technologies. Some of you might remember that spin Launch has basically developed a high
powered catapult using a giant centrifuge inside of a vacuum sealed chamber to throw a
payload at over forty seven hundred miles per hour into the upper atmosphere. Once
the vehicle reaches an altitude of about sixty kilometers, it activates its engines and
finishes the orbiting process. This method removes the need for a traditional first stage
booster, the part of a vehicle that easily takes up the most weight of
a rocket. But the spin Launch system is not without its own drawbacks.
Just the logistics alone are a huge problem, with a three hundred foot diameter
vacuum chamber being needed for the final full size model as well with the speeds
involved with the wind up of the centrifuge arm, any potential malfunction could be
catastrophic. But that's nothing new in the rock tree field, of course,
and it seems like Sumitomo was impressed with spin Launch after its smaller scale tests
back in twenty twenty one. That scaled down accelerator was one hundred and eight
feet in diameter and hurled its test projectile up to nine point one kilometers in
altitude. It was an extremely impressive display of engineering. Spin Launch has come
up with a pretty unique way to get payloads into space, and it's great
that they've secured a huge investing partner to help them across the finish line.
Seeing the full sized version is going to be incredible.