Hello once again. My name is Andrew Dunkley, and welcome to another edition
of Space Nuts. Coming up on this episode black holes, Well, we
know they exist, we don't know a heck of a lot about them.
We've only imaged two of them, in fact, but they have found a
new one. It's it's actually a new class of black hole, and it's
enormous and it's just over there. We'll also be talking about the last universal
common ancestor. It's older than we thought and it is basically what made life
as we know it come into existence. And space junk in the news again
for all the wrong reasons. That's coming up on this edition of Space Nuts.
Fifteen second guidance in Channel ten nine ignition sequence Space Nuts or three two
one Space Nuts as when I report it, Bill's good, And I have
to be very careful about where I'm pointing when I'm talking about the discovery of
a black hole, because I was pointing straight at my wife anyway, joining
us as well to discuss all that. Professor Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large,
Hello Fred, Hello Andrew. Yeah, you could point to it actually,
because this black hole is one that is in our southern sky. Yeah,
I think it's probably circumpolar, which means it always goes around the sky.
Might be quite a circumpolar, but it's getting on that way. Okay,
Well, we'll talk about that and all those other things. First of
all, though, how are you and how you been well? Thanks?
Recovered from our outback tour a couple of weeks ago, that's still fresh in
our memory. Those were some of the things we saw the extraordinary, which
reminds me. Fred, we have a note from Tracy. You talked about
Tracy the other day who won the auction. Yes, she did for your
book. She sent us a note. Hi, Fred and Andrew Tracy Hill
here, thanks for the shout out. Have clipped the segment to put on
my Facebook page for family and friends to listen. It was a great night
and have just started the book. I will submit my questions soon. No,
there you are. That's paradoxical because that book is actually the one she
got. Was was you're on this upside down, which is all questions,
the whole books questions. So she's got plenty to go from. Fortunately,
I could just read out the answers. Yes, yes, but you know
what, what we've discovered with discoveries in spaces. They always throw out more
questions and questions tend to throw up follow up questions. It's just the way
of humanity, isn't it. I've always got question questions. Every answer to
a question tends to spail a new question in the world of astronomy and space
science. Yes, I expect we'll get a shout out from Tracy after we
gave her a shout out after she got the shout out, So this could
keep going around and around. Let's let's get onto it. Our first topic
is that of a black hole. This is a recently categorized variety of black
hole because it is what they call intermediate, and that was one we talked
about probably a couple of years ago when they I think the way it went
we were talking about the different sizes of black holes one episode and we said,
look they are they're either small or massive, but we can't find anything
in between. And honestly, within a month, I think they found one
ye. And now they found another one. Yeah. Yeah, And this
one's really significant because I think this is a very you know, PRETT is
a solid discovery of intermediate what's called an intermediate black intermediate mass black hole.
So well, let's just go through the details, because black holes do come
in basically two flavors. The stellar mass black calls, which, as the
name suggests, are about the must have a star. In fact that the
mass of a massive star usually ten twenty times the mass of our Sun,
so our Sun won't turn into a black hole. But when one of these
massive stars ends its life, runs out of fuel, the core collapses and
nothing will stop the collapse, and you get a black hole at the end
of it. And we recognize those. There are severally no galaxy. We
recognize them by the effect on their surroundings. They're usually swallowing up stuff an
issue and emitting X rays. The other end of the scale is the super
massive black holes, which are millions or billions of times the mass of the
Sun. And we think there's one of these at the middle of every galaxy.
We've talked about them a lot. There is certainly one at the middle
of our galaxy. It's about four million times the mass of the Sun in
the constellation of Sagittarius at a distance of about twenty five thousand light years,
so quite a long way off. Not doing much at the moment, although
it does occasionally swallow a gas cloud and get bright in the infrared and radio
spectra is invisible at visible at optical wavelengths, that's to say, the wavelength
of visible light. So physicists think astro physicists think that the super massive black
holes get that way by lots of black holes coming together. In other words,
over time they crete other black holes, so they basically, you know,
gobble up other black holes, and you get this thing that's growing up
to millions of times the massive for some or more. That's been thrown a
little bit into question recently by the fact that we see some of these super
massive black holes very early in the history of the universe. That's the results
that have come from the James Web Space Telescope. But we still have this
gap in the middle. Why don't we see anything that's on its way to
becoming a super massive black hole? For example, why don't we see something
that's bigger than thousands of times a stellar mass black hole? And these are
the things we would call intermediate black holes, black with a mass in the
region of thousands to tens of thousands of the mass of the Sun. So
where would you look to try and find these What you might look for is
things that we think are the remnants of a galaxy that's been stopped from evolving.
So if you imagine a young galaxy with its stars, maybe a bit
of spiral arms and things of that sort coming on, and a nucleus of
all stars, and then you suck it into another galaxy, what you might
get left with is the sort of nucleus of stars from the galaxy that's been
swallowed up. Plus it's black hole that would be in the middle of that.
And because what you've done is you've taken this galaxy out of the evolution
stakes, in other words, you've stopped it growing, maybe the black hole
would stop growing as well, and so this might be a way of finding
these intermediate black mass black holes. And the scenario that have just elaborated is
exactly what we think is the mechanism by which globular clusters are formed. These
are clusters of stars that have been known for well many hundreds of years.
In fact, it was William Herschel who gave them the name globular clusters because
they look globular and they're swarms of stars up to a million stars in the
biggest ones and very very tightly packed together Andrew, so you know that the
stars are all not exactly bumping into one another, but very very close.
And the thinking is that these are the nuclei the centers of galaxies that were
stripped off, that the outer regions stripped off because they were being swallowed up
by another galaxy, in this case our own Milky Way galaxy. And we've
got something like it's probably up to about two hundred globular clusters that swarm around
the Milky Way galaxy. And the thinking is that they are the remnants of
baby galaxies that were dragged out of the space around the Milky Way and have
just become part of the Milky Way, and their outer stars were swallowed up
by the Milky Way. But what's left is this tightly packed nucleus of old
stars. We know that globular cluster stars are very old, and so what
has happened is that the biggest of these things in our sky is a globular
cluster called only a centaury, and that is in the constellation of Centaurus in
the southern sky, one that we see very clearly from here in the southern
hemisphere. It's actually one of the reasons why telescopes in the southern hemisphere important
the two biggest globular clusters are in the southern sky. Anyway, scientists have
studied the Black Court, sorry the globular cluster Omega centaury by putting together a
very large number of images, more than five hundred images of this cluster taken
by the Hubble Space telescope. And the thing about the space telescope is it's
very very accurate in the way it can position stars. You know, you
can look at it and your images will show stars as they are at that
moment. But if the stars are moving, if they're circulating around something,
then having five hundred of them that have been taken over over a long period
will give you almost like a time lapse movie of what's going on in Omiga
centaury. And what they've done is they've done that and basically revealed a place
where stars are moving in such a way that we believe there is an intermediate
mass black hole in the middle. So it's you know, it's one of
these things where you're actually searching for something and you're using the right tools and
basically they have found it. That is the that's the current outcome of this
research. There's some nice pictures of the center of the dobular cluster Obiga Centauri,
taken with a Hubble space telescope on the web. They're easily easy to
find. And the nice thing about the story is that whilst the science team
were led by scientists from the Max Blank Institute for Astronomy in Germany, there
are University of Queensland researchers as well involved with the team, So early and
astronomers are mixed up with this, which is brilliant and it looks as though
this is the first really definitive evidence of an intermediate mass black hole. Now,
I hope the next question you're going to ask me, Andrew is how
do they know that it's twenty times twenty thousand times the mass of the Sun.
That was going to be my second question, but yeah, let's go
with it. What was your first one going to be? I forget No,
it was. Now I'll I'll get to it because now what you've brought
up is probably a more important aspect of it at the moment. But I'll
get to the question I had in mind in a teak, So, how
did they know it's twenty thousand times the mess I thought you'd never ask me
that. Thank you very much. By So, when you've if you can
detect stars moving around, which is what's happened here, and what you can
do is you can say, well, these stars are moving in a gravitational
field, and you need several stars to do this. One's not really enough.
But if you've got several stars, you can basically track the way they're
moving and from that you can deduce what the sort of center of attraction is,
what is the thing that they're moving around, because there'll be in orbit
around something. Everything is an orbit around something, and so that's how you
can measure the mass because you once you model their movement, you basically it's
very simple mathematics. Actually it's Kepler's laws go back to the early seventeenth century
when Kepler formulated these laws that tell you how things move in a gravitational field.
You didn't know it was moving in a gravitational field, but that's what's
happening, and so from that you can deduce how massive the object is at
the center and the alswer in this case is twenty thousand. It's exactly how
we've measured the mass of the Sagittarius a star the black hole at the center
of our own galaxy, because there are stars that you can see actually orbiting
that which have been measured by two different telescopes, the very Large Telescope others
by the Germany Telescopes in Hawaii. So we've got two independent research groups that
have done that work, and we've got that this is the work on the
center of our own galaxy, and the mass has been measured by this motion
of the stars. So it's a really nice piece of research and very exciting
for the world of astronomy. So what was your second question. Well,
you mentioned Sagittarius, a star which we've managed to image, and we know
that once at the center of our galaxy. This one they've found. It's
probably the nearest of its kind to Earth, which is a sobering thought.
It's not really that far away. What about a thousand light years or something,
and it's eighteen thousand I feel better, Yeah, yeah, but you
know it's a recent discovery. It's also a rare black hole in terms of
size. How many more are floating around in our galaxy because we we we
assume most galaxies have a black hole at at the center. But you've probably
answered the question partially in terms of the reference to globular clusters. But if
we know how many globular globular clusters there are, we have a better idea
of how many potential black holes they might be. That a fair point or
is that just to do with the intermediate size. Yes, that's the intermediate
size, that's right. But you're absolutely right. If a globular cluster is
the smoking gum to have a you know, intermediate lust black hole at the
center, they may all have one of these black holes at the center.
We haven't made that discovery yet. I think I can't remember the number of
popular clusters at the last count. I think it's between one hundred and sixty
and two hundred if I remember rightly associated with our own galaxy. When you
look at the Andromeda galaxy, there are many, many more. They've got
many more lobbies list up there. But no, you're right. What that
does is it it points to the fact that we might have in intermediate in
terms of intermediate mass black holes, we might have a lot of them in
our galaxy. We've got a lot of stalar mass black holes as well,
and I think the nearest of those is about a thousand light years away,
but that's only got twenty times the mass of the Sun or something like that.
So the question I thought you were going to ask, which is free
Why I'm saying I'd like to mention this mix. Well, you mentioned that
we've imaged the black hole at the center of our galaxy, the Sagittarius,
a star black hole. I thought you might ask, can we image the
intermediate black hole now that they've found a potential location? Ken? Probably not,
even though it's nearer, So eighteen thousand light years away compared with twenty
five thousand black years. Even though it's nearer, it's much much smaller.
Remember the area, say star black hole is four million times the mass of
the Sun. This is twenty thousand times the mass of the Sun. So
its event horizon will be a much smaller, you know, a much smaller
diameter. That means it's going to be much much harder to image, and
I suspect we'll with the present level of equipment, certainly we'll never see an
image of it. Okay, So what you're saying is, in universal terms,
size matters. Yeah, it may. Well, that's right, and
it may even be. Sorry, just to take a step Further, the
reason why this black hole is intermediate mass is because it hasn't grown, and
it hasn't grown because there's no hydrogen around it to suck in and turn into
energy and basically build the size of the black hole. So it's because what
you see with the event horizon telescope when we look at these supermassive black holes
and try and image their event horizon, you're seeing the effects of the accretion
disc the stuff that's whizzing around it and making it glow. And if that's
not happening in the Obiga Centauri black hole, we're not going to see it.
We're never going to see it. It will just be a black hole
with nothing to delineate it from its surroundings apart from the fact that it's pulling
stars around. And so that's the as I said, the smoking gun.
Yes, yes, it's a fabulous discovery though because as we've mentioned a few
times over the years, we didn't know if these existed, and when we
did, well, there aren't that many of them, so finding one in
our vicinity is pretty impressive work. Indeed, this is space nuts. Andrew
Dunkley here with Professor Fred Watson. Let's take a little break from the show
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in cogni dot com slash space nuts. Now back to the show Murder Space
Nuts. Now, Fred, we are going to talk about what's spawned life
as we know it on Earth, and that was the last universal common ancestor.
And the reason this story has come up is because we appear to have
started to develop life as we know it much sooner than they thought. I
suppose we should start by explaining what Luca is all about. Yes, so
so LUCA is an acronym for the last universal common ancestor. I don't know.
You notice a bit of background noise there, Andrew, and that I've
gone dark. There is a delightful lady who is pulling the paint off off
the paint, not the paint, but the paint limitations off our screen.
I'm going to show you. Hello, there we go. Yes, Will
she even know that she just went around the world. I don't think so.
I don't think she will. She's pulling the tape off that that keeps
the thing that kicks the pain from spreading where you shouldn't be. I hope
she doesn't. Didn't mind that. She's a delightful young woman, So that's
fine. So the what we're talking about the last okay, So it's it's
an idea, I mean, and it's well established. And of course this
is of great interest to astrobiologists because the origin of life on Earth is the
only model we've got for the origin of life anywhere, and so you know,
if life is going to form on other worlds, we want to understand
how that might that process might happen, and our evolutionary biologists who look at
this kind of thing they are basically putting putting the steps together to try and
understand what is at the root of life. So Luca is, as I
said, it is last universal common ancestor. It is. It's kind of
hypothetical in a way, Andrew, because it may not be. It's probably
not just one single microbe, but it's probably a lot of them which are
all the same, and they may even have formed those microbial maps that we
that Marny and I and our tour group were looking at in the Eddie Kara
fossil beds not much more than a week ago. My microbes are the basic
anti you know, the basic fundamental entities of life, single celled organisms.
So we have really good reason to believe that if you look back far enough,
you will come to this, Luca, this single celled organism. Basically
it is a it's a it's a you know, it's a category of organisms,
if I can put it that way. Now that then evolved into what
we call the tree of life. I looked into this a while ago because
I've given talked about it, and I have to say, and I'll preface
this with the disclaimer to the people who I know listen to this podcast.
Who know a lot more about life processes and medicine than I do. I'll
preface it by the disclaimer that I know nothing about biology or living organisms,
but when I read is of great interest. As I said, they did
the talk about Luca and the origins of life, and I don't know whether
the audience realized I had no idea what I was talking about, but I
think at the end and I seemed to be fine. You know, I
did them for forty years on radio. We're still doing it, Andrew,
We're still doing it. I haven't found out yet. Okay. So the
tree of life three main branches bacteria are Kea and Ukaria, and the ukariah
basically are the you eukaryotic I think life forms. I think that's the adjective
eukaryotic, and that includes us pretty well, everything that we we know.
It's plants, animals, and fung guy. So the all of these are
descendants from Luca bacteria, the Rka that's two different classes of sort of fairly
rudimentary life forms, and the eukarya, which are us and everything around us
that you know, are looking out at the lawn and trees are going up
the rock face at behind our house. That's all part of the eukarya eukaryotic
life, as is Hugh because he's a fun Hugh is because he's a fan
guy. I thought you were going to be nice to you today. I
couldn't help. But now he's watching today, and you know, one day
you and I are going to be in mid sentence, the whole thing's going
to go black. That will be the end of it when he pulls the
plug. Gosh, we're struggling with his story is anyway, And I'm going
to read a little quote from a very nice article by Everin Yaskin, who's
a journalist with Cosmos. It's an Australian science journal, very very well respected
Australian science journal. He's got some very nice sentences in here, which is
I'm going to quote him. All Luca's descendants share the same amino acids which
build proteins in cellular organisms, the same energy, the same basic cellular machinery
and DNA used to store information. So understanding us earliest ecosystem and what the
environment was like when Luca lived has been a major plank of scientific endeavor.
But first, and this is cutting to the chase, and I hope everymore
me quoting this, but it's great, it's written it very well. But
first researchers had to determine how long ago Luca lived. And just an aside
from me, you need to know that because you want to know what the
geology is telling you that the Earth was like. Then you know, you
can think about Luca, but you need to know what sort of environment,
what sort of environment was there, So we did not sorry, let me
see, Yeah, so first researchers had to determine how long ago Luca lived.
Using genetic information and known time separation between species from the fossil record,
scientists have now determined that Luca lived four point two billion years ago. And
this is the CrOx of the matter. This is what the surprise is.
And I'm quoting again from Everyim's article. We did not expect Luca to be
so old within just hundreds of millions of years of the Earth's formation, which
by the way, was four point five seven billion years ago, says I
said that last bit, But says Sandra Alvarez Carretero from the University of Bristol,
UK, co author of the study publisher Nature, Ecology and Evolution.
However, our results fit in with modern views on the habitability of early Earth.
That's the thing. If you do what they've done, and it's actually
similar. It's similar to a process that took place I think in the sixth
century when and I can't remember his name, that's terrible. He was a
monk. Effectively sixth century AD. He worked out the age of the world
from biblical accounts just by saying, well, this took that long, this
took that long, this took that long, this took that lot. And
that's how he knew that the world was created four thousand years ago, So
four thousand BC. I've forgotten his name, doesn't matter. He was the
only Denyseus, that's right, thank you, thank you, well done,
well done. That man on the Google Denysseus. So he did exactly this
process. He sort of thought about what we knew from the biblical account in
terms of when you know, how long people lived, how often they did
stuff, when they did it, and by that he was able to work
out that the earth was formed. I think he got accurate to a couple
of years four thousand and four BC, if lightly, which certain branches of
the church still hold that that's when the creation took place. We've got a
different story thirty point eight billion years which comes from slightly different you know,
slightly different reasoning. But just going back to the Lucas story, that's what
they've done. Looked at the genetic information that tells you the time separation between
the way species have evolved from the fossil record, and so now you get
this origin of Luca four point two billion years ago, and that's really quite
remarkable, it is. But there's more I've read about. Yeah, hang
on a minute, let me see if I can get to it. No,
I can't wait a minute. Yes, that's right. Yeah, here
we go. Okay, so this again is a quote actually from a Bristol
University of Bristol professor of phylogenomics whose name is David Pisante. Pisanti David says,
our study shows that Luca was a complex organism, not too different from
modern prokaryotes, which are part of the modern you know, bacterial species.
But what is really interesting is that it's clear it possessed an early immune system,
showing that even by four point two billion years ago, our ancestor was
engaging in an arms race with viruses. What about that. Yeah, that's
amazing. So it throws a whole new light on the origin of life as
we know it. And speaking of which, and it takes it takes it
right, Yeah, that's okay, but it takes it back further. And
it looks like this started very early in the life of the planet, which
is even more staggering. And I suppose that adds a little bit more confidence
to the argument that there could have been life on Mars. And I wonder
if that's the sort of thing they're looking for with their investigations at the moment
that these lucre type of events. That's right, Luke on Mars. What
an interesting thing. I mean, it's always been said that, you know,
as soon as we do find any evidence fossilized or otherwise of microbial life
on Mars, assuming that we do. I don't know whether we will,
but if you assume that they do, the first thing that you're going to
want to do is look at its genetic sequencing, get down to a molecular
level, and you might find that it's got the same ancestry as we have,
that it's got the same luca and that will be remarkable because that means
that life on the two planets would have found the same origin, and it
flourished on Earth because we had the right kind of climate, whereas Mars,
being smaller, just went cold and dry and life probably didn't survive. Yet
we had a better battle of soup, basically primordial soup. And of course,
just to sort of wind this story up, and you did refer to
it early on, this also creates a potential for Luca style of life being
created in other worlds if the recipe is right. So it opens that door,
particularly when you consider how long ago it happened, much sooner than we
thought, and that kind of paves the way for the potential for life to
get a little bit of a foothold in other worlds. If the conditions are
perfectly right, or even not perfectly right, they could start to flourish and
then the atmosphere changes and everything goes well. But yeah, fascinating stuff,
yes, and you can read all about it on the cosmosmagazine dot com website.
With space Nuts now fred to a story that is a little bit concerning,
probably a lot concerning, and one that we only spoke about very recently,
with a piece of space junk from the International Space station going through a
house in Florida in March. Now we've got reports of space junk coming down
all over the planet, not you know, in quick succession, but this
is starting to become very common, and they're worried that the time will come
where somebody becomes a fatality. This is very concerning, that's correct. Yeah,
And the principle, the sort of common theme of the particular bits of
space junk that we've spoken about hers is not so much the Starling spacecraft,
of which there are now you know, what is it, seven thousand or
something in orbit being launched August twenty twenty every two or three days. The
main culprit seems to be the trunking of the Crew Dragon space capsule. So
Crew Dragon is a is a something that looks a lot like you know,
it's conical. It looks a lot like the old Apollo spacecraft. But Crew
Dragon has a what's called a cargo trunk, that is the cylindrical part that
connects the conical capsule to the to the launch vehicle. Because the bits of
debris that have been found and we found them here in Australia exactly as you
mentioned, that stuff that came through the roof in Florida. There's something been
found in North Carolina, some stuff that's been found in Canada, and they
all seem to have this common theme that they are bits of the trunking the
trunk that joins the two bits of the spacecraft together. Clearly don't burn up
in the atmosphere, and even though when you look at images of it it
is a huge piece of apparatus, I mean, I'm not surprised it doesn't
burn up. The things as big as a truck. Well, that's right.
I think some of the some of the lots that have come down that
have been very sizeable pieces of pieces of kit, and they well, they
are interesting bits of stuff that are coming down. Things that have been to
space are always interesting. But as you say, there's danger associated with that.
And what some of the comment texts are saying about this is it's only
a matter of time before somebody seriously hurt or killed by falling space junk.
Yes, and even though there are laws in place, the nineteen seventy two
Liability Convention states that nations are responsible for whatever they put up there and disposing
of it. But the problem that has been created now with practically rocket launches
every day or every other day. Is that when it comes to civilians,
it's a different story. And this is the concern is that it won't be
long before lawsuits start getting registered due to damage or even death of people on
Earth being struck by debris. And we saw that recently in Florida, as
we spoke about a few weeks ago. So it is an it is an
ongoing concern and one that seems to be escalating. This is starting to pop
up all over the over the planet, as you mentioned, the most recent
being Saskatchewan. And I was amused by the remedy for that was found by
farmers and apparently the SpaceX company sent two employees in a rented truck to pick
the pieces up and paid the farmers for the fragments, which sounds a bit
comical, But what if it killed someone, a different story, then they
were very different. So yeah, it's it's I hope it never happens.
But with so much stuff going up and coming down and not coming down,
well it stands to reason that mathematically, statistically, something terrible is going to
happen. Dovetailing into that story, Fred is a failure with the Falcon nine
Heavy with a launch recently, and this was to deploy twenty Starlink satellites,
which they did deploy, but apparently because of the failure, they couldn't get
them to a decent enough altitude, so they'll all be lost. This is
a bit of a shock because this is a very, very reliable piece of
hardware. Yeah, it's just a standard Falcon Life rather than the Falconline Heavy,
the fucking nine. Yeah, yeah, it's slightly different. What is
it the number of launches successful launches, three hundred and sixty four successful launches
of the Falcon nine system carrying astronauts as well as you know, various payloads
for their commercial clients, and thousands and thousands of Starlink satellites. One the
last the last time there was a problem was an explosion on the launch pad
in September twenty sixteen. That is getting on for eight years ago. So
it's it's pretty you know, it's pretty pretty reliable as a piece of space
hardware, and that's what you want when you're sending astronauts up and down using
it. So what's happened this time is it was the second stage of the
launch vehicle that failed because it had developed a liquid oxygen leak, and so
it couldn't carry out a second burn. In other words, you've got what
you've got. You've got the first stage, which actually returned quite safe to
the drone chip. Probably yes, of course, I still love you.
That's the name of one of them. The others just read the instructions that
it returned and over which one it went to. There's another one too,
but it landed safely on the drone ship. Second stage had a burn to
separate it from the first stage, but then there was another one to inject
the Starlink twenty Staralink satellites that it was carrying into their proper orbits, and
that failed because of this oxygen leak, and so what happened was the Starlink
satellites basically, I think fifteen of them just came back to Earth. They
just burned up. They thought they could save five of them by using their
own thrusters to increase their orbit, because you know, the orbit that that
the second stage put these satellites in was unsustainable. Its low point was one
hundred and thirty five kilometers, which is well in the atmosphere and would you
know, would cause it to burn up very quickly. They were trying to
use the thrusters on five of them to lift their orbits and save them,
but I don't think that happened. Now. The story I hear is they
just couldn't do it and they've all been lost, and that's because of that
oxygen leak and therefore the booster failure. But only I think they only got
to an altitude that was half that required to be a success, so they
were on a hiding to nothing by the sond of it, that's correct.
Sorry, I'm just answering a phone call on my watch talking about the future
the Sorry Andrew to be distracted there. But the main issue is that there
are two forthcoming launchers as we speak today recording this on the sixteenth of July
to launches. One is a cargo launch July nineteenth, but the other is
a crude launch on the thirty first of July from a project called Polaris Dawn,
which is a private mission, and Polarist Dawn itself is pretty interesting actually,
it's a private human spaceflight mission. It's a billionaire who's funding it.
Space X will operate it with a crew Dragon capsule and it's the first of
three plant missions. But it's a bit like do you remember we talked a
few weeks ago about the medical details that had come from a private mission called
i think it was Inspiration four, which had medical people on board, and
so they were able to give real time measurements of people's blood pressure and you
know, skin temperature, all of that sort of stuff. That provided a
wealth of data that we talked about. That's said basically spaceflight. Yes,
it knocks you about a bit, but within three months of getting back to
Earth, you pretty well back to where you started with. And there was
the issue of the telomere's growing. In fact, one of our regular listeners,
Heidi di Bloc, who's a space medic, she commented on texts received
from her about that, how interesting that was the research that came from that
inspiration for mission. This is different, it's a different one, it's a
different billionaire, it's a different name, Polaris DAM. But they will do
experiments, they'll do you know, experiments in the flight. So it's a
private company once again taking flight using a crew. Dragon Now that mission must
currently be in doubt with the failure of the Falcon nine launch that we've just
been talking about yes, and of course the ongoing issue with the Starline a
Boeing star Liner and are still on the International Space Station waiting to come back.
So yeah, and all. What this does is it kind of underlines
how precarious and dangerous space flight is. I know we're taking it for granted
more and more these days, but it only needs to be just a slight
change in circumstances that could lead to something horrible happening. The fact that it
was there were no people on the space the Falcon nine that ran into trouble
is great news. But as you said, there are missions coming up which
will be taking people into space, and yes, they're going to have to
have a look at what went wrong and see if they can figure it out
so they can avoid it in the future. We'll wait and see on that
one. And of course, if you want to chase up those space Junken
SpaceX stories there at space Daily dot com. That brings us to the end,
Fred, Thank you very much. It's a pleasure, Andrew. We've
covered a lot of ground today and how would I look forward to the next
time indeed, which could be very very very very very very soon. No,
no thanks, Red, will see you Fred Watson, Astronomer at Large,
and thanks to Hu in the studio who turned up today. I haven't
seen him do anything yet, but I'm sure he'll do something later. And
from me Andrew Dunkley, thanks for your company. See you on the next
episode of Space Nuts. Bye bye to the Space Nuts podcast available at Apple
Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, or your favorite podcast player. You can also
stream on demand at bides dot com. This has been another quality podcast production
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